Afleveringen
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What is âTime-Based Productivityâ, and how can you apply it to your daily work? Thatâs the question I am answering this week.
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Script | 322
Hello, and welcome to episode 322 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the huge benefits of the Time Sector System is that it removes the tyranny of task-based productivity and replaces it with something more concrete: time.
You see, tasks will never stop coming at you. Your kidsâ toys need to be picked up, the laundry needs to be done, your bed needs to be made, and youâd better check the refrigerator to see what you need to pick up from the supermarket. And thatâs before you start your work day.
If you base your productivity system on the tasks you need to do, you will wear yourself out. Itâs impossible because itâs never-ending. There are no barriers, and you will see this rather quickly if you use a task manager. Task managers fill up, and everything is screaming at you to be done.
But then youâre faced with the question: where am I going to find the time to do all these tasks?
It always comes back to time.
This weekâs question asks how you can transition away from this tyranny of task-based productivity and bring a sense of control and calm into your world.
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Jens. Jens asks, hi Carl, I am always overwhelmed with tasks and never able to get all my work done. I am also constantly interrupted by messages and emails and never seem to be able to get a quiet moment. How would you handle this situation?
Hi Jens, thank you for your question.
You describe a real problem today. Over the last fifteen years or so, technology has broken down the barrier between our work and personal lives. Long gone are the days where when we finished work for the day we really did finish work. If we needed to respond to a work email, it had to be done from our office computer. Once we had gone home, that was it. No more work email.
Sure, there were other issuesâpeople staying late in the office for one, but at least when you left your place of work for the day, that was it. You left work at work. (Or it certainly felt like it.)
So, what can you do today to establish some barriers so you do not always feel pressure to do more?
A few years ago, I discovered that if you base your system on task management, you will lose. Tasks are never-ending, and there will always be more to do than time available to do them.
It was that phraseââalways more to do than time availableâ that gave me a clue towards the solution. If tasks were unlimited, then perhaps I could work on the one area that was limitedâtime.
Working with time gave me natural limits or constraints. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and during that time, I need to eat and sleep at the very least. That then gave me a new number to work with. Given that I personally need around seven hours of sleep and, letâs say, ninety minutes for eating, then all I had left was fifteen and a half hours for everything else.
Once you work out how much time you need for sleep and eating, plus time for personal hygiene, you likely will have around fourteen hours a day to work with.
So the temptation is often how much work can you fit into fourteen hours, yet thatâs probably not the best place to work from.
Work is just one part of your life. Itâs an important part, but so is time spent with your family, getting a little exercise and perhaps some relaxation activities such as watching TV, reading a book or watching your favourite sports team.
When you add up all the time you need for these activities, your work day will likely be around eight to ten hours.
So, what can you do in, say, nine hours?
Well, letâs break things down a little further.
Email and Slack or Teams messages will probably be a big part of your workâparticularly if you are a knowledge workerâi.e. you are employed for your brain rather than your physical strength. That being the case, how much time do you need to be able to stay on top of all these messages and emails?
In my case, I need about an hour a day to respond to my actionable emails. You will likely be around the same figure. Think of it this way: if you had one uninterrupted hour each day for responding to your actionable emails, would you be able to stay on top of it?
If thatâs the case, then you need to protect an hour a day for managing your communications. If you accept you need an hour yet do not protect that hour, whatâs likely to happen?
At the very least, youâll need two hours the next day, three the day after that and so on. Where will you ever find two or three hours in a day for nothing but email and messages?
Not protecting time for these activities is not sustainable. Thatâs how backlogs build up, and that just drains you.
One of the first things I advise my coaching clients to do is protect some time each day for communications. This one positive action can bring huge benefits.
The first is that you stop worrying about whatâs lurking in your inbox. You know you have time protected to deal with it. This means you are going to be much more focused on the work you want to get done. The second is that it starts to reduce the âaddictionâ of going in and out of your inbox âcheckingâ to see if anything important has come in.
