Podcast appearances and mentions of franklin planner

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.   

In this special episode of The Daily Mastermind, George Wright III collaborates with John Harding, an expert from the Franklin Planner, to discuss strategies for conquering overwhelm in today's digital world. They delve into the definition and causes of overwhelm, such as lack of clarity, overcommitment, and digital distractions. The discussion highlights practical solutions, including the principles of the Franklin Planner system, Stephen Covey's Seven Habits, and the unique benefits of using pen and paper to manage tasks, improve memory, boost creativity, and reduce stress. The episode aims to provide listeners with actionable insights and tools to lead a more intentional and focused life, both personally and professionally.00:06 Overview of the Franklin Planner Podcast00:43 Understanding Overwhelm in a Digital World02:12 Defining Overwhelm and Its Causes04:55 Addressing Overwhelm: Priorities and Focus06:57 Solutions to Overwhelm: The Franklin Planner Approach20:28 The Power of Handwriting and Paper PlannersThank you for listening and remember, "It's never too late to create the life you were meant to live". See you tomorrow.George Wright IIICheck out Franklin Planner Podcast at FranklinPlanner.com

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

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

This week, it's COD week. In a special episode, I'll walk you through the fundamentals of what all solid productivity and time management systems have.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin 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 | 318 Hello, and welcome to episode 318 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Now, some of you may be wondering what COD means. Well, it's not a type of fish. COD stands for Collect, Organise, and Do, and these three parts of a productivity system are the critical foundations you need to develop if you want your system to work effortlessly. COD came about several years ago following a research project I did. In it, I went back to 1960 (not literally) and looked at all the time management and productivity systems I could find to see if there were any common denominators.  There were multiple systems and approaches, from Hyrum Smith's Franklin Planner system to Stephen Covey's First Things First and Jim Rohn's notebook and planning method. And, of course, I didn't neglect to look at GTD (Getting Things Done) and the multiple variations that came from that.  There were four standout features of all these systems. The first was to collect everything into a trusted place. The second was to organise or process what you collected. The third was to plan the day, and finally, there was doing the work.  When I developed COD, I wanted to give you a simple framework on which to build your own system. A system based on how you prefer to do your work. Many of you will like routine, others perhaps like flexibility. What COD does is give you a three-step process you can customise to work in the way you want to work.  Let me begin with collecting.  Nothing will work if you don't collect whatever comes your way in a trusted place. Here, there are two key parts. Collect everything and put it somewhere you trust you will see later in the day.  Scribbling tasks and ideas onto PostIt notes can work, but I have observed that they often get stuck on computer monitors, whiteboards, and many other places, which means you don't trust that you will see them later in the day. What works best is having a central place for all these tasks, appointments, and ideas. That could be a task manager on your phone and computer or a pocket notebook you carry with you everywhere you go.  What matters is you use it consistently, and you trust it. This may mean you need to practice to develop the right habits. But this practice is well worth it.  The second thing about your collecting tool (or UCT, as I call it, Universal Collecting Tool) is that it should be fast. If there are too many buttons to press or you keep a notebook in your bag and you have to retrieve your bag to get your notebook, you will resist and start to believe you will remember whatever you were going to collect in your head. And that will never serve you. It will forget to remind you to add it to your inbox.  The second part of the process is organising what you collected. Here, you want to choose something that works for you. I recommend using the Time Sector System, but you may find organising things by project works better for you.  What matters when it comes to organising is that you can quickly organise what you collected that day into their appropriate places. For instance, a task would go into your task manager, an event would go to your calendar, and an idea would go into your notes app. Where you put them will depend on how you have each of these tools set up.  With your task manager, what matters is the things you need to do show up on the days they need to be done. Nothing else really matters.  A side issue is that if you are going in and out of your task manager looking for things to do in individual projects or lists, you will be less effective. When you are tired, you will just scroll through your lists of tasks, causing you to feel depressed about how much you have to do and how little time you have to do them.  This is why being clear about when something needs to be done prevents that scroll. You trust that what you have on your list of things to do today is the right thing to do today.  That's why I recommend the Time Sector System as your organisational system. It focuses on when you will do something, not how much you have to do.  There are only twenty-four in a day, and you're not going to be able to get everything done in a day. Be realistic about what you can and cannot do in a day.  And then there's the doing.  And this is what it's all about. You've collected all this stuff, and it's organised, so you know where everything is, what appointments you have, and what tasks need to be done today. If you have ensured the first two parts—the collecting and organising—have been done, the doing part will largely take care of itself.  But what is important about doing? That's doing the things that matter, and remaining focused on what you have decided is important.  When you don't have any kind of system for collecting and organising, you will find you get pulled into doing things for other people at the expense of what you are meant to be doing. It can be easy to spend four or five hours helping someone else to get their work done, only to find yourself with precious little time left to do the work you are expected to do.  This is where you will find yourself building mountains of backlogs and with no time to get them under control.  It doesn't mean that you cut yourself off from other people. What it means is you begin the day with a clear idea of what needs to be done.  If you do have everything organised and you are spending five or ten minutes each day planning the next, you will find that out of a typical eight-hour day, you will likely need three or four hours for your own work. That still leaves you with four or five hours where you are available for other people. If you are structured and disciplined, you will find managing your own work and the requests of others easily manageable.  Yet all this begins with the collecting and organising.  That is the most powerful part of COD. It's essentially a process you follow that ensures the right work is getting done at the right time.  And that is the way to think about it—a process. Throughout the day, you collect. Then, at the end of the day, you spend ten minutes or so organising what you collected, and for the rest of the time, you do the work.  There are other parts to building a productivity system. Ensuring you have enough time protected each day for doing your important work, which means blocking time on your calendar. I find it interesting that with the advancement of technology, we have focused on doing more rather than using technology to protect our time for the important things in life.  I remember years ago envying bosses who had secretaries. Secretaries protected their bosses' calendars by making it difficult for people to make demands on their time. Technology can do this for you today. Services like Calendarly allow you to specify when you are available for meetings with other people, and they can choose a suitable time from a list of available times.  There are Do Not Disturb features on your phone and in internal messaging services that tell people you are busy. Technology can do all the things the best secretaries did twenty to thirty years ago. Use them. They will make your life a lot less stressful.  The final part of doing is the art of prioritisation. In the COD course, I have a section on the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. This is a simple method for choosing what to work on each day. The principle is that each day, you dedicate ten tasks to be done. These tasks do not include your routine tasks—the low-value maintenance tasks. These are bigger projects or goal-moving tasks.  Two of those tasks will be nominated as your must-do tasks for the day. These are the tasks you absolutely must do that day, and you will not stop until they are done. For instance, today, my two must-do tasks are recording this podcast and continuing my research into the profession of archiving.  When I did my planning last night, I highlighted these two tasks in my task manager and blocked time out on my calendar for getting them done.  There are other things I need to do today, but those two tasks are the must-dos.  This is how COD helps you. It gives you a framework and a process for doing your work and living your life.  If you adopt COD, you will find you have a system for managing your workload. However, beyond COD, there are a few other things you need to develop.  The first is how you will manage your tasks. As I mentioned before, I recommend the Time Sector System, which emphasises what needs to be done this week and pushes everything else off your list until it becomes relevant. This act alone significantly reduces that sense of overwhelm and encourages you to be realistic about what can be completed in a week.  Then there are the higher-level objectives in your life—your long-term vision and goals for getting to where you want to be.  However, without the basics in place, you do not have steps to get there. After all, a goal without a set of steps to achieve it is a delusion.  If you are struggling to get things working for you, I encourage you to take the COD course. Even if you already have a system, the course will give you ideas and methods that will help you make your system even better.  It's a free course and will take less than an hour to complete. Plus, you get free downloadable guidance sheets and so much more.  The link to the course is in the show notes, and you can get further information from my website, carlpullein.com  Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

This week, it's all about preventing yourself from becoming overwhelmed and learning to build more realistic days.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 299 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 299 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. How much “stuff” do you have to do today? Do you think you will complete it all? Does it even have to be all done today? These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself that will help you to see whether you are running close to being overwhelmed or are already overwhelmed.  There are a number of reasons why you may find yourself consistently overwhelmed. One of which is not having any prioritisation techniques in place. If you cannot, or do not, prioritise the stuff coming at you, you will treat everything as being important and given you cannot do everything all at once, your brain will slide into panic mode, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and not knowing where to begin.  Another reason is because you believe you can do a lot more than you realistically can. You cannot do fifty tasks, attend six, forty-five-minute meetings and deal with over 200 emails in a day. Nobody can. Even if you went without sleep, didn't eat or bathe, you would still not get through all those meetings, tasks and emails.  So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Paolo. Paolo asks, hi Carl, I've learned a lot from you over the last two or three years, and I am very grateful to you. My question is, I still feel overwhelmed by everything I have to do and was wondering if you have any tips or tricks that will help me to stop feeling overwhelmed.  Hi Paolo, thank you for your question.  This is one area I have thought a lot about over the years—why is it, with all the technology we have today, do we feel more overworked and overwhelmed than ever before? I mean, technology is supposed to make our lives easier, not more stressful, yet life isn't easier or less stressful.  Part of the problem is with the technology. It's more convenient than ever to collect stuff. If you wanted to learn more about Yoga, you would have had to find a few hours to go to your local library to research the subject. Today, you can read thousands of websites without leaving your sofa.  Email is easier to send than a letter. A text or Team message is easier to compose than making a phone call, and adding another to-do to a task list is much easier than pulling out a notebook, finding our pen and writing it down. When something is easy, we will do more of it than if it were difficult.  The other problem with technology and apps, in particular, is these are designed to keep you hooked. This means we are encouraged to pour more and more stuff into them and spend time organising and moving stuff around so we can tell everyone how wonderful a particular app is. Just look at how Notion hooks people. It has a ton of features; you can create beautifully designed templates and share them with the world, and this encourages you to join more and more groups looking for more and more templates to download and try out.  Just remember, with all this “playing” and organising, you are not doing any work. So, while you have great-looking and fantastically organised tools, you have an ever-growing list of things that are not getting done. When we realise we have to do some of the work we are organising, it's a huge disappointment and the fun stops.  This is one of the reasons why I often say our apps need to be boring. If they are boring, we spend as little time as possible in them, which is great because if we are not organising and fiddling, we have no choice but to do the work. Which, in turn, reduces the overwhelming lists that are accumulating.  But let's return to the prioritisation point. The starting point here is to know what your core work is. What are you employed to do, and what does that look like at a task level? It's no good saying I am employed to sell, or teach or design. That tells you nothing at a task level. What does selling involve? How many calls do you need to make each day? How many appointments per day will enable you to reach your sales target each month?  It's making those calls and setting up those appointments that are the tasks you need to be doing each day before anything else. That is your priority.  Beyond your work, knowing what your areas of focus are, what they mean to you and what you must do each day or week to keep them in balance is critical if you want to ensure that what you do each day serves you and moves you towards building the life you want to live.  One of the first books on Time Management I read was a book by Hyrum Smith. Hyrum Smith was the creator of the Franklin Planner, and his book, the 10 Natural Laws of Time And Life Management, was the book that launched Franklin Planner. By the way, you can still buy that book on Amazon. (You can also still buy the Franklin Planner too)  Smith spends around a quarter of the book discussing the importance of governing values. These are the values you hold dear, and by observing them, you have a natural prioritisation workflow. For example, if you place your family above your work, if your boss asks you to stay behind to do some extra work when it's your daughter or son's birthday, you would not hesitate to say no to your boss.  There is a hierarchy of values, and there is a hierarchy of areas of focus. At different times in your life, your areas of focus hierarchy will change. When you are in school, self-development will be near the top; as you get older, finances and health and fitness will likely rise. Perhaps in your thirties, your career or business will be close to the top. It's in this area where we are all different.  The key is knowing what your areas of focus are and what's most important right now and ensuring you are prioritising anything that will help you accomplish what you want to accomplish there.  Now, that's all the background stuff. Spending a little time there and working out what is most important to you right now will help you make decisions faster. Now, what about strategy? The simplest way to get on top of everything is to group similar tasks together and do them in one single session. For example, email and communications. Rather than reacting every time an email comes in and responding to it, move the main to an action folder for later. Then, at the allocated time, open up that folder and begin with the oldest one and work your way down. Do as many as you can in the time you have allowed for this activity. If you consistently do this every day, you will soon find yourself on top of your mail.  Let's be honest: if you have 400 hundred actionable emails, you won't be able to do them all in one day. So don't try. Focus on spending an hour each day on it and watch what happens.  Do the same for admin. Schedule an hour a day for your admin. We all have admin to do. That could be activity reports, expenses, banking or attendance records. Don't let it become a backlog. Allocate time each day for doing it. This consistency will soon have you back on top of everything.  The great thing about having a consistent time for doing things like communications and admin, it very quickly becomes a habit. I cannot imagine going to dinner without clearing my actionable email. Similarly, once dinner is over, I love sitting down with a cup of tea and doing my admin. Sure, admin is boring, but a great cup of tea and a bit of music can do wonders for monotonous tasks like admin.  Now for more meaningful work—work that requires an hour or more; if you know this to be the case, you will need to find the time for it. There's no point in hoping you will find the time; you won't. Time does not like a vacuum, so you will always be doing something. Sleeping, watching TV, reading, playing computer games or whatever. So the key is to be intentional with your time. Sure, rest time should be included. If you feel tired, make the decision to stop and take a break. Equally, if you know you have an important piece of work to do, and it will take you longer than an hour or so, schedule the time. Be intentional. It won't happen by accident.  A strategy I use is to block out two hours each day on my calendar for focused work. Every morning between 9:30 and 11:30 am, I do something meaningful. That could be writing, working on a project or doing client work. My calendar tells me what type of work I will be doing, and my task manager gives me a list of tasks associated with that activity. It's simple; it allows me to get focused work done each day. It's having this structure and consistency built into your days that ensure you get your work done. You don't have to do everything in one day; you just need to know what you will do in your two hours. I knew before I began today I would be writing this script today in my two hours. I know tomorrow I will be finishing off this week's newsletter and sending it out. If you work a typical eight-hour day, you still have four hours free for other things (allowing for your one hour for communications and an hour for admin). That's more than enough for emergencies, sudden requests from clients and customers and other unknowns.  I hope that helps, Paolo and thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

Join Maurice Harker, the Director of Life Changing Services, in an engaging episode that explores the profound concept of discovering and embracing one's true identity. In this workshop-style podcast, Maurice encourages listeners to participate actively and take notes while reflecting on the themes discussed. Maurice kicks off the episode by emphasizing the importance of teaching and learning based on eternal principles. He acknowledges that while he strives for accuracy, he is still mortal and may have teaching flaws. He reminds listeners that the most crucial lessons are often learned through personal prayer and pondering after the meeting. The episode delves into the idea of planning and its significance in one's life. Maurice shares anecdotes about people who have great intentions but often fail to follow through on their plans, leading to frustration and embarrassment. He highlights the risks associated with hoping for success but encourages listeners to embrace these risks, as achieving personal growth can be a rewarding outcome. Maurice introduces the concept of "the noble and great ones of the final generation" and the subtle satanic attacks that can erode one's self-worth. He challenges listeners to examine their self-imposed rules that may limit their potential. The episode also discusses the sources of the principles taught, which include elements from Stephen Covey's work, the Franklin Planner, and President Nelson's Pattern for Growth System. Maurice provides a homework assignment that involves creating a mission statement, identifying one's purpose, and defining the characteristics needed to fulfill that mission. He encourages participants to use the Battle Planner and take notes to track their inspirations and psychological challenges, which will be discussed further in the podcast series. Listeners are invited to invite friends and family to participate in the journey of self-discovery and transformation, making this episode a starting point for a life-changing process. Join Maurice Harker in this transformative exploration of your true identity and the potential to become one of the noble and great ones of the final generation. Want to read more about this topic? ⁠⁠https://www.lifechangingservices.org/unlocking-your-potential-a-comprehensive-guide-to-self-improvement/⁠ Rather Watch Something? ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMMPdVv3_CY⁠ Check out the Eternal Warriors 3.0: ⁠⁠https://www.lifechangingservices.org/eternal-warriors-workshop/

How do you use your calendar? Is it just a place for your appointments or a powerful way to manage your daily activities? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 297 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 297 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. For centuries, the great and the good (and not so good) have all used a simple time management system. It's a system that has largely been unaffected by digital technology and one that has enabled such great things as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling painting, Charles Darwin's Origins of Species, and the Apollo Space program's moon landing. Without this method and tool, none of these amazing iconic events would have happened.  What system am I talking about? The calendar. Or rather your diary.  I was reminded of this recently while helping a high school student prepare for a particularly intensive period of exams and assignments. We began talking about where he was keeping his course notes and how he was managing his time. We considered using a task manager, which he rejected as being just another thing to manage (good point, I thought), and it was when we began talking about using his calendar that I could see instantly that here was the key to helping him through this busy time.  So, just how can a calendar help you with your time management and productivity, and what should you be putting on there? Well, that's for this week's question to ask. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Alan. Alan asks; hi Carl, I've heard you talk a lot about your calendar and was wondering if you have any advice on using it better. At the moment, I only use my calendar for my meetings and public holidays.  Hi Alan, Thank you for your question.  I consider myself very lucky today because my introduction to the world of time management systems was a simple A4 desk diary. When opened, that diary showed my full week, and I had space at the bottom of each day for my tasks.  At a glance, I could instantly see how busy I was on a given day, and it was that diary and then a Franklin Planner, from around 1993, that managed my life until 2009, when I went all in digitally.  This meant that my core beliefs about how I managed my time and did my work were centred around my calendar and what I had time for.  Now, the way I use my calendar is for three critical things.  The first, unsurprisingly, is for my appointments. All my appointments, whether manually added by myself or ones that come from my coaching programme's scheduling service, are automatically added to my calendar.  Now, a quick word about my scheduling service. I have complete control over what is scheduled here. I set the times I am available, and only people who have the link can schedule appointments. This has been a big time saver for me because most of my clients are based in the US or Europe. That means there is a significant time difference between where I am and where they are.  Instead of going back and forth negotiating a suitable time, my clients can pick and choose based on what's convenient for them without having to waste time sending countless emails. Once they have selected a time, I get a notification, and the time is blocked out in my calendar.  However, the advantage of using a scheduling service is you give yourself greater control over your day. For example, if you want to protect your mornings for focused work, you can set your available times for between 1 pm and 4 pm each day. Doing that would mean over a five-day period, you would be available for fifteen hours. For most of you, I am sure that would be enough time for all your meetings and appointments.  The great thing about scheduling services is your boss, clients, and colleagues enjoy the flexibility and not only do you save time for yourself, but you also save time for everyone else. All they need do is go to your scheduling service, select a time that suits them, and the appointment will then be pushed to your calendar. Job done with no input from you at all.  The two services I know are Acuity, the one I use because it's built into my website and Calendly. I believe Calendly has a free option if you want to test it out first.  The second item that goes onto my calendar is date-specific events. These are things like bills to pay, public holidays or if my wife is going to be away.  Now, a lot of my bill payments are set up as automatic payments, but I still add the payment date to my calendar because I want to make sure there are sufficient funds in my account to cover the payment.  If you are viewing your calendar as a week to view rather than a month or day to view, when you do your weekly plan, you will instantly see anything that is date-specific that you need to be aware of and can plan accordingly.  Another type of date-specific event you can put here is your project deadlines or if you need to call someone on a given day, and they can be called at any time. (If you need to call them at a specific time, you add the call to that time slot on the appropriate day.)  Another type of date-specific information you can put here would be travel notices. For example, if your town or city or a city you will be visiting that day has a major road closure, you need to be aware of. For example, a couple of weeks ago, the town we live in had the main coastal road closed for five hours while they ran the annual marathon. While I do not often use that road, it is something useful to know in case we decided to go out for lunch or do an errand.  Rail strikes in the UK are usually pre-notified. If you use the rail service and you know there will be a strike coming up, you can add that to your calendar.  All these date-specific events and information should be placed at the top of your calendar as all-day events. That way, they don't interfere with your timed schedule but act as notices you need to know about.  And finally, your time blocks for focused work. If you have followed this podcast for a while, you will have heard me talking about core work—the work you are employed to do. To get this work done on time every time, you need to make sure you have enough time blocked out for doing it. If, for example, you block your mornings for doing focused work, that would give you a further fifteen hours a week for undisturbed, focused work. Imagine that. Knowing, confidently, you have fifteen hours each week to get on—undisturbed—with work that must be done each week. How productive would you be in that situation?  I don't block every morning for focused work, though. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays are blocked. I keep Thursdays open for calls (my clients on the West Coast of North America are currently sixteen hours behind me). I work Saturdays as well, and I keep Saturdays open, so I have the flexibility to catch up with anything I have not had time to do or am a little behind.  Now, if you pause a moment and look at what you could have here. Imagine you work a regular forty-hour week. You have fifteen hours available for meetings and collaboration and fifteen hours for focused work, which leaves you with ten hours for flexible work—the unexpected and urgent. Would that be enough for you?  Now, none of this should ever be set in concrete. There needs to be some flexibility. If you consistently do a daily planning session, then you can move things around to better suit the week you are in and what needs to be done that week.  For example, once a month, I will have one or two days blocked out completely for project days. This gives me the time I need to dedicate a full day to a bigger project.  There is one more item I would suggest you block out. That is an hour a day for dealing with your communications. Let's be honest; we all get too many emails and messages that need to be dealt with. If you do not set aside time for dealing with them, when will you do it? You cannot ignore most of these messages and emails (although I am sure you wish you could do so sometimes).  If you know you have an hour dedicated to responding to your email each day, you will find you are less reactive about it and much more proactive. You don't panic when a message or email comes in because you know you have an hour set aside later in the day to focus on your responses.  There are a lot of ways to get the most out of your calendar, and I would strongly advise you to find ways you can use it to bring a sense of calm and focus to your day. There are little things you can do. For example, I only allow people to schedule either thirty or fifty-minute appointments. That then gives me time to prepare for the next call if I have back-to-back meetings.  You are now likely wondering about where the task manager fits into this system. Well, like the calendar, the to-do list has been around for a long time. However, the to-do list was and should still be considered a subsidiary of the calendar. If something must be done on a given day, it goes into the calendar; if it can be done at any time, it goes into your task manager.  With the Time Sector System, you group your tasks by when you would like to get them done. You can date these tasks for specific days, and if you see you have several calls or follow-ups to do, you can block out an hour or so for follow-ups or communications to take care of these. Your time sectors are holding pens that help you to structure your day. You structure your day in your calendar, and your task manager acts as a feeder for all the little things you need to do in the time you have available.  For example, in my task manager today, I have three writing tasks, which I have done in the three hours I set aside for writing today. I also have a number of admin tasks to complete, which I will do in the admin hour I have scheduled later today. My calendar tells me what I should type of work I should be doing, and my task manager takes care of the tasks I should perform at that time.  When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool and your task manager as the feeder, you quickly see what you have time for each day and can then reschedule or renegotiate commitments to ensure you are not overstretching yourself.  So there you go, Alan. I hope that has helped, and thank you for your question.  Thank you to you, too, for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.   

