Afleveringen
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This week, I’m exploring where much of our overwhelm comes from and how to sharpen up your inbox processing.
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Script | 362
Hello, and welcome to episode 362 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How often do you feel overwhelmed? It’s a good question to ask because some of that overwhelm is caused by what has been called “open loops” or in other words stuff to do that has not been looked at to see what is involved.
A lot of this will come from your inboxes. We throw all sorts of things in there without much thought about what needs to be done. With our email and messaging inboxes, we don’t have any control over what arrives in there—that’s out of our control.
The issue here is we have it collected, and that’s often a weight off our minds, but there’s a sense of anxiety because we don’t know for sure what needs to be done and how long it will take us to do it.
If we are not processing what we collected frequently and correctly, then there is a gaping hole in the system that needs filling in. If not, there will be a lot of things that need to be done that gets missed. And that then leads to a distrust in your system which creates its own set of issues.
This week’s question is how to develop the right habits and processes to make sure that our inboxes are cleared and what gets into our system is clear, actionable and with realistic timelines.
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks, Hi Carl, could you walk us through how to best clear a task manager’s inbox as well as some “best practices” for clearing email and other inboxes?
Hi Stephen, yes I can and thank you for your question.
This is a place that I feel I must tread very carefully. On the one hand I want to encourage you to stop trying to remember everything in your head and to externalise it so you reduce the stress of trying to remember everything.
On the other hand, I also want to encourage you to maintain a clean and tight task management system. By that I mean that your task manager only contains genuine things you either must or should do and anything you think you’d like to do can be put into your notes app.
Email and messaging services are reasonably straightforward.
There’s a two step process. The first is to clear the inboxes. This part is about speed. The faster you can do that the better.
When processing your inboxes here you want to get into the habit of asking the questions: What is it and what do I need to do about it?
An email rom a customer asking for some information about their account, for example, would give you the answers; it’s an email from a customer that requires me to answer a question.
So, it’s actionable and you would then send it to your Action This Day folder for action later in the day.
The temptation is to deal with it immediately. It’s from a customer! I must reply immediately. I get it. I know there’s a sense that anything from a customer must be dealt with instantly.
Unfortunately, doing so will create challenges for you in the long-term. The first is you set an expectation. Instantly replying to a customer means they expect you to reply instantly next time too. And next time may not be as convenient as it is now. You might be at your son’s sports day, or having a romantic lunch with your partner.
It’s not very romantic if you have to pause the conversation while you respond to your customer is it?
The second challenge is it rarely ever is just one. It’s often several emails or messages like that. Each one will likely take you five to ten minutes. Just six of those and you’ve eaten up forty-five minutes of your processing time. What about the six other emails you need to clear from your inbox.
This is how inboxes fill up and become overwhelming. If you have sixty to seventy emails in your inbox you should be able to clear those in around twenty to twenty-five minutes. Stopping and dealing with individual emails because you think it will only take a few minutes to deal with them lengthens the processing time, which means you won’t have time to clear it.
Your customers are in the same place as you. Swamped with stuff to do with a shortage of time to do it. The chances are they’re going to hate you for responding instantly. Now you’ve given them more work to do.
And let’s get real here, if something’s genuinely urgent, they’re not going to email you are they? They’ll call you.
The second part of this process is to set aside time each day for dealing with your actionable messages.
This is where you open up your email’s Action This Day folder and begin with the oldest one and work you way down the list. It’s at this point you will thank yourself for not responding to all those quick and easy emails.
If all you have in your Action This Day folder are emails that require a lot of thinking and work, it’ll be a painful experience. If instead you have a wide variety of emails to deal with you build momentum and and plough through them quickly.
And that’s it. A two step process. Through out the day, between sessions of work, clear your inbox by asking two simple questions: What is it, what do I need to do with it. If you need to reply, read or review something, throw it into your action this day folder.
Then later in the day, settle down and go through your Action This Day folder and clear as many as you can. As long as you are starting with the oldest first, you’ll never be very far behind.
Next up is your tasks inbox.
This is a little different from your messages or email inbox because you control what’s put there. Unlike emails and messages where you have no control. You cannot control who is sending messages to you.
The challenge here is to be ruthless about what gets into your system.
Throughout the day, it’s easy to throw all sorts of things into this inbox. You may have heard someone recommend a book that sounded interesting, so you throw that in there. You may have seen someone with a colourful umbrella and you decide it’s time for you to get yourself one.
Then there are all those ideas about redesigning your kitchen, or cleaning up your notes app or a thought about getting some Christmas cards printed with your name on them--I’m not sure if that’s still a thing.
Your inbox is the gateway to your system, so it’s perfectly fine to throw anything and everything in there. Where you want to be ruthless is what you allow into your system.
Processing your task manager’s inbox again has a few questions.
The first is: what is it? Then, what do you need to do with it?
For example, you may have realised that your passport expires in the next ten months. So you have a task in there that says “renew passport”.
That’s good. But is it enough. I know if I come to a task that says renew passport I’m going to ignore it. Why? Because behind that simple “renew passport” is a lot of stuff I don’t know about.
The last time I renewed my passport was ten years ago. The passport office will undoubtedly changed the system since then. So what’s the real task here?
It’s to find out what I need to renew my passport.
So, I would change the task to “find out what I need to renew my passport” and then decide when I will do that. Do I need to do it this week? Next week? Or perhaps next month?
And that’s the third question, when will I do it?
Once decided, I drop it into its appropriate folder.
You will often have some obvious tasks in there too. It could be something like sending a quote to a prospective customer. So you add a task “send quote to Drax Enterprises into your inbox.
Yet, is it that simple?
This might be a potential big multi-million dollar contract. One you need to discuss with your boss first. So, what is the task? It’s to talk with your boss about what discounts to offer. So you can change the task to “Discuss with boss Drax Enterprises quotation”, add a date you will do it—perhaps tomorrow—and place the task into your This Week folder.
The danger of not rewriting tasks with the real next step is you will ignore the task because you are unclear about what really needs to happen next. When you process your inbox, you have an opportunity to get clear about what needs to happen next.
Once you know that, you will be less likely to skip it.
I know this all sounds complex, but if you step back and look what you are doing, you are asking yourself three simple questions.
What is it? What do I need to do with it? And when will I do it?
I’ve found that if you apply these questions every time you are in an inbox, it quickly becomes natural.
You also get better at triaging your task manager’s inbox. This helps you to keep your task manager clean and tight. The less you allow in there, the more focused you will be and much less susceptible to picking the easy tasks leaving yourself with only the more time consuming ones later in the day. (Something you want to reverse—remember “Eat The Frog”)
And that’s it, Stephen. Keep things simple, run through the questions and be ruthless about what gets into your task management system.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me no to wish you all a very very productive week.
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This year, the Time Sector System is five years old! For thousands of people it has changed their relationship with tasks and time in so many positive ways. Today’s question concerns the basics of the Time Sector System and its philosophy.
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Script | 361
Hello, and welcome to episode 361 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I still remember the day that the Time Sector concept came to me. I was walking to the gym one sunny afternoon and was reflecting on my overwhelming task list waiting for me at home. I remember thinking to myself that all these tasks hitting me day after day was not sustainable.
I was organised and knew where everything was, but I felt trapped in a cycle of never-ending tasks and emails. Whenever I feel this way about anything I always tell myself that there must be a better way.
And then it hit me.
I think it was the word “unsustainable”. The number of emails I was getting was never going to reduce. It was going to increase. The amount of work I had to do was equally never going to reduce. At some point I would reach breaking point.
It wasn’t the work itself. It was time. I just didn’t have enough time. That was the clue.
You cannot control the number of tasks, messages, and emails you receive. It’s a random number. Yet, the one constant—a constant not controlled by you or me, but by science, and in particular physics, is time. Time is our constraint.
If I could allocate time for doing the different categories of work I had to do and decide when to do the tasks in those categories, it would not matter how much work I had coming in. Everything would get done in due course.
And that was the seed that sprouted into the Time Sector System five years ago.
So, with the history told, it’s time now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Elaine. Elaine asks, “Hi Carl, I recently came across one of your videos where you talk about the Time Sector System. Could you explain its philosophy and how it differs from other time management systems?”
Hi Elaine,
Thank you for your question.
The thinking behind the Time Sector System is that we are limited not by what we can do—we can do a lot—but by how much time we have to do things.
We need to eat, sleep and move (exercise), at our basic level. On top of that we likely have family commitments, school runs, doctor appointments and friends that need seeing. Then we have our work to do.
The limiting factor is time. It’s fixed. We only get 24 hours a day.
Now you can manipulate time by hiring people to do stuff for you. For example, you may be fortunate to be able to afford a nanny to take care of your kids when you are at work. Or, you may be able to hire an assistant. But no matter how you manipulate time, it’s still only 24 hours.
So the philosophy behind the Time Sector System is, it’s not about what you have to do, it’s about when you will do it. After all, that’s the only thing you have control over.
At a wider level, that means organising your tasks into tasks that need to be done this week, next week, this month, next month or long-term or on hold.
When you divide your tasks up into when you will do them you narrow down the decisions you need to make on a day to day basis. When a new task comes in, you only need three questions:
What is it?
What do I need to do to complete it?
When will I do it?
So, for example, imagine I get a notification from my health insurance provider informing me I need to book myself in for a medical check-up.
What is it? It’s a request for me to make an appointment with the doctor.
What do I need to do? I need to make an appointment with the doctor.
When am I going to do it? That depends.
It depends, in my case, on when is convenient for my wife. We go together to the clinic for our annual check-up. In Korea it’s a six-hour ordeal, some turn it into a family outing. So, before I can make the appointment I need to consult with my wife.
So, back to question 2. What do I need to do? Consult with my wife. So, there’s the task. When do I need to do it? This week would be good because if I don’t it will sink to the bottom of my list/ So. I choose today when I see my wife.
When you are processing your inbox, that’s the process. What is it? What do I need to do? When am I going to do it?
Another example might be I have a project that is due for completion at the end of the month. As I am looking at the project, I know what it is—it’s a project. What do I need to do? I need to talk with my colleague about how she is getting on with the graphics for the landing page. That will give me an estimate on when I can finish the landing page. So, when am I going to do it? I’ll send her a message on Monday, so I can add that task to my This week folder.
It could be that as I return from a business trip, I notice my passport will expire in eight month’s time. Now, I know the government won’t be reminding me that my passport needs renewing, so it’s something I need to do.
What is it: It’s a passport renewal.
What do I need to do? I’m not sure. The last time I renewed my passport was nine years ago. The system’s probably changed since then. What can I do about that? Go to the government’s website and find out the process.
Okay, I need to do some research. When will I do it? I’m busy this week, so I can drop the task: find out how to renew my passport into my next week folder.
I don’t need to add a date to it at this stage because I will be doing a weekly planning session on Saturday and I decide then.
It’s brilliantly simple, and takes next to no time to develop the habit of asking these three questions.
There are a few other little things you can do to make this seamless.
For instance, have separate folders for your routines and critical recurring tasks. Routines are those little things that just need to be done. Watering the house plants, cleaning actionable emails, and basic admin tasks.
Your Recurring Critical tasks are those tasks that come from your Areas of Focus and your core work. I won’t go into the Areas of Focus here. These are your life level tasks such as planning your exercise, staying in touch with family and friends and self improvement.
Your core work tasks are the tasks you are employed to do. At a basic level, these would be things like talking with customers if you’re a salesperson, preparing materials and teaching if you are a teacher, etc.
What you do is pull out the tasks you need to perform each day, week or month, and se them to recur as frequently as they need to.
Another one is when you first adopt the Time Sector System, the temptation will be to throw everything into your This Week and Next Week folders. This results in them filling up which causes overwhelm.
When you first begin using the Time Sector System, you want to be learning what is realistic and what is not. This involves monitoring what you can and cannot get done each week.
For example, I know my limit, when I begin the week, is thirty tasks in my This Week folder. Any more than that and I won’t be completing the excess. This does not include my routines and Recurring Critical Tasks.
If I am to get my most important work done each week, anything more than thirty tasks in my This Week folder and something will break.
It will take you a few weeks to find your limit.
And then it all comes down to your daily planning.
While you can plan the week, you will find that you are picking up tasks that need to be done in the week you are in. Before you end your day, you should look at your calendar for the next day. Look to see how much time you have available to do your tasks.
You’re going to have a very challenging day if you have seven hours of meetings and thirty tasks to complete. Something’s not going to get done.
It’s during the daily Planning Sequence that you plan out a realistic day. Perhaps you can move some meetings, or reduce your task list.
And to finish, you select your two most important tasks, flag them and make sure they are your must-do tasks.
And that’s it.
As I go through this, it sounds complex, but when you are doing it, it is not.
New tasks go through the three questions—what is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? And you can then move those tasks from your inbox to their appropriate folder.
Then, on a daily basis, you check to see how much time you have for tasks, based on how many meetings you have, and create a prioritised, realistic list.
At the end of the week, you get to look at your other folders—next week, this month, next month and long-term and on hold to see what can be brought forward to your this week folder.
The good news is, this approach, helps you to delete tasks that no longer need to be done.
Now what about projects? If they are not in your task manager, where are they?
You manage your projects from your notes app. That could be Apple Notes, Evernote, Notion, OneNote or any kind of notes app that allows you to create links to documents, articles, images and emails.
You notes is a natural place to manage your projects. After all, a project is a big hairy thing that needs managing. You will likely have documents and meeting notes to keep together.
So, keep them together in a notes app. That way, when you’re working on a project you’re not distracted by all the little, easy tasks you could be doing. You can get yourself focused on the project and work from your project notes.
All you then need is a single task in your task manager telling you to work on a specific project. Depending on what tools you are using, you will also likely be able to create a link directly from the task to the project note.
Now the good news. If you are curious about the Time Sector System, I am in the process of updating the online course. It’s the fifth anniversary and it’s a big update. We are in the final editing stage and I hope to get launch the update in the next ten to fourteen days.
I’ve also done a lot of YouTube videos on this—you can see the playlist on my YouTube channel.
Thank you Elaine for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Is self-discipline overrated? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script | 360
Hello, and welcome to episode 360 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
We hear a lot about self-discipline and how we should develop our discipline to achieve our goals or become more productive. But is this true?
Self-discipline is hard—more so these days with all the instant gratification distractions—and anything that is hard is going to be tough to do consistently. Whether you are trying to accomplish a goal or become better organised, if you rely on self-discipline to get you through there’s going to be a good chance you will fail.
There are some people who thrive on self-discipline. The most famous being David Goggins—he’s a tough cookie. Pain, discipline and a never die mindset are what he appears to live for. But, people with that mindset are rare and you don’t need it.
There is a better way. It’s not easy—nothing worthwhile ever is—but with practice, a little determination, persistence, and consistency, you soon find you don’t need discipline to achieve these things.
Now, before we get to the question, Here’s a little reminder about this week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop.
If you have not yet registered, you can still do so, there’s a link in the show notes or you can visit my website—carlpullein.com— to register.
The workshop will cover how to transition from an unsustainable task-based productivity system to a more sustainable time-based one. I will show you how to manage your work, how to time block effectively and how to prioritise your work so you know you are always working on the right things at the right time.
For those of you already registered, I will be sending out the first workbook in the next day or two so keep an eye out for that. I will also include the joining instructions.
If you want a less hectic and overwhelming life, then this workshop is a must. It’s your chance to create a time management and productivity system that works for you.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips on getting better with self-discipline? I’ve never been very good at being disciplined but as I get older, I feel I need to do better at this.
Hi Ryan, Thank you for your question.
I’ve always found the concept of “living a disciplined life” interesting. You see, the word discipline suggests “punishment” of some kind. When we’re at school if we do something wrong, we are “disciplined”. That was my first introduction to the word. (Or perhaps my parents disciplining me for whatever reason.)
And yet, when we talk about living a “disciplined life” it’s often spoken of in positive terms. Yet, there’s that underlying sense that it’s bad.