All that checking is creating havoc in your cognitive abilities to focus on what needs to be done. Itâs hugely inefficient and drains your mental energies.
Try to think of it in terms of the gears in your car. If you are constantly changing gears, you are going to run out of fuel much faster than if you get into top gear and stay there. You may not be accelerating as fast, but you are running at a much more efficient rate, which conserves energy.
Constantly switching your attention to check email or messages does the same thing to your brain as if you were going up and down the gears. Itâs highly inefficient and drains you of energy.
But we keep checking because we donât feel confident that we have sufficient time at the end of the day to clear any actionable email.
The key to time-based productivity is to identify the types of work you are expected to do. For example, if you are a designer, how much time do you want to spend on design work each day?
Imagine you protected four hours each day for doing focused design work; this means you could focus all your efforts on doing the work you were employed to do. From 8:30 am to 12:30 pm, you would block that time on your calendar as focused design work.
Now, all you need is a list in your task manager called âdesign workâ, and you can pick which you will work on that day.
Now, I know many of you will immediately tell me thatâs impossible. Okay, it might be in your situation. But rather than dismiss this idea, perhaps you could play with it.
Perhaps instead of blocking the first four hours of your day for focused work, you could break it down into two-hour segments. You could do two hours of focused work and one hour of miscellaneous work, such as communicating with your clients and colleagues. Then do another two hours in the afternoon.
That would still leave you with four hours for meetings, returning calls and messages, and handling emails.
I promise you that one change will radically improve your productivity and leave you a lot less exhausted at the end of the day.
If this is so effective, why do so few people do it? Fear.
Itâs the fear of saying no to someone who wants to interrupt your protected time. And thatâs hard. Thereâs an element of FOMOâthe fear of missing out, but also a deeper human instinct to be alert for danger. That danger today, is not some predatorial mammal but angry bosses, upset clients and people thinking youâre being lazy because youâve disappeared.
However, when it comes to your evaluation as an employee, no one remembers whether you answered an email in thirty minutes or less. You will always be assessed on your results.
People will always remember when you failed to meet a deadline or didnât deliver an order on time. Saying, âBut I replied to your emails and messages within a few minutes,â isnât going to wash.
The only way to get results is to do your work. If youâre wasting precious time allowing yourself to be interrupted and distracted, something is going to have to change.
So, yes, if you base your productivity on the number of tasks you have to do, you will feel overwhelmed and stressed out. Thereâs only one end resultâburnout, and thatâs not very pleasant.
Instead, make a list of your core work activitiesâthe work you are employed to do and a list of the things you want to spend time doingâyour non-work related activities.
Then, open up your calendar and find time for those activities.
With your core work, I recommend you fix it as repeating blocks on your calendar where possible. Find a time in the day when you are least likely to have meetings and block it out now.
You may find that a fixed time is not possible because of the dynamic nature of your work; in that case, block sufficient time out on a week-to-week basis for you to get your work done. Itâs an extra planning task, but itâs worth it.
For the tasks you want to complete, place them in your task manager in folders designated by when you will do them: this week, next week, etc. Then, label or tag the task by the category of work it relates to.
Is the task related to communication or administration? Does it relate to your core work as a designer, salesperson, or manager? On your calendar, create blocks of time for each of these categories. When the time comes, the only list you need to look at is the list of tasks for that particular category. Then, do as many of them as you have time.
If you remain consistent with this process and donât cherry-pick the easy tasks, your output will soon shift upwards. I know; Iâve seen it time and time again. It works, and very few people ever complain you are no longer as available. And the few that do, once you explain you need quiet time to get on and do your work effectively, they soon stop complaining.
Switching away from unsustainable task-based productivity is easier than you may think. It does take a positive effort, though. To start, decide how much time you need each day to fulfil your work commitments and go from there. Once you see it working, you will be encouraged to add more focused time blocks.
Thank you Jens, for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me know to wish you all a very very productive week.