Aeson Knight is a multi-talented individual who excels as a Master Psychic, teacher, and podcaster. As a gay poly individual, Aeson embraces his diverse identity and brings a wealth of experience to his psychic work. He is a respected member of the Tarosophy Tarot Association and has earned a place on the esteemed Best Psychic Directory. Aeson is also the Co-Founder of the Psychic Coffee Shop Network (PCSPN) and co-hosts shows alongside his partner.   If you've ever wondered how Aeson manages his hectic schedule, you can join him every Sunday for a live session where he shares his life planning strategies and provides a weekly tarot energy overview. This engaging discussion offers insights into Aeson's approach to managing his time effectively.   When working with Aeson, rest assured that he focuses solely on answering your direct questions. He believes in delivering clear and concise answers without wasting time on vague or unhelpful responses. By cutting through the fluff and nonsense, Aeson addresses the core issues that truly matter to you. Whether it's relationships, career, or life in general, he provides the valuable information you need to progress.   A key addition to the Psychic Coffee Shop Network is Techie Joe, an expert in Information Systems & Operations Management. With his extensive problem-solving skills and expertise in tech support, Joe has been assisting people for many years. Together, Aeson and Joe offer a comprehensive perspective, combining psychic insights with practical knowledge in the digital planning world.   Experience the power of Aeson's Q&A style readings, where he prioritizes your specific needs and offers guidance to help you move forward in life. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pcspnetwork/message

Aeson Knight is a multi-talented individual who excels as a Master Psychic, teacher, and podcaster. As a gay poly individual, Aeson embraces his diverse identity and brings a wealth of experience to his psychic work. He is a respected member of the Tarosophy Tarot Association and has earned a place on the esteemed Best Psychic Directory. Aeson is also the Co-Founder of the Psychic Coffee Shop Network (PCSPN) and co-hosts shows alongside his partner.   If you've ever wondered how Aeson manages his hectic schedule, you can join him every Sunday for a live session where he shares his life planning strategies and provides a weekly tarot energy overview. This engaging discussion offers insights into Aeson's approach to managing his time effectively.   When working with Aeson, rest assured that he focuses solely on answering your direct questions. He believes in delivering clear and concise answers without wasting time on vague or unhelpful responses. By cutting through the fluff and nonsense, Aeson addresses the core issues that truly matter to you. Whether it's relationships, career, or life in general, he provides the valuable information you need to progress.   A key addition to the Psychic Coffee Shop Network is Techie Joe, an expert in Information Systems & Operations Management. With his extensive problem-solving skills and expertise in tech support, Joe has been assisting people for many years. Together, Aeson and Joe offer a comprehensive perspective, combining psychic insights with practical knowledge in the digital planning world.   Experience the power of Aeson's Q&A style readings, where he prioritizes your specific needs and offers guidance to help you move forward in life. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pcspnetwork/message

Hey Crew - It's so good to check back in with you here on Episode 026. With so many task management systems now in existence, there's an opportunity to turn your To Do list into a job unto itself. Managing your tasks should be a simple exercise: Prioritize and execute, that's the goal. But it's now easy to become lost in app's, bogged down in trying to get this app to talk to Outlook, which then needs an add-in to talk back to your task management, which then needs to be updated so it can coordinate with your calendar. In my world, all of that linking of applications does nothing but cause friction. In this episode, I discuss my task management system - Tried & true pencil & paper. I've spoken about my Franklin Planner and what a anchor it is in what I do day-to-day to keep myself organized. I challenge the listener to take a step back off the line this week and assess how your task management systems are working for you. Some notable links from the episode: Tiago Forte - Building a Second Brain Focused Podcast Connect with me anytime!! LinkedIn: Bob Hildebranski, PE Website: Hildebranski.com Contact Page Link --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bob-hildebranski/message

Podcast 256 This week, we're looking at the overwhelming number of so-called “projects” people create and why it's these that contribute to overwhelm and a lot of wasted time.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 256 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 256 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. I read David Allen's seminal book, Getting Things Done, around fifteen years ago, and it helped me to transform away from a manual Franklin Planner that had served me well for the previous 17 years to a fully digital productivity system.  In Getting Things Done, David Allen defines a project as anything requiring two or more steps to complete. He also mentioned that most people have between thirty and a hundred projects at any one time.  Now, if you are following a correct interpretation of GTD (as Getting Things Done is called), that would not pose a problem because projects are kept in file folders in a filing cabinet near your desk and your task manager is organised by context—meaning your lists are based around a place such as your workplace, home or hardware store, a tool such as your computer or phone or a person, such as your partner, boss or colleagues.  Unfortunately, when apps began to appear, many app developers misread or misinterpreted the GTD concept and built their apps around project lists instead of contexts. It could also have been a concern for intellectual property rights. But either way, this has led to people organising their task list managers by project and not context. And it is this that has caused so much to go wrong for so many people.  This week's question is on this very subject and why managing your task manager by your projects is overwhelming and very ineffective.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Lara. Lara asks, hi Carl, Last year I read the Getting Things Done book and have really struggled to get it to work for me. I have nearly 80 projects in my task manager, and I feel I am spending too much time keeping everything organised. I never seem to be able to decide what to work on, and everything feels important. Do you have any suggestions on spending less time managing work and more time doing the work?  Hi Lara, thank you for your question.  So, as I mentioned in the opening, the problem here is you are managing your projects in the wrong place. Task managers are there to manage your tasks, not your projects. If you want to manage projects with software, you would be better off purchasing dedicated project management software. However, those apps can be very expensive and have been designed for corporations and large teams working on a single project. Apps like Monday.com and Wrike are examples of accessible project managers.  However, apps like these are designed for teams of people working together on a single project and will not solve your problem of being able to spend more time doing your work and less time organising it. Now, you did not mention if you wanted to continue using the GTD model or not, but if you want to get things better organised, the first step would be to remove your projects from your task manager and replace your lists with something you can better manage.  Now, I use the Time Sector System to manage my tasks. This means my task manager is organised by when I will do the task. There are five time sectors: This week, next week, this month, next month and long-term and on hold.  This means when a task comes into my task manager, the only thing I need to decide is when I will do the task. If it needs doing this week, it will be added to my This Week folder; if it does need doing this week, I will distribute it accordingly.  In the GTD world, you need to set up your task manager by your different contexts. These can be anything, but they do need to work for you. While in the GTD book, David Allen gives us examples of @office, @computer, @phone and @home etc, these are a bit out of date today. We can do email from a computer, tablet or phone, and many of us work in a hybrid way in that we do a lot of work working from home.  Now, I've seen some people organise their work by energy level: for instance, high energy would be for big tasks that require quite a bit of time, low energy would be for easy tasks that can be done at any time.  The great thing about GTD is you can choose your own contexts that better fit your lifestyle.  However, a better way to manage all this is to treat the folders in your task manager as holding pens for tasks yet to be done. The only thing that really matters is what you have to do today. Allowing yourself to be distracted by what can be done tomorrow or next week will slow you down and bring with it a sense of overwhelm.  But, before we get there, let's look at how you are defining a project.  In GTD a project is defined as anything requiring two or more steps. This is where I think GTD breaks down. For example, arranging for my car to go in for a service will require more than one step. I need to confer with my wife for a suitable day that we both will be available, I need to call the dealership to book the car in and I need to add the date to my calendar because the dealership is sixty miles away from where we live.  Yet, the only task I have in my task manager is an annual, recurring task that comes up on the 1st September reminding me to book my car in for a service. When that task appears, I know to ask my wife when she will be available. I don't need three tasks all written out in a separate project.  Equally, much of the work we do is routine. For example, every week, I need to write a blog post, two essays, prepare and record this podcast and create two to three YouTube videos. Technically, in the GTD world, each of those tasks are projects. There are more than one step involved in each of those pieces of content. But I do not treat them as individual projects. They are tasks I just do.  I know I need around five hours a week for writing, so I block out five hours each week for writing on my calendar. I need three hours to prepare this podcast and another three hours for recording and editing my YouTube videos. As I know the amount of time I need for each of my pieces of work, I block the time out in my calendar.  Now, in your case Lara, what is the work you have to do each week? Before you do anything else, block out sufficient time for getting that work done on your calendar now.  Let's say for example; you are in sales and each day you want to contact ten prospects. How long does that take you? If that takes you an hour each day, then you need to block an hour out on your calendar to do that work. There's no point in ‘hoping' you will find the time. You won't. If it is something you must do or want to do, you need to allocate sufficient time for doing it. On your calendar, you would write “Sales Calls”. In your notes, or a spreadsheet, you would have a list of people to contact. In this example, it's unlikely you need a task for this because your calendar is dictating what you will do and the list of people to contact are in a dedicated CRM, spreadsheet or notes app. You don't need to duplicate things.  Let's look at a different kind of project. Let's say you are moving house. That's a big project. How would we manage that?  My advice is open your notes app. Project like this that are going involve checklists, emails, images, designs, things to buy, copies of contracts and so much more would never work well in a task manager. You are also likely to need a file folder on your computer to keep all these documents.  On your calendar, you will have your moving date and perhaps a few extra days for organising your new home.  What would go on your task manager? Very little. You may have tasks such as send signed contracts to landlord or your lawyers, or to call the electricity company to notify them of your moving in date, but you would be managing a project like this from your notes app, not a task manager.  Most of our difficulties with task managers is we are putting too much in there. There's a limit to what we can do each day. We are constrained by the time available. It's that part of the equation we cannot change. Time is fixed. The only thing we have any control over is what we do in the time we have available. And it's there where we need to get realistic.  If you begin the day and there are 60+ tasks in your task manager for today, you have failed. You will never complete all those tasks. You've got to get realistic about what you can achieve each day.  For me, if my task manager has more than twenty tasks to do, I know I am not going to complete them all. I will go into my task manager and reschedule some of those tasks. It's no good telling myself these tasks have to be done, because I already know I will not have enough time to do them all. You need to get strict about what must be done and what can be rescheduled for another day.  So, Lara, my advice is move your projects out of your task manager and into your notes. Whether you use Apple Notes, Evernote, Notion or OneNote (or something else), it's your notes app that will better manage your projects. You can keep copies of relevant emails, links to documents and so much more in your notes. You can also create checklists. I will be travelling to Europe in a couple weeks. It's a ten day trip and I've create a note for the trip in my notes app. That note contains my travel checklist, copies of my flight confirmation email, and a list of the things I need to do while there. There is nothing in my task manager. A few weeks ago, there was. I had a single task telling me to book my flights. Now that's done everything related to this trip is managed from my notes app.  The goal, is to keep your task manager clean and tight. Only relevant things that need to be done should be there. Routines such as cleaning my office and doing my admin and cleaning my actionable email each day are in there—while I don't really need these reminders, they are there in case I have an emergency and need need a lit of things that should have been done where I can decide what must be done and what can be rescheduled. I hope that has helped Lara and thank you for your question. Thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.  

Hey Crew - It's great to be back with you. For the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of free-time thinking about goals. I've been a goal setter since I got my first Franklin Planner in 1989. Back then, I learned the basics of goal setting that we all know & love: Determining values & what matters most, developing ways of creating task lists that would be the incremental steps that lead to accomplishing the goals. I don't consider myself to be a "Type A" personality who's always trying to get to the next ladder rung, I'm just a guy who's trying to better himself everyday. Safe to say, we all are striving towards things that we believe to be important to us, so loosely defined, whether we write them down or not, we all have goals. In this episode, I take a quick drive down my own Goal Setting Memory Lane and talk a bit on how I have historically looked at the process of goal setting. And then, I'll take you down a bit of a back-road and introduce you to a concept that has changed the way I think about goals. For me, this has been a game-changer: I won't be setting my goals the same way I used to. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on whether my new way of thinking might be something you'll implement. A few linkables mentioned in the Show: Range (David Epstien) Franklin Planner System Andy Frisella and his 75 Hard Challenge Connect with me anytime!! LinkedIn: Bob Hildebranski, PE Website: Hildebranski.com Contact Page Link --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bob-hildebranski/message