I recently wrote about Charles Aznavour, the prolific French singer/songwriter. Aznavour wrote over a 1,000 songs and recorded many more. He lived until he was 94, exercised every day and was still touring when he passed away in 2018.
In interviews he was frequently asked about his productivity and how he created such a disciplined life. Yet Aznavour never thought he was disciplined.
He woke early every day, and spent his mornings writing songs. For him it wasn’t discipline, it was his passion, his purpose. He couldn’t wait to get started each day. And on those rare days he wasn’t in the mood to write, he still wrote.
Why? He didn’t need to. He wrote because that was what he did. It was a habit.
Have you ever tried starting your day without your morning coffee or not brushing your teeth? How did you feel? Probably uncomfortable and little self-conscious.
You don’t need discipline to brush your teeth or make your coffee in the morning do you? It’s just what you do.
And there is where you will find the answer to living with a little more discipline. Don’t think of it as discipline. It isn’t. It’s just what you do.
Take planning your day at the end of the day.
Last night, I spent three hours in a recording studio recording the audiobook of Your Time Your Way. That was after a full day recording and editing videos. I was exhausted. My voice was ragged. Yet, after getting home, I got my Franklin Planner (Yes, I’m still using it), sat on the sofa and planned today.
There was no discipline involved. I also had a great excuse. I’d been on the go since 8:30 am and it was 11:45 pm. I could easily have skipped it. Yet I didn’t.
Why? Because that is what I do in the evening. I give myself five to ten minutes to plan the day.
I love the quote from Jim Rohn: “each day you get to choose between two pains. The pain of regret or the pain of discipline”.
I know what happens if I don’t plan the day—the next day starts out of control. I have no focus and anything loud and “urgent” becomes the priority—even when it isn’t a priority.
Most people’s problems with time management and productivity is because they skip the five to ten minutes planning the day. If you don’t have a plan for the day, you will end up on someone else’s plan and they don’t care about how you feel—a bit harsh, I know, but it’s true.
For most things you don’t need discipline. It’s a choice. Do you scroll social media or read a book? Do you sit on the sofa watching TV or go out for a walk? Do you eat a chocolate bar or a banana? That’s nothing to do with discipline. It’s a choice.
Reading a book is easy. Get a physical book, not an ebook, and place it on the coffee table near your favourite armchair or sofa. Then give yourself ten minutes each day to sit and read it. If you place a bookmark in the book, you can see the bookmark gradually falling to the bottom (the end of the book).
And as the book is on your coffee table, you will see it every time you sit down.
More often than not, you will read more than ten minutes.
Ultimately, those people you think are living a “disciplined life” just have certain habits. Getting up early and writing a journal is a habit. It doesn’t need discipline if it’s a habit.
My wife writes her journal every evening before she goes to bed. She uses Day One, the digital journal, and writes on her laptop. She sits on the sofa, opens her laptop and writes. Some days she’ll only write for five minutes. Other days she’ll write of over an hour. For her she sees it as winding down at the end of the day. Absolutely no discipline is involved.
It would be strange not seeing her on the sofa writing a journal.
Yet for many sitting down to write a journal requires discipline. Ask my wife if writing her journal requires discipline and she’ll laugh at you.
You don’t need discipline if you have the right habits.
How do you develop habits. Well, firstly I would recommend you read James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It’s a brilliant book.
Secondly, identify the habit you want to develop. I always suggest your morning routines are a good place to e to start. These are the easiest kind of habits to develop. What would you like to do first thing in the morning?
You may want to read, meditate, exercise or write a journal. Pick one thing.
For example, if you choose to write a journal, start by making yourself your favourite morning drink, then sit down somewhere comfortable and begin writing. Give yourself five to ten minutes to write.
You can help yourself by putting your journal next to your kettle or coffee maker before you go to bed. That way when you wake up, turn on the kettle you see your journal there waiting for you.
Something James Clear mentions in Atomic Habits is to reduce the friction. This is akin to those who wish to exercise in the morning, putting out their exercise clothes next to their bed before going to bed. It reduces the friction of choosing what to wear. I think of this as minimising the risk of finding an excuse.
These are all great tips. Yet, the disciplined life that Charles Aznavour lived didn’t need tricks. It appeared disciplined, yet it was just how he lived his life. And that’s the goal here; to build daily habits that are effortless because that is what you do.
Most people eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time? Why? It’s because that’s what they do. When I commuted to the office, I would catch the 8:05 bus each morning. I knew what time to leave the house because I knew how long it would take to walk to the bus stop. It was simply what I did.
I should give you one little tip I’ve used in the past. If, say, I want to read a book each evening but find myself watching TV instead, what I will do is tell myself I must read for ten minutes before rewarding myself with turning on the TV.
The advantage of this little trick is you still get to do the thing you want to do—watch TV—but you also get to do the other thing you struggle doing. Eventually, it just becomes a habit. Watching TV without reading becomes uncomfortable.
So there you go, Ryan. It’s not really about being disciplined. It’s more about choosing what you want to do and carrying it through.
Your calendar can help you there. Remember the saying, what goes on your calendar gets done. With this, the key is if you don’t or cannot do something you must remove it from your calendar. That act of moving it from your calendar reminds you about you haven’t done. It acts a good incentive.
If, for example, you schedule going for a walk after lunch, but keep skipping it, because you are removing it every day, you will begin asking yourself what’s wrong and re-assess things. Perhaps you will be more consistent if you go for your walk in the morning or evening.
I hope that has helped, Ryan. Think about what you want to do, when you want to do it and do it. Sooner rather later it will be just what you do.
Don’t forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The first session is on Friday evening, it will be something you will never regret.
Thank you for your question Ryan and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
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In this week’s episode, what’s the best way to manage projects?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Ultimate Productivity Workshop
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Subscribe to my Substack
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 359
Hello, and welcome to episode 359 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
From time to time, something comes along that sounds great when first described but then turns nasty.
In the productivity world, that something is Getting Things Done and in particular the definition of what a project is.
This is not the fault of David Allen, Getting Things Done’s author; this is how his description of a project has been horribly misinterpreted.
At its essence, Getting Things Done is about categorising your work into contexts. That could be work you can do on your computer or phone. In your office or at home. It is, and never was about “projects”. Projects, at best, are a sideshow. A simple way to organise your work. Nothing more.
Yet for some reason, a few early readers misunderstood GTD, wrote about it and now there’s a whole generation of people believing anything that involves two steps or more is a project and must be organised as such.
And there, is the source of overwhelm, time wasted to organising stuff instead of doing stuff and huge backlogs of things to do.
Before we get to the heart of today’s podcast, it’s important that I clear this misunderstanding up.
If you ever bought one the fantastic GTD setup guides that was, and may still be, sold on the GTD website, you will notice that whatever task manager you are using, you set up the lists, folders or projects (depending on which task manager you are using) as contexts. Those contexts usually related to people, places or things. For example, your home, or office. Your computer, printer or car. Or your partner, boss or colleagues.
You then dropped any task related to these contexts into its appropriate context.
Your projects were organised in a file folder system that you kept in a filing cabinet. Current projects—the things you were working on this week or month—were kept on or near your desk for quick access.
In those folders you kept all the details of the project. Notes, documents, outlines, etc. Perhaps you also had a checklist of what needed to happen next.
Today, you can use your digital note app for that purpose.
The key thing about GTD was it was task context driven—ie, you could only do something if you were in the right place, with the right tool and with the right people. It was never about projects.
So, now you have the background, I think it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, How do you best manage projects using your task manager, notes app, and calendar together?
Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question.
I think the first place to start is to avoid looking for a way to treat any new input as a project. Most things are not.
Theoretically, this podcast is a project. I need to choose the question, write the script, set up the studio, record the podcast, edit it, then publish it and hand it over to the my marketing manager for sharing on social media.
That’s seven steps. Well within the definition of a GTD project. Yet, if I were to treat each podcast episode as a project, I’d waste hours just organising it.
A podcast episode is something I do every week. It’s not a project. It’s just part of my work.
Usually, on Thursday I will write the script. That means I go into my list of questions which is in a single note in Evernote, select a question, then begin writing the script.
Then on Sunday morning, after my coaching calls have finished, I set up my little studio, and record the podcast. Once recorded, I edit it and then publish it.
The only tasks on my task manager are a task on Thursday that reminds me I need to write my script and a task on Sunday that reminds me to record the podcast. Two tasks. That’s it.
I don’t need a project folder for any of this.
There is one other thing I do that relates to your question, Benjamin. I have a two hour writing block on my calendar on a Thursday for writing the script and a two hour block on Sunday for recording it.
So, there in essence you have all three tools working together.
I have a single note in my notes app with the title “podcast questions”. That makes it easy to search for. My task manager reminds me when I need to write the script and record the podcast.My calendar protects enough time each week to ensure I get each part of the process completed.If you want to simplify things I would suggest looking at how you define a project.
In my eyes, a project is something unique, something you either have not done before or rarely ever do. Typical projects would be:
Moving house
Buying a new car
Planning a vacation
Setting up a new payroll system
Starting a business
Finding a new job
Doing the work you are employed to do is not a project—well not unless you are a project manager.
An advertising agency isn’t going to treat each new client as a “project”. An advertising agency creates advertising campaigns every day.
The graphic designer has a list of designs they are working on and when they begin their day they only need to choose which campaign they will work on that day.
Designing is their job.
The same goes for the copywriter. When they begin their day they choose which campaign to work on and that is dictated by when the next client meeting is.
What is the work you are employed to do?
A teacher doesn’t treat each new class as a project. They have a process or system for preparing their materials and when the teaching time begins they teach.
It’s possible that a lot of your work does require a place to keep meeting notes, plans and links to documents you may be working on. That’s what your notes app is for.
Your notes app has replaced the filing cabinet today. Filing cabinets were static—they never moved. Your digital notes app can go with you wherever you go.
If you do have any projects, that is where the information and resources go.
All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you should be working on today.
You may have tasks like:
Work on new payroll system project
Finish proposal for Universal Exports
Follow up Mr Oddjob at Auric Enterprises
Clear Action This Day folder
Your calendar tells you if your task list for the day is realistic. If you have six hours of meetings today and you plan to work on your payroll project and finish the proposal for Universal Exports, you’re likely being a little ambitious.
You calendar tells you if you have time to do the things you’d like to do that day.
You can go further, though and use your calendar to protect time for doing your key work.
If, for example, you want to (or need to) spend two hours working on the Universal Exports proposal, then you can block time on your calendar for doing that work. There might be some time sensitivity involved there. Getting the proposal to Universal Exports might be the most important thing you need to do that day. That would be flagged in your task manager as a non-negotiable task that day.
The daily and weekly planning is where I would decide what I will be working on that day or week.
The planning sessions are where you can step back and look at the bigger landscape of what you have to do and decide where you will put your time that day.
Right now, I do have a project. I am in the process of recording the audiobook version of Your Time Your Way. This is not something I can sit down a real off as a single task.
I need to book the recording studio and sound engineer and my voice will only last for around 3 hours before I begin sounding like an out of tune frog.
The only thing I need in my system each week is when I need to be at the recording studio. Currently that is Wednesday nights at 7:30. We record until 10:30 pm. I don’t need a task for any of that. That’s on my calendar.
The next day, the sound engineer sends me the recordings and I go through them to make sure everything sounds right. I have a task in my task manager that pops up each Thursday reminding me to review that previous day’s recordings.
I have a project folder for the Your Time, Your Way book. That contains all my notes, meeting notes and any information I may need. Right now, though, I don’t need to reference that. I just need to turn up at the recording studio on Wednesday nights, record the audiobook and review the recordings the next day.
The important thing is not to confuse your core work with projects. Core work is the work you are employed to do. Designers design, teachers teach, managers manage, truck drivers drive a truck.
All you need is a list of tasks you want to complete each day and get on and complete as many as you can. The majority of those tasks will be related to your core work.
A project, on the other hand, is something unique, often outside of your core work, that needs additional time for doing. You may need to utilise your unique skills to complete that project, you may only have a small say in the project. Either way, on a day to day basis, the only thing you need to decide is what your next task is and do that.
This year is the fifth anniversary of the Time Sector System course. I am currently in the process of re-recording and updating that course.
Is it a project or just part of my core work.
I know from experience that if I treat it as a project things will get complicated.
Yet, I’ve create many courses over the years. I know the process.
For an update, it’s to review and update the course outline. Then schedule time on my calendar for recording and editing it. There will be some additional tasks related to marketing, but I am not there yet. I’m recording, so the driver is my calendar.
Hopefully that has helped, Benjamin. The key is to simplify things as much as possible. Try to avoid creating projects and instead ask if there is a process you can follow. Most things you frequently do has a process.
Processes speed everything up.
As the Formula 1 season is about to start, I’m reminded of one of the sports best leaders, Ross Brawn’s comment on running a team.
The new car for the new season is never considered a project. It’s a process. There’s a time to begin work on the new car, there’s a time to test the new car, etc. Yet none of that is considered a project. Aerodynamicists do the aerodynamics. Engineers work on the chassis and engine and the logistics people work on the logistics. It’s what they do every day.
Yet, building a new wind tunnel, or engineering factory, that would be a project. These “projects” are rare and need specialist inputs.
Don’t forget, we’re two weeks away from the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025. This is your opportunity to take a live workshop with me where I help you to create and build your very own productivity system, A system that works for you.
Thank you Benjamin for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
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Where are you spending most of your time? Are you planning or doing? That’s what we are looking at this week.
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Script | 358
Hello, and welcome to episode 358 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Podcaster Chris Williamson has recently caused a bit of a stir in the productivity world with the phrase “the productivity rain dance”. Cal Newport picked this up and it’s something I’ve written and spoken about for many years.
If you are obsessing about productivity tools—apps, techniques and systems—you’re not doing the work. You’re doing the productivity rain dance. It’s organising, planning and searching for new tools in the hope that somehow the work will get done.
It won’t. And while you are wasting all that time planning, and playing, the work continues to pile up.
This week’s question is linked to this in that it’s about tools and organising work and I hope, my answer will help you find the balance between collecting, organising and doing.
Before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question, I’d like to mention that the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025 is coming.
On Fridays 14th and 21st March I invite you to spend two hours with me learning how to create a time management and productivity system that’s focused on doing the work so you have time for the things you want time for.
In the workshop, we will cover getting control of your calendar and task manager . Then in week two, I will show you some simple techniques to get control of, and more importantly, stay in control of your communications—email, Slack/Teams messages AND the all important daily and weekly planning sessions.
Places are limited so, if you would like to develop a personal productivity system that is focused on doing rather than organising and planning, get yourself registered today. The link to register is in the show notes.
Okay, back to this episode. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alastair. Alastair asks, hi Carl. I recently came across your work and wonder how you avoid getting caught up in the wonderful world of productivity apps. I never seem to able to stick to anything and I know I am wasting time.
Hi Alastair, thank you for sending in your question.
I’m not sure you are necessarily wasting time looking for the right tools. If you are at the start of your productivity journey, finding the right tools is inevitable and yes, it can be confusing. There are so many.
However, there comes a point when you need to stop and settle down with a set of tools.
Those tools are: A calendar, a notes app and a task manager.
The good news is the built in tools that comes with your computer will do. You don’t need expensive subscriptions to so called AI enabled tools or collaborative project management tools.
What are you trying to do when you decide it’s time to get organised and be “productive”?
It’s not about getting more work done. That’s a bit of a misnomer about productivity. It’s about getting the important stuff done and eliminating the less important.
Getting your kids up, dressed, fed and ready for school each morning is important at 7:30 am. Checking email and messages is not. There’s a time and place for those messages, but 7:30 am is not the time.
The world we live in today has made communication incredible fast and easy. Forty years ago, the only forms of communication were letters and telephone calls. (Although some offices had fax machines too).
If you were not next to a telephone, no one could contact you. And if you were not in the office, you didn’t know what surprises were contained in the correspondence waiting for you.
It was therefore easier to compartmentalise your days. Today, it’s much more difficult because you can be alerted to problems instantly, and those problems can derail your day very quickly.