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If your notes are a disorganised mess, this episode is the one for you.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Script | 321
Hello, and welcome to episode 321 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This week, I have a special episode for you. No question; instead, I want to share a way to think about your productivity tools, particularly how your notes app fits into the whole scheme of things.
There is a trinity of productivity toolsâyour calendar, task manager, and notes appâthat when connected, will enhance your overall effectiveness by reducing the friction between organising and doing work.
Today, I want to focus on the notes app because this is the tool that is most often neglected.
Within this Trinity of tools, your calendar is number 1. Everything flows from your calendar because that is the tool that will prevent you from being overly ambitious and give you the reality of the day. There are twenty-four boxes in your calendar, each representing an hour, and thatâs all you get each day.
You cannot change that, for time is the fixed part of your productivity system.
Your task manager tells you what tasks you have committed to and when you will do those tasks. Its relationship with your calendar is critical because if you have seven hours of meetings, youâre committed to picking your kids up from school, and you have a hundred tasks to do; you will know instantly you have an impossible day. You can then either reschedule some meetings or reduce your task number.
So, where do your notes come into this trinity?
Your notes support your tasks. Itâs here where you will manage your projects, interests, goals and areas of focus. Itâs also where you can keep your archive, which, if used well, will become a rich resource of inspiration, ideas and creativity. But more on that later.
Of all the productivity tools you use, your notes app is the one where you can be a little relaxed. Your notes do not need to be perfectly curated and organised. Most notes apps today have powerful search built in, and I would argue that the ability to search within your notes is a critical part of your choice when choosing a notes app.
I suspect Evernoteâs popularity over the years (despite its recent changes) is due to two factors: its search, which is arguably still the best in the field, and its brilliant web clipper.
The ability to search your notes means that as long as you give any note a sufficiently descriptive title, you will be able to find it quickly and effortlessly.
As a side note, I highly recommend that you learn all the different ways your notes app can search for your notes. Just Google your notes app of choiceâs search functions. For instance, you can search âOneNote searchâ or âNotion searchâ. Learning this will save you a lot of time in the future.
Evernote has a keyboard shortcut on the Mac operating system that Iâve been using for years. However, for a brief period in 2019, this feature stopped working while Evernote was transitioning from the old âlegacyâ version to the new Evernote 10, which was very frustrating.
During that six-month period, I realised how important it was to be able to search your notes quickly in terms of overall productivity.
Your notes do not just support your projects. They can also support multiple parts of your life, from tracking your goals to keeping your eight areas of focus front and centre of your life.
Moreover, you can keep track of your hobbies, wish lists, book notes (if you read Kindle books), self-development topics, and interests. And all this information can be taken with you wherever you are through your mobile phone.
All this is great, but what if you have a notes app up and running, but it has become neglected and lacking in a little TLC (tender loving care)? Well, fear not. As you do not need to be as strict about how tidy your notes are, getting things back on track can be a little project you do over a few weeks or months.
Hereâs how to get things started.
First, create five folders. What these are called in your own notes app will depend on the app you are using. If your preference is OneNote, this would be your notebooks, Evernote would be stacks and Apple Notes would be folders. To help you, this is the highest level you have in your notes app.
These five folders should be named as follows:
Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources, and finally, your Archive. Again, depending on what app you are using, you will also need an Inbox for collecting your notes.
To give you a quick summary of what goes in each folder, for your goals, this is where you put the goals you are currently working on. Really, this is a place where you keep track of your goals. For example, if you are saving money, you can track how much you are saving each month. Similarly, if you are losing weight, you can track your weight each week and add the numbers here.
Your areas of focus is where your eight areas go. If you are unaware of these, you can download my free areas of focus workbook from carlpullein.com. What you do with this folder is create a subfolder for each area and have a note in each defining what each area means to you and what you need to do to keep it in balance.
Next up, your projects folder. For each project you are currently working on, you would have a subfolder. There, you can keep notes on any meetings you attend, checklists, links to any files you need, copies of relevant emails and contact details for collaborators.