Despite being a common diagnosis, many people with ADHD may go most of their lives without ever officially being diagnosed. Although there are a number of challenges that this presents, one of the most frustrating is that the longer ADHD is left untreated, the more difficult it becomes to change our habits. Even so, that doesn't mean it's impossible - and our guest today proves it!For this week's episode, I invited Bob Shea - a renowned children's author who only recently received an ADHD diagnosis at age 52 - to talk about the trials and triumphs he experienced living with hidden ADHD for so long. Although Bob has some legitimate regrets about not getting diagnosed sooner, he's worked hard to address his challenge areas and make meaningful transformations in his habits. As a result, Bob has seen major improvements in both his personal and professional life that he's excited to share with our listeners. He also reveals the tools, systems, and interventions that helped him along the way. His contributions to the podcast reveal an important lesson - it's never too late to get the support we need to become the best version of ourselves. I know you'll enjoy listening to Bob's advice, wit, and humor just as much as I did during our conversation.Here are some relevant resources related to our conversation:ADHD ResourcesOn-Demand Webinar: ADHD Fundamentals - What you need to succeed after diagnosis: This is the link to a webinar Beyond BookSmart held recently. If you register, you'll gain instant access to the webinar. 8 Things You Need to Know About ADHD After a Diagnosis: A blog that summarizes key points from the webinar linked above.ADHD Information for Adults: This website includes information on medication and non-medication approaches to managing ADHD.How To ADHD YouTube Channel: An amazing channel that tries to both normalize and help support the trials and tribulations of living with ADHD. Dr. Tracey Marks - Skills Training for ADHD Playlist: A fantastic psychologist and content creator with invaluable insights on living with ADHD. Other Stuff We DiscussedBob's Planning and Time Management Strategy Here's a pic of Bob's notebook so you can see how he lays out his tasks and week.The Sam Harris Meditation App: This is the meditation app that Bob likes to use every morning.Jetpens.com: Bob's favorite place to shop for pens online. The Pomodoro Technique: 25 Minutes to Increase Productivity: This is the time management approach called the Pomodoro Method that Bob uses. We also use it as coaches!Leuchtturm1917 Notebook: This is the notebook I use for my bullet journal.Time Timer Visual Clock: This is the visual timer that I asked Bob about and then he showed me his which he had on the desk next to him.River Fox BuJo: My daughter's Pinterest account I mentioned in the episodeBob Shea's Instagram and WebsiteContact us!Reach out to us at podcast@beyondbooksmart.comIG/FB/TikTok @beyondbooksmartcoachingTranscriptHannah Choi 00:04Hi everyone and welcome to Focus Forward, an executive function Podcast where we explore the challenges and celebrate the wins you'll experience as you change your life through working on improving your executive function skills. I'm your host, Hannah Choi. When my kids were little, we spent hours at our local library and we'd go home with 50 or so books at a time. We especially loved picture books that made us laugh. And one day we discovered an author called Bob Shea, and Bob's books quickly became some of our favorites. Thanks to the internet, we found out that Bob also lived in our home state of Connecticut. We followed him on Instagram and really enjoyed his drawing tutorials and quirky posts. And Bob started inviting other children's authors and illustrators to have a conversation with him on Instagram Live every Friday. And one day he had author and illustrator Charles Santoso on for a chat. And Bob openly and very candidly shared about his experience having ADHD. He talked about the time management strategies that he uses, and how important they are for him. I knew at that very moment that I just had to invite Bob on to be a guest on the podcast. So today, I've got you a very entertaining and very real conversation about how ADHD impacts his life, how medication really helped and the tools and strategies that he uses to find satisfaction in his life. And I'm really thrilled to share Bob's story with you today. Before we jump in, I want to acknowledge that not everyone with ADHD uses medication. And whatever choice people make about medication is theirs and theirs alone. There are alternative options for those who choose not to use it. And for those who do use it, they likely find that it doesn't work well just on its own. As you'll hear Bob say it works well for him because he combines it with other non medication strategies. If you are interested in learning more, check out the show notes for more reading and resources on this topic. Okay, now on to the show. Okay. Hi, Bob. Thanks for joining me today. Do you wanna introduce yourself to our listeners? Bob Shea 02:10Sure. My name is Bob Shea. I'm a children's book author and illustrator. And I found out that I had ADHD when I was 52.Hannah Choi 02:24Did you, did you won...have you had you wondered before in your life?Bob Shea 02:30I not in a serious way. It was probably the six months before I was diagnosed that I really started to think that it was more than just character flaws.Hannah Choi 02:51Did something happen? Was there like a some kind of shift in your thinking or something that got you to start with questioning that?Bob Shea 03:00There were two things I did start following some ADHD accounts on Instagram. That was one thing. So that put it on my radar pretty strong. And what would happen was or what happened I remember specifically, someone did a real that had symptoms of ADHD that I had never known would have been things and it was exactly how my brain works like exactly. And it wasn't the traditional. This is what ADHD is why because my the one of the reasons I one of the reasons I didn't think that I had it was because I know people who you know, in five minutes, you're like, Man, this conversation is 20 different subjects. And my my brothers both have it in and in the three of us it presents differently. So that was difficult. I'm not hyperactive, I don't have any of the traditional things. My my thoughts about ADHD were Bart Simpson, bad student acting up can't sit still. I was I did well in school. I wasn't a troublemaker at all. None of those things. So I was like, I don't have any of that stuff. And then there was a day when I was trying to finish a project I was trying to finish a book that I had do. And I couldn't do it like I couldn't pick up my iPad and open up the file and start... like it was due it was like that safety net of, of a looming deadline did not fail to ignite the fire. And I was scrolling on the Instagram instead. Like, compulsively. I was like I can't stop doing this. I'm look I was like I need some kind of stimulation that and the the I was I'm looking forward to doing the book. Like it was not like Yay, I'm gonna do this book and I'm excited finally gonna get to dig in. I've avoided it and I, I made an appointment for the next day with my, with my doctor with a physician's assistant. I went home and told my wife and she was like, Yeah, that's a really good idea.Hannah Choi 05:23She's like, finally the day has come.Bob Shea 05:24She was like, yeah, she was like, Man, she got the worst of it over the years, I'll tell you. So, yeah, so then I went to the, you know, when I went to this appointment, and I almost cancelled it. I was like, you know, just do your work. I'm sure you're fine. She's gonna let I had gone to her one time for Xanax because I had to go on tour. And I didn't want to talk to people that asked for like, I'm like, Look, I just need, I don't take it normally. Like, she has my records. Like, I'm not a drug seeker. But I was like, I'm traveling, I got to talk to people. I need some Xanax. And she was reluctant to give it to me, and like really gave me a hard time about it. And so I was like, she's not going to do anything for this ADHD, she's gonna laugh at me. She's like, come back when you break an arm. That's what I thought it was gonna be when you have when you're bleeding. Give me a call, like not for this. Boo hoo hoo, you can't get your work done. But she was really, really empathetic. And I had I had in the three months prior stop drinking, because it was a pandemic, and I was getting really heavy. Yeah. I was exercising every day. And I was, I had cut sugar out. And I was meditating a lot. I'm a big meditator. And so I went down the litany of what was happening, and that I had that I had and hadn't been doing these things in the last three months. And she said, everything you just said is what I would have told you to do. I would have said, eat better exercise and meditate. She said, if you're doing that stuff, and then she gave me an assessment, and I was laughing, because it was like, they were watching me during my day. I was like, Yes. Like, that's what I do every time. Yeah, they're like, do you like not? Do you get really close to the end of a project and not finish? I'm like, there's something new to do here. Like, right? I'm like, Yeah, you know, like everybody does that like, no, not everybody. And she put me on Adderall right away. And it was flipped, like flipping a switch. It was great. It's wonderful. I know it doesn't work for everyone. And everyone has their own way of treating it. But for me, my wife was like, thank God.Hannah Choi 07:48That's awesome. Yeah, that's so great. It's so great that you that you didn't let the part of you that wanted to not go that that part didn't get its chance. And you just went anyway and talked with her. Yeah. Well, I mean, I actually know that a lot of people are afraid to find out because they don't want to find out that that, that they have X, Y or Z. And but I'm sure it has been your experience. Once you find out it actually can really open up a lot of doors and opportunities and possibilities and totally different way of thinking about yourself.Bob Shea 08:23Just Yeah, I saw my, the past 50 years of my life and an entirely different light. And I was like, Man, why did anybody put up with that guy? He was the worst. I was, I was so glad I actually was birth because I was like, man, like,my life would have been so much different. Had I known that I could have been fixed. But you know, and then the other thing is like, both of my brothers have it. They don't want to do anything about it. Like they like it. And I'm like, really? I'm like I would I can't get rid of it fast enough. I'm like this is I don't I don't spin this into a positive thing at all. For me personally, I'm like, I have I could get I could have been high. Who knows what my life would be like, if I didn't have it? It's not it's not some secret power that I have.Hannah Choi 09:18Right? Right. But like we were talking before we started recording, don't you feel like it has given you some of the creativity that you've needed to to create the do the stuff that you've done, create the books that you've done andBob Shea 09:34yeah, I'm, I'm hesitant to give that so much credit because, but I'll tell you I think that that's true. I think that it allowed me to say, see to make connections I wouldn't have made otherwise when I was coming up with things and what it did was it gave me a unique voice creatively, my sense of humor is very unique to me, for good or for bad. I'm not saying that it's better or worse than anyone. But I'm saying when I write jokes or make a joke, it's comes out of left field. And it's not, Oh, I see what he's doing when he's doing this. It's very strange, for better or worse, but I'll tell you all the things that it didn't wear me all the things that it did for me, I would trade it to be have had a normal life, because I think it was a million times a detriment than it was, then then whatever it gave me.Hannah Choi 10:39Yeah, that's so interesting. Yeah,Bob Shea 10:41If I was sitting right now in my office up in Hartford, Connecticut, as executive of insurance company, in the HR department being like, you know, we have a lot of events coming up. And we have to do these things in a nice, neat desk. I'd love nothing more.Hannah Choi 11:00Well, I have to say that I'm really glad that you did not discover your ADHD until you were 52. And I think that there are lots and lots of children in the world that are really glad you didn't. And lots of parents.Bob Shea 11:12Well, I appreciate you saying that. But you know,Hannah Choi 11:15So if you look at your life, since you were diagnosed, since you started, like, you know, taking Adderall and just being okay, I have a diagnosis. This is this is why do you see Have you seen the change? Could you compare the like before and after?Bob Shea 11:33It's night and day, I mean, that there's there's work things like like right now, I'm as busy as I've ever been in my career. Right now, for the last two months, and probably going into the next couple of weeks, I have so much to do. And it's fine. Like, it's not, I'll have to work this evening, I'll have to get up early in work. But it's fine. I can. I can see it for what it is. I it's not overwhelming things. I was overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed all the time. And that affected my relationship with my family. Because nobody can talk to me. Because you have so much going on in your head. That is all equally important. That was the thing. Everything you had to do was just as important as the other next thing, which actually wasn't as important. So when my wife would come in the room and go, Hey, what should we have for dinner? I'd be like, how can you come in here and add another thing to this pile that's in my head, right? And now I'm just I'm so much more pleasant to be around. I was irritable all the time. I was I thought I thought it was over. I thought I thought I was going to I thought we were going to split up because it may like we didn't talk about it. But in my head. I was like head in my head. I was like, I don't know what's wrong with me. But I can't be around people.Hannah Choi 13:04Do you think that it was it's mostly that medicine that has changed things for you?Bob Shea 13:11Yes, you know, yeah, because, but that but there's I have to explain that a little bit. I do think that that's the case because I wanted to change. I didn't want to be like that. I knew that I was I knew that I was a jerk. And I knew that I was impatient, and that I couldn't she on the weekends. She'd be honest. She's like, you know, when you're home on the weekend, all you want to do is be at work. I know that you're I know that you're not happy. I couldn't, I couldn't relax. I couldn't go just do something. And it was because I thought I had failed the previous week, getting things done. And so I was trying to always try to catch up. I was always trying to catch up. The medication allowed me to make use of the systems I had been trying to put in place because it was always planners. So always had calendars, planners. How do I do this? How do I do this? And once I took the medication, I was able to do all the things. And everything fell into place. It's all it's all a bit. It's not just oh, it took a pill. I was fun. It was it was a framework of things. And knowing that you're even now I'm like, You're bad at this. So you have to do this more than other people do. Because you're so bad at it. Yeah, yeah.Hannah Choi 14:32So what's what kind of systems and strategies do work for you?Bob Shea 14:36It's sort of a it's sort of a mix of a lot of different systems that I had found. But But basically, it's capturing all the information in your head. So I I just did it this morning because it's Monday. I usually do it on Sundays. I write down everything I have to do that week like and it's all in a big pile. So it can be work on this illustration. And the next thing could be make an appointment for a haircut. Like it's not there's no over here you put work and over here you put it it's it's a, it's a messy list on the page next to that I put big blocks because I have to see things and I can't do this on the computer, I have to write it down with my hands, or else. It all looks the same on the computer. It's just like typed words. It could be anything. Yep. And now, because a draw, we're like writing a list, you can draw a little picture of something. Oh, yeah. Whatever. Yeah. So then I, so then I do the days of the week next to that, just horizontal bars of Monday through Friday. And then I drop in roughly, where what I'm going to do on what day really rough like not like you at three o'clock are going to do this. Yes. Then when the day comes...this all sounds so complicated. And it's not. Then on the day I draw a box for every half hour of the day, I make a list, I make a list, I'm going to I'm like, I'm going to work on this. And I'm going to work on this and I make a box for every half hour of the day and I write in the box, what I'm going to work on at what time and it's it is very flexible. If I don't, I'm okay with that. But I have to just know that I have a plan. I will not make this punitive because I will be mad at it. So it's to help me it is not to punish me ever. And one of the things that I did it first, or one of the things that helped the time while blindness was so bad because I'd be like I have a book to I'll take me two days, I don't know, that's fine. You know what I mean? Like, I had no concept. So what, so what I do is I write what I plan to do in that in those blocks time. Then when they pass, I go, and I don't do it immediately. Like at the end of the day, I'll say, Boy, I thought that thing was going to take me an hour and a half took me three hours. That's awesome. So I'm training myself to know what things really take like, oh, going to the post office, that's probably negative 20 minutes. Like, really, you gotta get an envelope, gotta find the right size envelope, you got to pick up the address the person gave you you got to seal it, you got to walk down, there's probably going to be aligned, you know, you're gonna get a coffee after because you did an errand and you need a treat. And then you know, by the time you get back, like how long did that trip to the post office, it takes an hour. And then you have to be like, alright, you have to go to the post office today that costs an hour. Like and then you know, because then you're like, then you're not, you overestimate what you can get done. And then at the end of the day, you feel terrible. You're like, you beat yourself up and you're like, what's wrong with me? And you're like, Yeah, you know?Hannah Choi 17:48Yeah, time blindness is a really big. It can, it can really impact so many aspects of your life like, like actually just running out of time. But then also the your opinion that you have it yourself. Yeah, if you constantly are not estimating the time correctly, then you're just gonna feel like you can't get anything done.Bob Shea 18:12Yeah, yeah. And as a result as a result of doing that. And the medication I don't take on as much. Yeah, ever. Because now when I see so if I'm sitting here, and I go online, or whatever, and I go, Hey, look at little felted animals, looks fun. I could get some felt. And I'm gonna make little, like penguins and foxes. It'll be adorable. I'm a children's book author. I should be doing this whimsical stuff all day. And then you go and you look that stuff up. And you buy felts and you got felting needles and stuff. And then you're like, how am I going to do this? And then the reality hits.Hannah Choi 18:55It's just so funny because my other my other job is I, I teach fiber arts classes with a friend of mine and that's like exactly what we do!Bob Shea 19:07Right? But it looks really fun. I have the needles here. I in my closet, I have the needles. But now I see that and I go Yeah, that'd be fun if you have time because and the only reason I say this because I'm like, Well, what are you going to do the other 20 things I taught myself that. Agreeing to do something means you're saying you're not going to do something else. Right? And I'm talking to the guitar in my corner. Okay?Hannah Choi 19:37Just this morning, I was talking to a client and he, he is an adult who was also recently diagnosed with ADHD. And he was talking about how, like for work he's doing really great like staying on to on on track and not taking on too much. You know, and checking like, Is this realistic? Like if my you know, am I is it realistic to take on another client or whatever. And then and then we were talking about how you also have to kind of do that in your, you know, in the in the fun things. Like you, you, you might want to make the felted animals and play the guitar and you know, be really good at all these things. But if you would you ask you have to ask yourself the same thing you ask yourself with your work, like, is it realistic to take on all of these things? If you if you take on too much, you can't do it all and then you just beat yourself up?Bob Shea 20:29Yeah, that's the thing. I could enjoy none of the things. Yeah. And all it was was another source of tension with my wife, because it's like, my half done projects were all over the place. And she was like, can you just throw this out? Now just bring it to Goodwill, or give it to somebody throw it away? And she was right. But I mean, I was like, I was like, I'm gonna make that it's gonna be great. And that's the other thing too with ADHD, you can't be bad at things. Like if I played guitar, I was like, I'm gonna be really good at it. So I didn't say that with guitar, but with most most things. I'm like, I don't want to just, I don't want to do this half measure. I want to be good at it. It's like, Well, yeah. And again, with the paying attention to how long things take. I'm like, I can't do anything else.Hannah Choi 21:15Yeah, right.Bob Shea 21:16I'm full! Like even with work, I'm like, when are you gonna do all these amazing?Hannah Choi 21:21There's only so many hours in a day. Yeah. And you have to sleep and you have to eat and you have to have some downtime.Bob Shea 21:27Yeah, I belong to a Makerspace in New Haven. And it's good and it's bad, because it's great because I can go there for the day. And I'm like, I'm just doing this and I enjoy it. And I I said to my... I stopped putting up requirements on myself. I'm like, when I go in, you're gonna fail at all the things and not walk out with a wooden, whatever you were making. You're going to walk out with your materials all ruin that you paid for. And just and but I'm like, That's the day that's fine. And the other thing, the other other reason it's bad is because they keep getting new stuff, which Oh, wow, you guys gotta chill. So I could do pottery? Oh, my gosh, I'm looking at slip casting. And what do I need? What do I need to buy for this? Man, I'm like that. So now I'm like, ignore that, don't learn how to use the tablesawHannah Choi 22:23You're getting a lot of practice of saying no.Bob Shea 22:25I am! I'm just ignoring stuff. I'm like, I let me tell you, I hate Pre-Adderall Guy so much, that I'm saying no out of spite. I'm like, you don't deserve to make pottery. Help bring another thing into the house. You. I see you back there. You know, because it's still I'm still the same thing. Like my brain still is seeking those that stimulation to like, it's still dopamine, when I'm like, a new thing to learn. There's a lot of dopamine in that goldmine of dopamine. So passing that up as Adderall makes you say, you've got enough to get by. You don't need to go look for other places, even social media. I'm on social media so much less. I used to be on Twitter all the time.Hannah Choi 23:17So going back to the strategies that you use, how did you develop those? How'd you come up with those?Bob Shea 23:22Even before the Adderall, I was obsessed with time management. Always, always, always, always, unsuccessfully. I remember in the 90s, A long time ago, I went and did a Franklin Planner thing. And I think I kept a Franklin Planner for a while, like for a year, probably about a year and then I had to refill it. And I'm like, fellas, I'm gonna have to do that anymore. But I always remember the sort of the principles and stuff. And I remember now thinking back, like it's not ADHD friendly. Like they're very, it's very, like, it's for people who already have their act together. And it's just a way to clean up their act.Hannah Choi 24:08Those linear thinkersBob Shea 24:09It's so I always thought it's always like, something wrong with me. I thought I always thought it was like a character failing that I had, I was like, Well, you know, I was like, You know what, I always hated sports. When I was growing up, I probably just don't have discipline. And that's a now that's why they always wanted you to do that, so that you could do a boring task that you didn't want to do. And then, so I had an even I was even going back to the makerspace I was designing all these electronics, things that were all about how to remind me to do things. Every one thing, I had a thing where I'm still making this one, and that's not me lying, it's my first project. I was gonna have more successful authors than may record a message to me like, "Hey, how's that book coming you were telling me about?" Yeah, and then randomly during the day, it would announce that whatever I was doing was like, Oh, I was looking at felted animals. Back to work, yeah. I had I have it all sketched out, like, how it works. And the components I need, but everything I did everything I was like, seriously, I was like, I'm going to film, because I didn't know how the day worked. I'm going to film this was an idea of flowers, drying and decaying and falling off the thing. And then I'm going to play it fast during the day over eight hours, so that when I looked up, I go, Oh, the things are starting to fall. That means I have this much time. I was trying to, I was trying to find ways to look at time visually that I'd understand and not like just a clock, which I'm like, that's just the number I don't know. Because you come in in the beginning of the day, and you're like, I have all day. You know, and you're like, well, and then you're like, Well, I'm gonna go get a cup of coffee. I'm gonna go take a walk. And then I'm like, Jesus running out real quick.Hannah Choi 26:06Yeah, like half a day now. Have you heard of the Time timers were like shows a red...like, It's like, it looks like a clock. And yeah. That right there. Do you use it?Bob Shea 26:19Sorry about that noise. That's part of my thing with with the, with the blocks that I draw out the half hour blocks, 25 minutes, because it's the Pomodoro Technique, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Are you if that is the I'll tell you something. The timers are the key to everything. If if I use the timers, the days I'm I'm, I'm diligent about using the timers. That's a good day. If I'm just like, oh, just freestyle it today. It's like it's not a bad day, it still works falls apart a lot easier. Those timers, because it gives you a little deadline. Yep. And you look at that thing. And you're right, like the visual thing for me was huge. And so for that deadline, I go, I tell myself, you can't look at your phone, because you're working. And so then that way I go, Well, there's only 15 minutes, I can not look at my phone for 15 minutes. But if I don't have the time, or it's every three minutes up, pick it up. Yeah, I'm better about it now, but that's how it works. I also blocked Instagram on everything but my laptop so that when I sit down, it's intentional. Like I'm gonna go on Instagram now. Look at messages I do. scroll a little bit. It's boring on your laptop. You're not on the sofa looking at TV and doing it. So I'm out faster. I'm in and out faster. And and then on my devices for work. Like my iPad. No. No social media. Still the news? I still look at the news all the time. But no social media. Yeah. Pinterest is great. I like Pinterest. Yes.Hannah Choi 27:57It is great. My daughter is like slowly racking up a whole bunch of followers. She does bullet journaling. Yeah, she does. She does bullet journal. She has this bullet journal. She's 13 years old. And she's really starting everyday. She's like, Oh, I have like 20 more followers. She's up to 350! Yeah, it's so cool. But she like shares like her that art the art that she did it for the week and how she laid it out. AndBob Shea 28:24Does she get this she get... she's been to like JetPens, right? And she gets all this stuff fromHannah Choi 28:29I don't know what JetPens is. But she's got all the pens. Bob Shea 28:32Sorry, I told you because oh, there's a whole other world of pens you don't know aboutHannah Choi 28:38JetPens, okay, I gotta write that down. Bob Shea 28:39So good. I love I love that stuff. And like pencil cases and like pencil sharpeners that look like pandas. Hannah Choi 28:48And you guys could talk for hours. She's totally into it. Bob Shea 28:52So So I give her a lot of credit, because I couldn't keep up with a bullet journal. My thing is like black ink and then read for like, what I really did, because I'm like, I had to pare it down to a simpler.Hannah Choi 29:04Yeah. Well, I keep a bullet journal too. But mine is also like, super. It's just like, there's nothing fancyBob Shea 29:11Yeah, that's what mine looks like. Yeah. And you have the same you have that kind to Yeah. Yeah, my wife made minus 10 or something.Hannah Choi 29:20Yeah, yeah. IBob Shea 29:20don't know how you say it. I use those a lot for other things. But I don't but I use a different I just use a grid. Very simple one because I go through so many of them.Hannah Choi 29:30Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So keeping systems like that requires some practice. It requires quite a bit of perseverance and quite a bit of, you know, discipline. What motivates you to stick with it?Bob Shea 29:49This I think what, what motivates me to stick with it is that, like I said before, it's not punitive. It's not it's not it's here to help me not make me feel bad. So as I use it things that don't work for me, it was a little more not complicated. There were more, there was more to it when I first started doing it, anything that didn't sort of serve me I got rid of. So now it's like, it's a way to collect my thoughts. It's not a way to to be a taskmaster that you have to do these things. At the end of the day, a lot of times, I'll have gotten made a lot of progress on things, but maybe not even the things I thought I was going to do. And then I'm like, that's still a good day, I made a lot of progress. And I'm proud of what I did. Like, I'm glad that I moved the needle on this project. The other project can wait a day, because I have long deadlines. You know, like, I don't usually I think, like when I was doing graphic design, like maybe I didn't notice it much because it was like That thing's due in two days, like and it would be like in the next week, something else would be due now. It's like months at a time. That's bad for people like me.Hannah Choi 31:01Long term planning is like a whole different set of skills thatBob Shea 31:04I'm still working on that that is like, time makes no sense to me. Three months, like, that's never gonna happen. It's never gonna be here.Hannah Choi 31:14Have you ever watched inside the mind of a master procrastinator with Tim Urban? He, it's a TED Talk that...Bob Shea 31:22Yes, I think so! He has he does his thesis in the last day. That was hilarious. Yeah. So good. Before I knew I had ADHD. Yeah, it's hilarious!Hannah Choi 31:35it's a great, that's such a great example of exactly what you just.Bob Shea 31:41Yeah, yeah. It's like, and it's, I'm not. I so I just turned in a book. A couple of, I'm in the revision process of it now. And I was proud of myself. Because it was only two weeks late, instead of three months, like yeah, I was real- And I'm sure they are, but it was a new art director and I don't think that they were as proud of me as I am.Hannah Choi 32:05You're like, you don't know what this means.Bob Shea 32:08Like, I'm like, checking outside to see if the UPS guys bring in like, you know, a Harry and David box gift basket. Two weeks late, two weeks late, not three months. Like, oh, look, guess who's almost like a normal person?Hannah Choi 32:26That's so great.Bob Shea 32:27I have friends who are like, Yeah, this isn't due till September. So I finished it early, so I could get out some other things. I'm like, What are you talking about? I've never, ever done that. Ever. That's the thing. I had a friend who told me he did that. And then I was telling him about the ADHD. And he's like, maybe I have ADHD. I said, let's take a step back. Yeah. Remember how you told me? You just finished something up? That's not due for three months? No, no, no, no. I'm not a medical professional, but no.Hannah Choi 33:01So funny. What do you think would happen if you turned something in on time?Bob Shea 33:06I might have no, I don't know. I have no idea what that's like, I think that I'm gonna tell you though, I see the I see the benefit of doing that. This sounds so dumb. This sounds like such a, Are you new to being in the world? Like, if I so working alone and making up my own projects and things it's like, it's it's so much more helpful to me to have a system and try to get in on time. Because that frees up time for other things. Not felted animals, other projects that could maybe make money, right? Like there's, I mean, it's a balance with the kids books, because I can't, I can't have people be like, Man, he's cranking these things out once again. You right, you know what I mean? Like, Hannah Choi 33:57Can't be too productive! Bob Shea 33:58Good, right, like, have a side hustle. I can drive for Uber in those two weeks. That's what I could have been doing.Hannah Choi 34:08No, no, Bob. Bob Shea 34:10I don't think that's not a good idea. Hannah Choi 34:11You obviously did something different to get your three week overdue and a three month overdueness down to two week, two weeks overdue. What do you do different?Bob Shea 34:20That was that that's the last piece that I'm working on now. What is the long term plan? I can't I don't understand how time works. I don't get that. You know, I don't get that. Laters not does not a thing. Laters Not a thing. And it's not better than now. Like the way I behave now? Yeah, I'm gonna behave like that tomorrow. Like, I'm like, I can be like, Oh, tomorrow when I wake up, I'm gonna be all put together. You know what I mean? So now this machine that I've made that can kind of not a very fast moving thing. It's it's constantly pressing forward, which is good and not speedy. But so it's only recently that I've acknowledged that the future is going to happen, whether I like it or not. So I start to use. So now I am using a calendar. On my computer, which I don't like to do, I should actually get a physical one. And I'm writing in dates things are due so that I can see them approach. Yeah, that's good. I know that I have something due on August 1. And I'm already obsessed about it not obsessed. But I'm already like, if you don't get started on July 1, you're never going to get that done. I know that that's and I'm like, I can't. Last minute panic. It gets old after 50 years. Yeah.Hannah Choi 35:47Takes the wear and tear on your body. Yeah. What if instead of... what if you put the deadline- So you have the deadline that it's due on August 1? What if on the calendar on July 1, you wrote, like, start the thing?Bob Shea 36:04Yeah, that's, that's what I should do. And I did. I did that. The one that was two weeks late, I put in every day like you are supposed to be working on this thing. I am the worst employee. I just, I That stuff's easy. If I'm like, if it's due in 30 days, I'm like, Well, I can go to MakeHaven today. You know what I mean? Because it's 30, I still got 29 days - work a little harder.Hannah Choi 36:36And I suppose thinking, well, if I just do it all now and I get it done five days before the due date, then I could spend five full days in a row at MakeHaven.Bob Shea 36:46that sounds like a wonderful world that I do. You know, I'll tell you, I have that conversation with myself in a very convincing manner. executing that plan, to a degree where all the steps are taken care of in a in a timely way. And let me tell you something, too. It's not me. It's not me blowing it off. It's, it takes longer than I guess. So even with this thing, even. And then things happen that you don't anticipate. You know, that's the other thingHannah Choi 37:19Yeah. And the unpredictable variables of life,Bob Shea 37:22That and that's even going back to the boxes, and it applies to the month to going back to the boxes. If you write down what really happens. You can look back and go, oh, there's all these things that I didn't know in the morning were going to happen that I had to deal with. And so you don't feel bad. At the end of the day. You're like, well, it wasn't my fault. I wasn't I wasn't like googling what movie was Nicolas Cage in in the 90s was the thing and they switched faces. You know what I mean? You're like, you don't you don't stop to do that. As long as I'm like working and not like, just looking at, you know, woodworking videos. What I like to do - keep that to my personal time.Hannah Choi 38:05Yeah, having some flexibility, like, like, flexibility both in what we do during the day and also like recognizing that, that we cannot be rigid all the time. We cannot. As much as we want to stick to whatever we have planned for that day, it just doesn't. Yeah, definitely gonna happen.Bob Shea 38:25Yeah, it's, it's, it's about being honest with yourself about how you work, and then saying, Look, you work this way. Here's what'll work with that without you beating yourself up because I because I couldn't figure it out. Because I was like, I did all this stuff in my career to get to the point where I'm have autonomy. I can work by myself. I come up with my own projects. Great, great, great. And I'm like, and then you ruin it because you're on stupid Twitter. Why would you do that? You have you? Here's everything that you wanted. And you undermine yourself. It's awful. It wasHannah Choi 39:10How much do you think that had to do with fear? The fear that you weren't going to be do it do it right or fear that it was going to be uncomfortable while you were doing whatever it was.Bob Shea 39:22That's a big part of it because I would - the books - I can't look at books that I did already. From the past. Somebody's using an angle grinder outside. So I can't look at Yeah, so good. It's like, I hope I hope they're making a playground. Something good.Hannah Choi 39:45I never found out what my neighbors were doing.Bob Shea 39:48Right. Hold on. Let me look real quick. Oh, soft serve ice cream. It's gonna be good. Yeah,Hannah Choi 39:55Wait! That's another distraction. Now, I think they're building a brand location of the makerspaceBob Shea 40:02Oh, that's good. Right there. Right? They are. It's they're putting in a table saw. More noise, Great. Yeah, you know, you get so excited for these projects. And in your head, it's perfect. It's the best thing you've ever done. And then you can then you put it down on paper, and there it is going through the filter of your abilities.Hannah Choi 40:25And your own self criticism, I'm sureBob Shea 40:27I can't I was saying before, before they were making the ice cream stand outside, but I can't look at my old books. I can't open them up. People are like, Oh, what was that thing? And I'm like, I'm not going I'm not opening that again. All you see is the things you did wrong. And and in my case, all I see is Yeah, you did that at the last minute, didn't you? Yeah, you're a champ. You're a prince. Look at that, aren't you Like, aren't you professional?Hannah Choi 40:53I'm so curious. I want I kind of want to follow up with you in a couple of years and see, like, if you, like see how your thought processes about your own work have changed? Yeah, I'd be interesting to see that.Bob Shea 41:07I think that I think that I'm managing expectations about that. And as long as I can be comfortable with myself, I'm fine. Like I said, like the overwhelm went away. So I'm not always like, yeah, I sort of can just accept things the way they are and be like, yeah, that's okay. And I'll tell you, that is so huge. Like, it's so huge.Hannah Choi 41:35Yeah. So I'm, I'm doing an episode on procrastination. So would you say you are a procrastinator?Bob Shea 41:46Yep. Yeah, more. So before the Adderall for sure. Yeah, yeah, I still do it. And now when I do it, I can stop if I want to. But also, if I'm doing it, and I know that I'm doing it, I'm like, give yourself a break. You're okay. It's not that big a deal. Because what the other thing is about understanding how you work. So I write this grid during the day, the last couple of hours, like probably from from four to four to six. You're not getting anything done. Like you're not, you get it you get an ice cube of creativity every day, you get like, here's this, you can you have this for like an hour and a half, and then you're not gonna get anything good. Stop. So I know from four to six, I'm like, Alright, clean up your office, which is still a mess from ADHD, I'm still working on that. Clean your office reply to emails, low cognitive load things. Yeah. Because that's the time when I'll be like, looking at Instagram or something. Because I'm, I'm out, I'm out, I'm out of stuff, you know.Hannah Choi 42:53So something that I try to work a lot with my clients on is is exactly that, like noticing, diminishing returns, noticing when your effort is not, is not being effective anymore. And so that's so great that you, you know that about yourself, and you know, what the things that you can do, instead of just messing around, like, you know, you can still do some things, which is going to make you feel better about yourself by the end of the day, like, oh, like, like all these other things that I did? Yeah, I may not have like, written more or drawn more, but I did make my space more usable,Bob Shea 43:30Which is another goal. Like it's one of the things so it's like, yeah, I can I can move piles around for the next hour from one spot to the next. Just which is another thing I can't I bet it. I can't see. I'm clutter-blind as well. Anyway, but uh, but yeah, that's, that's the thing is to just be easy. Go easy on yourself. And if you if you know that you're diligently trying don't like I'm like, yeah, they know. It's all working out. Okay, it's all from everything's for my benefit. So I don't mind it so much.Hannah Choi 44:04Yeah, that's great. And being able to do that self reflection is so important. And, and, and recognizing, like, what your strengths are and what's challenging, and how you can use both of those. Bob Shea 44:17Yeah, a lot of that, too. I mentioned before I'm a big meditator meditation has allowed me to understand my thoughts as they're happening, and to recognize thought patterns and be like, alright, I see what it is you're doing now. And you take your level you're a little distanced from you don't become your thoughts. You're able to like observe them and go, alright, you you don't want to do this. Why not? Yeah. And then think about what else can I do instead? And that lets me shift and then that way I'm not hooked on the well you back off other thought because I'm getting some dopamine from this Instagram and then I'm gonna ride this for a while.Hannah Choi 45:05So how do you? How did you get into meditation? And how do you keep yourself? How do you? How do you keep up with the practice?Bob Shea 45:13I, you know, my, my mother in the 70s was into back when it was a super popular thing. She was into Tm. It's a transcendental meditation because it was like on the Merv Griffin Show. You know,Hannah Choi 45:26I remember people talking about that when I was little.Bob Shea 45:28Yeah, you know, I was like, That guy was on TV all the time. It was super like it was a pop culture thing. And then she would do it, she went to some meditation thing, tried to get us boys to do it, we laughed, and we're like, I'm not doing this. We tried once. You can't make people meditate, you cannot make them do it. But I always remembered that she did you know. And so I think when I was like, in my 20s, I started doing it again, late, my late 20s, I did it. And I did it in a different way. I didn't do TM, but I would just do it with the real. And again, I had to do the ADHD, I'm like, You need to build this muscle of focus. And so I did it that way for a while. And it was fine. It was fine. It was good. I didn't really know what I was getting out of it. And then I started to use the Sam Harris app a couple of years ago. And that's really the thing where he walks you through why you're doing it and how to do it and all this stuff. And that and he's like, he comes at it from a point of view of not like it's a spiritual thing. It's other goes my my cuckoo clock to did let me know that an hour has passed in my head. So I have an understanding of time. I've 10 clocks all around the thing. I'm obsessed with clocks now. It's a good one. Yeah, and I'll let the bird keep talking for a second. There it goes. And that the keeping up on the practice is, all of these things work in tandem, I have to, I can tell when I'm eating poorly, if I'm not exercising, if I'm not doing meditation. Life's worse. Like even with the medication life's worse. So if I try to try to ride my bike in every day, I usually when I you know, and this is more of a habit forming than anything else. Usually what I'll do is when I get in right away, I'll sit and meditate. When I walk in the door, put my stuff down, sit on the cushion. There's on the app, it's a meditation everyday 20 minutes do it and it's over. Like when I wake up when I wake up. I try to write for a while. Then I'll exercise that I might go for a run. I'm in, meditate, set, it all sounds wonderful. It sounds like you have this wonderful thing. It's all it's all tension. It's all motivated by fear. So that's the foundation is fear. So but it all helps me stay focused a little bit.Hannah Choi 47:54Yeah, right. It's a fear of not feeling good, right? I feel a fear of failing, you know, those strategies are to help you be successful.Bob Shea 48:02I can feel better. I feel better. If I get sleep. I have to get enough sleep. And then I just I feel so much better. I'm so much more able to deal with things.Hannah Choi 48:13Yeah, I I really feel that with exercise. Like for me, I really need to exercise if I don't exercise then I tend to really beat myself up a lot. And when I exercise I'm much gentler myself. And I actually just ran a half marathon yesterday I ran the Fairfield half marathon. Yeah. It wasn't my first half marathon but was my first time during the Fairfield one. It was really fun. Two more questions for you. They're not long. What are you excited about?Bob Shea 48:43What am I excited about? Me personally? In the world? Because nothingHannah Choi 48:52Okay, personally? Yeah, I know the world is awful, right? PersonallyBob Shea 48:59I'm excited about my son's graduating high school, he's gonna go to college in the fall. I'm pretty excited about that. I'm, I'm doing I'm - because I do one thing at a time now. I'm doing some I have some good projects at the makerspace that I'm excited about. I'm excited, just even about running and riding my bike. I'm so excited that it's nice outside. It's all very simple things that I do. And I write down gratitude stuff at the end of the day. And it's always the same thing. It's always like my wife, something delicious, and out and my bicycle.Hannah Choi 49:35I have been keeping a gratitude journal for - I'm in my fifth year now. It has, I have to say like I think that has made one of the biggest impacts on my life. Bob Shea 49:39For real? Hannah Choi 49:39Oh, yeah. It's amazing Bob Shea 49:42Do you do it in the evening or in the morning to start your day and set your intention kind of thing.Hannah Choi 49:54Yeah, that's a great question. I do it in the evening and I also sometimes end up doing it in the morning for the previous day, because I forgot to do it. But what I have found, it has helped me so much with negative thinking. And, and I find myself throughout the day going, Oh, that's something I can write about. I automatically think that way now. And it also at the end of if I have like a particularly hard day, it forces me to look back on it in and look for the even if I can be grateful for the challenge of that hard day. I made it through or, or whatever, like my kids made me happy or, you know, something.Bob Shea 50:43This day is over. I'm grateful. Yeah.Hannah Choi 50:47During the pandemic, I often just wrote, "I'm just glad this day is over". Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. So that's been a huge thing for me. So I'm glad you're doing it too. Yeah.Bob Shea 50:58That's good. I'll start to - I'm not mindful of things during the day. To to jot down that's a great idea. That's good. That brings it into the whole day.Hannah Choi 51:08Yeah, yeah, it's been really nice. And it's cool too, because the one that I use as a line a day journal, so it's actually got five years on each day. So I can look back on that, that day from the previous and so I'm in my fifth year now. So I can look back on on all of them before and it's really interesting to see that I do tend to be thankful for a lot of the same stuff. And so that makes me feel really good. Like, Oh, those are those are things that I should be doing. Like I do kickboxing, and I'm very often thankful for kickboxing. And, sadly, the place where we do it at is closing. But umBob Shea 51:43Oh, really? Hannah Choi 51:44Yeah. It's a real bummer. But it's it is it's really nice to look back on that. And just, it's like evidence. I just I love looking for evidence. And there's a lot of evidence in that book.Bob Shea 51:56Yeah, yeah.Hannah Choi 51:59All right, one more question. How do people find you even though you're not too much on social media?Bob Shea 52:05On social media, on Instagram, I'm Bob Shea books. And then I do have Bobshea.com. That's my books website. But those are really the two main places the main thing is is Instagram, @BobsheabooksHannah Choi 52:22and on your local children's library bookshelves.Bob Shea 52:25Oh, yeah, exactly. Wherever, from your local independent bookseller. Yeah, just go in and go in and demand my books. And if they don't carry them there, they usually have a display in the center of the store, like new releases or whatever. If they don't have it, just flip that over. Flip it over, run out.Hannah Choi 52:45Well, that's that's how we found you, my kids. When my kids were little, we can't remember how we maybe they had one of your books up on like the, like the top, they put like one of the books up on the top?Bob Shea 52:56And oh, okay. Yeah, good I hope so.Hannah Choi 52:58So every time we found out you had a new book, we are super excited. So thank you for being a part of my children's childhood.Bob Shea 53:04Oh, sure. Thank you.Hannah Choi 53:08All right. Well, thanks again, Bob. This is great. It's really interesting to hear different people's perspectives. And and I'm so glad that you found strategies that are working for you. And I wish you luck on figuring out long term strategy planning, I think that I was thinking about it, like, just the fact that you're very good at doing your daily stuff is probably why you ended up with only being two weeks late and not three months, like, Yeah, I think that daily practice, probably just made you more aware of time and just made you more productive at, you know, the only thing I was, I was wondering, do you work backwards? Like, do you ever do start at the finish? And then figure out like, Okay, well, I know that they want it, like this amount of time ahead of time. And then and then okay, that means it takes me usually takes me about five days to do whatever and then schedule that there. And then it's like, all of that, all of that time blindness that you're conquering, can be so useful, right? Because, you know, you know how long things take now. So then it makes it easier when you're working backwards to budget in time. So yes, yeah, I think take now,Bob Shea 54:25I would I, I know I should. I should do it that way. In fact, I used to use Gantt charts, you know, again, you know those things. So again, a Gantt chart. I, this is my pre ADHD like, I was so obsessed with them. Like I gotta come up with a way that I can do this. Basically, it's a timeline, and then you hang like a string that moves along with for every day. But on that chart, you have the different things that you're different tasks that have to get done, so you can see where you are and whatever tasks and then So But what ends up happening is you just keep moving the task, like the Gantt chart is, so that is a quick visual, like, if you have five things going on where you are and all those five things.Hannah Choi 55:10Yeah, that's cool.Bob Shea 55:12Yeah, no, yeah.Hannah Choi 55:14I recommend looking at how long things take you and trying to, trying to figure out and adding in buffer time and adding in time for all those variables that we can't predict.Bob Shea 55:28I do. I try to add 50% more than my guess. And I'm getting better at it, but not still can't do like I'm never spot on.Hannah Choi 55:40Have you ever read Atomic Habits by James Clear?Bob Shea 55:43I did. I did. That's where I got the sit down and meditate as soon as you come in.Hannah Choi 55:47Yeah. Habits stacking. Yeah, I was meant to. I meant to mention that earlier when you were talking about that. But I like his idea of just 1% better. It obviously adds up over time, like you have you have proof. You have proof that a little bit better does add up over time.Bob Shea 56:05Yeah. And then the other the other thing I do in the book with the boxes, the next day, I look at how I did the day before. And I go Yeah, you know, you kind of were messing around too much at this time. And you know, you went for that walk was longer than you thought. So then that day, I can be like, Yeah, that's what I say. I'm like, I'm going to be a little bit better today than I was yesterday.Hannah Choi 56:27Yeah, that's so great. Oh, you're like a dream client. Oh my gosh.Bob Shea 56:31I'm too introspective. Hannah Choi 56:34Nah. No such thing. Well, thanks so much, Bob. This has been great.Bob Shea 56:39Thank you. That was fun.Hannah Choi 56:43And that's our show for today. I really hope that you had a chuckle and learn something useful from Bob. Or maybe you could just really relate to his story. More and more adults are being diagnosed with ADHD, so this feels like a really relatable and important story to share. Check out the show notes for a link to see some of Bob's time management strategies. And thank you for being here and taking time out of your day to listen. If you are enjoying learning about these important topics we're covering in each episode of Focus Forward, please share it with your friends, and be sure to check out the show notes for this episode. And if you haven't yet, subscribe to the podcast at beyondbooksmart.com/podcast. We'll let you know when new episodes drop and you can easily find the resources we share on each topic. Thanks for listening