The challenge therefore is to be able to quickly sift through all the stuff coming at us and to decide what is important and what is not.
When things are coming at us all day, they appear loud and urgent. But urgent is not necessarily important.
If you have a thousand emails backlogged in your email system and your boss is demanding you send in your employee evaluations by the end of the week, your employee evaluations are the more important task. The backlog will have to wait.
And let’s be honest, if someone’s been waiting three months for you to reply to their email they’re not going to be bothered if they have to wait a further week.
If you consider that scenario for a moment, your productivity tools are not going to help you.
The only thing you need to know is that writing your employee evaluations must be done. Shuffling that task around your productivity tools won’t do that for you. You are, in effect, procrastinating.
I like the analogy to the rain dance here. A rain dance is performed to persuade God or the gods to bring rain to water the crops. Yet, the dance doesn’t produce the rain. You can dance as much as you like, you can wear elaborate costumes and involve other people. None of that will give you what you want—water to feed the crops.
You can download as many productivity tools as you like. You can organise your notes in such a way that finding stuff is quick and easy and you can spend hours curating your notes and tasks so they look pretty. Yet, none of that gets the work done.
Doing the work is the only way the work will get done.
So, all you need each day is a list of things you have decided are important and you get done and do them.
For that, you don’t need expensive apps. A single sheet of paper would do that.
I’ve always found it interesting how productive people get their work done. The common thread is they do the work, not organise it.
If you Google Albert Einstein’s desk you will see a mess. Papers and books strewn all over the place. If you search for Jeff Bezos’ desk from the early days of Amazon, you’ll see something very similar.
These guys got a tremendous amount of work done without the need for clean and tidy systems. They got on with doing the work that mattered and cleaned up when they were finished.
Sadly, unproductive people don’t achieve very much so we cannot see their workspaces, but I’ll bet they were beautifully neat and tidy with bookshelves of neatly organised books and papers lined up perfectly on their desks.
A few years ago I got into watching YouTube videos of minimalist desk set ups. (Weirdly, these videos are still popular!). I remember at the time wondering how they ever got any work done. It must have taken hours to keep their workspace so clean.
The key to all of this is knowing what is important and what is not. This is why I recommend doing two exercises before you begin developing any kind of system.
The first is to establish what your areas of focus are. These eight areas around your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness, lifestyle and personal development are important because they define what is important to you as an individual.
The next is to get clear what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do and directly effects your promotional prospects and ultimately your income.
Being quick to answer your phone, respond to a message or email or being on time to every meeting is not your core work. Well, not unless you work in customer support.
Once you know what your areas of focus are and your core work is, you have a pre-defined set of priorities on which to base your decisions about what you should be doing each day.
For example, one of my areas of focus related to my work (career) is to help as many people as I can become more productive and less stressed. To do that, I produce several pieces of content each week.
Creating and publishing that content is always a priority for me.
I don’t need a lot of tools to to do that.
A calendar protects time each week for creating that content—I have twelve hours a week protected for this.
I have a very disorganised list of content ideas in a single note in Evernote—a notes app I’ve been using for almost 16 years now.
And, of course, I have an app for writing and producing that content.
Are there better calendars, notes apps and writing tools out there? Possibly, but how much faster would I be able to create content with those new tools? Probably no faster because using them would be unfamiliar to me.
The tools I use I’ve used for over ten years. I know them inside out and they are boring. And that’s good because I’m not tempted to organise them, or even look for new apps. They do the job I need them to do and I can focus on creating the content.
If you want to become more productive and get the important things done on time every time, the only way you will do that is to do the work. There are no shortcuts and no productivity tool will do it for you. Only you can do that.
If you need to write a report, open up Microsoft Work or Google Docs and write the first paragraph.If you need to prepare a presentation, open up PowerPoint or Keynote and create the first slide. If you need to wash your car, go to the car wash centre and wash your car. If you need to do your taxes, download the documents and write in your name and national insurance number.Funny how none of those things requires you to add a task into a task manager. You just need to decide when you will do them and do them.
So there you go, Alastair. Focus less on the tools and more on what you need to do to get the job done. You really don’t need elaborate apps, complex organisational structures or a minimalist desk.
You just need time protected to get the work done.
Thank you, Alastair for your question and thank you for listening. Don’t forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop where will cover many of these concepts (and much more).
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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This week, why managing your time is better than managing tasks.
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Script | 357
Hello, and welcome to episode 356 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 where astronaut Ken Mattingley, played by Gary Sinese, is trying to find a way to power up the Command Service Module to bring the three in danger astronauts through the earth’s atmosphere and safely back to earth.
All they had to play with was 16 amps; that’s it. Sixteen amps isn’t enough to boil a kettle. And we’re talking about life support systems and navigation that was critical to bring Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise back to earth safely.
In the scene, we see Ken Mattingley testing every switch in every possible combination so they do not exceed 16 amps . It’s painstaking; it takes a lot of time, but eventually, they devise a sequence that the astronauts can use to power up the command service module within the 16-amp limit.
We know that Apollo 13 landed, or splashed down, safely to earth after five days.
Each day, you, too, are dealing with a similar situation. You have a limited resource—time—and that’s it. You get the same 24 hours every day that everybody else gets. How you use that time is entirely up to you.
The problem is you don’t have 24 hours because some critical life support measures require some of that time, including sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, that will have a subsequent effect on your performance that day; you won’t be operating at your most productive.
This is one of the reasons why it is crucial to have a plan. No flight ever takes off without a flight plan. They know precisely how much weight they are carrying. They can estimate to some degree of accuracy the weight of the passengers, and they know precisely where they’re going and what weather conditions to expect.
Yet many people start their day without a plan; they turn up at work and email messages. Bosses, customers, and colleagues dictate what they do all day, and they end up exhausted, having felt they’ve done nothing important at all. And that will be very true. Well, not important to them.
This week’s question is about getting control of your time. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tina. Tina asks, Hi Carl, I am swamped with all the stuff I have to do at work and home. It’s never-ending and I don’t have time to do it all. Do you have any tips on getting control of everything?
Hi Tina, thank you for your question.
There’s an issue when we focus on everything that we have to do. We forget that ultimately, whether we can or cannot do something will come back to time. Time is the limiting factor.
There are other resources—money, ability, energy, etc but if you have all those resources, and you don’t have time, it’s not going to get done.
Things get even more messy when we consider that as humans we are terrible at estimating how long something will take to do. There are too many variables.
For instance, as I am writing this script, my wife is messaging me and Louis, my little dog, is looking at me expectantly, hoping I will give him his evening chewy stick early.
When I began writing, I thought it would take me a couple of hours, I’ve already spent an hour on it and I am nowhere near finishing it.
One place to start is to allocate what you have to do by when you will do it. This helps to reduce your daily lists which in turn reduces that sense of overwhelm.
I recommend starting with a simple folder structure of:
This Week
Next Week
This Month
Next Month
Long-Term and on Hold.
When something new comes in, ask yourself: What is it? What do I need to do and when can I do it?
The questions what is it and what do I need to do will help you to classify the task.
Classifying a task is helpful because it will allow you to group similar tasks together.
For example, if you walk into your living room and notice the windows are looking dirty, you may decide to create a task to clean the windows.
The next question is when will you do it? The best time to do this kind of task is when you do your other cleaning.
Grouping similar tasks together work to prevent procrastination.
When I was growing up, my grandmothers and my mother all had what they called “cleaning days”. This was a day, once a week when they did the big clean. Vacuuming, dusting and laundry. It was a non-negotiable part of their week.
And if you think about it, you don’t pop out to the supermarket to buy food individually. It’s not like you run out of broccoli and go to the supermarket to buy only broccoli. You would add broccoli to your shopping list and buy it when you do your grocery shopping.
Well, we can adopt the same principle here.
Like most people, I get email every day. The problem is, you and I have no idea how many emails we will get. It’s a random number. This makes it practically impossible to know before the day starts what you will need to do.
However, what you can do is have a set amount of time to deal with your actionable email each day.
I have a process. Before the day starts I clear my inbox, filtering out the stuff I don’t need and archiving things I may need. The actionable email goes into an Action This Day folder in my email app and later in the day I dedicate an hour for clearing that folder.
I have my Action This Day folder set up so the oldest email is at the top of the list and I start there. It doesn’t matter if I have fifty or eighty actionable emails. I give myself an hour work on it and once the hour is up I stop.
I repeat this every day, so my emails are not backlogging. Most days I can clear them all, some days I cannot. But as I always begin with the oldest email, nobody will be waiting more than 24 hours for a reply.
This means it really doesn’t matter how many messages I get each day. While I can’t predict how many I will get each day, I have been able to pin down how long I spend on it each day (around an hour and twenty minutes) and that’s it.
Another thing you can do is to default all new tasks to next week, not this week. It’s tempting to throw everything into this week, but if everything goes into this week, you’re going to be swamped.
Much of what we are asked to do doesn’t need to be done straight away. It can wait. The advantage of waiting is many things end up sorting themselves out.
There’s a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yikzak Shamir, who would take every letter, memo and document he received and put it on a pile on a side table. He wouldn’t look at it for a week or ten days.
When he did go through the pile, he found 90% of what he was being asked to sort out had sorted itself out and the remaining 10% needed his attention.
Of course, today not touching something for a week to ten days might not be practical, but it does highlight another issue we find ourselves in—rushing to do something that if left alone will sort itself out.
The final piece of this puzzle, is how you organise your day. This is where your calendar takes priority and where the time limit comes to play.
We have twenty-four hours. From that we need to sleep, eat and take care of our personal hygiene. That’s going to take up around nine to ten hours of your day. So, in reality you have around fourteen hours to play with.
Where will you do your most important work? This is where your calendar comes in.
Most of us have meetings and often we have no control over when those will be. However, what you can do is block your calendar for doing your most important work.
For example, you could protect two hours in the morning for doing your critical work. And then an hour in the afternoon for dealing with your communications—the action this day folder.
That’s only three hours. If you’re working a typical eight hour day, that still leaves you with five hours for meetings snd other stuff that may need to be done.
If you can consistently follow that practice, you’ll soon see a lot of that work that’s piling up getting done.
One thing to keep in mind is the work will never stop.
There’s a story that on Queen Elizabeth’s final day, she still had to deal with her official documents and messages. It’s likely you will too. Stuff to do will never stop coming.
All you have are your resources and of those time is the most limited. The question is—how much time are you will to give to those tasks?
So, Tina, the best advice I can give you is to sort your tasks by when you will do them. This week, next week, later this month or next month.
From there, categorise your tasks into the type of work involved. That could be Writing time, communications, admin, chores etc.
Then. Look at your calendar and see where you can protect time for doing that work.
And that’s it. If you are consistent in following your calendar, you will find the right things are getting done on time and you’ll feel a lot less frazzled and overwhelmed.
Thank you, Tina for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
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This week, Dr. Kourosh Dini returns to the podcast to discuss how we can ensure that the goals we set are achieved.
Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work.
Newsletter:https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/Waves of Focushttps://wavesoffocus.com/on SMART goalshttps://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/
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Should you take up journaling, and if you do, will it help you with your time management and productivity? That’s what we’re exploring this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Subscribe to my Substack
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 355
Hello, and welcome to episode 355 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This year is the 10th anniversary since I took up consistent journaling. And it’s been one of the best things I’ve ever taken up.
Not only is it one of the most therapeutic things you can do, it’s also one of the best ways to organise your thoughts, work your way through problems and vent your anger towards those who really wind you up.
Over the years, I’ve also found that journaling has helped me to achieve my goals because each day I am writing about how I am doing and if I find myself making excusing, the act of writing out my excuses exposes them for what they really are—excuses.
So, this week, I’ve chosen a question related to journaling and I hope it will inspire you to invest in a quality notebook and pen and start doing it yourself. And if I can inspire just one of you to take it up and become a Samuel Pepys, I’ll be very happy.
So, to kick ups off, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks, hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk about your journaling habit numerous times. Do you think writing a journal has helped or hindered your productivity?
Hi Tom, thank you for your question.
To answer your question directly, I can say with certainty that journaling has contributed to my overall productivity.
To explain further, I write in my journal every morning, no matter where I am. And one of the things I always write down is my two objective tasks for the day. Those objectives are the two non-negotiable tasks for the day and by writing them down at the top of my journal entry, I have a way of ensuring I did them when I write my journal the next day,
But more powerfully, writing them down each morning focuses my mind on what needs to be done and how and when I will do them.
Those tasks are also in my task manager, but it’s the act of writing them out by hand that gives me the focus.
Writing a journal is much more than being an aid to productivity. It’s also a form of therapy.
Like most people, I feel frustrated, overwhelmed and stressed at times. Those feelings need an outlet. A negative way to do that is to get angry, shout, and scream. Sure, that blows off steam, but it also transfers your negative feelings to others—your colleagues and family. Not great.
Instead, if you have a way to write about these things, you start to find ways to solve whatever the underlying issues are. Writing slows down your thinking, and if you were to step back and analyse why you sometimes feel stressed, frustrated and overwhelmed, it is because you feel—incorrectly—everything has to be done right now.
That slowing down helps to bring back some perspective and you can decide when you will do something and what can be left until another day.
When it comes to achieving your goals, a journal is perhaps the best way to track progress. It can also help you establish new, positive habits.
When I developed my morning routines around eight years ago, I chose to track them in my journal. I always draw a margin on left of the page, and I list out the six items I do as part of my morning routine: make coffee, wash face and teeth, drink lemon water, write my journal, clear my email inbox and do my shoulder stretches.
I write them down at the top of my journal entry for the day in the margin. And, for the dopamine hit, I check them off too.
I exercise in the late afternoon and, again, I will write out what I did in the margin of my journal.
Now, I could spend a lot of money on habit-tracking apps, but with my journal, I’ve found no need. I have my record and can review it at any time.
Over the years, I’ve been asked what I write about and if I use any prompts.
The answer is no. Well, apart from writing out my objectives for the day.
Now, prompts can be helpful when you first start—you can think about them as those little stabilisers we put on kids’ bikes to help them learn to ride. Sooner or later you want to take them off so you can experience the freedom of riding freely.
I write whatever’s on my mind that morning. If everything’s going great I write about that. If things are not so great I write about it and why I think things are not going as well as I want them to. I often find as I am writing about an issue, a solution begins to form in my mind and I will continue writing.
If a task comes from that solution, I can put that in its appropriate place later.
As a general rule, I will write for around fifteen minutes. However, if I don’t have much to write about, I will give it ten minutes. The weather’s a good subject to write about when you have little to write.
If there’s a lot on my mind, I’ll keep going until I’ve emptied my thoughts. That’s very rarely more than thirty minutes, though.
Over the years, I’ve tried both analogue journaling—with pen and paper and digital journaling using an app called Day One.
On balance, I’ve found that pen and paper journaling works best.
I spend most of my working time in front of a screen. I type a lot. So, opening up a nice notebook and picking up a fountain pen is a lovely break from the constant screen time. It also feels a lot less rushed and more relaxing.
One thing I noticed when I was writing my journal in Day One—a popular digital journal—was I never went back to my old entries. I read enough typed documents on screen all day. I have no desire to read through more, even if it’s my journal.
I keep my old paper journals on my bookshelf and often skim through pages when waiting for a call to start. It’s incredibly nostalgic and leaves you realising you have accomplished a lot.
I was recently asked if I am worried about people reading my journals. Hahaha, that’s the point.
One of the inspirations for me to start writing a journal was how the journals of people like Samuel Pepys, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton are still around.
These journals were written hundreds of years ago and, in the case of Samuel Pepys, are a snapshot of how we lived in the 17th Century.
Pepys was very open about what he did. Some good things and a lot of bad things. But does he care we are reading them today? Of course not. He’s been dead for 320 years.
I have the same attitude. I’ve nothing to hide from my wife, and the journals are kept in my study—home office. If I lost my journal when travelling, so be it. There’s nothing scandalous in there—well, not yet anyway hahaha.