You can also keep a master projects list here, which will give you quick access to any of the projects you are working on.
Then, there is your resources folder. This is for your interests, hobbies, further education, and anything else you want to keep. Think of this as your commonplace notebook area. If you are not sure what a commonplace book is, hereâs the Wikipedia definition:
âCommonplace books are a way to compile knowledge, usually in notebooks. They have been kept from antiquity and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.â
Your resources folder is unique to you, and you donât want to overthink it. I love all things related to James Bond, and I have a subfolder of articles, links, and videos related to all things James Bond. Thereâs stuff in there about the films and locations, clothing and props, and products the James Bond from the books used.
Itâs a gold mine of information related to something I have a deep interest in and itâs unique to me.
And your archive. Contrary to popular belief, this is not one step away from the trash. Your archive is a rich resource of discarded ideas, old projects, and stuff you were once interested in. Itâs here where you can potentially make connections only you could make. Your life experiences, knowledge, and way of thinking make you who you are, and many of the ideas and things you were once interested in may be the spark to something very special.
When Steve Jobs was at university, he took a calligraphy class. At that time, it was a passing interest, yet several years later, when they were designing the Mac User interface, many of the things he learned in that class came back to him. Today, whether you use a Mac or Windows machine, you can thank Steve Jobs that you have hundreds of fonts to choose from.
Nobody had made the connection that multiple fonts to choose from would allow people to use their computers to be creative. Perhaps nobody would have done had Steve Jobs not taken that calligraphy class.
Thatâs the power of your archive. Yes, I know Steve Jobs didnât have the benefit of Apple Notes in the early 1980s, but that passing interest sparked an idea we all benefit from today.
Itâs the randomness of your archive, built up over many years, that will become a place for you to, at the very least, reminisce. This is where you have the freedom to dump stuff. You never know when or if any of what you put in there will become useful again.
Once you have your folder structure set up, you can go through all your old notes and move them into your new structure. Now, I want to stress that you do not need to do this in one go. Take your time, enjoy the process and reminisce as you go through your old notes. This should never be a chore; it should be treated as a fun project.
Remember, because of the powerful search your notes app has, all your notes, new and old, are searchable. So there is no rush to do this. You could decide to do this while watching TV in the evening or perhaps while commuting to work if you use a bus or train. Maybe you have a long flight coming up; you could use some of that time to go through your notes.
One tip I can give you here is that as you go through your old notes, you should ensure that the titles of your notes mean something to you. If you come across notes with an image, for example, you may find that the title is something IMG6654. You want to change that title as it wonât be searchable in that format.
You can also add tags if you wish to. Be careful not to tag something with the same name as the name of your folder or subfolder. To give you an example from my James Bond subfolder, I use tags to denote whether something is related to a book, film prop or location. I use a coded tagging system. So, anything related to a location would be tagged JB Location. Anything related to a film would be tagged JB Films.
Likewise, I have a subfolder in my resources called Places to Visit. The tags I use here are the place names. So, I have tags for Paris, London, Seoul, Tokyo etc.
Your tags are there to aid search, so if you decide to use tags, make sure you use names that mean something to you. You do not want to be too clever here. A good adage to go by is, âWhen tagging, tag as if you were being your dumb self.â
Now, if you want to learn more and go into more detail, I have just published a brand new course called Mastering Digital Notes Organisation. In this course, I go into detail on setting up your notes, how to process new notes, and the importance of the three underlying foundations of provenance, categories, and series.
This course will also show you how to build a rich resource of information that you will want to revisit repeatedly. Details on how to join the course are in the show notes, or you can go directly to my website, and the links and everything you need to know will be right there.