Continuing with our Week #3 Daily Leadership Tips, Principle #16 is to Show Enthusiasm and Energy.Have you ever noticed that the most successful people in just about any industry are the early risers? Ben Franklin called this group of people the “Six O'clock Club.”Franklin spent the first hour of his day planning the events of his day (to do this he invented the Franklin Planner) and reading. He often claimed that the first hour of his day was the most important.How does this relate to raising your own energy level? We have a choice every morning when we wake up. Do I want to hit the snooze bar a few times, or do I want to put some energy and enthusiasm into my day?Frank Bettger, in his book How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, said that if he had to narrow down to one thing why he has been so successful, it would be enthusiasm.ENTHUSIASM IS A SECRET TO SUCCESS.His enthusiasm was what moved him from a “second rate bush-league making $25 a week” to the starting shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals. His enthusiasm was also what transformed him from a washout in sales to the most successful insurance agent of his time.Where did his enthusiasm come from?He says that he didn't have any enthusiasm in the beginning, but he faked it. He acted like he was enthusiastic, and behold he was. After a few successes, the enthusiasm came easy.Week #3: Gain Enthusiastic Cooperation.Principle #16: Show Enthusiasm and Energy.https://www.leadersinstitute.com/daily-leadership-tip-16-show-enthusiasm-and-energy/

This week's question is on the subject of optimisation and process. Two parts of the productivity mix that rarely get talked about.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 226 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 226 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. There's a lot of information on creating a system or method for better managing your time and being more productive, but how do you improve those systems and methods once you have them in place?  More importantly, how do you repair broken systems when they fail? (And they always fail in the early days) Because there's less information about these situations, a lot of people quit trying or wander off looking for another new system.  That's the wrong way of looking at it. As long as the system you adopt covers the three basics: collecting, organising and doing, then the system can be made to work for you. Your system is a little like when you buy a new mobile phone.  When you first get the phone, there are a number of preinstalled apps. If you tried to live your life with these limited apps you wouldn't get the most out your mobile phone. You need to customise the phone for the kind of lifestyle you have. It's no good having the English Premier League app installed when your sporting love is rugby and cricket. So we add and remove apps according to taste and that's the same with your productivity system. You will at some point need to customise it to maximise the effectiveness of your system.  That's what I'll be talking about in this episode.  And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Andrew. Andrew asks, Hi Carl, I've tried a lot of time management programmes and methods over the years, but I can never find one that works for me. There's always something missing and a lot of features I'm never likely to use. I am curious how you have made things work for you.  Hi Andrew, thank you for your question. The reality is no system, programme, or method will ever work perfectly straight out of the box. You see the difficulty is all these methods are developed for humans and humans are not machines. We all think differently, prioritise different things and work different jobs.  And even in our own lives, our priorities will change. In our teenage years is all about getting an education. In our twenties, it's about learning to handle the responsibilities of being an adult and intimate relationships. And as we get older, there's likely parenthood, career and eventually retirement to manage.  The reality is, a system you developed to manage your education is not going to be as effective when you want it to manage your career and family life. It will have to change and evolve as you change and evolve.  Now the mistake I see most people making is thinking that as their priorities change they need to change their whole system and that's not true. Rather than changing a whole system what really needs to happen is the existing system you use needs to be adjusted.  So what does that mean? Well, let's look at the three parts to a good productivity and time management system. There's a task manager, a calendar and a notes app. Now the only thing that's changed here over the last ten to twenty years is we've gone from a paper-based system (diaries and notebooks) to a largely digital system.  The biggest change there was the separation of our task list and notes. Twenty years ago, we wrote our to-dos in our notebooks (or on PostIts!). Now, for most people, they are two different apps.  But, the basics still apply. To ensure we are working on the things that matter we need to be clear about what needs to be done. Whether those tasks are written out on paper or in a digital system doesn't matter.  The same applies for writing out our goals and plans. Whether you write these out on paper or digitally doesn't change things. You still write them out (externalise them) and review them (hopefully). This means if you are struggling with “systems” it is not likely to be the system itself, it's more likely something is not working within the three areas (collecting, organising and doing)  With collecting, the emphasis is on writing down all your commitments and ideas and not trusting your brain to remember them. That's simple enough. But, the question here is: are you collecting all your commitments and ideas? Do you sometimes skip this part?  Problems here are usually in three areas.  The first is there's no habit to collect, so we ‘forget' to write things down or we believe we will remember—which often we don't. Plus, if you don't collect everything you don't get a sense of how much you have to do, so you end up with a false picture of what commitments you have.  The second is there's a lack of trust in the tools you are using. If you don't trust that your task manager or notes app will safely store what you put in there, you will continue to try and remember everything in your head.  Trusting your tools is a big step for many people, and it becomes a lot harder for those who are always switching their tools. Whenever you start using a new tool (or app), there will always be an element of doubt that what you collected went where it was meant to go. It takes time to build that trust.  And thirdly, the tools you are using make it very difficult to add new tasks or ideas. If there are too many ‘clicks' or taps to get something new into your task manager or notes app, you will not consistently add stuff.  It's important when choosing tools, you test out how easy it will be to get stuff into the app. If there are too many clicks or taps, then stay well away from the app.  What I've noticed here is a lot of people are attracted to the latest, shiniest tool, so they are looking at the aesthetics of an app or what popular YouTubers are telling them. Just remember, a lot of these YouTubers are paid to review these apps and they are not necessarily reviewing things objectively.  Now when it comes to organising, I find a lot of people's organisation system is either their downloads folder or their inbox. There's no structure and so it's almost impossible to find anything.  These days you don't need a complex hierarchical organisation system. The computers we use have fantastic search capabilities, but you do still need some form of basic organisational structure or you will become overwhelmed when you go searching for something you cannot remember the name of.  How you organise your stuff really depends on you. No one person will be the same here. My notes, for instance, are structured around GAPRA—Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and an archive. This gives me a place for all the things I collect.  When I shared this organisational structure on YouTube, I got so many questions about where I think something some be stored. I couldn't answer a lot of those questions because I didn't have the kind of notes I was being asked about. In this area, we will all have different types of collected notes. This is where you have to trust yourself and think about how you would naturally look for something.  My file folder structure, for instance, is divided into two parts Personal and Professional. That's because I use a single computer for both my work and my personal life. I have a lot of clients who have a computer for work and a computer for their personal lives. In this situation, my structure wouldn't work.  For my professional work, I run my own company. This means I need folders for tax, company regulations, expenses, employees and admin. If you are an employee, things like HR, admin and taxation are likely things you don't need.  Doctors and lawyers are required to do continuous professional education which means they need a way to keep all of these educational materials somewhere. Project managers may be managing several projects all at once and so need a way to manage these materials.  Hopefully, you get the point. No one person is going to have the same file and note organisational structure. It's very important to spend some time developing your own so you can find what you need when you need it.  When it comes to how you manage your task manager, here, all you need to see is what needs doing now. Something that needs doing in six months' time is not relevant today.  I find the problem with the way people manage their task managers is overthinking things. The only thing that's important today are the things you need to do today. Tomorrow's tasks are not relevant today. This means, that the most crucial part of a day is when you ask yourself “what needs to be done today?” Now, ideally, you will do this the night before, not the morning of. You want to be very clear when you start the day what needs to be done. If you leave the daily planning to the morning of the day, you waste so much valuable focus time trying to decide what to do.  When you do the daily planning the night before, you can step back and look at the big picture and anticipate what's coming at you. You will also find you are more engaged with your family and friends because the next day is planned and you are not worrying about things you may have missed.  I don't buy into the excuse that there's no time to do the daily planning the night before. It's a ten to twenty minute daily commitment. If you cannot find ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day, then you have serious problems. Nobody is genuinely that busy.  No, if you are not doing a ten to twenty-minute daily planning session, you are just being lazy. Pure and simple.  How difficult is it to look at your calendar and your task list for tomorrow? Seriously? You don't have time for that? And if you don't want to look at it because you don't want to be thinking of work when you are not working, you need to question your career choice. If you hate your work that much, you cannot bear to look at your calendar and task list for a few minutes before you end the day, you're in the wrong career.  And finally, when it comes to doing, how are you managing your time? Are you maximising your “doing” time or are you spending too much time organising?  Now here it's about learning when you are at your most focused. Again, we will be different. Some people are more focused first thing in the morning, while others find their focus is better later in the day.  Now, I understand that a lot of people don't have a great deal of control over their calendars when at work, but you can still look at ways to make sure you are blocking time out for the more difficult work at a time you are likely to be most focused. Okay, you may have a meeting at 10:30am, but what are you doing at 9:00am? That's still a good hour and fifteen minutes where you have a block of focused time. If you know before you start the day what the big task is for the day, you can get started on that first thing.  So, Andrew, rather than looking at different methods, programmes and systems, look at the three foundations of collecting, organising and doing. How are you in each of these three areas?  Whether you are using David Allens, Getting Things Done, the Franklin Planner or my Time Sector System, if you are not consistently collecting, don't have a clean, workable organisation system and have no plan for doing your work each day, nothing will work.  You will be constantly looking at different methods and tools and never finding what you are looking for because you are looking in the wrong place. Look at yourself first. Decide what you want to see each day and how you prefer to get things done.  Then build on that.  I hope that has helped, Andrew, and thank you for sending in your question. And, thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.  

Episode 22 - It's nice to be back with you all!! The couple-of-month hiatus is past, just too much else going on... A couple of weeks ago, those of us at our company received our annual "Self-Evaluation Form." That means it's time to reassess. I've always enjoyed stepping away from the total station and the laptop and getting the 10,000 foot view of where my life & career are heading. I've done it since I got my first Franklin Planner in 1989. Self-assessment and goal setting have always been part of my life road mapping. But this year's analysis will be a bit different. New situations, both around the shop as well as outside work. I'm still heading to the right destinations, I'm just choosing to look for off-ramps and dirt roads, as opposed to staying on the 4-lane paved highway). In this episode, I play catch-up on the "Hey Bob, where have you been?", and then dive into how I'm setting my course of action for the year, using Jiu Jitsu as a means of establishing what the "long game" is all about. I mention Trimble's Constructable and their article titled 14 Best Construction Podcasts to Listen to in 2022 Thanks again, Rachel, for the mention!! LinkedIn: Bob Hildebranski, PE Website: Hildebranski.com Contact Page Link --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bob-hildebranski/message

It's that time of year again when that clean slate desire is in the air and people are motivated to purge and organize their homes. They buy the bins; say they'll do it this weekend and daydream what their spaces will look like when they're done. The weekend comes, they jump right in, become overwhelmed and then mentally check out an hour later. They call it quits for the day but resolve to doing it next weekend. Sound familiar? Finishing an organizing project takes more than just containers and saying you're going to do it. You need a plan. Without a plan, even just a simple one, it's easy to get stuck, sidetracked and overwhelmed. Here's some tips to create a project plan so you can finish your projects once and for all. Tip #1 Create a goal. When you start with a goal in mind, it's easier to create tasks to accomplish those goals. For example, converting an office into a baby's room, adding exercise equipment to the garage or creating space in your kitchen. Tip #2 Forward think and backwards plan. Now that you have forward thought to come up with your goal now think backwards to determine the action steps. Have an if/then conversation with yourself. For example, “If I want to put the Peloton in the garage, then I have to move the tires.” Continue working backwards till you find the easiest step to start with. Tip #3 Write it down. Keeping visual track of the action steps will enable you to spend less time thinking and more time working once you've gotten started. I recommend Franklin Planner, Basecamp or Trello for project tracking. Tip #4 Schedule a specific time. Instead of saying you will do it this weekend, look for a specific time frame, for example 10-2 and add it to your calendar. The more specific you are, the better the chances you will do it. Tip #5 Prioritize. As much as everyone wants to get it done right away, you just can't. Look at your list of action steps and prioritize which ones need to happen first. Having a plan in place before you get started is the best way to ensure you will actually finish what you set out to do. By following your plan, you'll have that clean slate feeling before you know it. And it feels glorious! Website:  Miss Organized Book:  If Clutter Could Talk....The Stories It Would Tell