There are a few tips I would share with you if you are thinking about journaling. Start on paper. Buy yourself a nice notebook. You’ll find bound notebooks with a hard cover are best. Choose A5 or B5 size. You’ll find an A4 notebook a little daunting at first.
Hardback notebooks will last a long time, and the hardcover will protect the pages better than a soft cover.
I would also suggest investing in a fountain pen. You can pick up a refillable one for less than $20 these days. Lamy Safaris are excellent pens, and so are the Pilot Metropolitans and Platinum Preppys.
If you invest in a fountain pen, ensure the paper you buy is fountain pen-friendly. Rhodia Web-books and Clairefontaine notebooks are good choices, as are many Japanese notebooks such as Midori’s MD notebooks.
When you start journaling, think of it as if you were meeting a stranger for the first time. You will naturally be a little reserved at first. You might only write about the weather and perhaps what you did yesterday.
As long as you remain consistent with it, you will soon open up. You’ll start writing a few thoughts and feelings after a few weeks. Let it roll and don’t hold back.
I would also recommend writing in the morning. You will likely be much more consistent that way. Evening times can be difficult because you will sometimes be tired. You may even have had a few too many G’nTs, and you won’t write.
Tie writing your journal to your morning routines. You don’t have to write for long. Give yourself ten minutes.
And if you want to be more focused, after writing the date at the top, write out your two must-do tasks for the day. That way, you have a method to hold yourself accountable. If, for whatever reason, you didn’t do your must-do tasks, dedicate a sentence or two to writing about why you didn’t do them.
This helps you because over time you may see a pattern developing. You might discover that afternoons are terrible for doing your focused work because your boss always wants to have meetings then. You can then use that information to change your structure.
If you draw a margin on the page, you can use the margin to track other data such as a food log, exercise and even your energy levels. I track my weight there. Each Wednesday, I weigh myself and write my weight in the margin (in a different coloured ink).
And there you go, Tom. Yes, journaling has helped me to be more productive. It slows me down and gets me to think better, leading to better focus on the day ahead. It also gives me a place to consider new ideas and play around with possible solutions.
I hope this episode has inspired some of you to start journaling. It’s a fantastic way to bring perspective on chaotic days and weeks. It also slows you down—always a good thing in a fast-paced world, and gives you a place to express your thoughts.
And who knows, you may be the next Samuel Pepys or Leonardo Da Vinci in three-hundred years or so.
Thank you, Tom, for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.
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Do you feel you are rushing from one task to another while not getting anything important done? Well, this week, I’m going to share with you a few ways to change that.
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Script | 353
Hello, and welcome to episode 354 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
What’s the rush? This is one of those powerful questions you can ask yourself when processing the things you have collected in your inboxes.
It’s easy today to feel that everything you are asked to do must be done immediately. While there is a category of tasks that require quick action, most of what comes across your desk (or pops up on your screen) does not fall into that category.
The trick, of course, is knowing which is which. This is where developing confidence in your judgement and abilities helps. But that can only come from establishing some “rules”. In a way, automating your decision-making.
I recently heard an interview with President J F Kennedy, in which he said as president, the kind of decisions you make are always high-level. Anything smaller will be dealt with at a lower level and rarely reach your desk.
That’s an example of government in action. The president or Prime Minister cannot decide everything. Lower-level, less urgent things can and should be handled at a department level.
That’s the same for you. Most of your decisions should be automated. What kind of emails are actionable, and what can be archived or deleted, for example.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Edward. Edward asks, Hi Carl, I recently read your newsletter in which you wrote about slowing down. Could you explain a little more how to slow down and still be productive?
Hi Richard, thank you for your question.
One of the disadvantages of technology and how it has advanced over the last twenty years is the speed at which tasks can now be done.
While technology has speeded up incredibly, our human brains have not. That causes us many issues.
The biggest issue is because everyone knows how quickly we can reply to an email, they expect almost instant replies which ignores the fact we might being doing something else.
For example, when I am driving or in a meeting or on a call, I cannot reply to an “urgent” email or message. I am doing something else.
In the days before email, there was a natural delay. I remember when I was working in a law firm, email was very new and lawyers didn’t trust it. So, we continued writing letters. This meant, if we received a letter in the morning, we had until 4 pm to reply—that was when the mail went to the post office.
If we missed the post, that was okay, we could blame the post office. And that was accepted.
Other lawyers knew this as did our clients and the clients of the other lawyers.
This also meant we had time to think about our response, talk to a colleague if necessary or escalate to our boss if the issue was complex.
Today, we often don’t feel we have that time. The truth is you do.
One thing I’ve learned is when someone sends you something they are secretly hoping you do not respond quickly. They’re snowed under with work too. If you reply quickly, you’ve just given them more work to do today. You’re not going to be their favourite person.
One of the easiest ways to reduce some of this anxiety is to put in place some rules.
Let me give you an example. I receive around 100 to 150 emails a day. Most of the mail I receive comes through the night. I therefore process my inbox each morning before I start my work. The goal of processing my inbox is to clear it as fast as possible.
There’s no time for applying the legendary two-minute rule (where anything that can be done in two minutes or less should be done). All I need is ten emails where I could apply the two-minute rule and I’ve lost twenty minutes.
No thank you. I want a cleared inbox as quickly as possible. I’ve applied this rule for over ten years now and can clear 150 emails in less than twenty minutes. My record is 380 (ish) emails cleared in 36 minutes.
Then around 4 pm, I will go to my email’s Action This Day folder. Begin with the oldest email and work my way through that for an hour. I aim to respond to any actionable email within 24 hours. And I would say I have a 95% success rate with that “rule”.
It’s a process I repeat every day, and it’s ensured I never have an overwhelming backlog in email at any time.
Now, I do have some rules. For example, anything involving money, whether that is issuing a refund, or sorting out a discount code, I will deal with as soon as I see the issue—people are sensitive when it comes to money.
Also, questions from my Membership Community have priority as well as people who may have forgotten their password or are experiencing other difficulties getting into their learning centre dashboard.
Fortunately, these instances are rare. Perhaps three or four a month.
You can also apply rules for your core work—the work you are employed to do. Because your core work is work you have to do regularly, it’s easy to set up processes to do the work.
Once you have a process set up, you can protect the time on your calendar to ensure you have the time to do the work.
Because a process is something you repeat, you soon get fast at doing it. It’s a human form of automation. If you can fix it for the same time and day, it gets even better because you can start to accurately predict how long it will take you. And your colleagues learn your routines and will leave you alone.
My wife knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 every morning, I am doing my creative work and to leave me alone. That took a lot of training hahaha.
There is a trick I learned from former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir was Prime Minister between 1986 and 1992, so before the proliferation of email and instant messages.
Whenever a letter or memo came into his office, he would move it to the side and leave it there for a week or ten days. What he discovered was that 90% of what had come in had resolved itself. The ten percent that was left was where he needed to apply his attention.
Rushing to respond or complete a piece of work often leads to unnecessary work. How many times have you responded to an email a few days after receiving it, only to be told the issue has been resolved?
Now you may not be able to sit on something today for a week, but it is possible to pause for 24 hours. All you need is a little confidence in yourself.
Slowing down is a great way to reduce the amount of work you have.
I remember when I used to pounce on an email from a student asking for help logging into their account, only to find a subsequent email come in telling me they had resolved their issue.
Now I wait an hour before responding. That way if a student does resolve their issue I am not wasting precious time resetting passwords that don’t need to be done.
I’m reminded of this question: What the rush? With 2025 goals.
It doesn’t matter what you have done on the 31st January. A 2025 goal is about what you have accomplished on the 31st December. The start will always be messy and inconsistent.
It’s likely you original ideas don’t work, but with a little patience and a few adjustments you will find the right strategy. The result you want will come on 31st December, not 31 January. You have plenty of time.
This idea of slowing down is at the heart of the Time Sector System. In the course, I recommend you default all new inputs to your Next Week folder. Something would have to be genuinely urgent to go into the This Week folder.
By applying the default to your Next Week folder, when you do the weekly planning it’s fantastic to discover that thirty to forty percent of what’s in there no longer needs to be done.
My wife is a get it done now person. Everything is urgent, even when it’s not. Out accountant in Korea is the opposite. Our accountant will ask us for the bank and credit card statements around six weeks before she needs them. When my wife receives that message, everything stops, and she rushes around trying to collect everything together in one afternoon.
It leaves her exhausted, and inevitably, something’s missed, and she then has to repeat the stress the following week.
You want to be like our accountant. Work from your calendar, and ensure that you give yourself sufficient time to collect information. You don’t need to rush around panicking then.
Slow down, protect sufficient time for the bigger tasks and default all new tasks to next week. You will find you have less to do, and what you do have to do can be done slowly, more meticulously and with fewer mistakes.
Thank you, Edward, for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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This week, how to reduce procrastination and why you don’t want to completely remove it.
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Script | 353
Hello, and welcome to episode 353 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
We recently asked what’s the biggest thing that ruins your productivity on my YouTube community page. 58% of participants said procrastination.
In a way, that doesn’t surprise me. When you see the statistics on how many people spend time planning their days and weeks, I am actually surprised that the number isn’t higher. I’ll explain shortly.
Now, procrastination has been around for a very long time. Leonardo Da Vinci only managed to finish a small number of paintings. Of the twenty paintings attributed to him, around five were finished.
Leonardo was a serial procrastinator. Yet, it was that procrastination that led to many of his inventions. If he had not procrastinated as much as he did, we would have many more of his paintings but very few of his notebooks full of drawings and diagrams.
The good news is, there are a few practices you can do that will reduce procrastination and enable you to be more internal about your days.
To get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Carlos. Carlos asks, Hi Carl, what advice do you have for overcoming procrastination?
Hi Carlos, thank you for your question.
As I alluded to, procrastination and daily and weekly planning are linked. When you are clear about what needs to be accomplished you will procrastinate less.
The problem when you have no plan is you waste a lot of time trying to decide what needs to be done. And then, it’s likely you will pick the easiest thing to do in the hope it will get you started.
It’s true, you will get started, but you will be doing low value tasks leaving behind the higher value ones. The ones you don’t know what needs to be done or what the first action is because you don’t have a plan.
And that leaves you at the end of the day looking at a list of important, high value things you didn’t do.
One way to overcome this is to be very clear about what the next action is. In my next YouTube video, coming out on Thursday, I explain why “think about” tasks are not really tasks and will be the ones you will sacrifice the moment your day becomes busy.
The reason why these get put off is because it’s not clear what the real action is. For example, if I had a task like “think about what to buy mum for her birthday”, I would procrastinate. It’s too much effort and is not the real task.
The real task might be to talk to my brother and sister about what they re getting my mum. Or I could talk to my father and ask him what he thinks she would like.
Which task would you most likely do:
Think about what to buy mum for her birthday, or, call my brother and ask him what he’s getting mum for her birthday?
One is actionable the other is wishy washy. The wishy washy task is the one you will procrastinate on.
You will procrastinate because it’s not clear what needs to be done.
This is where planning comes in. When you have a plan for the day and are clear about what needs to be done, you will be less likely to procrastinate because your brain is subconsciously planning ahead for you. You’re doing one task and your brain is thinking, subconsciously, about what you will do next and how to complete the task.
This prevents your brain from going offline and procrastinating.
However, when you don’t have a plan for the day, none of that happens. Instead, you procrastinate. You are always on the lookout for something interesting to do, and anything that does not fit the mood you’re in will be skipped for something more interesting.
So, the first practice to develop is to plan your day.
This does not take a long time. It can be done in five minutes. And the ideal time for maximum procrastination protection is to do it before you finish the day.
There’s something more intentional about starting your day knowing exactly what it is you want to get accomplished.
Now, there is a caveat here. If you are an early riser, you can do your planning for the day as part of your morning routine. After all, it’s only five minutes.
So how do you effectively plan your day?
Step one. Look at your appointments for the day. How much time do you have left after your meetings and meal breaks?
Step two is to look at your task list and choose actionable tasks that you can do in the time you have available.
Step three is to prioritise those tasks. Which ones are your non-negotiables? The ones that must be done today?
And that’s it.
To give you an example, Today, I have six hours of meetings. I also need to take Louis to his groomers for his haircut. In total, I have around seven and a half hours of commitments today.
That leaves me with around two hours for everything else. This means, the only task I can confidently complete today is this podcast script. So that’s what I have on my list of tasks.
There’s no point in me having twenty tasks on my to-do list. It would be impossible to do them all in two hours.
Now if I began the day with twenty tasks and seven and half hours of commitments, I would waste so much time trying to decide what to do—ie procrastinate. No! The only thing that matters is getting this script completed.
So, that’s my plan for the day.
Now there are other factors involved in procrastination. If you are sleep deprived, for example, you’re not going to be focused and you will procrastinate. All those shiny objects, social media feeds and click bait news will be attractive. Your brain’s tired and it won’t want to be doing anything that requires thought or creativity.
Similarly, if you eat a high carbohydrate lunch, you’re going to find staying on task in the afternoon challenging. The insulin spike that results in you feeling groggy and tired will cause you to procrastinate.
I would also add that if you are not moving enough you will catch yourself procrastinating. A good tip here is to get up after each session of work or meeting and go for a walk around your workplace for ten minutes.
While you’re walking, think about your next task and how you will do it. You will find when you settle down to get back to work, you are more focused and ready to go.
None of these reasons mean you are a serial procrastinator. It just means you’re tired. Fix that issue first. Get enough sleep, be careful what you eat at lunch time and make sure you move for ten minutes between sessions of work.
Do those four things: plan you day, get enough sleep, avoid carbs for lunch and move and you will see a significant reduction in the procrastination.
Now when talking about procrastination, we do have to be careful. Sometimes procrastination can be a good thing.
I mentioned Leonardo Da Vinci earlier. His procrastination is what led him to invent things hundreds of years before anyone else thought about them.
You see procrastination is really all about exploring ideas. The trouble today is there are far too many things we can procrastinate on.
You’re thinking about your summer holidays and remember you need to buy a new suitcase. So, you head online and search luggage. Yet, it’s eight months before you go on your holiday. You don’t need to buy or research new luggage now. Yet, that’s more interesting than whatever else you should be doing.
And because it’s so easy to do a Google search, you do that.
Now, had you added a task to research new luggage and added it to your long-term and on hold folder, it’s unlikely you would be thinking about luggage today. It collected, processed and in your system.
There’s a time for procrastination—the exploration of ideas, but it needs to be controlled.
A tip here is to keep a part of your day as free as you can. For instance, you could try to keep your afternoons as free as possible so if you do slip into procrastination, you’ve got your most important work done in the morning and your procrastination can be made useful.
This means when you plan your day, you make sure your most important work gets done in the morning.
Which comes back to ensuring you have a plan for your day.
So you don’t want to be eliminating procrastination completely. It’s your creative brain wanting to explore. It’s more a case of controlling it.
Which means it’s a good idea to monitor when you procrastinate. When I’ve done this, I find I procrastinate most in the early afternoons. Knowing this, I have designed my schedule to allow me time to take Louis for his walk. I know my brain wants to explore ideas at that time. What better way to do it than to be walking in nature and thinking about all these distractions and ideas?
What it comes down to is having a realistic plan for the day. If you find yourself staring at an impossible day, you will inevitably procrastinate. Then you will get annoyed with yourself. Yet, you can fix it. Be very clear about what your non-negotiable tasks for the day are.
Your brain will then take over and give you that sense of urgency to get the non-negotiable tasks done.
I’ve never been a fan of website blockers or forcing yourself to turn off your devices. I find those become a distraction in themselves because you are now worried about what you are missing.
What I’ve found works for my clients is to have that plan, be aware of how tired you are and if you are tired, take a nap, if you can, or get up and go for a walk. That way you softly remove the temptation to procrastinate and once back you can get on with your high-value work.
I hope that has helped, Carlos. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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What happened to my 2020/21 minimalist project, and where am I today? That’s the question I am answering today.