Thank you for listening, and I wish you all a very, very productive week.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Setting up a structured day makes sense. It reduces decision-making and helps you prioritise your work. But how strict should you be with this structure? Thatâs the question I answer this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Take The NEW COD Course
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Script | 320
Hello, and welcome to episode 320 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
The change that has given me the biggest productivity benefit over the years was giving my calendar priority over every other productivity tool. This means that if my calendar tells me itâs time to buckle down and do some focused work, I will do that. If a customer or boss asks for a meeting when I have scheduled time to work on a project, I will always suggest an alternative time.
This single change has meant I get all my work done (with time to spare), I can plan my days and weeks with a reasonable amount of confidence, and I rarely, if ever, get backlogs.
However, when you adopt this method, the temptation is to adhere to it rigidly. And that is where things begin to go wrong.
This weekâs question is on this very question. How strict should you be with the plan you have for the week? So, with that said, literally, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Lucas. Lucas asks, hi Carl, I love your idea of blocking time out for your core work each week. The problem I have is I feel guilty now whenever I ignore a message or refuse to meet someone when I have a time block. What do you do to overcome this feeling of guilt?
Hi Lucas, thank you for your question.
Having structure in your day (and week) lets you know with a strong degree of confidence that you have sufficient time each day to do your work.
Let me give you an example. Pretty much all of us get email each day. Itâs just one of those inevitable parts of life. Now, if you are a typical knowledge worker, you will be getting upwards of 80 emails each day. Letâs say, of those 80 emails, half of them are non-actionable, 10 of them are for reference, and the remaining emails (thirty) require a response of some sort from you.
How long will it take for you to respond to thirty emails? An hour? An hour-and-a-half? However, how long it will take you is rather less important. What matters is that at some point in the day, you will need to deal with those emails. If you donât allocate some time, you will require double the amount of time tomorrow because you will have to deal with all the emails you didnât deal with today.
Thatâs how backlogs build: by being unrealistic about the amount of time you need to protect to stay on top of things like email and your admin.
It would be easy for me to sit here and tell you to find an hour a day and dedicate it to responding to your emails. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, life will get in the way. It always does.
And even if life doesnât get in the way, you may be exhausted, or something could be worrying you. All of which will conspire to slow you down and make you less efficient.
Instead of strictly sticking to a plan, you will find it better to work on the principle that one is greater than zero. In other words, while you may like to have an hour to manage your emails, on those days that you donât, give yourself twenty or thirty minutes instead.
The goal is not necessarily to clear your actionable email each day. The goal is to stay on top of it. This means that if you are unable to clear all your actionable emails today when you come to deal with your email tomorrow, you begin with the oldest and work from there.
This way, no one will ever wait longer than twenty-four hours for a reply.
This approach gives you the flexibility to deal with requests as and when they come inâand they will come in. Iâm sure youâve had the experience of waking up with a clear plan of action for the day, only to begin your work day and be told some catastrophic mistake has happened and all hands are required to get things back under control.
Thatâs life for you. As the saying goes. âNo plan survives the first shot being fired.â
Getting comfortable with this reality means you retain some degree of flexibility to deal with colleaguesâ and friendsâ requests in a way that doesnât make you feel guilty.
But letâs look at this a little deeper.
Attending meetings and answering messages and emails is what Call Newport describes as the administrative tax you pay for agreeing to do a project. Unless you are working on your own project, there will always be some form of communication that, while important, will stop you from doing actual work on the project.
Your colleagues may be very happy to see you in the meeting or to receive your message responses in a timely manner, but how will they feel if you are unable to meet your deadlines?
Nobody will remember you skipped a meeting or two or were a little late responding to a message. But I can assure you they will remember if you cannot meet your deadlines. That will leave them feeling disappointed and tarnish your reputation as a productive and effective employee.
Time blocking does not mean you block out every day for specific types of work. Allocating two hours for focused work and an hour each for communications and admin would only take four hours out of a typical eight-hour working day.
That would ensure you are consistently on top of your work and still allow you four hours for meetings, responding to quick requests and answering your phone.