This week's episode is a question that came about because of my recently updated Time Sector System course. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time Sector System Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 217 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 217 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. So, many of you already know that my productivity system is called The Time Sector System. This system is based on managing my work by when I want to do it rather than by project.  Around three or four years ago, I discovered that when I managed my tasks by project, I was spending too much time organising and reviewing and not enough time doing the work. It was leaving me with a lot of work that needed rescheduling at the end of the day. Not a good place to be when you want to feel you are becoming better at managing your time. Too much rescheduling and you lose confidence in your system.  That's when it dawned on me that, really, the most important part of any system is having the time to do the work, not how you organise your files and projects. That was my light-bulb moment.  Now, I do get a lot of questions about this system. It goes against the grain of many of the more popular systems out there and naturally I get a lot of questions about it. So, I have selected one of those questions to answer this week.  So. Without further ado. Let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Eric. Eric asks, Carl, You used to write and talk a lot about GTD but I notice you no longer use it. Why is that and what do you use instead?  Thank you Eric for your question.  Let's start by dealing with the elephant in the room. Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen. This is the standard text by which all productivity and time management systems are judged today. There's nothing wrong with GTD, as it is called. It's a solid workable system.  However, there are two issues with GTD that caused me problems. The first is this is a book that was first published in 2001 and its concepts are based on what David Allen taught in companies as a productivity and time management trainer in the 1980s and 1990s.  Now, I remember working in the early 1990s and in those distant days it did matter where you were and what tools you had with you. If you wanted to respond to your mail, you needed to be in a place where your mail was because, for most people, there was no such thing as email. And even in the late 1990s, when email became more prevalent, you needed to be at a computer set up for your email.  If you were lucky enough to have a personal email account, you needed to be at home with your “personal computer” in order to reply. For your work email, you needed to be at your office and sitting in front of your work desktop computer.  So, for a simple task such as responding to your mail, you had to be in a specific physical location (home or office) and be in front of your computer (the tool). The second issue I was struggling with was how the digital task managers were created. For some reason, task managers were set up by project, not context as it should be in a GTD system.  For those not familiar with GTD, in GTD your task lists are organised by context. This means you create lists based on a tool, such as a computer, a phone or car. Place, such as your office or home or person, such as your boss, spouse or colleague.  The idea is you choose what to do based on where you are, with which tool or person.  Now, when I went digital, I fell into the trap of believing the most effective way to manage my tasks was to organise everything by project and to use tags or labels for my contexts. Big mistake.  In GTD, a project is defined as anything requiring two or more steps. This meant, theoretically, arranging for my car to go in for a service was a project or even arranging to have my haircut (I did once have hair that needed cutting). So you can imagine how many projects you end up having on your list.  David Allen mentions that an average person is going to have between seventy and a hundred and fifty open projects.  That's a lot of projects for an individual like you and me to manage.  Now the glue that makes GTD work is the weekly review. This is where you sit down at the end of the week to go through all your projects to make sure everything is up-to-date and current.  Well, for me, by the time I switched to using the Time Sector System my weekly review was taking almost two hours to complete each week. Yes! Two hours.  No, I don't know about you, but giving up two hours of my weekend to review all my projects and get current is not really the best use of my time on a weekend.  However, let's not be too hard on GTD. It's a great system and it does help you get very organised. All your projects are kept in project folders—originally, paper-based project folders you kept in or near your desk, now digital folders you keep on your computer. It is easy to find what you need when you need it—if you are willing to maintain your system and keep it up to date.  And that's really the problem with GTD today. Maintaining the system takes a lot of time. Time that could better be served to do the work you are creating lists for.  If you look at the very basics a productivity system needs; it's a way to collect all your inputs such as calendar events, tasks and notes. You then need to organise those inputs in a way you can find them when you need them and you need to be maximising time to do the work.  GTD crosses the first two boxes. It teaches you to build a collection system. When the GTD book was first launched that meant purchasing a physical inbox that you had on or around your desk. And it organises your documents and relevant materials into projects or reference materials that are easy to find. However, because of the time, it takes to manage those first two parts, you are taking away a lot of time for doing. And if you want to be more productive, you need to maximise your doing time and minimise your organising time.  That's why I eventually got to the point where I realised GTD was not working for me. I wanted to free up my organising time so I could focus on doing.  That led me to analyse what was really important about getting my work done. That was when I realised that the only thing that really mattered about a task was when I was going to do it. After all, it does not matter how important or urgent something is, if there are no hours left in the day it is not going to get done that day. Period. And, I'm sure you are aware now, contexts have become a lot less important. You can design presentations, do work on a spreadsheet, email and make phone calls from a handheld device you carry with you everywhere you go. You no longer need specific tools to do a lot of the work you need to do.  I have been told that contexts are a personal choice. You can create contexts around energy levels. For example, if you feel energetic, you can do some of the more difficult work. If you feel tired you can do some of the less strenuous tasks. That true. But I cannot predict when I will feel energetic or when I feel lethargic. I cannot control how I will sleep tonight. For energy level contexts, there are far too many variables outside my control for those to be effective.  In the end, I realised that all I wanted to know was what tasks were important this week. Which ones did I want to do and which tasks could I do that would move a project or goal forward.  So, I created a folder structure in my task manager that focused on when I would do something. That means I have: this week, next week, this month and next month folders for tasks I am reasonably certain I want to get done in the next eight weeks or so. And I have a long-term and on hold folder for tasks that I'd like to do sometime, but I am not sure yet when I will do them.  What this means is when I do my weekly planning, all I need to focus on is when I will do something and more importantly what will I do that week.  Using this method means instead of spending two hours or so doing a weekly review, my weekly planning sessions last around twenty to thirty minutes. They are a little longer at the end of the month because I am looking at more folders.  It also makes processing what I collected in my inbox much simpler. I have far fewer decisions to make. Really all I am doing is deciding what something is and when will I do it. I don't have to worry about what context to add and which project to put it in.  Now, all my projects notes and resources are kept in my notes app. Tasks that relate to these projects are hyperlinked to the relevant task so all it takes is one click and I am in my project notes. This makes it so much quicker to get down to work. I can quickly see what's been done and what needs to be done. I also have access to relevant emails, meeting notes and files all in one place—which is not something you can do if you are managing your projects from a task list manager. The most important thing for me though, is how I spend very little time managing my projects and reference materials and I am spending far more time doing the work that matters. And this has given me much more free time to do things outside of work. The more time I have available for doing the work the more free time I get at the end of the day.  And, I no longer skip my weekly reviews as it did when I was doing GTD. I'd probably do a proper weekly review once a month. Now, as I know a planning session won't take longer than thirty minutes, I love doing them. It's got me a lot more focused on what's important and I no longer lose anything. But the most important thing for you to remember is, the best productivity system is the one you design for yourself. I strongly believe that you need to take parts of the many different systems out there and build them into your system. I have elements of Tony Robbins' RPM (Rapid Planning Method) system, Ivy Lee's method and the Eisenhower matrix in my system.  Tony Robbin' RPM is how I plan out my projects and goals. The Ivy Lee Method is how I prioritise my day when I do my daily planning and the Eisenhower Matrix ensures I am working on the things that reduce the urgent work.  It's taken me a long time to develop a system that works seamlessly. It began with the Franklin Planner in the early 90s, through GTD in the naughties and eventually to my own system I call the Time Sector System.  Always remember, you are a unique individual and what works for one person will not necessarily work for you. Take elements from one and merge them with something else. You will find a system that works best for you and that one will be the one for you.  Thank you, Eric, for the question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Leadership is difficult. The work is endless, and you get constantly bombarded with problems left and right. Leadership is a responsibility. You have to carry the burden of making the decisions that impact your company, negatively or positively.  In a recent coaching session with the President of a construction company, we discussed three issues that every executive faces: how to make tough decisions, how to solve challenging problems, and how to prioritize.  After the call, I shot three short videos discussing the perspectives that I shared with my client to help him address his challenges. This podcast episode includes those three videos.  You will like how they give you practical ways to handle some of your toughest issues. One of the segments is particularly personal to me. I share the most difficult decision I ever had to make, two weeks before I was due to get married. It was tough! Listen to this episode today!  Discussion Points: 0:00 Introduction  1:40 The Franklin Planner  3:40 The principle of prioritization still works  3:59 How solving business problems is similar to losing weight  5:15 Identify your goals in business  5:37 Identify the levers to help you reach your goals 5:47 Keep track of how you execute your levers  6:10 Commit to incremental progress  6:52 The toughest decision I ever had to make  8:21 What is the toughest business decision you are making?  8:47 The difficult decision you have to make 9:21 ‘36 hours of pain’ 9:51 Be driven by doing the right thing  Resources:  Do Your Project Executives Need to Become Better Leaders? Book a 10-minute call with Eric Anderton (https://10minutes.youcanbook.me/)  Connect with me on LinkedIn. For more podcast episodes, you may also visit my website. Tune in and subscribe to the Construction Genius: A Leadership Master-Class Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thank you for tuning in! 

Welcome to the 25th Hour Podcast – where successful business owners talk about the magic of creating a 25th hour every day! We've all been there - your calendar is in great shape. Your to-do list is done. You are in the zone . . . All your balls in the air are being easily juggled. Then....something changes, and suddenly chaos reigns! This podcast will help you learn to up-level your time management strategies so you can get back in control of your day – and make an extra hour, your 25th hour, a reality - every day.Today’s guest is Heidi Kerner. Heidi is a certified seminar leader, business consultant, and coach specializing in supporting women in taking their career to the next level learning the art of presentation skills, sales training, and networking techniques. Heidi is the founder of The Coffee Club Divas a women's professional networking organization. Through training, coaching, and consulting, she helps corporations, nonprofits, universities, hospitals as well as entrepreneurs develop and strengthen their leadership ability.In this episode, we discuss the importance of accountability, how to get started on the tasks you’re avoiding, and Heidi shares her strategies for effectively navigating your day while remaining fully present. You won't want to miss this one!Time Management Strategies for Success: Paper Planner - “I'm old school, I like my Franklin Planner so I can physically write things down.”Planning the week on Sunday - “I look at the whole week and mark everything in my calendar - my projects, clients, appointments, break time - so that I can be on point.”Structured work hours - “I’m very structured. I treat my business like a job, so there's no room in my day for laundry or grocery shopping, I’m at my desk at 8am no matter what and I work until 4:30pm.”Breathing time between appointments - “I used to schedule things too close together and didn't give myself breathing time, so now I leave myself room for fires, or to take a break, and it’s taken so much stress out of my life.”15-minute timer - “When you’re struggling to start something, set a timer for 15 minutes. It’s amazing what you can accomplish just knowing there's a beginning and an end, and the feeling of satisfaction and making progress - one bite at a timeAccountability partners / coaches - “I’m big on coaching and accountability, whether it’s to work on my book, other projects, eating healthy, or spirituality, I always have one or two coaches going at a time. We can’t do it alone and it’s okay to ask for help.”Here’s how Heidi likes to spend her 25th Hour:Dancing - “I love dancing and getting my body moving, whether it’s swing dancing or just being silly - my 25th hour is about what I can do for self-care, including movement.”Resources Referenced:Coffee Club Divas: https://www.coffeeclubdivas.com FlyLady.net: http://flylady.net Ready to accomplish more while working less? Check out the Delegate Like a Pro Master Series: www.DelegateLikeAPro.com If you’re ready to master the art of presentation skills, sales training, and networking and take your career to the next level, reach out to Heidi:WebsiteHeidi is currently offering a strategy session exclusively for 25th Hour listeners! Visit her website to learn more.FacebookLinkedIn YouTube

Today we're talking about Grown Up Wonder.  Wonder is one of the three aspects of Tenet #2 of Intentional Optimism, being Present.Intentional Optimism using The Sailboat Analogy:Optimistic = The boat - the hull, the vehicle that gets you from island A to island B.Present = The centerboard - keeps you upright, focused, “centered,” if you will.Courageous = The rigging - this holds everything together and makes it work - your resilience. Energetic = The sail - without this, your boat can't go anywhere, but when the sail fills - wow!Wise = The rudder - keeps you on track, heading in the right directionIntentional = Setting everything up to properly capture the windTopics discussed in this episode: Celebrate Beauty. [6:02]]Childlike Perspective. [7:36]Cultivate Curiosity [10:20]Now what?  Cultivate CURIOSITY. Decide [11:33]To pursue Curiosity!To be astounded by your own knowledge and experienceChoose [13:30]  Take a deep breath, and choose to be amazed - life is full of wonder, and the older we get, the more wonderful it becomes.Resources mentioned in this episode: (As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases) Franklin Planner [6:05] (#CommissionsEarned)Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (pbs.org) [12:10]Get involved!Do YOU want to be part of a community that practices, encourages and supports being Intentionally Optimistic? Join me over in the Intentional Optimists Facebook GroupGab your FREE:Andrea's Favorite Planning & Productivity tools “Ultimate DISC communication Cheat Sheet”Get your own DISC Assessment, and don't forget the 10% discount (code "PODCAST") at check out!Email me at andrea@theintentionaloptimist.com  so I can be your professional encourager!  ● Follow on Instagram @theintentionaloptimist  ●  Linked In Andrea JohnsonNoom: A Mindful Way to Eat Learn how to intentionally challenge your mindset in order to take control of your health.Skillshare: Spark your creativity. Get 40% Off Annual MembershipDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/AndreaJohnson)