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Script | 352
Hello, and welcome to episode 352 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Towards the end of 2019, I decided that in 2020, I would go all in on a minimalist project. I had played around with it for a number of years, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I formally turned it into a project and began the process of clearing out a lot of stuff I had collected that was no longer benefiting me.
And yes, four or five years ago, minimalism was a thing. Everyone was talking about it, and there were thousands of videos of people showcasing how bare and minimal their workspaces were.
It was a trend, and while that trend appears to be forgotten, I learned many things that I still practice today.
So, it was a nice surprise to find a question about it in my inbox a few weeks ago. I realised it was a good time to tell you about what I learned and what I am still practising today.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question… Which I realise I’ve already told you.
This week’s question comes from Milos. Milos asks, hi Carl, I remember a few years ago, you mentioned that you were about to start a minimalist project. How did it go, and are you still a minimalist?
Hi Milos, thank you for your wonderful question.
Like most projects, or goals, designed to change how you do things, once you complete them, it’s easy to forget you ever did them. My minimalist project was such a project.
I changed a lot of things that I do automatically today, so your question caused me to reminisce on how things used to be.
I should point out that I wasn’t into extreme consumerism. I would replace my phone, iPads and computers when they stopped functioning in a way I needed them to do.
For example, my old Intel computer became very slow over a year when Apple switched from Intel chips to their M series. So much so that it took up to an hour to render a fifteen-minute YouTube video. When I changed my computer to an M series one, that time came down to around six minutes.
However, I think I am a bit of a hoarder, and I had boxes of old papers from my teaching days I no longer needed. I was always reluctant to throw away old clothes, believing one day I might regain the weight I had lost and would require those bigger sizes again.
My wardrobe, drawers and other cupboards were full of stuff I no longer needed and would never need again.
So that was where the project began. Clearing out old clothes and papers I no longer needed.
As with all endeavours like this, I did go a little extreme. My desk, for instance, was stripped of its soul—well, it felt like it. All I had on there was my computer, keyboard and trackpad. I found it became an uninspiring place to work.
So, gradually, I added some things back. An analogue clock—a tool I use to prevent time blindness when I get into a focused zone and a few little mementoes to bring some character back.
The biggest part of the project was clearing out drawers, cupboards and my wardrobe. That was liberating and I was surprised how much space I had once everything was cleared and either thrown away or taken to the recycling.
I moved house at the end of 2021, and that was an opportunity to complete the project—well, the clearing out of the old part of the project.
However, the biggest change was in the way I approached purchasing.
I stopped buying electronic gadgets. I am in the Apple ecosystem and Apple’s products, on the whole, last a long time. For example, I have an iPad mini for reading ebooks, magazines and the newspaper. I’ve had the same iPad mini for the last five years. And I have no intention of replacing it any time soon.
Another change was to apply some rules to my purchasing. This was inspired from how the British gentry in the early 1900s approached buying clothes and personal consumption items.
In the 1920s (and 30s), aristocrats bought clothes and necessities once. For instance, a young aristocrat would purchase a set of luggage that would last a lifetime.
If something broke or the leather tore, they would fix it. A new suitcase was not necessary.
These repairs added character and gave these items a unique look.
It was also a much more environmentally friendly way to treat possessions than we do today—throwing away items once they are either out of date or have a minor problem and buying new ones.
It’s easy to tell ourselves that life was much simpler in those days. It wasn’t. People had just as many problems as we do today. They did not have the conveniences we have: no food delivery services, no Google or ChatGTP to find something out instantly, and no technology to make doing our work better and faster.
The clothing rule I applied was built around the principle of less is better. This translated into buying better quality and less of it. It also allowed me to apply a rule of only buying natural fibres. So that meant mainly cotton and wool.
I do have some un-natural fibre clothing. My exercise gear and a heavy winter coat, for example—it gets very cold in Korea. But apart from that, I stick to natural fibres.
Much of what I do today is inspired by the pre-consumerism days. Only buy what you need and buy the best quality you can afford.
I also learned something from Winston Churchill. Choose your suppliers. What this means is you use the same stores to buy your clothes and anything else you may need.
Winston Churchill, for instance bought all his suits from H W Poole—a London tailor in Savile Row. His shirts were bought at Turnbull and Asser, and his iconic cigars came from James Fox.
If you think about that for a moment, if you use the same suppliers for all your clothing and other things, you know your sizes and precisely what you want, which means you don’t need to research or waste a lot of time trying to find what you want. You reduce the paradox of choice and get back to living life.
Now, I cannot afford to buy suits from H W Poole or shirts from Turnbull and Asser, but I do have my own favourite suppliers.
I buy socks from Peper Harow, my sweaters from N Peal and Cordings of Piccadilly and coats from Barbour. Yes, they are expensive, but the clothing last a very long time and are all made from either cotton or wool.
Another lesson I learned from my minimalist project was the importance of rules and routines.
If you’ve read Around The World In Eighty Days or the books by P G Wodehouse and his characters Jeeves and Wooster, you may have noticed the main characters had strict rules and routines. Wake up times and when they expected their morning cup of tea. Dinner time was a social occasion with pre-dinner drinks and formal clothing.
Perhaps part of the reason for the increase in mental health issues today is because we no longer have these important daily rituals. It’s all go go go. No time to stop and appreciate sitting around a table with family and friends or going out for a daily walk, or even doing what in Around The World in Eighty days is called your “toilet”—which means washing and bathing.
These were deliberate activities, not rushed or forced. It was just what you naturally did each day.
There was a time for everything.
Another area of this period that has fascinated me was the way people approached writing and replying to letters. This was considered a joy and most people spent time each day doing it.
And there was a mix of personal and business letters that needed to be done and the volume was comparable to what we receive in emails and messages today.
The biggest difference was rather feeling they had to reply to everything each day, they focused on the amount of time they had available to write. I have adopted this approach myself. I don’t look at how many emails I need to reply to, I look at how much time I have and once that time is up, I stop.
If you do that every day, you will remain on top of your communications reasonably consistently.
I often hear about people doing a digital detox. One change I made, was to again take inspiration from the 1920s and 30s. In those days people bought their favourite newspaper and read the whole paper.
Now, many successful people still do this today. Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase Bank and Warren Buffett for instance. They subscribe to their favourite newspapers and allocate time each day to read them.
This stops you from getting caught up in clip bait headlines and being “triggered” by low quality reporting.
So now I read the same newspaper every day and only look through my social media later in the evening when I have finished my day.
So the lessons I learned was to buy less stuff but better quality. That’s ensured my wardrobe is clean and not over-stuffed with clothes I won’t wear.
I have also structured my days better. There’s a time for doing my communications, eating with family and friends, and my favourite of all, going out for what we call our family walk. That’s with my wife and little Louis. He loves it, and my wife and I get some quality time most days.
All of this was inspired from reading history books and biographies and realising that minimalism isn’t about stripping everything out of your life so all you are left with is a soulless screen. It’s about removing things that no longer serve you, and leaving the things that mean something to you and living life by a set of rules you set yourself.
I hope that has answered your question, Milos. Thank you for asking it and thank you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all very very productive week.
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What one thing could you do this month that would transform your productivity? That’s what I’m answering this week.
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Script | 351
Hello, and welcome to episode 351 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It’s one of the strange quirks of human nature to overcomplicate things. This is particularly so when things start to go wrong.
In my favourite sport, rugby league—as in most team-based ball sports—the basics of winning a game are possession of the ball and territory. If you can consistently complete your sets in your opponent’s half of the field, you will likely win the game.
Drop the ball or give away silly penalties by overcomplicating moves, and you’ll make it very difficult to win the game.
Teams that lack confidence are particularly guilty of these mistakes. Watch any winning team, and you will see they stick to the basics and never panic when they go a try or goal behind.
You can see this in any workplace, too. Those people who rarely appear stressed or overwhelmed stick to the basics. They have processes for getting their core work done—the work they are employed to do.
Top salespeople dedicate time daily to prospecting and following up with their customers. CEOs ensure they have time for meeting with their leadership team weekly so they are aware of what’s going on and know where the potential issues are.
So, what can you do to ensure you stick to the basics each day to avoid those pernicious backlogs?
Well, before I answer that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from George. George asks, hi Carl, are there any strategies you know of that guarantees someone will always be on top of their work?
Hi George, thank you for your question.
I’ve always found it fascinating to look at occupations where mistakes can lead to a loss of life—airline pilots and surgeons, for example.
Before any flight, a pilot goes through a checklist to ensure the plane is in working order. They check the weather and the weight of the cargo—both of which can affect how the aircraft will fly.
They calculate the speed they need to reach before taking off and plot their flight path to avoid storms or dangerous weather fronts.
No pilot would ever consider not doing these checks. Indeed, not doing them would be an act of gross negligence and could potentially be career-ending.
Similarly, surgeons follow a checklist. They check the patient’s name, the type of surgery being carried out, and, if necessary, which side they will be operating on. They also check the patient’s blood pressure and other measurements.
Again, failure to do so would be considered gross negligence, and a doctor could be fired for not doing them.
Now, perhaps lives do not depend on you doing your job correctly, but approaching your work in the same way a pilot or surgeon does can ensure that your work gets done without missing essential tasks.
The first step is to identify your core work. The work you are employed to do at a micro-level. For example, if you manage a team of people, what do you need to do at a task level to manage your team?
That could be to prepare for and hold a weekly team meeting. It may involve setting aside time each month for a thirty-minute one-to-one session with each team member. That would translate into weekly tasks for preparing for the team meeting and scheduling appointments with your team.
A journalist’s core work may be to research a story and then write the story before the deadline. Imagine their deadline is 1 pm on Thursday; then the journalist could ensure sufficient time is protected before Thursday to get the story written and submitted before the deadline.
What are your core work tasks?
Next comes the all important communications and admin tasks. We all have them. The problem with these tasks is we cannot accurately estimate how much will come in.
Each morning, when I start my day, I have no idea how many emails I will have. Some days, it’s 80; other days, it can be as high as 150. Yet, one thing I can guarantee is that I will have email to deal with.
So, I protect an hour a day for dealing with communications. This way, I know that no backlogs will ever build, and nobody is waiting longer than 24 hours for my response.
Somedays, I need the whole hour; I may only need thirty minutes on other days. Yet I still protect an hour.
It’s no good “hoping” you will find the time to respond to your communications. You won’t find the time, and if you do not have a consistent amount of time to do it, backlogs will soon build.
You mentioned strategies, George, and the strategy is ensuring you have enough time protected for the key work you need to do.
This may mean you need to cap your meetings each week. Now, I know whenever I mention this, people recoil in fear. Yet, if you work an average of forty hours a week and spend thirty hours in meetings, how will you ever get your work done? How will you prevent backlogs?
Let me give you an example how being strategic with your time.
I limit my coaching hours to twenty each week. Think of my coaching sessions as meetings. Following each session, I write feedback, which takes an average of twenty minutes to write.
I know I can dedicate an hour each day to writing feedback, so my limit is three feedbacks per day. That works out at twenty-one per week.
If I allow more than twenty hours for coaching sessions in a week, I will either have to reduce my other work or work longer hours. It would not be sustainable. While the money would be good, my health and effectiveness would suffer. So, it would only be a short-term benefit.
I’ve learned over the years that the only thing you control is what you do in the time you have each day. You cannot control time itself. That is fixed. When you realise that you see that you can only build strategies around what you do, that means getting comfortable saying no.
You cannot say no to your boss and your customers, right? Well, yes and no.
You see, it comes back to that time issue. Twenty-four hours. That’s it. Now, if you are happy using all twenty-four hours running around for your boss and customers, that’s fine. But if you accept that, I would suggest you gain some self-respect.
I know that might be a bit harsh. But you are a valuable person. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, has the right to demand all twenty-four hours of your time.
Sometimes, you do need to say no. You cannot do everything because everything takes time. The question then becomes how much time are you willing to to give to your boss and customers?
Let me give you an example. I protect two hours each day doing my focused work. Work that ultimately benefits my clients and customers. I also protect an hour for communications and thirty minutes for admin. In total, I protect three-and-a-half hours a day for meaningful work.
If I were working a typical eight-hour day, that means I still have four-and-a-half hours available for my boss, customers and clients.
Would four and a half hours be enough for you?
The “guarantee” that puts you on top of your work is consistency with your strategy.
Over the last few days, I’ve travelled back to Korea from Ireland. Door to door, it’s a thirty-hour trip. We set off at 2:00 am on Sunday from the west coast of Ireland and arrived back at our home around 30 hours later.
Between checking in, waiting for flights and flying, I stayed on top of my email and admin. The last thing I wanted when I got back home was a backlog of stuff to do.
Then, after some sleep, I went into my office and spent around three hours catching up with everything else.
Had I ignored my messages and admin, I could have lost a whole day trying to catch up. No, thank you. I’ll take advantage of the downtime when travelling to stay consistent.
By the way, a quick tip David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) gave me a few years ago is to block the whole of your first day back to catch up. If it’s a short trip, you can get away with half a day, but a whole day is always better.
Whatever work you do, there will always be tasks that are core to what you do. Those tasks need to be embedded into your days and weeks as must-do tasks. Must-do tasks are non-negotiable. Because they are non-negotiable, you allow no one—not your boss or customers—to steal that time from you.
Offer alternative times and days, but never negotiate on your core work times.
That’s the only strategy that’s ever worked and will be the only one that will work in the future.
Whatever industry you look at, the top performers know this and stick to it. It’s not just industries either. Top athletes, elite soldiers, and entertainers remain at the top of their field by being consistent with the basics—their core work.
So, spend a little time establishing your core work—the micro-level tasks you need to perform to stay on top of your work. Then, protect time for doing that work. Fix it in your calendar, and never ever let anyone steal that time away from you.
I hope that helps, George. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive New Year.
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This week, I've delved into my archive to bring you an episode first published on the 1st of January this year. This will help you prepare yourself for an outstanding 2025.
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Script | 305
Welcome to episode 305 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
So, 2024 is here. A New Year with a lot of potential new opportunities and plans. The challenge you will face (because we all face this challenge) is executing on all the ideas and plans you have for this year without a loss of enthusiasm or energy.
And that will happen because no matter how well you have planned the year, things will not work out as you imagine. Some things will go exactly how you expect them to, but most will not. And that’s the same for everyone. If you deliver all your plans and projects exactly as conceived, you are not ambitious enough to move forward. You’re making things too easy.
So how do you avoid the loss of enthusiasm and energy that you will need to see you through the year? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s question, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for the question.
This week’s question comes from Carrie. Carrie asks, hi Carl, every year I get excited about all the things I want to do, and when it gets to February or March, I lose all my enthusiasm because I haven’t done anything I had planned to do. Do you have any advice on avoiding this?
Hi Carrie, thank you for your question and Happy New Year to you too.
One thing I can tell you straight up is you are not alone. It turns out 92% of those who set New Year goals or resolutions have given up by 16th February. Only 8% manage to achieve some of their goals.
This means we need to learn what those eight percent do that is different from the 92%.
The first thing I discovered about the 8% is they have no more than three goals for the year. And those three are very specific. For example, they may have a financial, a physical and perhaps a career goal. And that’s it.
If we use these as an example, the financial goal is possibly the easiest. Imagine your financial goal is to save $5,000 this year. You can break that down into twelve months and send $417.00 per month to your savings account. On the 31st of December, you will have a little over $5,000 in it.
On a task level, this is a 30-second task once a month where you send the $417.00 to your account.
Now, if your finances are tight, you may have to review what you are spending money on and make some changes to what you spend, but the action to take is just thirty seconds per month.
Physical goals can be a little more complex. Not everyone does exercise to lose weight. Some just want to improve their overall health; others would like to challenge themselves physically by running a marathon or climbing a big mountain. However, whatever the purpose or “what” the goal is, physical goals mean you need to find time for regular exercise. The essence of the goal is to find the time and do the exercise, and that will almost certainly achieve your goal.