Podcast 144 In this week's episode, I answer a question on developing a system that works for you.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Your Digital Life 3.0 Online Carl's Time Sector System Blog Post The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script   Episode 144   Hello and welcome to episode 144 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.   This week, the question is all about building your own system, something I feel very passionate about because it's only when you have a system that works for you that you can finally start to trust your system and when you trust your system you use properly that's when you start to see huge increases in your productivity and your time management.   But first...   The early-bird discount for my latest Your Digital Life 3.0 course will be ending Tuesday 4 August at midnight PST (That's LA time). Right now, if you have not enrolled in this amazing course, you can get it for $59.99–that's a 20% discount on the normal price of $74.99.    Remember, with Your Digital Life you get a course that covers your whole digital life including your calendar, notes app, to-do list and cloud storage. PLUS... I also give you free access to my Complete Guide To Creating Your Goals and Email Productivity Mastery courses (which alone is worth $99.00)    So don't miss out on this amazing offer. Remember this offer will be ending tomorrow at midnight LA time. So get yourself enrolled today. Full details of the course are in the show notes.    If you are already enrolled in the course, this is a free update and you do not need to do anything. The new, updated course is available for you in your dashboard on my learning centre right now.   Okay, it's time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week's question.    This week's question comes from Abdul. Abdul asks; Hi Carl, I've struggled for many years to find a productivity system that works. I've tried GTD and that is too complicated for me, I've tried a digital version of the Franklin Planner—which was okay, and I've tried so many other ‘systems'. Is there something wrong with me or do you know of any other systems that might work?   Hi Abdul, thank you for your question.   First up, I can promise you there is nothing wrong with you. So many people I've met feel exactly the same way you do. That's partly because there's so much advice out there, it's hard to know what works and what doesn't work. Plus, the technology available to us today is changing so fast it's hard to find a settled set of apps and really learn those before a new app comes out promising to revolutionise how we manage our projects and tasks.    The reality is, no one system will work for everyone. We are all different and that is a good thing. Life would be very boring if we were all the same; liking the same things and doing things in the same way.    I think it's also a good thing we have so many different apps to choose from. With all this choice there are so many different ways we can build a system that will meet our own individual needs.    Of course, with choice comes confusion. We find ourselves asking if the tools we are using today are the best tools and wondering if there are better tools we could be using that would make out systems better. That is a dangerous way to think. That can lead to app switching which never creates a trusted system. All app switching does is creates distrust and wastes a lot of time moving all your data from one app to a new app and then finding you have data, tasks and notes all over the place.   One of the best approaches is to do a little research on how successful people manage their time. Try to find what apps they are using. For example, Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO uses Apple Notes for everything. It's his to-do list manager, his journal and his notes app. Now the way my brain works that would not work for me, but I do admire the simplicity of creating lists in Apple Notes to manage the work I have to do each day.    And that is another consideration for you. What kind of work do you do? I would consider my work as creating content. It's what I love doing and I am fortunate to be able to make a living from it. As I create content for different platforms each week, all I need to do is manage when I will write and record each week. I know at the beginning of the week I need to write a blog post, a podcast script, two newsletters, record this podcast and record two to three YouTube videos. Knowing that at the beginning of the week means I can schedule the time for that in my calendar and fix it each week.   But if you were an emergency room doctor you are unlikely to have a fixed schedule like that. Your work will be shift based and so no one week would be the same. Your calendar would be changing on a week to week basis and you are likely to be dealing with working some weeks during the day and some weeks at night. I find shift workers are better using their calendars as their primary time management tool.   If your work is largely project-based and your projects change frequently, then calendars will be useful for managing your meetings but not helpful managing all the different tasks you will have for the different projects you are working on. So a to-do list manager would likely be your primary tool for managing your time.  So, the starting point is to look at the work you do. If you are in sales, for example, often the driver of a sales process is the company's CRM system. If you try to run a hybrid CRM system alongside your company's CRM system you end up duplicating everything which is not the most efficient or effective way of managing your work. With that situation, it is far better to work with your company's system, or at least give it a try before looking for alternatives.   Another consideration is to figure out how you yourself like to see things. Are you a visual thinker—preferring to see things visually? If so, then apps like Asana or Trello would work best for you. These apps use boards to show you where your tasks and projects are and you get to choose how many boards you have, what the columns are and all you do is move things around your columns.    Alternatively, if you are like me where I am a bit of a visual thinker and a linear thinker, you could use an app like Todoist or Microsoft To-Do to manage your tasks and Asana or Trello to visually represent your projects progress.    So there quite a few different ways to build a trusted system.    That said, if I were to start from scratch myself today, then I would begin with my calendar. Your calendar is your best friend because it will never lie to you. It shows you exactly how much time you have available each day and from there you can allocate the work you want to do on a daily and weekly basis.    I use my calendar to schedule out my work. I don't go too deep with what I put on there but I use it to tell me if I am writing, doing exercise, teaching or recording. When I do my weekly planning session, I can schedule out the time I need to complete my content and do my exercise. I can get that fixed before the week starts and I know I have time then to complete all my content for the week.    The details of what I write about will be in my notes app and tasks that need doing—updating my website, scheduling my social media posts and errands will be in my to-do list. All I have on my calendar is an ‘event' called “writing time” or “audio/visual time” once I see that I can refer to my notes and see what I have planning to create that week.    I've also a few clients who use a to-do list as a capture tool only—ie they collect tasks and then later in the day transfer those tasks directly to their calendar. This is a great way to make sure you are not over-scheduling yourself and it also helps with prioritising. With this system, you only need an inbox in a to-do list manager.  So, first, understand the kind of work you do and what you need to manage that work. Secondly, sort out your calendar. Make sure you are using it properly and you have your ‘must-do' work scheduled on there at the beginning of the week.  Next up, as I eluded to above, make sure you have a good capturing system. This means you need to learn keyboard shortcuts, use widgets on your phone and set up Siri. You want collecting to be as easy and simple as you can possibly make it. You see, the thing with collecting is if you are not collecting everything then your whole system falls apart before you begin. If you know you don't have everything collected, there's no way you will trust your system. So, make sure you collect everything. Work on developing that habit right now.   Should you use labels or tags (contexts in the old GTD system) in your to-do list manager? That's an interesting question. For the kind of work I do, I don't need them. In the old days when if you were to do writing you needed a computer, then I did use them. But today, when I can write on my phone, reply to emails and listen to podcasts, I really do not need them. But...   If I were in sales or real estate, then I probably would. I would like to see all my calls and follow-ups, so a labelling or tagging system for calls and follow-ups would be good. But as a content creator, I really do not need them. This one really is up to you. But be careful. Don't add labels and tags and not use them. I've seen a lot of people say they need them, but then never use them to filter down their lists. If you're not using them, delete them. Just because your app has the ability to add tags or labels or contexts, does not mean you have to use them.    So as you can see, Abdul, with all the choices you have today, you want to be thinking about how you work, how you think and what you like.    One caveat, Whatever way you want to build your system, keep it simple and keep the apps you are using to a minimum. There are four core apps you really need: a calendar, a to-do list, a note app and a cloys storage system and you only need one of each. It's when you start adding additional apps to manage your work that things get complex and you find your duplicating and losing a lot of tasks. Think “Project One” as I like to call it. One app for each part of my life. One writing app, Ulysses for me, one To-to list manager (Todoist) and one notes app (Evernote)    Hopefully, that has helped, Abdul. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you for listening. Don't forget, if you have a question you would like answering, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.   It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Geoff Thatcher is the CEO of Creative principals, providing creative leadership for brand experiences, museums, visitor centres and attractions. He is the author of the CEO's Time Machine and a TEDx Speaker. In this show, discover: The power of experience through story The correlation between stories and leadership What the CEO's Time Machine can do for you How note taking can lead to creating great stories Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com   Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA   Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services   Learn more about Geoff Thatcher here: Instagram: @geoffthatcher   Geoff on LinkedIn Twitter: @geoffthatcher The Book web site is www.ceotimemachine.com  Creative Principles: https://www.creativeprincipals.com   Full Podcast Transcript Below.   ----more----    Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.   Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.   Today's special guest is Geoff Thatcher. He is an experienced creative director who excelled at leading projects from concept to reality. He is the CEO of Creative Principles and he is the author of The CEO's Time Machine. But before we get a chance to speak with Geoff, it is The Leadership Hacker News.   The Leadership Hacker News   Steve Rush: Ever wondered why you can get captivated listening to a leader who tells a great story? The history of storytelling dates back many thousands of years ago when we lived in caves where we used to use pigment to paint on our walls with our hands before we could speak. Then when we could start to communicate using our verbal communication; we used to create stories and myths while sitting around campfires in order to inspire people and let people know what was going on in our world. The ancient Greeks then carved their language into walls to tell how history was evolving for them. Generations and cultures grew and developed. Routines and rituals were turned into stories. Legends were created, and legacies were left behind for generations to pass on.   English writer and actor William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays in the 16th century. Shakespeare was a huge influence on storytelling because of his ability to really transform our language into stuff that we even use today. So how can stories help us as leaders? Well, storytelling is a key leadership technique because of its quick, powerful, energizing, and collaborative approach to persuading and entertaining people. It also helps us make an emotional connection. Yeah, of course, stories have to be authentic and make sense because if not, they become fables and folklore, then you also don't get buy in.   If through story you create that emotional connectivity, you will also create buy-in with your audience. So we may have replaced our medium of campfires with social media and high tech video conferencing, so the next time you are communicating a key message, think about how stories can bring it to life. There is an old Native American proverb I love and want to share with you: Tell me the facts and I will learn, tell me the truth and I will believe, but tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever. That has been our Leadership Hacker News. If you have any insights, information or stuff that, you would just like our listeners to hear, get in touch with us.   Start of Podcast   Steve Rush: I am joined on today show by Geoff Thatcher. Geoff is the founder and CEO of Creative Principles. He is a TEDx speaker and the author of The CEO's Time Machine. Geoff, welcome to the show.   Geoff Thatcher: Thank you, Steve.   Steve Rush: Our pleasure indeed.   Geoff Thatcher: It is great to be here.   Steve Rush: So before we get into the concept of The CEO's Time Machine and some of the work you do at the moment with Creative Principles, tell us a little bit about your journey into becoming a CEO yourself?   Geoff Thatcher: Well, I have been very lucky to have basically grown up in the industry that I still work in, so I started as a 14 year old clean-up boy, and that was the actual title of the job. I was a clean-up boy at an amusement park.   Steve Rush: Right.   Geoff Thatcher: And worked all my way through high school and college, and then after a brief flirtation with journalism have been back working in theme parks, museums, visitor's centres, brand experiences, and experiences for a long time. It is very rewarding to have been basically working in the same industry since I was 14. I just love the fact that what was part of my childhood is also part of my career now as a 52-year-old guy.   Steve Rush: So what has been the draw to theme parks and the world of themes and entertainment for you? What has been the draw?   Geoff Thatcher: That is a really good question and you know, on the surface of it is that it is fun and you bring smiles to people and it's about creating experiences. On a deeper level though. It is really about storytelling. Now, when I was, you know…train engineer at an amusement park. You know choo-choo, try having a steam engine around a Lake and, you know, looking at zoo animals. I did not think much about story, but you know, after college and you know, studying journalism and actually working as a reporter and then coming back into this industry. You really begin to realize that the best experiences, the ones that are most memorable are those experiences that are based upon a powerful story. So Steve you're in the UK and we certainly have a great love for Harry Potter here in the United States, and so when you go to Universal Studios and you immerse yourself at Hogwarts and that wonderful story. It really is quite a memorable experience, and so that is to me, what is most precious is, I love telling stories.   Steve Rush: Telling stories, not just through the written word, but through the experiences that you now create on behalf of the organization you lead. So tell us a little bit about Creative Principles, and what it is you do right now?   Geoff Thatcher: Well, that is right. I mean, if you are going to tell a story and an experience, the first thing you have to do is actually write that story. And so what we do at creative principles is we are, as the name would imply creative leaders and we work on high level creative concepts for theme parks and museums and visitor centres and corporate brand experiences. And so we started the company about three years ago. I mean, obviously I have been doing this my whole career, but three years ago, went out on our own and started the company. And since then we've worked on everything from the grand opening of Warner Bros World Abu Dhabi, which was just fantastic to work with those amazing brands. I mean, you have Batman and the joker and, you know, bugs bunny and, you know, the Flintstones. To an amazing corporate brand experience in Singapore and in Boston of all things and insurance company, FM Global. But they had a great story to tell and, you know, don't have to get into the details, of what story an insurance company might have to tell, but needless to say. We all have, I think appreciated the value of insurance here, as we faced a pandemic and other challenges before us. It is nice to have a little bit of ability to be resilient, and so the company that we work for in creating these experiences, FM Global, their motto. Their tagline is resilience and the power of resilience, and so it is important, especially in challenging times that; we learn how to be resilient.   Steve Rush: Story telling as a principle is not new of course; when we were living in caves 50,000 years ago, it was the only way that we were able to really communicate and that's where storytelling kind of got its early grounding if you like. In gathering insights, and gathering people and gathering audiences, what do you notice is the direct correlation between storytelling and the leaders that you have worked with when you are creating those things experiences?   Geoff Thatcher: Well, the best leaders tell great stories and they tell those great stories over and over and over again. I am sure if we were to talk about our childhoods we would be able to talk about those stories that our parents told us over and over and over again, to the point where you almost begin to roll your eyes and go, oh, not that story again, please no. But that's actually a good thing. I mean, if you are in the workplace and you are the CEO and if your employees start to roll their eyes and go, please don't tell us the story about note taking again. Well, maybe you are actually starting to make a difference in getting that story ingrained into the culture of your company. So I would always encourage CEOs to tell stories and tell the same story and tell it over and over again, because those stories become part of your culture and part of who you are.   Steve Rush: I observe that too when I particularly coach leaders. I make a direct correlation with those who are more effective in terms of engagement, by their ability to tell better stories than those who are aren't. Would you noticed that too?   Geoff Thatcher: Absolutely, I mean the challenge, I think sometimes with leaders is almost all of us can tell a great story, but can you tell a great story that makes a point? I mean, for example, you know. I talk about how I got my job in the first place as a 14 year old, I wanted to work at this amusement park and I wanted what I thought to be the best job at this amusement park, which was working in their swimming pool, which we didn't have water parks back then. It was a big, you know, million gallon swimming pool with diving boards and, you know old water slides, which are much different than today's water slides. But I wanted, what I thought was the best job. I did not want to work, you know, in food service; I did not want to take tickets. I wanted to work at the swimming pool as a clean-up boy, because I knew that would lead to the being a lifeguard, which is kind of a sexy job. And you know, that would lead to other opportunities, and so the way I got that job was politely bugging the manager, the swim pole for three weeks straight, almost single day. I would find that manager walking around the swimming pool because I was a regular; I had been a regular at that pool since I was five years old and I would just simply, you know, smile and ask her, you know, hey, I applied for the position. Is anything available? You know, hey, have you heard anything? Hey, have you checked with your manager? Hey, is there a chance for me to have a job? I mean, I always did it with a smile, but I politely bugged her.   And after about three weeks, she finally said, well, no, there's still not a position open, but fine. Why don't you come in and we will get you on staff. And you know, you may not work for many hours, but you're hired, and that I think is an important lesson that any leader could teach their employees is you need to politely bug people. If you want to get stuff done, whether you are in sales or in management, or leadership or human resources or anything else. Politely bugging gets results, and so I tell that story all the time. I have told that story to my kids so many times they are probably sick of it, but it is important to teach those lessons. And too many leaders not only are afraid to tell stories because it makes them vulnerable, but they're afraid to tell stories that make a powerful point.   Steve Rush: And a powerful point hits that emotional connection, which creates an action shift in people, doesn't it?   Geoff Thatcher: Absolutely.   Steve Rush: So, as you were growing through your leadership career, Geoff. Where did you take your leadership inspiration from or who even?   Geoff Thatcher: Well, I have been fortunate in my career to have both really good leaders and really bad leaders. And so we can learn from both, you know, I remember being a very young leader, so I was 17 years old and I got a job as an area supervisor at Lagoon Amusement Park and went through a management training course as a 17 year old. And so you can learn so much by taking those courses. I remember this is going to really date me. I remember going to a, you know, the Franklin Planner, you know, the old Franklin Planner. I think they are still around. Right, and I went to a Franklin Planner, you know, time management seminar as like a 19 year old. And it was fascinating to experience that but if I were to probably pick one leader. His name would be Boyd Clark and he was the CEO of the Tom Peters Company. And if you're in leadership or, you know, business gurus, you know who Tom Peters is.   Steve Rush: Sure, Yeah. He is a guru in learning and development for sure.   Geoff Thatcher: Oh, absolutely. I mean wrote In Search of Excellence in the eighties, which was like the big, big, big management, you know, business book of that era and still speaks today. I, I believe, but Boyd was the CEO of the Tom Peters company. He was in leadership training and development and, you know, Boyd taught me so many lessons and he was kind and just a really, really great guy. And unfortunately Boyd died of cancer, but you know, he was really a mentor to me and I remember there was just so many little things he taught you along the way. And I remember one of my favourite lessons was. We were having a meeting and the company was, you know, debating its future. And there were several leaders in the company that wanted it to shift from being a training and leadership Development Company to a Consulting Company.   And Boyd patiently listened to the different leaders in the company debate and argue whether it should be a consulting company or a training and development company, and then finally he stood up at the end and he asked a question of the people that were arguing at for it to be a consulting company. And he said, how much do we charge for a day of consulting? And they said $2,500 a day. He goes, that is our day rate for day of consulting is $2,500, and then he turned to the people arguing for the leadership side, and he said. How much do we charge for a day of leadership training and development? And at the time they said $9,500 and he goes $9,500, and then he looked around the room and he said, we're a training and development company! And then sat down. Everybody got the message, you know. Yes, you know, consulting is nice, but when it comes time to supporting the company and being a business that it is about making money.   Steve Rush: Lots of organizations make the mistake of trying to become too diverse or to pivot away from their core proposition and in doing so often and lose that key focus that they were so successful in building their business with.   Geoff Thatcher: Yeah, it is funny, isn't it? You know, I have had other experiences where I just don't understand why a company's changed when they don't need to change. I mean, there is so many examples. You know, it is really interesting, you know, look at history and, you know, certainly when we talk about The CEO's Time Machine and the book part of that is traveling back in time. There is so many examples of companies who did not change when they needed to and also examples of companies that changed when there was no reason to.   Steve Rush: And there is no right or wrong answer is there? I think it is very much around timing and opportunity. And if you think about some of the evolution and innovation that we experienced today, that is because somebody said, “let's do this and let's be creative and let's do these left of field things that we never even envisaged before”. And sometimes that creative thinking can create the motivation and indeed the business opportunity that follows.   Geoff Thatcher: What you should never ever stop creating and I mean, since Steve you're in the UK and I love my history, one of my favourite examples in history of somebody simply trying to do something new, but it leading to something far beyond his imaginations is Abraham Darby and the invention of the Blast Furnace. Now the Blast Furnace really ushered in the industrial revolution, which has changed the world in so many ways. And you would think, Oh wow, Abraham Darby, I can't, you know. You must have had this amazing vision for the future of the world, with the industrial revolution and creating the blast furnace. But it was actually just a guy trying to figure out a better way to make an iron pot, that is it.   Steve Rush: Yep.   Geoff Thatcher: He was trying to make a cheap iron pot. That is such a simple ambition and yet in trying to achieve that very simple ambition, he ended up changing the world. And so, you know, no matter what business you're in, I hope you're trying to improve what you're doing because through those incremental improvements, you may just stumble upon something that will transform the world.   Steve Rush: I love that principle of just letting creativity take over and see what happens also.   Geoff Thatcher: Yeah, I mean, it is really true. I mean, we did, this was a long time ago, but we did at the 150th anniversary of the Smithsonian, which is a big museum complex, if you will. In the United States, in DC. At the a hundred 50th anniversary of the Smithsonian. They took all of their artefacts on tour and Intel was a sponsor, and so we created a theatre an immersive experiential theatre for Intel and it was called more than you ever imagined theatre. That was the name of the theatre, more than you ever imagined. And the whole point of it was throughout time. All great inventors, never truly realized what people would do with their invention and Intel of course, was talking about the, you know, the chip and, you know, the semiconductor and that people are doing way more than the inventors of the semiconductor ever thought possible. And it was the same was true with Gutenberg, Edison, Ford, Darby, all great inventors, never truly understood the amazing things people would do with their inventions.   Steve Rush: Right, and therefore it is imperative, isn't it? That we are also scanning for new ideation because whilst somebody else might have the idea, I might be able to evolve it.   Geoff Thatcher: Exactly and can I just say for a moment that I love talking to someone from the UK, because you say whilst, and I've never been able to do it and do it properly. It is all, you know, it is always, wow. While we do this, while we do that, but it is whilst, and it just, I can't even say it right.   Steve Rush: It is a really Interesting word that I forgot I use because while I was writing my book, my editor who was American, used to say Steve, you've got to stop saying whilst, please, can you say, while. Cause nobody in America will understand what you mean, anyway.   Geoff Thatcher: He should have let you be English, right? I mean, you did invent the language for goodness sakes.   Steve Rush: Well, apparently so, so Geoff, it is no surprise that being creative director will really immerse you into the mind-set of storytelling and thinking about stuff differently. And the book, The CEO's Time Machine was one that you evolved over a period of time. Right? Tell us a little bit about that.   Geoff Thatcher: I actually wrote the book in 2016 when I was traveling back and forth between Cincinnati, Ohio and Riyadh Saudi Arabia. And we were working on a traveling exhibition for the King Abdullah foundation and King Abdulla had just died and his foundation, which is basically his family had really wanted to kind of honour his legacy. And I don't want to get into geopolitics, Steve, but there's no doubt that a lot of the changes that you're seeing in Saudi Arabia, a lot of the reforms, and it has changed so much since 2016 when I first started working over there. But those changes are doing large part to the fact that King Abdullah introduced a scholarship program that sent hundreds of thousands of students to the United Kingdom, to Canada, to the United States, to France and other countries to get an education, to get a college degree.   And then they came home and they want to change and the crown Prince is simply responding to the demands of his people for that change, and so that's exciting and when we were working on this traveling exhibition, I started thinking about time travel. And I was talking to Bruce Weindruch from the history factory who were working with on the project. And he had this philosophy and this book called Start With the Future and Work Back, which is that we all need to start with the future. Where do we want to go? But we need to look back in our own life and our own company's history and the own history of our country at those milestones to help us get to where we need to be. As I was thinking about all of these things, I started thinking about; wouldn't it be interesting if there was a CEO who had a time machine?   So we wrote a book about a kind of Elon Musk, Steve jobs type of CEO, who is always inventing the future, creating new markets. And the rumour is, is that he has a time machine in his secret R&D garage as if he's like Tony stark, right, with his secret, you know, R&D lab in the basement of his house. But this time it's a garage behind his company headquarters, and he's turning over the reins of his company to a much younger protégé. And the last thing he has to do before he turns things over and leaves the company is to introduce her to his time machine and that's what the book is about.   Steve Rush: And it is a neat, really neat idea, but the whole philosophy of being innovative and forward thinking versus looking back, splits the camps and somewhat, doesn't it? Speak about innovation, lots of people I speak to say yeah, yeah - we just need to leave the past behind and head into the future versus learn from the past and head into the future. Where do you sit with that?   Geoff Thatcher: I think that too many leaders today are focused on so much on the future as they should be, but they're focused so much on the future that they abandoned their own past. And they forget that there are amazing things that they can learn from their past. One of the examples that I give and certainly they were a client and while I was not involved in industrial designers and like that. I do know that, you know, when I worked for Honeywell, they were passionate about only really caring about the future. You know, they really did not want to talk about the past at all and then I find it ironic then. That in this obsession for the future, they missed one of the greatest inventions of the last decade, which was the Nest Thermostat. And it's hard not to argue that the Nest Thermostat wasn't based upon a very simple, innovative design that Honeywell innovated, which is the Circular Thermostat. It was the Honeywell classic, iconic, Circular Thermostat is an iconic classic design. And I think in the obsession to focus on the future, they miss that inspiration. They missed that connection to their past that could have truly brought them forward into a new future, and instead Nest saw that Circular Thermostat for what it was, which is an incredible innovation that should be repurposed and redesigned for digital age.   Steve Rush: Part of the story that you tell through The CEO's Time Machine is where your CEO is handing over the reins to the protégé. They have a walk through the garage and there is this range of seamlessly useless kit and Nintendo's and other artefacts that this individual CEO has collected over time. But there's a story behind each of those that sets out these principles for some leadership behaviours. Just tell us a little bit about a few of those?   Geoff Thatcher: Sure, one of the cool things I think about the book is it's written like a theme park attraction. And that's what we do at my company is I'm an experienced designer. And so in the queue, if you will, in that windy path, that leads from the entrance of the garage to the time machine itself. The CEO has collected a bunch of artefacts and these artefacts are all about important lessons that we can learn in business. So for example, you know, he keeps a spark plug of a Delco spark plug, and you are like, why, why on earth would you want to keep a Delco spark plug? But the Delco spark plug is there because it reminds him of Charles Kettering invention of the electric starter, which changed automobile history forever and introduced and made the automobiles safer, not just men to drive, but really safe women to drive because they don't even have to crank the car to start it up.   And so that was an incredible adventure and it was invented right in Dayton, Ohio. And then of course at the same time, Charles Kettering was inventing the electric starter. You had the Wright brothers and keeps some artefacts and some books of the Wright brothers on hand as well, because there is one lesson you can learn from the Wright brothers is that you should always focus on innovation rather than litigation. They spent so much time suing people over patent infringement that they have failed and missed this amazing, you know, window to invent the future of aviation. And they seeded their leadership position to, you know, Lockheed and Northrop and Martin and others that we still see in Boeing, if you will. And others that we still see you know, leading the industry today and it's really, really sad. And so one thing that I think a lot of companies miss when they look at their own history is they focus on important milestones.   Like we introduced the new, you know, XY-5000 model, and who cares? what you need to focus on is lessons that were learned and why those lessons are important for us today and sometimes that's very hard to curate and very hard to figure out, but, you know, it's fascinating to me that, you know, here you had in Dayton Ohio. National cash register, which became NCR, you had AC Delco, which was purchased and really became the R&D lab for General Motors, and the Wright Brothers, here you had this amazing innovation happening at Dayton Ohio at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century. And there are so many lessons to be learned, including why they didn't maintain that leadership position. There is a reason why Silicon Valley is not in Dayton, Ohio today and yet it was in 1910.   Steve Rush: And those stories that you talked about before. Is a way to bring those lessons to life, isn't it?   Geoff Thatcher: Absolutely, and if you don't know your Genesis story of your company and how you came to be. It is very important that those stories be curated and those stories be told. So everyone in the company understands those important lessons that they can take away from things. I mean, this pandemic introduced, I think, an important lesson for my career, if you will and my little company. In our life, which is, you know, when that pandemic hit like everybody else, we looked around and we were like, oh crap. I mean, we had project after project going on hold. It is impossible to do business development in March and April is people are dying and, you know, the sickness is spreading. I mean, what are you going to do? And I turned to Zoey, who's our designer and also happens to be my daughter. And I said, you know that book, we've been talking about? That book that we have been toying around with, I said, let's do it and we just had this intense desire to get it done, and so, while I had written the story in 2016, it just sat on a shelf. So Zoey cranked out 43 illustrations in three weeks, we called a publisher. We called a copy editor. We called the graphic designer and we were able to get the book published and on Amazon in less than five weeks.   Steve Rush: Wow.   Geoff Thatcher: And it was a rewarding time to pivot and everybody is pivoting right now because of the pandemic. And I guess one of the lessons we all need to learn from this is, you know, maybe next time we shouldn't wait for there to be a pandemic before we pivot. Maybe we should, instead of treating projects in their spare time, we should actually, you know. Slot them into the project line-up. There is a guy named Jim Coudal in Chicago, who's a designer. And he likes to say, you know, the problem with doing project in your spare time is there's never any spare time. And so his philosophy was always. If they had a cool idea, they would just treat it like a regular client. And they would give it a job number and they would just slot it into their schedule and get it done and I think, you know, one lesson I hope all of us can learn from this pandemic is we shouldn't wait for the next pandemic to pivot.   Steve Rush: This is super, yeah.   Geoff Thatcher: We should constantly be looking for ways to pivot.   Steve Rush: Ah, wholly agree with that. Whole principle of strategic thinking is just that it is the stories we need to tell ourselves for the future. “What if”, scenarios, aren't they? The wildcards?   Geoff Thatcher: Absolutely. Absolutely.   Steve Rush: What lessons are you hoping for that folks are going to take from the book Geoff?   Geoff Thatcher: Well, more than anything else, you know, I hope people really take the story to heart. And I hope at the end of the day, they care more about the history of their own company. At the end of the day. I hope they care more about the future of their company and they realize that no matter whether you travel back in time or travel to the future, you still have to be decisive in the moment. I mean you and I could travel back in time and talk to Abraham Darby and we could probably learn a lot of interesting things about the birthplace of the industrial revolution and lessons he learned in inventing the Blast Furnace, but we still have to come back to this moment in time. We still have to come back to the present and make a decision. I mean, if you and I were to go back to 1919 and talk to people about the Spanish flu, we could learn a lot, but we would still have to come back to 2020 and we would have to make a decision.   Steve Rush: Right.   Geoff Thatcher: And so that's, that is what I hope people take from this book is connecting the past to the future by being decisive today.   Steve Rush: Really great principles and thank you for sharing them as well, Geoff, by the way.   Geoff Thatcher: Hey, anytime, thank you for having me.   Steve Rush: Leadership is what you do as well as what you inspire. So this is part of the show where we turn that leadership lens on you and I hack into your leadership mind, and we're going to explore a couple of things. First thing we want to explore with you is. What your top leadership hacks or ideas would be that you would share with our listeners?   Geoff Thatcher: Number one is to write, we have forgotten the importance of writing because most leaders don't require their people to write for them because they're too busy and don't want to read. And so if you are a leader, make sure that you tell your people that you would like to read what they write and then take that extra time to read what they put together. And the reason why that's important is because you can't get to the depth of thought by simply talking about it and putting together a few PowerPoint slides. You miss the connective tissue between bullet points. If you don't actually take the time to write. And so if you're a young person in an organization, even if your boss won't read what you write, that doesn't mean you shouldn't write because your presentations, your PowerPoints, your proposals will have more depth of thought and more logic and more meaning. If you take the time to write, so number one, I would say, don't forget to read and write, which sounds very remedial and basic, but based on my experience, it's woefully missing in many, many organizations today.   Steve Rush: Right?   Geoff Thatcher: It is just so much easier.   Steve Rush: It is often the context that is missing in the communication as well, isn't it? Geoff Thatcher: Right, I mean, I was just working on a project where all they wanted to do was sit around the table and talk about it and talk about it and talk about it and talk about it. And, you know, at some point one smart person has to go away and write about it. So sure, talk about it, but it realized that at some point, you know, somebody actually has to go away and create a narrative. I can tell you from experience. I know what it is like, and I am sure, you know, it is like Steve. You wrote a book to be sitting there and you have this idea in your head of where you want the chapter to go, but as you are writing it, you realize that does not make any sense. That is not going to work. Well, I thought it was going to work. I had it in my head. I talked about it with my colleagues. Why isn't it working? Well because you are actually having to sit down and do it. You are actually having to sit down and write, and so, you know, someone might have an amazing business plan, but if you don't sit down and write it out, you're never going to know if it actually makes sense. So that is my number one leadership hack is to write.   My number two, leadership hack is to take great notes. If you know anything about The CEO's Time Machine. The book that I wrote, you know, that note taking is also a very important part of that, of that story. And note taking to me is perceived by most young people as being remedial. And we need to change and shift perception about note taking because the people that take really, really, really good notes, what they're actually doing is managing the intellectual of their company. And so that's a kind of job that you should have, and if you establish yourself as being somebody who can really manage intellectual property and take amazing notes, you'll be invited to the most important meetings. If you are a 24-year-old young person in an organization. That is where you want to be is in those important meetings, managing that intellectual property.   And I guess the third leadership hack I would say is manage expectations. There are so many unrealistic expectations in the workplace today, and we need to constantly manage those expectations, whether its things like how to deliver ideas. People think sometimes that there is coming up with great ideas is just all fun and games, and it is not. There can be serious arguments, and debate and clashes of opinions, so you need to match expectations. And I just think there's too many people today that have unrealistic expectations about the workplace. Whether it is about how much money they should make. About the relationships, they should have in the workplace. About the loyalty that accompany should or should not have. If you don't manage those expectations, you're going to have employees who are constantly disappointed because their unrealistic expectations are not being met.   Steve Rush: And ironically managing expectations comes from telling great stories as well.   Geoff Thatcher: It does.   Steve Rush: Yeah.   Geoff Thatcher: It does, I mean, you know. One of the stories I tell when it comes to managing expectations is I talk about a colleague of mine named Todd Hall. And Todd and I after a very long day in Dubai, came back to the hotel and we were standing in the lobby and he looked at me and he said, I don't want to have dinner with you. And I looked back at him and I said, I don't want to have dinner with you either, and he looked at me and he said, good night. And I said, good night, and we turned and walked away. And people like, what, how rude. Our point is this; Todd Hall is not my friend. Todd Hall is an amazing colleague, a talented man. I love working with him, but Todd Hall is not my friend. I have never done anything socially with him. I have never hung out with he and his wife. I don't want to hang out with he and his wife and that's okay.   He is a colleague. We have mutual interests. We want to make sure that both of us do a really good job and make each other look really good, but we do not have to be friends, and so too many people come into the workplace and they think they have to be best friends with everybody on the job and that's just not true. That is what I mean by managing expectations.   Steve Rush: Super wise words Geoff. Thank you.   Geoff Thatcher: I am really a nice guy though, by the way, I believe in being friendly, to be clear. You should be friendly, but you don't have to be friends.   Steve Rush: Yeah, I get that, so we want to explore with you now. What we affectionately call Hack to Attack, and this is a time in your work or your life where something hasn't worked out as you were intending it to. So maybe it is not worked out well, or indeed, we have screwed up, but we have now used that experience and we learned from it and we use it as a lesson in our life now. What would be your Hack to Attack?   Geoff Thatcher: Well, I got fired twice. Both times, it was initially quite devastating but in the end, it was the best thing that ever happened to me, both times. And so I would say that if you haven't had a bad experience, whether it be being fired or getting yelled at or you know having a big disappointment at work. That you are probably just not trying hard enough, so learn from your mistakes, but don't be afraid of making mistakes. I am really, really glad I got fired. So don't fret about those types of things, because it'll be all right,   Steve Rush: And lessons can be learned from each of those experiences as well. Right?   Geoff Thatcher: Absolutely.   Steve Rush: So now as the author of The CEO's Time Machine, I'm going to get you to do some time travel. And I'm going to ask you to travel back in your time machine and bump into Geoff at 21, and you have an opportunity to tell him a story and give him some advice. What would it be?   Geoff Thatcher: 21, so when I was 21 years old, I was a missionary for my church. Full time volunteer missionary for my church in rural Kentucky called Paris Kentucky. It was towards the end of my six months there and I was getting my haircut from a local man who was also a member of our church. And he was talking to me and asking me questions just about my life and my family and in the course of that discussion, it came out that I have a black brother, a black sister, three Korean sisters. I come from a multiracial family, adopted. I have five biological siblings and five adopted siblings and he stopped cutting my hair. And he said, well that explains it. And I said, what do you mean? And he goes, now I know why the Lord sent you here, and I said, what do you mean?   And he said, the Lord sent you here because we needed you to help change us. And I looked at him a little surprised, and it is true. When we first came to that congregation as young 21-year-old missionaries that was a white congregation. There was not really any black members, or there wasn't any racial diversity in the congregation. We worked really hard in the African American community there in Paris, Kentucky and we baptized and brought in several members of the church from the African American community, and didn't really think anything about it. I mean, I was a kid, I just did not think at all about it at all. But this barber just was very blunt with me and he said, you know, he goes, really appreciate what you've done because you're changing us and I was still kind of a young idiot.   I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, kind of looked at me very nonchalant. And he's like, well, I'm racist and you've helped us to see we should change. And what's ironic about this whole story is that in the end, this barber became best friends with Mama Cosette, who was the matriarch of one of the families that we brought into the church. And they're still friends to this day. I saw them several years ago and saw Mama Cosette and she and his barber are still very close. So I guess what I would say to my 21 year old self is not anything that I would say. I think I would want my 21-year-old self to say back to me. To look at the challenges we face today with the innocence of a young person. Because honestly, when we went into that town, I did not even notice that there was a black section of town and a white section of town.   You know what I mean? We just started teaching people and just starting to serve and to help people. I think a beauty in not seeing colour, there is a beauty and not seeing race and there is a beauty in doing what Martin Luther King said is to, judge people by the content of their character instead of the colour of their skin. And so I think it would actually be me today as a 52 year old man learning something from my 21 year old self, rather than me trying to teach my 21 year old self  anything. Because that was a powerful experience for me to have this barber talk about the power of change and his self-awareness and understanding his own personal history and the way he was raised and knowing that he needed to change and then the love that allowed him to change. Cause Mama Cosette loved him and he ended up loving her right back, so that is probably what I would learn more than anything else.   Steve Rush: Really profound story and parents can learn as much from their kids. Right?   Geoff Thatcher: Absolutely and in fact, the reality is if you are a leader in an organization today and you want to travel to the future, all you have to do is walk down the hallway and talk to a 21-year-old working in your company because they are the future of your company. We can learn a lot from our younger selves.   Steve Rush: Super words. Thank you, Geoff. So as folks are listening to this. They are probably thinking, how can I get a hold a copy of The CEO's Time Machine, but more importantly, how can they find out a little bit more about the work that you do? Where would you like them to go?   Geoff Thatcher: Probably the easiest way to find us as ceotimemachine.com that is ceotimemachine.com but sorry, just a little joke with the advertising voice there. Of course, you can Google us you know, Geoff Thatcher, you know, on LinkedIn. Creative Principles has a website, our company, but probably the quickest and easiest way is just to go to ceotimemachine.com and the book is for sale on Amazon and everywhere else. Steve Rush: Also, make sure we put the details of the book and indeed your LinkedIn profile and websites in the show notes too.   Geoff Thatcher: Thank you so much.   Steve Rush: Geoff it just goes for me to say I have had a real ball listening to the stories and the anecdotes you shared, and it has been a real pleasure in listening to some of those stories with you. And I just wanted to say on behalf of our listeners, thanks for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.   Geoff Thatcher: Thanks for listening to my stories. I appreciate it.   Closing   Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.   Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker    