The difficulty with these types of goals is the starting point. If you have not exercised for a number of years and are not in great shape, it is going to be hard. This is like pulling a large truck. The hardest part of pulling a truck is the start. When the rope you are attached to takes the strain to get the truck moving, it takes an inordinate amount of strength. However, once the truck begins to move, it gets easier and easier. The difficulty then becomes stopping the truck.
Starting an exercise programme is the same. It’s incredibly hard to begin with. The first session’s never that bad until you wake up the following morning. When you step out of bed, your muscles scream out in pain, and you’ll wonder how on earth you will be able to repeat your exercise again today.
The thing is, getting fit and staying fit is the same. It’s all about turning up and doing the exercise. But it doesn’t have to be the same exercise each day. Jog one day, walk the next. Then perhaps go for a swim or do some light weights in the gym on other days. Fitness is all about movement, so find time each day for movement.
What I’ve discovered about fitness is that it’s all about routine. It needs to be built into your day, and the time of day you do it needs to work for you. Once it becomes a routine and you get through the first fourteen days, it becomes much easier, and there’s rarely any muscle soreness (and when you do get sore, you feel a sense of achievement because you know you had a good session the day before).
What about a career goal? This is likely to be the most complex of goals. There are likely to be multiple different parts to it. Skills acquisition, experience and time are all involved. So, finding out what skills you need to move up the corporate ladder would be one task. Arranging a meeting with your boss or HR to discuss your goal would be a first step.
Once you know what you need to do, you can then formulate a plan to make it happen. If you need to go back to school, then you can research how best to do that. Then you will need to find the time to study. Again, like exercise, this needs to be scheduled. You won’t achieve educational goals by winging it. You need to set aside dedicated time for studying.
A number of my coaching clients have dedicated days for learning. Two of my clients use the weekends for studying and taking courses or having coaching sessions. Saturday mornings seem to be the most common time for this, but it will depend on your own schedule.
Just one piece of advice here, avoid Sunday nights. These are not the best times for studying. You’ll be distracted by what you have to do next week and likely be tired from all your social activities. The thought of sitting down to study after an eventful weekend would be off-putting for most.
Ultimately, if you want to successfully achieve your goals in 2024, then you will need to establish some habits and routines. This does not need to be overwhelming. You can do as much or as little as you feel capable of. For example, if you plan to read twenty-five books in 2024, that’s one book every two weeks. If you spent an average of forty-five minutes reading each day, you would easily accomplish that goal. This means the only question you need to answer is, when? When will you do your reading?
Perhaps you could include this as part of your morning routine, or instead of watching TV late at night, you read a book.
I will confess that in the last six months, I have spent far too much time watching TV in the evenings. In 2024, instead of watching TV, I intend to read. I have already prepared a comfortable corner to read. It’s a place Louis, my little dog, likes to cuddle up to me in the evenings, and I’m already looking forward to it.
I will still watch TV. However, I have created a list of TV shows and YouTube videos to watch, and I have allocated Saturday evenings to TV watching. If I find I have the urge to watch something, I will add it to the list, and then on Saturday, I can open the list and choose from that list.
What about daily and weekly planning? This is something that will bring you so many rewards. Having a plan for the week is a no-brainer for me. I know what happens when I don’t have a plan. The week goes south very quickly and then I am in overwhelm territory just trying to keep up with silly little things.
When I have a plan for the week, I am more focused. The right things get done, and I have the mental space to deal with the unknowns and urgencies of others without losing focus.
This is something I would recommend to everyone. Make it a habit in 2024 to do both the weekly and daily planning sessions. This one habit will do so much for you when it comes to achieving your goals in 2024.
One thing I must stress, though, is to keep your list of goals as short as you can. Two or three goals is about the right number. Any more than that, and you will be overwhelmed and unable to stay focused on what needs to be done.
Remember, we are all a work in progress. You do not have to change everything in twelve months. Pick the two or three things that are most on your mind right now.
I neglected my fitness in 2023, and regaining my fitness is my number one goal in 2024. Today, I will be heading out for a run, no matter what the weather is. It’s the first day of the year, and it’s not about how well or far I run; it’s about re-establishing the habit of exercising each day. Get the 1st of January in the bag, and tomorrow I can do a few push-ups or go for a long walk.
My goal in January is to do some form of exercise every day. I’m not worried about February right now. If I get through January having done exercise on 25 or more days, that’s a result I will accept. It’s not perfect, but it’s 25 days of exercise—that’s something to celebrate! I can then decide what I will do in February to maintain my momentum.
And that’s what setting and achieving goals is all about. You are not going to be perfect every day or week. But that does not mean you failed. It just means you had a bad day. You can pick it back up the next day or week. It’s not what you achieve in one day; it’s what you have accomplished over 365 days. (Or 366 days this year)
So there you go, Carrie. Keep your list of goals short, and look for habits and routines you can build so that the action you need to take becomes automatic. And remember, just because you had a bad day or week doesn’t mean you failed. You can pick yourself up at any time and get moving again.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive 2024.
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This week, why it’s important to know what kind of person you are.
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Script | 350
Hello, and welcome to episode 350 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
WOW! 350 episodes. I never thought this podcast would still be going strong after six years. Thank you to all of you for following me and this podcast and to everyone who has sent in questions. Please keep them coming in—they are the fuel of this podcast.
So, back to this episode.
One way to destroy your efforts to become better organised and more productive is to fight against yourself. This can manifest itself when you are a deadline-driven person trying to be a carefully planned out person.
Let me give you an example: if you struggle to find the motivation to begin a project because the deadline is six months away, yet you pressure yourself to start now. You’ll likely find yourself losing interest and giving up after a few weeks.
Then you beat yourself up.
But, perhaps you’re not doing anything wrong; you’re just trying to do something you are not wired to do.
That’s why it’s important to know what kind of person you are and to figure and what works and what doesn’t.
Okay, before we go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Matthew. Matthew asks, Hi Carl, What do you recommend to someone who finds it difficult to get motivated unless there the deadline is right on top of them?
Ho Matthew. Thank you for your question.
I’ve witnessed something like this very close to home.
My wife struggles to start work on a project or a task until the deadline is right in front of her. She then pulls out all the stops pulling all nighters if necessary. Yet, she always meets her deadlines.
In the twenty + years I’ve known her, I cannot recall a time she missed a deadline. Ever.
My mother, on the other-hand is the complete opposite. She will begin getting her holiday items together sever months before she travels. I know, when we travel to visit my family over the Christmas holidays, he will be wanting to plan her next trip to Korea with me. Six months before she’s likely to travel. She even gets her suitcase ready.
It would be fruitless to encourage my wife to be more like my mother or vice versa.
My mother hates stress—it gives her a headache. My wife doesn’t see the point in over preparing.
Yet, we shouldn’t be looking at the methods, instead look at the results. Neither my wife nor my mother miss deadlines. They have different approaches, but still achieve the same results.
Some of my coaching clients wake up very early 4:30 - 5:30 am and like to plan their day before they finish their morning routines end. Others find it more beneficial to plan the day the evening before. Yet, as long as you begin your day with a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished that day, does it really matter when you do your daily planning?
I recommend if you are an early bird, do your planning in the morning. If you are more of a night owl, do it the evening before. What matters is you plan the day. The benefits of having a clear idea of what you want to get accomplished that day, far outweighs the timing of your planning.
I have clients who see Ali Abdaal’s productivity recommendations and wonder how he gets any work done with so many tools being used to organise something as simple as what to do and when. Yet, I have other clients who love using the tools Ali recommends.
There’s no right or wrong way to do this as long as you are getting the results you want.
In your case, Matthew, the productivity tool that you should master is your calendar. If you are motivated by deadlines, you will need to be very clear about when you deadlines are. Having your deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section and in a colour you cannot fail to see will ensure you know when your deadlines are.
All my project deadlines are in my calendar in red. These are hard deadlines and when I am planning my week, all I need to do is look ahead two or three weeks to see what’s coming up.
You may also find it helpful to have a Master Projects list in your notes app so when you are planning the week you have a central place where all the information you need is. On your Master Projects list you can have the deadlines, and what needs to happen next. That way you can judge how much work is still required to meet your deadline.
That’s something I’ve learned from my wife. While on the surface she looks a disorganised mess, underneath that disguise is someone who’s looking at the calendar on her phone every evening to see what’s coming up over the next few days.
Last Monday, while we were sitting on the sofa, my wife reminded me that Louis had a grooming appointment on Thursday and she wanted to check I was sill okay to take him.
And there I was thinking she was scrolling social media, yet, she was looking at her calendar for the week to see if she needed to to do something.
Did she need to know about that last week? No.
I did, though. My system’s different from hers. Yet both our systems produced the same result. Louis arrived for his grooming appointment on time.
However despite having very different methods for getting our work done, there are some principles that will never change. Writing your commitments down somewhere you trust is critical.
While my wife does not use any kind of task manager, she does use, and trusts, her calendar. And I’ve seen this with many other people who don’t use a task manager—they still use something they trust.
A former boss of mine, would have his secretary print out his Outlook calendar for the week each Monday morning. He would then fold that calendar up into his pocket diary.
Throughout the week, he would add to-dos and appointments to that printed calendar as required and on Friday afternoon update his Outlook calendar so the up-to-date version would be ready for him the following Monday morning.
Again, he never forgot anything as far as I could tell. It was an unorthodox system, but it worked.
This is why it can be dangerous to copy other people’s systems. They are not you.
Earlier, I published my latest Todoist setup on YouTube. I do this twice a year, and I suspect I do it more for me than for anyone else. I have been doing this since around 2019, so now I have five years of set-ups I can refer back to and see my evolution.
The biggest change came in May 2020 when I launched the Time Sector System. That was a result of struggling to make Getting Things Done work for me in the digital age. I remember walking to the gym one day and being hit be a sudden realisation that really the only thing that mattered was “when” I would do a task, not what I needed to do.
It doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have time to do it. What matters is what you do when you do have time.
This realisation solved so many struggles for me. It caused me to limit the number of meetings I was available for each week, and if I could not restrict my meetings, then I had to restrict the number of tasks I was trying to do.
Perhaps I am more aware of the limits time imposes on us than others, or others knew all this before I became aware of it. Either way, it helped me to begin working to my strengths rather than fighting against them.
This also applies to when you are at your most focused. Most people will find they are at their most focused in the mornings but not everyone is.
Some people will find they are at their best in the evenings. This is one reason why flexible working times work for some and not for others.
If you are more a night owl, working for a company that allows you to work to your own schedule will help you thrive. Working for a company that keeps strict 9 till 5 hours will create all sorts of difficulties for you.
Doist, the parent company of Todoist, works flexible hours. Because they are a 100% remote company, their team is spread throughout the world. They have people on the west coast of America, and people here in Korea. That’s a seventeen hour time difference. Insisting everyone worked a 9 till 5 day would not work.
Doist has an unenviable staff turnover level. I believe over the last ten years only four or five people have left the company. That’s incredible for a company that employs over one hundred people.
I’ve discovered more on this with my pen and paper experiment this year—well, it began as an experiment. It’s hard to call it an experiment now.
Returning to pen and paper has helped me to rediscover the art of thinking and the importance of slowing down from time to time.
Digital tools are great, they make storing and finding documents easy. They all help manage quick notes and ideas. Paper, though is different, there’s no batteries and if you grab an A4 pad of paper, and a Bic ball pen, and disappear to a cafe, you could spend all day there and never have to worry about recharging your device. That bit ball pen will draw a 3 kilometre (about 2 miles) line before it runs out. And of course, there’s no notifications or beeps and buzzes.
Yet, pen and paper doesn’t work for everyone. There’s a lot of people who do love them, there’s also a lot of people who hate them. And that’s fine.
So, Matthew, look at how you prefer to work. If you need deadlines to motivate you, the only thing that matters is you meet your deadlines. If that causes you to have to work later than you want to, perhaps you could create a false deadline. You could say this piece of work must be finished tomorrow by 5PM so I can hand it in the next day.
False deadlines are great. I generally have most of my projects finish at the end of the month, so my “fake” end of the month is the 25th. This gives me around a week before the real deadline hits and ensures I am not scrambling to finish things late into the night.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Matthew. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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This week, the question is on how to reduce the time it takes to complete a solid weekly planning session.
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Script | 349
Hello, and welcome to episode 349 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One issue that frequently comes up in my YouTube video comments and email messages is the subject of weekly planning and it taking too long.
It’s taken me a while to see how this might be happening, but a recent coaching call pointed me in the right direction.
The issue is the difference between what David Allen calls the Weekly Review and planning a week.
The Getting Things Done Weekly Review is, about looking backwards. You spend a lot of time looking at what you have done on individual projects.
Given that in GTD, anything requiring two or more steps is a project and that by following that definition, you are going to have between, and I quote from the Getting Things Done book, thirty and hundred and fifty projects at any one time, is it any wonder weekly reviews take so long.
This is why I do not call my planning session a weekly review. Instead, I am planning the week, not reviewing my work. The word “review”, at least to me, suggests looking at something that happened in the past.
Yet, planning is about looking ahead. What’s happened has happened. What matters is what you do in the following seven days, and that will be contingent on appointments and commitments you have in those seven days.
So, without further ado, let me turn you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling with doing my weekly plan. I’ve taken your advice to do it on a Saturday morning, but it still takes me almost two hours. Are there any secrets to getting it down to less than an hour?
Hi Greg, thank you for your question.
The question I would start with is, “Are you planning the week or looking back at the week just gone?
If you are following the Time Sector System, one routine task I recommend is to give yourself ten minutes before you close out the day to process your task manager’s inbox.
Processing your inbox is about asking three questions:
What is it?
What do I need to do?
When will I do it?
The second question, What do I need to do? May give you the answer, nothing. In that case, you can delete the task altogether.
When you do a task, will depend on its urgency. It may be something that doesn’t need to be done this week, in which case you can move it directly to your next week, this month or next month folder.
If it does need to be done this week, when will you do it this week? You then add the date.
Doing this routine task everyday, means when you sit down to do your weekly planning on Saturday morning, you only need look at your next week and this month folders and move anything to your This Week folder if you must or want to do it in the next seven days.
In my experience, that only takes ten minutes.
Now what about all those projects?
Well, if you are still trying to manage you projects in a task manager, good luck. Weekly planning is going to take a long time. You will have to go through each project and make sure nothing has been missed. That’s going to take a long time if you have between thirty and 150 projects.
However, if you manage your projects in your notes app, then these won’t need reviewing. Every time you touch a project you update the project note. You can, if you wish, move the next task to your task manager, although if you create tasks that tell you to work on a given project, you should not need to do that.
I don’t define a project in the same way as David Allen does. A project for me is something that will take at least three months to complete and will have a lot of tasks to complete.
In the Getting Things Done world. My upcoming trip to Europe is a project. Yet, for me, it’s a single task. Book flights. Once that task has been done, I will know exactly what needs to happen next. Do I need to book a hotel? This year, no, but I will need to book bus tickets once I arrive in Dublin. So the next action is to book the bus tickets.
The thing is, I didn’t know if I needed to book a hotel or a bus ticket because that depended on what time we arrived at Dublin airport. And I didn’t know that until I had booked the flights.
I do have a note in my notes app called “Ireland 2024” and in there, I have my packing list and a list of things I want to purchase while there. I also save my flight tickets and anything else I may need.
Another way to look at it is if you were a HR manager, and a colleague asked you to hire a new team member, that would not necessarily be a project. As a HR manager, hiring people is a part of what you do. It’s probable you will be hiring many different team members, and managing the process of hiring is just a part of your core work.
Yet if you were tasked to overhaul the payroll system or to organise the seamless move of all employees to a new location, given that you wouldn’t ordinarily do that kind of work, they would be projects.
When would you review those projects? Perhaps when you know you have a management meeting coming up, or you have a one to one with your boss.
But, reviewing is not planning. Reviewing is a task by itself.
Planning is about deciding what you will do. A weekly plan is about setting yourself objectives for the week. Daily planning is setting objectives for the day.
Last night, as I planned today, I made writing this script an objective. Once I knew that I would be writing this script, I checked my calendar for my committed events for today, and mentally decided when I would write it.
It did not mean I had to go through all my previous scripts or review the list of questions I keep. That was a task I set on for Saturday afternoon—decide what topics I will create content around next week.
When I was writing Your Time, Your Way, it was obvious what needed to be done each week—set aside one or two hours a day to write the book. How much reviewing was needed for that? Zilch, nada, zero. To complete that project required me to sit down and write the book five days a week.
Every two weeks I had a meeting with my publisher. These were usually Friday evenings for me. This meant I had a task on Friday to review what I had written over the previous two weeks and to add any questions I had for the publisher.
Often my publisher would ask me to do something. Perhaps he wanted me to send him a profile picture, approve the cover designs, or update the chapter list. During the meeting I added those tasks to the meeting note and afterwards, transferred the tasks to my task list.
This meant, when I did my weekly planning, I did not need to go and review the whole project. What needed to be done was already in my Next Week list. All I needed to do was to decide when I would get the information requested together and send it.
The reason planning the week takes so long is likely because you are not planning, you’re reviewing and cleaning up.
Cleaning up your task list, your notes or anything else is not planning. It’s cleaning up. That’s a completely different category of task.
If you’re spending five or ten minutes at the end of the day clearing your task manager’s inbox, deciding what something is, what you need to do, and when you will do it, you won’t have very much cleaning up to do at the end of the week.
When the special forces plan a mission, they start with the objective—take that hill—they then set about working out how they will get to the top of the hill. They don’t waste time looking at what they did or didn’t do this week or how they got to where they are.
They focus their attention on getting from where they are now to where they need to be.
And that’s the approach you want to take when planning your week. You have seven days to accomplish a set number of objectives. The question is what do you need to do to get there?
And just like the special forces, your plan will break—it always does. It’s at that point you pause, look at where you are, and figure out what needs to happen for you to reach your target.
And for us, that’s what we do when we do the daily planning.
I should have written half of that report by now, but I haven’t started yet. What do I need to do in the remaining 48 hours to complete the report by the deadline. Perhaps I need to cancel two meetings tomorrow, so I can use that time to write and get myself back on track?
It’s not going through the project again, and finding excuses for not accomplishing your task. You’re behind, what do you need to do to get back on track? That’s planning.
If you are putting deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section, when you are planning the week, you can quickly see what deadlines you have coming up over the next two or three weeks and that can guide you towards what you should be working on.
If you use task start and due dates in your task manager, then, of course your weekly planning is going to take you longer. You will need to review all your tasks to ensure you haven’t missed anything. Good luck with that approach.
So, when do you review you projects? Personally, I review my projects when I work on them. I have a master projects list table on my notes app that shows me all my projects, their deadlines and what needs to happen next.
Every time I finish working on a project, I update that table with what I did and what I need to do next.
Going back to writing Your Time, Your Way, there was very little updating required. I had five two-hour writing blocks in my calendar each week for writing the book. The next action was easy—continue writing my book.
Now, if a project becomes a complete mess and you don’t know where you are or what needs to happen next, the task is to review the project. That will then help you to get it back on track. But that’s not part of the weekly planning. That’s just a task you need to do, and you may add it as a task to do next week.
Another question, I get asked is what about follow-ups and waiting for’s?
Again, that’s not part of your weekly planning. That’s a separate task. Personally, I check my follow-ups folders once a week or when I am working on a project and I can see I am waiting for something. It’s certainly not part of my weekly planning.
So, if when you sit down to set out your weekly plan, you are also reviewing all your tasks and projects, yes, it’s going to take you a long time. But you are not planning. You’re reviewing.
If you’ve read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or any time management book prior to 2001, none of them had you reviewing “open loops” and “projects”. That’s regressive and means you waste a lot of time focused on the past.
These books—books that helped millions of people—focused planning on what you will do next week, this month, quarter or year. They were forward thinking. That’s what planning the day and week is all about.
What will you accomplish next week? What needs to be done? And when will you do it? That’s it.
And if you are consistent with this, you will find weekly planning will take you between thirty and forty minutes.
I hope that helps, Greg. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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This week, I’m going to show you how to design your “perfect” day.
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Script | 348
Hello, and welcome to episode 348 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
What would a perfect day look like for you? I’m not talking about drinking sangria in a park, feeding animals in the zoo, and later, a movie.
I’m talking about how a typical day would go.
What time would you like to wake up?What would you enjoy doing for the first hour of your day?What would you like to do in the evenings?And what time would you like to go to bed?These questions are all part of what I call designing your perfect week. It’s an exercise that helps you to bring some structure into your day. Once implemented, this reduces the number of decisions you need to make each day and makes planning less demanding and a lot faster.
Not taking control of your calendar means others will take control of it. If not your boss or customers, it’ll be your family and friends. This leaves you being pushed and pulled all over the place.
When you wake up in the morning, you have no idea what will happen or where you will end up. More dangerously, you will have no idea whether you can get your work done, and inevitably, you’ll find yourself with huge backlogs and a lot of accumulated stress.
Not a great place to be if you want to be better organised and more productive.
So, let me show you how you can regain control of your calendar and start putting what you want first.
This means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Megan. Megan asks, hi Carl, I’ve tried designing a “perfect” week but found I don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do. Do you have any tips to fit everything in?
Hi Megan, thank you for your question.
That you have discovered you don’t have enough time for everything you want to do is part of why I recommend people do the Perfect Week calendar exercise. The purpose is to help you see what you do and don’t have time for.
But first, how do you set up the Perfect Week calendar?
First, open up your calendar—it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar. What you are going to do is create a new calendar and call it “Perfect Week”.
I recommend you do this on a larger screen. It is possible to do it on a phone, but you won’t see the bigger picture of the week. A laptop or tablet works better when you do this.
Now, begin with your personal life. How much sleep do you want? What time will you go to bed? Block those times in first. For instance, if, in your perfect world, you go to bed at 11:00 pm and want seven hours of sleep, then you would block 11:00 pm to 6:30 am. (Allow yourself thirty minutes to fall asleep).
Now, how long do you want for your morning routine? Perhaps you want the first hour of your day dedicated to you. To exercise, read, plan, meditate and/or write a journal. All you need to do in your perfect week calendar is block the time you want for these activities on your calendar. Call it your Morning routine time. (The details of what you do in that time can be added as a checklist in your notes later.)
Next look at the evening. What would you like to do?
Be careful here; you may wish to block time out for family and friends. When you do this, you are involving other people, and they will have a different agenda to you.
You could, for instance, protect 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm for family time, but be flexible. Your teenage daughter will unlikely want to spend much time with you. Your partner, on the other hand, may wish you to sit with them and talk or watch their favourite TV show.
Consider “family time” as being flexible. If no one wants to spend time with you, be available. Perhaps you could read in the same room as your family or do some chores around the house.
Next, what would you like to do later in the evening before you go to bed? Put that on your calendar.
Many of my clients enjoy playing a musical instrument, others use that time for self-study and some go out for an evening walk. Whatever you want to do, put it on your calendar.
Now, your work.
A couple of questions you can ask here are: how much time do you need to do focused work? Work that if you are consistent with will prevent backlogs and ensure you meet your deadlines.
And how much time will you allow per week for meetings?
Limiting your available meeting time is a great way to control time.
Imagine you work a forty-hour week and you want three hours a day for focused work; that would leave you with twenty-five hours each week for everything else.
If you were to limit the time you were available for meetings to fifteen hours a week, that would leave you with ten hours for all the unexpected demands that inevitably pop up. Would that be sufficient time?
Play around with these numbers and see if you can find a happy balance.
With the meeting limit once you have filled the limit for that week, you only offer meeting times for the following week.
As this is your perfect week, you can fix times when you are available and when you are not.
Once you have completed your perfect week, does that look like a week you would be happy living?
One adjustment I made to mine was on a Monday. My calls begin early—well, early for me—meaning I need to wake up at 6:15. That’s much earlier than usual. I discovered I was not able to work effectively after around 11:00 am. So, I added a ninety-minute nap window from 11:00 am. That worked perfectly for me.
Now, once you have created your perfect week, turn on your other calendars. Where do things align? You will probably find some activities already aligned, but some will be wildly out
Your mission now—should you choose to accept it—is to align your real calendar with your perfect week one.
This mission will not happen instantly; aligning things may take several months, but it gives you a purpose and goal.
What happens if, after doing this exercise, you discover there are not enough hours in the week to do everything you want to do?
Most people find this after completing this exercise.
It is worth remembering you do not have to do everything all at once.
You could take a course on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and go to your Pilates class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. Perhaps you could do your weekly planning on a Saturday morning instead of a Sunday evening.
This is about completing a puzzle. How do you fit everything into your 168 hours a week?
You can also consider making things seasonal. In the winter months, you do one activity, and in the summer, you do another type of activity. After all, the weather is generally nicer in the summer, and the days are longer.
You may even wish to use the Spring as the cleaning-up season. I do.
Designing the perfect week calendar is not about locking you into a strict structure every week. Its purpose is to help you become realistic about what you can and cannot do each day. It’s from here that you can design the kind of life you want to live.
Over the five or six years since I first did the Perfect Week exercise, I have modified it many times. For example, when I did it the first time, I had this rather ambitious idea: I would go to bed at 11:00 pm and wake up at 6:00.
That didn’t last very long. Many of my coaching calls happen late at night, and I often don’t finish until after midnight. Now, I go to bed at 1:30 am and wake up at 8:30 am (except for Mondays). That has worked for me for over a year now.
I’ve also learned that while I’ve always believed that I am a night owl, I am more focused and creative in the mornings. This led to me protecting 9:30 to 11:30 am five days a week for my focused work.
One thing you don’t want to do, Megan, is to try and squeeze everything in. That will leave you feeling exhausted. Always remember you are a living, breathing human being, not a machine.
You need breaks, you do need to stop and enjoy nature and the environment you live in. It gives your mind a rest, and it elevates your creativity and fulfilment by giving you something different to look at other than a screen.
While I am very structured, I like it that way—I still keep my afternoons free for activities I want to do in the moment. Taking my dog, Louis for his walk, doing the grocery shopping and reading, for example. Whatever needs my attention, the afternoons are when I can do it.
Learning those things was a result of doing the Perfect Week exercise.
David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, often says, “You can do anything, but you cannot do everything”, and I’ve found that’s true. That means the question becomes, what will you do?
I would also say that the end of the year is a perfect time to do this exercise. The start of a new year gives you a motivation to try things and develop the kind of week you want to live.
Thank you, Megan, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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This week, why you should not be copying other people’s systems.
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Script | 347
Hello, and welcome to episode 347 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There is a lot of advice on managing your to-dos, organising your notes and controlling your calendar. And it can be tempting to copy whatever you have seen, believing if it worked for someone else, it must work for you.
Well, not so fast.
One thing I’ve learned from coaching hundreds of people is that no individual is the same. We think differently, have different jobs, and have different family lives and interests.
One example is Tiago Forte’s PARA method. It’s a great way to organise your notes, and many people swear by it. However, it never worked for me. I’m a goal-orientated person. Goals motivate me. I also define Areas of Focus differently from how Tiago defines an area.
This is why I settled on GAPRA (Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive.)
This does not mean that PARA does not work. It works, for some people. Similarly, I have coaching clients who find GAPRA works better. It all depends on how you think, like to organise things and do your work.
So, what can you do with so much conflicting advice? How can you find the methods for you? Well, before I get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, hi Carl. I’ve been a life-long follower of productivity systems and have struggled to find a system that works for me. How would you advise someone to find a way that works for them?
Hi Frank, thank you for your question.
Around 20 years ago, I began my career as an English teacher in Korea.
I had come from working a typical 9 til 5 office job and suddenly I was on the other side of the world, working from 6:30 am to 12:00 pm and 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. It was tough.
I’m not a natural morning person—never have been—so waking up at 5:00 am was a shock to my system.
It wasn’t long before I began taking naps. I would get home at 12:30, and go straight back to bed for two hours.
For the next ten years, that’s what I continued to do.
I had learned about the power of taking naps from none other than Winston Churchill. He believed that if you took a solid 90 minute nap every afternoon you would be able to get at least a day and half’s worth of work done in a day.
He wasn’t wrong. By taking an afternoon nap I found I was full of energy when teaching in the evening and was able to spend an hour preparing for my next day’s classes when I got home in the evening.
Yet, I knew Churchill took his naps between 3:30 pm and 5:00 pm. That didn’t work for me. So I adapted it to work better for me.
Likewise, back in 2016 or so, I read Robin Sharma’s brilliant 5 AM Club book. I was sold. I thought, okay, let’s give this a try.
For those of you not familiar with the 5 AM Club, this is where you wake up at 5:00 AM and do twenty minutes of exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of learning. It’s solid way to begin your day.
Yet, I had a problem. I’ve never been comfortable exercising in the morning. So, I adapted it. I did twenty minutes journal writing, then ten minutes planning the day and finally studied Korean for thirty minutes.
And it worked. I was consistent for around eighteen months and I loved it.
But then I hit a problem. My coaching business began taking off and I was doing coaching calls late at night—sometimes not finishing until midnight. This meant I was trying to survive on four or five hours of sleep. Not a good thing if you want to be productive.
It then occurred to me, the “secret” to the 5 am club is not waking up at 5 am. It’s what you do immediately on waking up that matters.
Today, I wake up around 8:00 am, and start my day with a solid set of morning routines that include journal writing, some stretches and learning my email inbox. It works perfect for me. It sets me up for mostly productive days.
And that’s the key point. Whatever you learn about productivity, time management and living life doesn’t have to be followed exactly as described. We all live different lives and it can be modified to better work for you.
However, there are a few caveats here.
The first is you will not be able to break basic principles.
For instance, if you want a solid way to manage your life, you will need to collect stuff into a trusted place and not rely on your head to remember things. You will then need to spend a little time organising what you collected and finally, you need to do the work.
Yet, how you collect things and where you collect them is entirely up to you. You could use a pencil and notebook, or a sophisticated task management system. Both work.
Another principle I see people trying to break is scheduling far more than the number of hours in the day will allow.
You get 24 hours a day. That’s not going to change. The only variable you have is what you do in the time you have.
This is not as simple as you may think. Sure, it’s easy to schedule seven hours of sleep, an hour for a gym session, four hours for deep work, another three hours for spending with your family and an hour for dealing with your communications and further hour for learning.
All that looks great on a calendar. But what if you didn’t sleep well, you woke up with the start of a heavy cold and had a fight with your teenage daughter?
Yep, that’s real life hitting you in the face.
Now, hopefully that’s not going to happen to you every day, but events will always get in the way of your perfectly planned day.
It’s rare to see any kind of time management or productivity system building in buffer time. Yet, buffer time—time you keep free for the unexpected—is critical if you are to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
One way you can approach the day is to treat it as a puzzle:
Here are the twenty-four hours you have. That’s your constraint. Here’s a list of things you need to do or attend in those twenty-fours hours, now how are you going to fit everything in?
Now, it could be that I am weird, but I love solving this puzzle every day. I love it so much I do it the day before.
First, I look at my confirmed appointments—these are the fixed stakes in the ground. They help to give my day a little structure.
Then, I look at my tasks for that day. Where can I fit these in?
It’s important to know your own natural biorhythms here. When are most likely to be focused? Perhaps you find focusing on deep work in the morning easier than trying to do in the afternoon. If that’s the case, then try to protect two hours in the morning for dedicated focused work.
I should say at this point, every productive person I’ve come across does this. They protect time each day for their most important work. Authors, CEOs, top salespeople, the most successful lawyers and Olympic athletes.
The difference is no matter where they are in the command chain, they are ruthless about protecting time each day for their critical work.
Unproductive, stressed out and exhausted people don’t do this. They don’t protect time. Instead, they have a false belief that they have to be available all the time for their customers and bosses. Well, good luck with that approach. It doesn’t work, never has, and never will.
I remember a sales training session I was on, and the trainer was a former top salesperson—I believe he was formerly the number one car salesperson in the country.