Time Management is a critical component of success! We use Buzzsprout and Otter to bring you this awesome podcast. If you want to learn more about those programs...Click here to check out Buzz Sprout!Click here to check out Otter.ai!Here's some resources referred to in the show...Check out Traffic Secrets, the NEW book by Russel Brunson!Check out The One Thing, by Gary Keller!Here's some tools mentioned in the show to help you on your journey...Check out the Five Minute Journal!Check out the Franklin Planner!Check out this productivity planner!Check out THE Passion Planner!The Tony Robbins "RPM planner" link coming soon!This podcast is NOT sponsored. Some product links are affiliate links which mean if you buy something we'll receive a small commission. These links were either used for, or mentioned in, this podcast.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/mm365)

This week, should you switch to the latest app? Well, it depends and that's the question I am answering this week.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website The Time Sector Course Carl's Time Sector System Blog Post The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script Episode 140 Hello and welcome to episode 140 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Over the last few months, we've seen the launch of the noting taking app Roam Research and the email app HEY! Both of these apps have received quite a lot of publicity. The question is should you switch to any of these new apps? Well, it does depend on a number of things and that is what I shall talk about in this weeks episode.  Now, before we get to that, I just want to give you a heads up that the 2020 Your Digital Life course will be launching very soon. It's a little late this year because I've completely re-recorded it and updated it with the Time Sector System.  Although this version is now the 3.0 version, anyone already enrolled in the Your Digital Life 2.0 course will, of course, get this huge update completely free. I know, I'm mad! But for me, it's always about helping you to become better organised and more productive. So, keep an eye out for the launch. It's coming very very soon. Okay, it's time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Jez. Jez asks; hi Carl, what do you think of the new notes app Roam Research and Notion? These new players look like they are taking over from Evernote.  Hi Jez, thank you for your question.  Every few months I get a lot of questions like this on Twitter and my inbox is inundated with app developers asking me to promote their latest offerings and I think it is fantastic that these amazing people are working hard to make our lives easier.  That said, though, App stores can be very dangerous places. You see one of the biggest issues is people app switching every few months because the latest and newest shiny object in the App Store is offering to solve all your productivity problems.  Let's get one thing straight first. No app whether it's new or old, will solve your productivity problems. Ever. Full stop.  You see if you have productivity issues it is not the app that is the problem. I mean, let's be honest here, as a species we survived pretty well with paper-based desk diaries and legal note pads for to-do lists. The issues many faces today, are the exact same issues knowledge workers have faced for decades. It's not the apps. It's the system you use, or not use.  So, there are two parts to this.  If you enjoy trying new apps and your productivity and time management systems keep you on top of your work, then that's great. Go ahead, play, research and learn. It can be fun trying out new apps and seeing what they can do. I do that myself. Last week I played around with HEY! The new email app. And for those you interested, it's not for me. I cannot send emails from my business email address only my HEY! Address. So it's a non-starter. I also do not like being forced to manage my emails in the way the app developer wants me to manage my emails.  There are also some marketing issues here too. Picking a fight with Apple may seem a noble cause, but to me, it smacks of a publicity stunt to get attention. And forcing people to only use their HEY! Email address seems to be exactly the same way Hotmail developed a following in the 1990s. It all feels very fake to me. But that's just my opinion.  Then there's the other side to this. If you believe that if only you have the right set of apps your productivity issues will somehow miraculously be solved, then you are deluding yourself. They won't.  In fact, if you are constantly switching apps, you are compounding your problems because you never give any app a chance to become a part of who you are. You will be constantly playing with feature sets, trying to figure out how to do something and importing your notes, tasks or events into another new app. All of which takes you away from actually doing the work.  The truth is no app with be a perfect fit. You will have to compromise. When I moved to Todoist five or six years ago, I did so coming from an OmniFocus background. I was used to start and due dates. With Todoist you don't get start dates. But the reasons for my move was much bigger than having start and due dates. It was because I was spending too much time in OmniFocus playing with perspectives and was not spending enough time doing the work. Todoist offered me a much simpler way of managing my tasks and it was the right move for me. It solved an issue of productivity for me. I quickly learned I did not need start dates anyway and I was only using them because they were a feature of OmniFocus. And that is the point. If switching to a new app improves your workflow and overall productivity, then your switch was the right thing to do. If, however, it solves nothing and you find yourself back with the same issues you had before, then you've just wasted a lot of precious time. Time you will never get back.  Now with a notes app, this is an interesting place for me. You see, the right notes app for you depends on the way your mind works. I have clients who are incredibly creative and love to doodle in meetings. They love the feel of pen on paper, They think better in images and drawings and charts. For these people, a notes app that allows you to drop images, scans of written notes and use an Apple Pencil or stylus would work fantastically for them.  Then I have clients who think more linearly and prefer written outlining with links to connected ideas and notes. For these people, something like Roam Research or even Workflowy, OmniOutliner or Google Docs works best.  The right notes app for you depends on the way you think.  The same actually goes for your to-do list. If you are a visual person, Trello or Asana are likely to be the best for you. If you are more of a linear thinker, then Todoist, Microsoft ToDo or Apple Reminders would work better. So, when it comes to choosing the right apps for you, you need to consider the way you think and work.  The problem with constant switching is you never learn how to use your app properly or build the all-important trust. If you do not trust your apps, you are less likely to use them properly.  The key to having a great set of apps is you instinctively collect everything into the app without thinking. I've used Todoist and Evernote for so long now, I don't need to think of the steps to get something into my system. It just happens. I have an idea, I pick up my phone or activate the keyboard shortcut on my computer and collect the idea or task. It's an automatic reflex. This is great because I stay focused on what I want to collect, instead of having to take my mind off that and try to remember how to save an idea.  And then we get to processing or organising what you collected. If you are constantly changing your apps you never really learn how to process quickly and efficiently. And with apps like Notion where there are so many customisable elements, the temptation to be constantly fiddling with your set up, the background colours or image means you spend a disproportionate amount of time playing and not enough time getting on with the work that matters.  What it all boils down to is what is it you want to achieve? Do you want to get better organised and become more productive, or do you want distractions and toys?  I agree it is important to keep up with the latest technology, but that should not be at the expense of your efficiency. I know plenty of productive people who still use a Franklin Planner. They routinely do their daily planning, they sharpen the saw and their planners are a gold mine of plans, appointments and tasks. They stick with it because it works and it is a system they trust.  It's your system that really determines whether you are productive or not. Developing your system, and making it work for you is what will improve your time management. The app you use really doesn't matter.  I think about the years I have been using Evernote and the incredible depository of notes, ideas and reference materials I have collected over the ten years of using Evernote is wonderful. Comparing Evernote to it's newer rivals makes Evernote look and feel old fashioned, but it works, it's never let me down (except on iOS which seems to have been fixed now) and I know how to find my notes in seconds. There's no temptation to customise it—you can't anyway— and because it has a fixed structure, I instinctively know how I want to organise my notes.  If I consider the time it would take for me to transfer all my notes from Evernote to something like Notion, it would just be a complete waste of time. I'm sure Notion in many ways looks and feels better than Evernote, but the real question is would it make me more effective? The answer to that is a resounding no. So, while I did try Notion a while ago, I quickly realised it was not going to make my system better or make me more efficient so the time cost involved in switching would not be worth it.  So, fix your system first. Make sure that works and that you use it automatically. Then find apps that work for the way you think, not because they look pretty or are the latest thing reviewers are talking about. All those reviewers will move on to the next things in a few weeks anyway. You will never be able to keep up with them and if you try your productivity will suffer. Just don't do that.  Hopefully, that helps, Jez. Thank you for your question and once again, thank you to you for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all. Very very productive week.   

  This week, how do you reset your time management system when things have gone wrong?   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page How to Stay Productive When Everything Gets Thrown Out of Sync   Script Episode 137 Hello and welcome to episode 137 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week it's all about getting back into your system when you have been thrown out of sync by external events or just because you have drifted off course. And that happens a lot more frequently than you might think.  Now I wrote about this a while ago and I have linked to that post in the show notes. For me, it generally happens after I have been travelling. Coming back to Asia after a trip to Europe throws me right out of sync and it can take me around ten days to get back on track.  That said when it does happen you there are a few strategies that can help guide you back on course.  So let me now hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week's question: This week's question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, can you help me? I love the idea of being organised and having time to do my work, yet every time I do get organised a few days later I stop and everything just falls apart. Is this normal? Hi Sam, yes it is perfectly normal. It happens to all of us from time to time. So you are certainly not alone. The question is how do you prevent it from happening?  A lot of this comes down to our habits and our routines. In particular the habit of processing what you collected at the end of the day (or at least every 48 hours or so) Not clearing your inboxes frequently creates a lot of overwhelm and when that happens we resist and usually give up.  Now, this is one of those areas I found interesting many years ago. When I was in sales we were permitted to claim our expenses. The salesperson who trained me out in the field did her expenses the day before the deadline for submitting expenses. She would go into the glove box of her car and pull out all the receipts for fuel, lunches and other expenses, and then write them all out onto the expenses sheet. It took her around three to four hours to do it all. My sales manager was a little better, he would begin doing his expenses a couple of days before. It was easier for him as he was based mainly in the office and he kept all his receipts in the top drawer of his desk.  Naturally, as I was a young twenty-something, I looked up to these experts and so followed their example. Soon I began to see this as a very inefficient way of managing expenses. Spending four or five hours painstakingly writing out the receipts onto a sheet once a month just seemed a bad way of doing it. I decided I would do my expenses every day instead. For me, this meant all I had to do was spend five or ten minutes at the end of the day and write my day's expenses onto the expenses sheet.  One of the additional benefits of this practice was I did not lose any of my receipts. On the day the expenses were due, all I had to was calculate the total, add that to the sheet and hand it in—five minutes at the most.  This practice of having a closing down routine every day has stuck with me ever since. When I used a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, I practised the same philosophy. At the end of the day, I would spend ten to fifteen minutes collecting all my notes, adding the relevant bits to my projects section at the back of the planner and planning out the next day with my diary and to-do list. New to-dos were put where they needed to be and any admin sheets required for my work were updated and filed.  It was a small daily sacrifice that meant I was never in a position where I had to stop every I was doing just to get everything up to date. My advice to you all is to develop a closing down routine that you follow every day. It does not have to be long. Ten minutes is fine. In this closing down routine, clear your to-do list inbox—decide when you are going to do the tasks, check your calendar for tomorrow, and clean up anything else that needs clearing up. Clearing inboxes is how we get back on track. Clearing our inboxes—whether that is email or to-do list—the act of cleaning it up is enough to make us feel better and organised. It's when we allow this area to slip when things go wrong.  Set aside some time each day for processing, Sam. It's the first place to start. The purpose here is to avoid the build-up of overwhelm. That's what often causes us to throw in the towel.  Developing the right habits can be very hard though, particularly if you try and do too much at once. And with a closing down routine, there is going to be a lot of trial and error. What you are looking for is efficiency and consistency. Spend a week or two testing out different ways of doing it. Decide what you want to clear at the end of each day and create a checklist.  Once you are happy with your checklist, set yourself a thirty-day challenge. For the next thirty days follow your closing down routine each day. Make sure you do as per your checklist.  Of course, if you feel you need to refine your list, by all means, refine it. After all, it is your list. The key is to commit to doing it every day for thirty days without missing a single day. That will begin the habit embedding process.  I find, having a set time each day to do the closing down routine is the best way. I often advise my coaching clients to set an alarm or a reminder on their phone or computer to come up fifteen minutes before they finish the day to remind them to do the losing down.  So for example, if you finish work at 6:00 pm set a reminder to come up at 5:45 pm and begin the closing down session. Stop whatever you are doing at 5:45, do the closing down and if needs be, finish what you were doing once you have closed down the day.  There are a lot of benefits in doing things this way. First of all, you give yourself time to process your inbox and review your calendar. It also gives you time to see what you need to do tomorrow and plan your objectives and tasks for tomorrow.  Back in the day when I worked in an office, there were many days when I left work, and because I had not looked at my calendar or cleared out my inbox, I had this nagging feeling I had missed something important. It was not the best way to spend the evening, worrying about what I had forgotten. Now When I worked in an office, we did not have smartphones and computers and iPads connected to our work life. Our work-life stayed in the office—a very nice state of affairs. So once I left the office I had no way of knowing what was missing until I arrived back at the office the next day.  Closing down the day, cleaning your inbox and knowing what's on your calendar for tomorrow leaves you feeling relaxed and stress-free and that always leaves you free to actually enjoy the evening doing what you enjoy doing.  And while you may think having to find more time each day to plan and prepare is going to be hard, this is where you will have to make a decision. You see, if you are not prepared to do the backend work—processing your inboxes, keeping on top of your email and planning the next day—then where does that leave you?  Without the backend work, you will have overflowing inboxes, un-replied to emails and a lot of stress. Not exactly the position you want to be in. Quite the reverse, I'm sure. The next part of the conundrum, Sam, is to have a system in place. And there are a lot of systems to choose from. There's my Time Sector System, where you manage your work by when you need to do it. There's the traditional GTD method (Getting Things Done) where you manage your work by context (people, place and things) and the Kanban method where your work is managed by what stage it is at.  Without a system, you will be flying by the seat of your pants. You will be in a reactive rather than a proactive state for most of the day. Being reactive means you are reacting to the loudest and latest rather than anticipating the pressures on your time and taking action to mitigate it before it happens.  Using those ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to clean up and process puts you into a proactive state because it's like stepping back and looking at what you have to do and making decisions about when you are going to do it or would like to do it.  It's when you have that level of organisation that you gain the clarity to plan better and faster and because you have turned it into a habit—helped by doing a thirty-day challenge—you are much less likely to fall off the proverbial productivity wagon.  The final part is the make sure you do a weekly planning session. Like the daily planning session, this does not need to be long. But it will take you around twenty to thirty minutes each week. Here all you need do is review the tasks you want to do next week and compare those against your calendar of events to make sure that what you plan to do is realistic when place alongside your daily commitments.  It's no good scheduling fifteen tasks for Wednesday when you are going to be on a training course all day. You are not going to get your tasks done.  If you are using the Time Sector System, all you need do is move your tasks from your next week's sector to this week, date your tasks, based on what you days look like for next week, and do a quick review of your project notes in your chosen notes app to make sure your projects are moving forward as you expect them to do so.  The weekly planning session is also a good time to catch up with anything that needs cleaning up. I usually process my Evernote inbox during this session because the notes I collect in Evernote during the week are not too many and can easily be filed once my weekly planning session is complete. It just feels like a natural step, to plan the week then clean up the previous week and make sure everything is reset for the following week.  It's a great feeling knowing that everything is done, all your tasks and emails are clear and up to date and you are ready to begin the new week with a clear mind. I hope these tips have helped, Sam. Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. If you are interested in learning more about the Time Sector System, then I have put a link in the show note to my blog post where I explained how it works and what you need to create the system. It's simple, easy to develop and will do a lot for your time management and productivity.  It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.   

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Today I'm joined by my friend MJ Broadbent. As a graphic facilitator and recorder, MJ uses visual thinking to help people communicate more effectively. In this episode, we talk about how drawing can help folks understand each other and make everyday life more joyful. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/the-informed-life-episode-16-mj-broadbent.mp3 Show notes MJ Broadbent MJ Broadbent on Twitter MJ Broadbent on Instagram MJ Broadbent on Flickr MJ Broadbent on LinkedIn Mike Rohde Sketchnote Army blog Rosenfeld Media events Enterprise Experience conference DesignOps Summit Pictionary IPEVO document cameras Landau Chartworks Franklin Planners Bullet Journal MJ's Stanford Continuing Studies course Read the full transcript Jorge: MJ, welcome to the show. MJ: Hi Jorge. Thank you for inviting me. Jorge: Oh, thank you for being here. It's good to have you here. Why don't you tell us about yourself? MJ: Wow, that's always an interesting question. I'm an emergent designer. I've studied graphic design, and my career and my way of forging through life has just been completely emergent. I really love to use visual explanations and I think the common overarching theme in terms of the work that I do and have done and looking at doing as I continue is, is connecting people with information in whatever manner that may be. It was originally traditional graphic design and then it became digital space and the nonlinear experience that were websites and apps and software. And then it became how do people… What kind of information do they need when they're being bombarded with information? And so I began to do graphic recording and sketchnoting and so forth and teaching people that really we can do that kind of visual sense-making on our own and with other people by reclaiming our innate human capability of drawing things, of making marks, just the way we write letters, we can write other symbolic language that demonstrate what it is that we're thinking and hearing. Jorge: I've known you for a while now and we've interacted in professional contexts where you've worked in large corporations and we've also interacted in things like conference spaces. And my picture of you in conference spaces has you seated at the back of the room when someone is presenting, capturing the presentation in beautiful — what I guess what are, they're called sketchnotes — but these kind of visual representations of what the speaker is talking about. And it's a mix of like words and pictures, right? MJ: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's right. Jorge: Is that what you mean by graphic recording? MJ: It is. The term graphic recording in the professional community of practice is generally understood to be someone who is scribing or writing in real time. Graphic recording is thought of as the large scale poster sized or you know, big boards, white boards or large format paper that might be on the wall or on a whiteboard or something that's visible to the participants in a meeting or in a conference room. And the actions are very similar with sketchnoting, which is a term coined by the wonderful designer Mike Rohde, who runs a blog called the Sketchnote Army. And it's just become hugely popular in the recent period of time — I would say, well, a decade or more — as a form of visual expression concurrent with the idea and the cognitive science that when we as human beings make marks on paper, most people have greater recall of the content, whether they're making meaningful marks, that represent content that's coming into their ears and their consciousness or whether they're making abstract marks like crosshatching them in the margin. For me, I am able — I've curated — an ability to listen and choose what it is that I would want to write down to capture what I'm hearing. It's a very personal curation that one does one listening and scribing because it's very different from a court reporter or somebody who's capturing or any kind of true recording where you're capturing all of the fidelity. How we're recording right now is capturing everything and we could get a transcript and that would include everything we say. Graphic recording and sketchnoting by nature of the fact that you're using your hand, you can't possibly write it all. So you have to choose. And I tell people the way that I choose is really same way we think about what level of content fidelity we need in order to communicate. To whom? Am I making this for myself? Am I making this for other people? What is the communication act that I want to achieve through this? So I'm intentional. Sketchnoting conferences — and I've had the good fortune to do sketchnoting for Lou Rosenfeld's events, Enterprise UX, which recently became Enterprise Experience, and the DesignOps conference as part of the support team. So I'm listening and I'm drawing the taste, like kind of the tip of the iceberg. Kind of key moments. Some of it is coming from the slides. Some of it is those interesting fun voiceovers that the speaker has or something that's happening in the conversation that might not otherwise be caught, a key quote or a joke. And sometimes they are words and sometimes they're visuals. And what's nice is for these conferences, there's a body of work that people can look back on — people who were there can look back on and say, “Oh yeah, I remember those key points.” Or, ” Which talk was it that I heard that theme or that particular concept?” And they can look back and quickly see where that was. They can also look at the arc of the whole thing over a period, you know, a set of, I think there's ten pages for a two day conference and say, ” Where do I want to highlight?” Or maybe a trip review, if I'm going back and talking about my experience of the conference, I can say, ” here's a talk.” It's a visual people could use for their teams, just to summarize what it is that was there and add their own thoughts. And then for people who were not able to attend a conference, they can look at what generally went on there very quickly and perhaps make a determination about where they want to invest time in looking at the videos that are available after the fact. That's a key piece of information management, to the main theme of your work and your podcast. That I think, my gosh, so much information is flowing at us. How in the world do we decide where to go back when we missed something? We have… I know I have tons of intention. I've tons of email that I've marked, I've flagged and I need to pay attention to and it's really hard to go back in time if you don't catch something in the moment and take care of it just then, it becomes more effort to go back. So I find that the sketchnoting is tremendous for that purpose. Being able to very quickly visually summarize or assess something. Jorge: I'm thinking that folks might be wondering if it's faster to draw than it is to write. MJ: That's a great question. And the way that I think about it, I started to allude to it earlier. I teach basic drawing or drawing skills for those who say, “They can't draw.” And I do this in a variety of ways. I've done it in a lot of workshops and conferences and it's part of a design thinking curriculum that I'm currently facilitating inside of enterprise. If anybody's ever played the game Pictionary — most people have had some experience with it — it's basically visual charades, very, very simple based on a word or phrase. And the way you win is that have to represent that object or that concept as quickly as possible. And this is the underlying principle in the drawing. Drawing it… By drawing, I mean the act of, of putting a stylus or a pen to a surface, you know, whether it's digital or it's analog. You're making marks, and those marks need to have a meaning. If you're not skilled at quickly drawing a horse and you can much more quickly write the word horse, and you're in a time situation, you're gonna write the word horse. What happens with people who can draw imagery or iconography or any kind of other symbolic representation is that they've developed the ability to make that thing, that representation, really quickly. Where they might say, “I'm going to come back in the break and add a couple of things in.” And generally there's a little bit of finishing work that will happen maybe in the five, ten, fifteen minutes afterwards. You can do some couple of embellishments and kind of finish it up. Letters are visual symbols that form words that form sentences, that form paragraphs. And we can do that similar thing with other kinds of verbal representational language, visual language. Jorge: I know that you do this for conferences and I believe that you also do it for meetings and let's say… a presentation in a conference is a structured argument, right? MJ: Right. Jorge: And one of the keys I think to this type of work, if it's going to serve the filtering or summarization purpose that you brought up earlier, one of the keys to it is bringing out the right visual hierarchy so that the main points somehow draw your attention. And can you talk a little bit about the differences of doing this in a more structured setting such as a conference versus a less structured setting? MJ: Absolutely. That's a great one, and I think you articulated it very well. In fact, at conferences we've all experienced — those of us who've attended any conference — have experienced that some speakers have highly structured, “here's how I'm going to tell you three things or six things.” Or they have really clear visual aids that help mark those chapters or themes or key points. Others are very good at storytelling and some speakers will use no visuals at all and they're really just creating a story arc that we don't know how planned it is or how extemporaneous it is. So it can vary quite a bit even in a structured setting such as a conference. When people are having less structured conversation — and I do support executive briefings, for example at several corporations — and so there are big decision makers exchanging information and time is very valuable, so it can easily go from a structured, “here's our capabilities” to “let's talk about how that serves your particular need” you know, customer, who's a visiting customer. And so I will typically go to a different format where I'm wanting to capture key aspects of the back and forth. And I'll just use two different colors and I will tend to use less imagery. So it presents more like a dialogue. And you can see by the color which party is speaking. So it becomes more like the Q&A that you would see at the bottom of anything. You know, the letter Q and the letter A are there, so you can distinguish which, or an interview transcript, that kind of thing. And so I'm not capturing everything that's there, but at least there's a record of the nature of the conversation and particularly if there's excitement about something that relates back to a theme or capability that's been discussed before. I can link that, I can visually link that on the chart, the chart being what we call the drawing itself, the physical artifact. So it can be challenging and especially if you don't… Managing space when you don't know how long or how deep something's going to go. When I'm doing graphic recording on large format, it's much more freeing because we'll start the day, the start the meeting with a pretty large piece of paper. And if you don't use it all, you can trim it. I'm working on a smaller format in sketchnoting, which is typically a personal size of notebook of some kind , it's either in your lap or it's on a table in front of you or on a workspace that's right in front of you so that people around you can see it. But generally the whole of the room or the audience does not see it until after, until you publish it. So that's another distinction about the size. Graphic recording — the large scale version — can be very valuable for meetings and conferences because people see that it's happening and they can watch in meetings, they can see that they're being heard and that, that they're being paid attention to. And it can change the dynamic of the conversation. They become more focused often, and they feel cared for in a way. There's somebody taking this, this step, this action and that there will be an artifact afterward. So a lot of just times we're in rooms where people are doing a lot of talking and maybe someone's taking notes. Mostly people are looking at what do we need to do coming out of this meeting? And then maybe capturing action items, but the capturing the content or the key aspects of what's being discussed, is something that I think we can do more of. Jorge: You've been talking about paper and notebooks and that brings up another question that I had about your process, which has to do with the mechanics of the actual drawing. I assume that you are drawing on paper as opposed to digitally, right? MJ: Presently I continue to really love the pen on paper, whatever scale is, and I have a lot of different pens, love them all. There's a trend right now and lately with the greater software and app capability to do this on tablets and people… It's just more portable. And I have not fully embraced it yet. I think I have a mental block about working on a screen. We spend so much time with screens. But there are folks who are doing it and I'm excited to continue exploring it because it's just, it's a different way of working. I did recently get an overhead camera. There are many makers, the one I happened to get was IPEVO. And it allows me to connect the camera to my computer and demonstrate to somebody who's not next to me or to a group of people, I can draw analog and it's projected basically onto the screen, large or small. I'm pretty excited about that because it's a little bit of a work around in terms of how do I get to show my work or demonstrate something in action when the human beings are distributed. Jorge: As for the “final deliverable,” to, say, your clients or when the conference has finished, for example, do you photograph the drawings and share them that way? Or how do they make their way from the paper world to the digital world? MJ: That's a great question. Typically for sketchnotes, I will photograph them initially so that I can put them on social media and publish them quickly. So they go out to attendees in Slack or on Twitter or on Facebook or anywhere. And then what I will do for the final deliverable to make PDFs, or in the case of Rosenfeld, they put PDFs on the website next to each of the speakers in the program. So they're stuck there… And they are not stuck there, but they're published there. And before that I will do high resolution scans and make sure that the lighting is even, and the colors are even and so forth. And it's a quick flatbed scan and don't spend a lot of time doing, you know, photoshopping or anything. But just a quick, quick scan. And then same thing goes for the big paper versions. There's a specialty shop that does very large format scanning and digital posts. And then you can have an image, a jpeg or a pdf. And those go to the client and the paper original goes back to wherever it would best serve the folks who generated the content. Jorge: That's great. I wasn't aware of the large format scanning piece of these. That's good to know. MJ: Kind of tremendous. There's a firm, happens to be local to us here in the bay, but they do work for people all over the world, and nice, really great folks. It's Landau Chartworks. Jorge: So I'm wondering how, if any, this way of working influences the way that you manage your own information. So things like commitments to yourself and others. I would expect that like taking notes for your own purpose, like this would play into it, but beyond that, how has it changed the way that you manage your own information? MJ: Oh my goodness, this is… That's a huge topic. Yes. It… Where do I go first? I make visual lists. I do when I sit down and I want to think about something. Last year I did a kind of a, “let me look back on the arc of the different ways I've been a professional in the world.” And I took a big piece of paper and I started thinking about how to organize it. So I did… This was not a straight up graphic design and visual communication, how might I make a PowerPoint slide type of a, an inquiry, a visual inquiry. It was a more organic, “what do I notice about the cycles and themes of the way that I've been making visual sense of things?” So ways that I use drawing and sketchnoting and basically words and pictures in my everyday life to… One of the ways I enjoy using it most is making little notes, little post it notes. And that can be for myself or for my domestic partner or, you know, on something in the refrigerator or on a food item that I have put in a bowl for a gift. You know, I make some interesting lettering, get some cool pens. Recently I got some new black jeans and you have to watch out when you wash them. You don't put light-colored things in there because you know, the dye will leach. And so I made a note to make sure to use cold water and I made the big blue cold with the waves underneath, like kind of just as a reminder. So I'm… That's kind of fun. And then also a really cool way is on a little simple calendar or paper calendars on the refrigerator. And sometimes I'll put a little drawing of something that happened that day. The way people make journals. Yeah. Maybe it was the weather or something you ate. Just drawing simple little icons, or you know, I keep colored pens around the house. We have cups of pens everywhere and so that's keeping it fun. And it's always nice when somebody else is involved. They enjoy it. It's like how we used to be about getting paper mail, getting a letter in the mail. And then, I think the other part is, in terms of how I manage my life, I can't have a conversation with people in, in person, often cannot have a conversation without drawing something. So I keep, I keep pens in my bags and I want to make sure that I have the ability to (unintelligible) and sketch something out, the napkin sketch type of thing. When I was working at GE Digital, I really would just walk around with my laptop and a pad of paper or some stack of printer paper and I'm just drawing things and talking about. Show what I mean or listen to other people and say, “Is this what you mean?” And get into a conversation with them about it. Jorge: You know there was a while back — many, many moons ago as they say — I used to use the a Franklin Planner… MJ: Yes. Jorge: … to keep track of things like meetings and to do's and stuff like that. And there was this kind of tactile pleasure to using this thing. And it was a big bulky thing that I had to drag around in my bag, but I remember that I spent perhaps too much time looking into things like page templates for that thing and being very mindful about where certain things went. Like I would keep track of to do's in one section of the thing and appointments in another. So digital has completely taken over from things like the Franklin Planner, but there's been an interesting phenomenon. Over the past, I would say five years or so, I've noticed that there's been a resurgence in folks keeping track of things and I'm thinking of things like the bullet, um, I think it's called The Bullet Journal? MJ: Yes. Jorge: Where folks have rediscovered the pleasures — the tactile pleasures — of keeping track of this sort of information in an analog format. And when I hear you talk about the various pens that you use when you talked about like, “Well, you know, I did the blue pen the word cool, and I did the little wave,” like to me, that speaks of this… This tangible aspect to drawing with pen and paper, which digital just cannot capture. Yet, at least. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on that or if you can tell us about the pens that you — because you've talked several times about the pens and how much you like the pens… MJ: Oh my gosh. Well, yes, but here's the thing. I'm gonna make an analogy to our ability, the way that we navigate ourselves literally through space, and we use Apple Maps or Google Maps, or when do we need to go from point a to point b, we say, “Please, please computer, tell me how to go.” And then we follow those directions. And then we have no, literally no memory other than maybe the physical experience of, of going through space and maybe whatever you noticed along the way. If you have good visual recall, you might say, “Oh yeah, I remember passing this street and that street,” because you saw the sign. But you could not recreate that because it wasn't memorable, and you didn't … The amount of control that you had, was a little more passive than if you had to look, consult a paper map and create a turn list or create some kind of notes to yourself as you would drive or navigate or walk to the place. And so what we're talking about is a kind of, it's not stickiness in terms of attention, but it's stickiness in terms of memory. And so when you make — this is back to my earlier point of when you physically make marks — and you're being intentional about it, you're saying, “I'm, you know, I want to put this or that onto the surface, the paper, or the tablet or the…” And that's where it gets blurry in the digital space. If you're drawing on a tablet, and you're choosing the thickness and the color and the scale and the hierarchy and you're creating something there, I think that still is just as good, just as meaningful, as if you're doing it on paper because you're in charge, and you're putting it there. What we're talking about is, what's going on for you behaviorally and cognitively with this act? How is it affecting your interpersonal relationships? If it's involving other people, which typically it would be… Well, it doesn't matter. It can be with yourself. If I sit down with a piece of paper, and I want to make sense of something for myself, I tell people, this is one of the things that goes on in my workshops, you're going to have a different relationship with your ideas and with your thinking if you externalize it onto the paper, than if you keep it in your head. I'm not saying it's better, it's just different. I mean it can be better. I think it's better, but it's not, it's not a judgment call. And then if you're going to have a conversation with somebody else, or you're in a conversation, and you're not sure or you want to be sure that you are communicating effectively, drawing anything, drawing scratchy marks and a couple of labels or if it's a model, or it's a plan… Well it could be any subjects. It's going to be easier for you to have accord with the person, agreement. And both of you come away from it, or the multiple of you go, come away from it with a shared understanding. I don't think you know about this, but I'm excited to be taking these concepts into a new course that's going to be offered at Stanford Continuing Studies this fall. And it's taking the need for collaboration — for effective collaboration — that is, that takes people in meetings or in rooms or in conversations and they're speaking words , to make it tangible. To use this very simple, Pictionary-like visual language, which in the course description we're calling Simple Sketching, and to use them in facilitating group communication. So this is going to be six sessions on Wednesday evenings starting September 25th. And we're going to look at how do you do that? How can you listen and draw and engage and make people focus in a way that gives them much more satisfaction and much more traction and allows people to see, who we're not there to see what happened. It allows people who were there to have a common frame of reference and empowers everybody to be doing happier, more focused work. Jorge: That's fantastic. Congratulations. MJ: Thank you. Jorge: And it's also a great summary of what we've been talking about thus far. So I think that's a good place to wrap up our conversation. So, where can folks find out more about you? MJ: I can be found on almost every social media platform at, @mjbroadbent. So I'm on Twitter, on Instagram, on Flickr, and my domain is mjbroadbent.com. I'll be putting information about the upcoming course and some other meetups that I'm supporting into these places. Jorge: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you. MJ: Thank you, Jorge, for your excellent work around information, which is critical.

In this week's episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about managing multiple roles in your life. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes   Script Hello and welcome to episode 64 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Well, I hope your year has started well and you are making significant progress on your goals. This week, I have a great question about managing multiple roles in your life and I know many of you out there are not just doing a job, you are also a parent, a friend, a teacher and perhaps a church or community leader. These are roles that create specific tasks and projects that you need to be managing.  Before we get into this week's question, if you haven't already enrolled in my FREE Beginners Guide To Creating Your Own COD system, then now is a great time to do so. The course packed full of ideas for you to create your own productivity system around the basic principle of Collecting, Organising and Doing (See C.O.D) the foundations of any great productivity system is simplicity and you can't get any simpler than COD.  So, if you do struggle with productivity, then this course will only take you around forty minutes to complete and once you complete it you will have the basics to create your own system and a system that will grow and work for you whatever your roles are now and into the future. So go on, get yourself enrolled now and begin a whole new productive life.  Okay, onto this week's question and that means it's now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Jim. Jim asks: What are some strategies to manage a personal and professional life that is composed of many, multiple roles? Thank you, Jim, for the wonderful question. What Jim has done here is just a few simple words has described what most people face. That is a life with multiple roles. So the question becomes, how do I manage all those roles?  Now, the first thing I am going to assume is that most of you listening to this podcast use some form of to-do list manager. Either that is a full Digital system such as Todoist, Trello or Omnifocus or a simple notebook and pen. When you have many roles it is important to have a place where you can manage all the tasks you need to do to maintain those roles.  So the first thing I am going to suggest is you create an areas of focus area in your to-do list manager. This needs to be quite separate from your projects list. Now for most of you using a task management system, you are likely to have an area where you list out your various projects. These projects are deadline specific and you complete set of defined tasks that will lead you to a completed project by the deadline date. Once the project is complete you can archive the project.  Areas of focus are quite different because they have no deadline date, or at least no fixed deadline date. An example of this would say if you run a blog. Each week there will be tasks you need to complete to write and publish a blog post, but the blog itself has no deadline date because you are writing and publishing every week. So you have an area of focus called “blog” and inside that will be your recurring writing tasks and maybe some maintenance tasks you need to perform from time to time.  Now, the changes come when you have a specific project related to your blog. Let's say for example you decide to redesign your blog. Now you have a project because the redesign of your blog will have a deadline—a date you want to complete the redesign by. When this happens you can create a project for the redesign in your active projects list for the redesign.  So hopefully that gives you a basic definition of what a project is an what an area of focus is. So let's look at Jim's specific question. If you have multiple roles such as a parent, a community leader you are going to have regular recurring tasks related to those roles. If you don't that's great, but you should still create the area of focus—I'll explain in a moment.  For those regular recurring tasks related to your roles, you can put them into your area of focus. For example, if you spend Saturday afternoon doing activities with your kids, then you may have a recurring task to talk with your kids about what they would like to do each week. Or if you are a community leader you may have to prepare an agenda for a monthly meeting. All these tasks can go into your area of focus related to your role. Weekly activities with your kids and preparing the monthly agenda recur, individually you could argue they have deadlines, but as they recur regularly I would not consider them as individual projects. That would just make your active projects list overly long and unnecessary.  Other areas of focus that you can use are for things like professional development, or side projects such as a part-time business you are building. Way back in the late 1990s I had a part-time business as a mobile Djay. Most weekends I was doing a disco somewhere and each event I did was different. Sometimes it was a wedding and in the UK it is the tradition for the bride and groom to start off the dancing with their favourite song. That meant for each wedding we did I needed to find out from the bride and groom what their first dance song was to be. If I did not have it—and in those days we used CDs, not MP3s—I had to go out and buy it. Other things I needed to find out each week was what kind of event we were doing, was it a birthday? A company event or something else. I also needed to know the age group of the people attending as that affected the kind of music I played. All these questions needed answering before the event, so I used a checklist in my Franklin Planner that contained all the questions I needed to ask our agent. I would have a recurring call every Wednesday with our agent to get the answers to these questions. Today I would be using my digital to-do list and it would be much simpler as I would create a recurring task in my Djay area of focus to call my agent each week and have the questions I needed to ask in a templated checklist for each event in Evernote.  If you have multiple professional roles such as I do, I am an English teacher and a have my productivity business. I separate these out in my areas of Focus. I have my English teaching business as an area of focus and single action tasks such as doing something for a student can be placed in there. Likewise, if I need to do something for my coaching clients, I would place that task in my productivity business's area of focus.  When you have multiple roles, and I think most of us have if we really sat down to think about it, having a separate place for your areas of focus can help to keep you on top of everything going on in your life. Now we have to remember there are only 24 hours in each day and we can't change that. Mondays for me, for example, I have a lot of English classes and so on Sunday when I plan my day, I know to look exclusively in my teaching areas of focus folder because that is where my focus for the day is going to be. Likewise, on Friday afternoons I do all my video recording, so on a Thursday I look at my YouTube Channel area of focus as well as my content scheduling board to see if there is anything I need to focus on when I do my recordings. When I check my calendar I know if I have a coaching call the next day and who with, so I can review my notes and client feedback and do some preparation for the call before the call itself.  Another great reason to use areas of focus is you can decide if you want to spend a month focused on a particular area of your life. The end of the year holiday season has just ended and for many of 'sus we may have eaten and drunk a little too much. So it's get back in to shape season. So, if you have an area of focus for your health and fitness you may decide that this month you will put a lot more focus on that area and do a lot more activities related to losing weight and getting fit.  One more thing and I know this is specific to you, Jim, is if you want to build a professional speaking career. This again would be an area of focus. Each new speaking engagement may become an active project, but to build the career there are going to be a number of activities you will need to do each week. You will need to be developing your expertise in your chosen area, you will need to be communicating with agencies and conference organisers etc. These will be ongoing tasks and so should be an area of focus. So if you decide to send out five to ten profiles to event organisers and agencies each week you will have a task to do that either on a specific day or spread out over a few days each week.  So, if you do have multiple roles, and I am sure you do as we all do in some form or another, I would spend some time thinking about the different roles you have and decide which ones you want to focus on. Then create an area of focus for each one. Do not worry if some have nothing in them at the moment. It could be that you decide that some of those areas you do not want to focus on right now. When you do have the list put together though make sure you review them each week when you do your weekly review. That way nothing is being forgotten and you can decide if you want to put some focus on those areas during the following week.  Remember, an area of focus does not have a deadline date, a project does. You may have projects that come from an area of focus from time to time and you can create that project in your active projects list. As soon as the project is complete you can archive it and put the management of the project in your areas of focus if it needs managing.  I hope that has answered your question, Jim and thank you for sending it in.  Don't forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast get in touch either by email (carl@carlpullein.com) or by DMing me on Twitter or Facebook.  Thank you so much for listening and it just remains for me to wish you all very very productive week. 

Visit ToughDecisions.net for complete show notes of each podcast episode. In this episode, we interview Tim Ray, founder of United Intentions Foundation, a non-profit foundation to assist others on learning how to transform worrisome thoughts into positive intentions. He’s also the host of a radio show, The UI Radio Network, where he interviewed thought leaders around the world. Listen as we hear Tim’s story and the current tough decision he’s facing right now.

Visit ToughDecisions.net for complete show notes of each podcast episode. In this episode, we interview Tim Ray, founder of United Intentions Foundation, a non-profit foundation to assist others on learning how to transform worrisome thoughts into positive intentions. He’s also the host of a radio show, The UI Radio Network, where he interviewed thought leaders […]

Watch the video podcast here. Sarah runs a successful business with Cindy Kendrick called Codebrain Media, a company which helps build custom websites, custom plugins, manages migrations and marketing. She also spends a lot of her time working with the team at ServerPress.com with product development and social media. And then there is their latest project - the OptimaList WordPress Plugin. From Full-Time Mum to Entrepreneur Sarah started spending time on the internet when her children were babies. She began blogging as a means to occupy herself during their naptime. Sarah also created a group for mothers in her area to support each other, socialise and network. Eventually, Sarah learned HTML and CSS by playing around with features on her blog. Her proficiency in writing online grew, and soon a friend asked Sarah to help with content writing using WordPress. That helped Sarah realise the potential of making money online and opened her eyes to new possibilities. Today, Sarah dedicates the majority of her time to working on business development and communicating with clients. She also keeps busy collaborating with the team at ServerPress with product development and social media. In addition to being a successful product developer, she also teaches ballet and when she’s not working, Sarah loves spending her time outdoors with her children. Small vs Big Clients Sarah tells us that they have a wonderful client who is a small business with a lot of legacy content that they are moving over to WordPress. This company listens and is really appreciative of their experience. So this type of client is Sarah's ideal as they are easy and enjoyable to work with. Her and her business partner, Cindy, have both worked on huge enterprise level builds but they enjoy working with the smaller business by helping them come up with affordable solutions for their company. This is very rewarding work for Sarah. Big Teams vs Small Teams Sarah prefers to work in smaller teams because she is very invested in her projects as well as her employees which makes it hard to manage large enterprise clients as well as the number of developers and designers that you need to hire to look after those clients. Sarah wants to bring her best to the table and working with a larger team meant she was thinly spread. She needs a lot of autonomy in her schedule and she wants to have the freedom to work when she wants to so it can fit in with being a mum. Larger teams take up more time and you have to be dedicated to a 10-15 hour day for those larger builds. Sarah did this for six months and then went back to working with a small team who she found to be more efficient and effective. Takeaways from Working with Bigger Teams Sarah says that working on those bigger projects with a larger team teaches you a lot. She says that you develop your professional ability because you have to manage your time, your workflow and be professional at all times. There is more breathing room in a small team. However, she realises that after achieving what she did with the bigger projects, just how valuable she is. "You can appreciate how much you do know and walk away with more self-worth." She tells us that it may be the right fit for some, but just not for her. OptimaList WordPress Plugin Sarah co-developed the OptimaList plugin which is a to-do list for WordPress. Her business partner had been developing a to-do list plugin for 5-years called "Cleverness To-Do List" which was quite successful, but it became time for a complete overhaul. So they leveraged Cindy's customer base and have been blown away at the market need for this product and have seen how people use it for all kinds of things. Sarah and Cindy needed $800 to pay for the business expenses, so they threw it out there and people donated! They are humbled by the people that supported them and their generosity. Tune in at the 35-minute mark to hear Troy and Sarah discuss the WordPress community and why WordCamps are so valuable. ServerPress Sarah explains to us what the ServerPress product "DesktopServer" is. Basically, you download DesktopServer and in a few minutes, you have your own local development environment which is WordPress optimised. It is super simple to use and you can change things with immediate results all on your local system. You don’t even need to use cowboy coding! Side note from Troy - Do not use Cowboy Coding on your websites people!  Find out more about the benefits and how to use this plugin around the 40-minute mark. Sarah's Golden Nugget Tips Manage your time. Sarah uses a handwritten to-do list every day and is a big advocate of Franklin Planner’s method (see the link below). She remembers things better when she writes it down. Use Twitter campaigns to get new customers. Sarah does sponsored Tweets because they are easy to do and you can segment your market very quickly. She has never spent more than $100 on a campaign and the ROI is amazing. Take your time to write proposals. Be thorough, and actually spend time with your clients in scoping discovery. Build the relationship and use your discernment in regard to charging people for the discovery process as you might not want to charge the smaller businesses that just don't have the money. Well, there you have it... we told you Sarah is a superwoman! Let us know what you think about the podcast in the comments below!

This week Ken Rochon takes his personal expectation of character to another level when he interviews Hyrum Smith, aka The Father of Time, co-founder of Franklin Covey, Co., and inventor of the Franklin Planner. Hyrum shares the 5 aspects of character based on our belief models of how our world works according to what we believe. Additionally, Ken shared highlights of Guerrilla Marketing led by Jason Myers & Jeannie Levinson including fabulous speakers Jon Benson, Matt Bacak, and more... A special pop in guest Paul Fuggle, the lead organizer for the A Bug Free Mind Mastermind headed up by Andy Shaw and Peter Halm. This 7 day Mastermind is made up of 120 top internet marketers in the world! Ken Rochon and his co-host Andrea Adams-Miller are participants and sponsors a 3rd year.

This week Ken Rochon takes his personal expectation of character to another level when he interviews Hyrum Smith, aka The Father of Time, co-founder of Franklin Covey, Co., and inventor of the Franklin Planner. Hyrum shares the 5 aspects of character based on our belief models of how our world works according to what we believe. Additionally, Ken shared highlights of Guerrilla Marketing led by Jason Myers & Jeannie Levinson including fabulous speakers Jon Benson, Matt Bacak, and more... A special pop in guest Paul Fuggle, the lead organizer for the A Bug Free Mind Mastermind headed up by Andy Shaw and Peter Halm. This 7 day Mastermind is made up of 120 top internet marketers in the world! Ken Rochon and his co-host Andrea Adams-Miller are participants and sponsors a 3rd year.

People say they struggle with getting a handle on their time - a time management problem. But really that's just a symptom of a greater problem - a problem of choices that we all make every day. Managing your time levels the playing field for all of us - we all are given the same amount of time each day - it's how we choose to spend those moments that gets us closer to the solution.

Today's show is all about getting the best plan.  Have you ever wondered about your goals or if you are using the most effective plan?  As we continue to discuss getting "back to the basics", all weeks long get tangible tasks for achieving very specific results.  Start achieving your goals by coming from a position of power, which happens when you have a clear vision and the right tools.  If you are having challenges achieving your goals then maybe you have set the wrong goals.  Find out how to set goals that empower and inspire you to stay on course until you get the results you are after.  Today's show will help you create a clearer path to success.  Pat Council shares 5 strategies that are easy to implement.  These strategies are timeless, but a little twist has been added so that you get more results.  Get back to the basics this month by re-examining your whole vision and track your progress using milestones that will give you a snapshot of your achievement process. Get a power word that will inspire you to make the best plans for your success.  Also, a new power action will certainly put you on the right track to using tangible actions to get the best results.   Mentioned on the show: The One Thing. Click here to read a preview.      Franklin Planner. Click Here Franklin Planner Discount. Click Here

What do humility and business finances have in common? Find out as former CEO of Franklin-Covey, Hyrum W. Smith, weighs in on some of the biggest financial mistakes entrepreneurs make and how to avoid them. Hyrum Smith knows a thing or two about the subject. When he started Franklin Quest back in the 80's with his Franklin Planner, he doubled his revenue every year for 8 years earning $60 million dollars in revenue. That was the good news. But his financial consultant also said he was bleeding money, so he had no choice but to double his income every year in order to stay afloat. Find out what it takes play with the big boys.  Whether you are starting a business or scaling to greater heights, this is one conversation you don't want to miss.