He told us, we could call him at any time if we needed help. But, not before 11 am. He would not answer his phone before 11 am.
When asked why, he explained he needed those two hours in the morning to do his follow ups, and contact his customers who were due to change their car in the next three months and make sure he had appointments scheduled for the rest of the day.
I suspect this was why he was the number one salesperson. He understood how to solve the daily puzzle.
Another area that can disrupt you overall productivity is the tools you use.
There are a lot of fantastic time management and productivity tools available to us today. Many promise the impossible, but ultimately, it will always come down to how you solve the daily puzzle. In that respect, no tool will help you beyond a calendar and a list of tasks that need to be done.
I get questions every day from people asking me if it’s possible to do this or that thing. What they are really asking me is “how do I complicate things?”
Let’s be clear, all you need to know each day is what appointments you have and when and what your critical must do tasks for the day are.
Once you know this and you know you have sufficient time to complete everything, you’re good to go.
The more organising you do, the more lists you create and the more tools you use, the less time you have to get on and do the work.
I mentioned Tiago Forte’s PARA method earlier, and I remember the popularity of this when Tiago launched his book on the subject. There was a frenzy and YouTube lit u with people doing videos on how to set up this notes app or that one with the PARA method.
I could see immediately why it was so popular. It was another way to reorganise things. It gave people something to play with. In other words it gave people an excuse not to do their work.
PARA is great, but it’s not going to make you more productive or better at managing time. I use Evernote and it’s a complete mess. When I need something, I use Evernote’s powerful search.
Whether I’m looking for a client note, a reference to an idea I had several years ago or my book notes from a book I’ve read on Kindle, all I need do is type a keyword, a date range or person’s name and in less than a second I have the information in front of me.
I could spend hours each week keeping my notes up to date, summarised and organised, or I can rely on search and give me those hours to get my work done. I know what I choose.
Over the last three or four months, Todoist has introduced a calendar and start and due dates. I use neither. They don’t help me get my work done and both of those features just add more complexity to what should be a simple list.
You don’t need to use all the features an app has. Use the ones that help you to focus on your work and leave alone the ones that add more organising work.
I hope that has helped, Frank. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
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This week, I have a special episode for you.
A second interview with Dr Kourosh Dini.
In this episode, we talk about rationalisation and how to change our approach to many of the false beliefs that come from it.
We also discussed pens and paper and a little more about managing ADHD.
Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work.
Newsletter:https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/Waves of Focushttps://wavesoffocus.com/on SMART goalshttps://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/
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Is it possible to expand time? Literally, no. But there is a way to find more time if you’re willing to use these techniques.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Subscribe to my Substack
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 345
Hello, and welcome to episode 345 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Common phrases you will hear are “I don’t have time” or “I wish I had more time”, and yet you already have all the time you need.
The problem is not time, the problem is often the amount of things we want to do in the time we have.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, life was simple. Find food and water, make babies and stay safe. Neglecting either of those three things would result in some serious issues—the biggest of which would be death.
Given that human evolution is slow, we are not best suited to deal with hundreds of emails and messages, requests from bosses, finding child care, commuting to and from work and all the other modern-day accessories we’ve chosen to add to our lives.
We cannot expand time, yet if we are unwilling to reduce what we want to do, we will feel overwhelmed and that more modern ailment, the fear of missing out, or FOMO.
However, there are a few techniques you can use that will give you enough time for the things you want to do if you are willing to try them.
But before I get to how, allow me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Giles. Giles asks, Hi Carl, I’ve done your “perfect week” exercise and realise that my problem is I want to do too much. There isn’t enough time in the day. Do you have any tips on fitting in hobbies and still get enough sleep?
Hi Giles, thank you for your question.
The good thing is you’ve discovered that no matter what you want to do or feel you must do, you will always be limited by the amount of time available.
And, now that you’ve done the Perfect Week calendar exercise, you can see what you have left after taking care of your work and family obligations.
One of the first realisations about finding time was when I learned of Ian Fleming’s writing routine.
Ian Fleming wrote a new book each year from 1952 to his death in 1964. He never missed a year, even in the year he had his first heart attack in 1961.
In the early years, Fleming worked For The Sunday Times as their foreign editor, yet he negotiated a two-month vacation each January and February. During those two months, he would fly off to his Jamaican home, Goldeneye and almost from the first day, would begin writing the next book from 9:30 to 12:30.
After lunch, he would nap, and then the day’s socialising would begin.
Around 4 pm, he would go back to his writing desk for an hour to review what he had written that morning, and that would be it.
Four hours a day for six weeks. That produced the first draft of his next book.
For the rest of the year, he worked his regular job in London. Dealt with any rewrites and began marketing the book that was being published that year.
If you were to analyse how Ian Fleming managed his time, he wasn’t looking at the day-to-day. He looked at the year as a whole.
He knew he needed six weeks to write a new novel each year, so he made sure those six weeks were blocked out in his diary before the new year began.
That’s just six weeks out of fifty-two.
This is similar to blocking time out for your core work. If you know you need ten hours a week to do your core work, hoping you will find the time is not a sustainable strategy. You won’t, so it will be more a case of hoping you will find the time.
Those ten hours need to be locked in each week.
Ian Fleming would never have written fourteen James Bond novels if he had “hoped” to find the time to do so. He had to find the time and then protect it.
You have 168 hours a week and twenty-four each day. Squeezing everything into those twenty-four hours will be tough—almost impossible. Yet, if you were to schedule for the week, where you have 168 hours, things become possible.
I see many people anxiously trying to find family time every day. It would be nice if you could do that, but you are dealing with other people and your 6 to 9 pm might not be convenient for them.
Instead, you could agree with your family that certain days or evenings are for family time. For instance, my wife and I ensure that Wednesday afternoons and Saturday evenings are protected for family time.
It’s lovely because while it is flexible, there’s no need for us to be trying to schedule time. It’s already protected.
This is all about expanding time. Looking at an individual day is tough; there are a lot of emergencies and unknowns that pop up. However, if you were to establish what you want time for each week (or month), block the time out so you know you have the time to do it, you will always have the flexibility to move things around if things change.
For example, this week, my wife had an exam to do on Wednesday afternoon, so we rescheduled our family day out to Thursday. All I needed to do was to move a few of my other commitments around so I could still get all my work done that week.
You can apply the same principles to your work commitments. If you require ten hours a week to get your core work done—the work you are employed to do, not the work you volunteer to do—you can pre-protect that time on your calendar.
Now, I know many people will object and say they cannot do this because they have to attend meetings.
That’s fine. Let me ask you a question. What will do more to get the project completed? Having a meeting about the project or working on the project?
If the project objectives have been communicated clearly and roles defined, meetings should not be needed.
One of the best ways to regain time is to become less accessible. Most people’s time management problems start by being too accessible. Of course, this will depend on the type of work you do. A salesperson, for instance, should be accessible to their customers. But perhaps not necessarily be as accessible to their admin departments or even their sales manager. If you’re producing the results, I can promise you your sales manager will leave you alone.
When I first began teaching time management and productivity, I was available on all social media channels. I was on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and email. Just to stay on top of all those channels was taking me three hours a day. I don’t have three hours a day to manage all those channels.
So, now I push everyone towards email. I have a process for dealing with email. Over the years, I have refined it to a point where I can handle over a hundred emails in less than an hour.
And the final point to make here, Giles, is you don’t have to do everything now.
Imagine If there’s a period each year when things go a little quiet at work. Perhaps in the summer, it’s quieter than at other times of the year. Maybe July and August is a good time for you to do some of the bigger projects. Then, when you enter the busy times of the year, you can work on the smaller projects.
One way you can do this is to use a tool such as Todoist, Asana, or Trello that allows you to create boards. You can then create four columns and spread out the activities you want to do.
For example, in quarter 1, I focus on my biggest projects of the year; I like to kick off the year with a bang. Q2 is focused more on processes and making them more effective and efficient.
Seeing everything I want to accomplish over the year organised in quarters stops me from becoming anxious about all the things I want to do.
This also gives you a plan for the year, which in turn helps you to be more focused.
Again, you can be flexible here. Feel free to move projects around the year so you are working on the right projects at the right time.
Time can be your friend or enemy. If you don’t harness it, it will be your enemy. If you take control of it, you will find you do have sufficient time for the things you want to do. Perhaps not this week or next, but when you look at things over a quarter or a year, many things become possible.
I know some of you would like to build an exercise programme into your life. Yet the thought of joining a gym, or yoga class puts you off because you have go to the gym, spend an hour exercising, then shower. After all that it will have eaten up two hours of your time.
You don’t have to do all that—certainly not initially. You could do some bodyweight exercises at home or go out for a walk. That won’t take up much of your time. I do twenty minutes every day at home.
As your fitness improves, then you may wish to add a few gym sessions. But that’s not a requirement of being fit and healthy.
I hope that has helped Giles. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too. It just remains for me to wish you a very very productive week.
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Backlogs… A rather bigger part of life that we probably wish wasn’t. Did you know that there are three types of backlog, two of which you don’t really need to worry too much about? Let me explain.
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Script | 344
Hello, and welcome to episode 344 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Let’s be honest: somewhere in our carefully organised lives, backlogs will build. It could be email, the ever-increasing list of house repairs, or the daily admin life generates.
With everything going on in our lives, it would be easy to believe that finding the time to stop these backlogs from growing is impossible.
Yet, when you understand the three types of backlogs, you can develop a process that stops the backlog from growing.
The three types are the growing backlog, the stalled backlog and the shrinking one.
You don’t need to worry about the shrinking backlog. It’s doing what you want it to do—shrinking. That could be getting your receipts together in preparation for doing your taxes. You’re gathering and sorting them, so the backlog is shrinking. This generally happens when the tax submission season is almost upon us.
The stalled backlog is also a little less urgent. It’s not growing, but you need to watch it carefully because this kind of backlog can start snowballing—house or car repairs, for example, often do this.
The most dangerous backlog is the growing one. This often happens with email and admin tasks and can occur when you try to expand your business too fast without adding resources.
Before we go any further, let me first hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janice. Janice asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to get my life organised but don’t have time because I have so many things to do. My email’s a mess, and every weekend, I spend all day cleaning up my home. How do you get on top of things when you are far behind?
Hi Janine, thank you for sending in your question.
This is a tough one. It can feel like we are stuck between wanting to get ourselves organised and realising that we have such a big backlog of stuff to do that it would take several months to break even—so to speak.
The strategy here is to first determine what kind of backlog you’re dealing with. Is it growing, stalled, or shrinking?
If it’s shrinking, keep doing what you are already doing. It’s shrinking, so it’s doing what you want it to do. Don’t stop.
The one that needs immediate attention is the growing one.
Imagine that you have over a few thousand emails in your inbox. It’s making finding important emails slow and cumbersome, and you want to get it cleared.
The challenge is that more emails appear every day, and that number is not fixed. Some days, you may receive 150+ new emails, while other days, perhaps it’s eighty. Either way, until you can achieve a net gain—i.e., processing and clearing more emails than come in—the backlog will continue to grow.
With email, I would first clear out the older emails. There will be a point where you’ve ignored an email for so long that it would be embarrassing to respond to it now. Where is that point?
For me, that’s two weeks. It would be embarrassing for me to respond to any email that’s been sitting around for two weeks or more. You may be more tolerant than I am. You may be happy responding to emails older than a month or two. Where is your limit?
Once you know your limit, take any email older than your limit and move it to a new folder in your email program called “Old inbox”. This way, nothing has been lost, and you can go through that list when you have time. That list will no longer be growing. You’ve put a stop to it.
Now, to prevent the backlog from growing, you will need to clear whatever emails remain in your inbox first, so you start from zero.
Now, here’s where you will need to be cautious of FOMO—the fear of missing out. This can paralyse you because you are fearful that you might be deleting something important. Fear not. Always remember with email if you have been sent something there will be a copy of it somewhere.
If for whatever reason you do need something you’ve deleted, you can reach out to a colleague and get a copy.
One of disadvantages of digitalization is we no longer see things piling up. Back in the day when most of what came across our desks was paper, it was very easy to see backlogs growing. The pile was physical and you could see it. With digital, it’s very easy to go into Ostrich mode. (Although ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand)—this is the out of sight, out of mind theory.
When I was working in a law firm in the late 90s, the majority of communications were through letters. Each day I would get in the region of a hundred to hundred and fifty pieces of mail. That needed processing. The advantage was I could see it all in my physical inbox and my goal was the clear that by the end of the day.
With email, the only way to see it is to open my inbox. That makes it easy to ignore it—which surprise surprise creates backlogs.
Admin is another area where backlogs can grow. Like communications, admin will grow each day if you are not dealing with it consistently.
This can be keeping your receipts organised, maintaining your company’s CRM system or, in the medical profession, keeping patient notes up-to-date.
If you are not protecting time for these each day, backlogs will grow.
If you’ve watched the brilliant film, Apollo 13, or read about that incredible story, one thing that will strike you is the astronauts followed checklists and routines to ensure everything was working as it should be.
The cause of the catastrophic explosion on board Apollo 13 was a simple routine task of stirring the oxygen tasks.
Astronauts are highly intelligent people. Yet, they know they cannot rely on remembering to do important routine tasks. They use checklists.
The same goes for pilots, surgeons and the military.
Each have checklists for daily mundane tasks that if not done will result in backlogs or something much worse.
You too can do something similar. Think of a shift at work as having a few key parts to it. Meetings, focused work and then routine work. Your routine work will likely be responding to actionable emails and messages, updating any internal customer management systems and your own admin.
This means estimating how much time you need for each of these activities.
The good thing here is you already have the data. How long, on average does it take you to update your company’s internal client relationship management system? How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications?
You can only work with averages here, but averages are enough. Some days you will get more than your average, yet other days you will get less.
If you’ve never measured how long it takes you, give yourself a week to track how much time you need in these areas. Again, you can only work with averages but that will give you an indication of how much time to protect each day for getting your work done.
One area I find people resisting this change is work they perceive as being more important. Meetings for example, seem to have a disproportionate level of importance. Sure, if you have a meeting with an important client, that will likely be more important than staying on top of your admin. But what about all those internal meetings? Are they really important or are you just showing up to show your face?
I cannot imagine a pilot or surgeon skipping their pre-flight or pre-operation checklist because they have an internal meeting. That would be a firing offense. So why do you do it?
We all will be different here, but I find if I spend an hour a day on my communications and thirty minutes on admin, I will, on the whole, end the week with no backlogs—certainly nothing overwhelming. That’s just ninety minutes a day. Ninety minutes that prevents stress, anxiety and missing something important.
Now, there will be some days when that will not be possible. Days when I am travelling, for instance, often mean it’s difficult to sit down and deal with my communications and admin. However, it’s worth working on the principle that one is greater than zero, so spending twenty minutes on communications and perhaps ten minutes on admin helps to keep things from spiralling out of control.
Yet, perhaps the most important thing is to identify where backlogs occur in your life. That would be the first step.
One area I never thought of was household chores. It’s easy to ignore that pile of washing in the corner of the bathroom until you find you have no clean underwear. Then it becomes an issue.
Now, on Tuesday’s and Saturdays, I do the laundry. It’s only fifteen minutes, but ensures I have a supply of clean clothes at all times. Plus, I can do it in between sessions of work. It gets me away from the screen and is far better for my eyes.
And I hate coming into the office and not having a clean coffee mug. Now, before I leave the office for the day, I will ensure the cups and tea pot are washed and ready for the next day. That’s less than five minutes a day.
One tip on dealing with the stalled backlog. Because it’s stalled you don’t have the same sense of urgency. Yet, it still needs to be dealt with. What you may find works is to identify it when you do your weekly planning and allocate a little extra time the following week to deal with it.
For example, if you have a pile of documents that need to be processed from last month, give yourself thirty minutes or so around you lunch time or mid-afternoon to work on it. Depending on how big it is, you will find that within a week or two that backlog has gone.
I hope that has helped Janine.Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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