The only area where someone may feel put out is if they want to hold a meeting at 10:00 am and you tell them you cannot do so but will be happy to meet at 11:30 am instead. Yet, with that said, Iâve never come across anyone who got offended because I suggested an alternative time.
And remember, if they pull rank on you, so to speakâi.e. your boss tells you that you must attend the meeting at 10:00 am, okay, you have no choice so attend the meeting and readjust your focus time. Either you can reduce the time that day, or you reschedule it for another time in the day.
When you plan your core work for the week, you do so knowing that your plan will likely need to change. That does not mean you donât plan the week.
Planning out when you will do your core work for the week means you know you begin the week with enough time to get that important work done. If, or rather, when something comes up that requires you to adjust your schedule, thatâs fine. Look at your calendar and see where you can move a focused time block. If you cannot, look at reducing the time block.
If none of that is possible, delete the time block altogether. Itâs one day, and you may create a small backlog for a day or two. But if you are consistent and you stay with your plan where possible, you will soon find yourself clearing any backlog.
Itâs interesting that you assume thereâs a feeling of âguiltâ. I must admit I did feel uncomfortable when I began implementing these practices. I went from being always available for anyone to being selectively available. But I donât remember ever feeling guilty.
The people demanding my time wanted me to do some work for them. The thing is, talking about work is not doing work. Sitting in a meeting delayed the work. It was easy to overcome any risk of guilt by telling myself that by making it difficult for me to be in a meeting with them, I was able to do what they wanted me to do better and faster.
Life is always going to be full of difficult choices. Do I take my dog for a walk now or later? When do I go to the supermarket? Do I work on this project or that one? Itâs never-ending.
Yet, a plan for the week reassures you you have the time set aside. And once that plan is in place, you do whatever you can to protect it.
That does not mean you stubbornly stick to it. There will always be a need for flexibility. But, if you give yourself ten minutes or so before the end of the day, you can look at what you didnât do and reschedule what you can.
The best special forces teams always begin a mission with a clear plan of action. Yet they know that once the mission begins, that plan will change. Part of their training is to learn how to adapt to the changing nature of the battlefield quickly. Intelligence may have been incorrect, a weapon may malfunction, or a team member may take a hit and be rendered out of action. The skill is in quickly evaluating the changing nature of the plan and adapting your actions to adapt to the new set of circumstances you face.
You will not be able to do that in a week or a month. Itâs something you will always be working on. But with practice and focus, you will soon find yourself becoming more adaptable. Better at making decisions about where to apply your time and feeling less guilty about being less available than you used to be.
Good luck, Lucas and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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So, your calendar and task manager are organised, and you have enough time to complete your important work. But how do you define what your individual tasks are? Thatâs what Iâm answering this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With⊠Weekly Newsletter
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Carlâs YouTube Channel
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The Working With⊠Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 319
Hello, and welcome to episode 319 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the most powerful ways to improve your effectiveness is to ensure you have sufficient time each day protected for your important work. Some of these tasks will be obvious. If youâre a salesperson and one of your customers asks you to send them a quote for a new product you are selling, that will come under the general category of âcustomersâ. As this is an important part of your work as a salesperson, your âcustomerâ category will have time protected each day. Well, I hope it does.
Then there will be your general communications and admin to deal with. We all have these categories of tasks to do each day. Thereâs no point in sticking your head in the sand, as it were, and hoping they will go away. Emails demanding a reply do not disappear. Ignore these for one day, and youâll have double the amount to do tomorrow. This means you will need double the amount of time, tooâtime you likely do not have.
What this all means is that if your task manager supports tags or labels (and most do), you can use these for your categories.
This weekâs question is about how you choose which category for your tasks.
So, with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from JosĂ©. JosĂ© asks, Hi Carl, I am struggling to define which tasks are admin, consulting, or sales-related. How do you go about choosing categories for your tasks?
Hi José, thank you for your question.
Let me first explain the different categories of work you may have.
The concept here is that every task you have will come under a particular category. Those categories could be communications or admin, but they could also be sales activity, writing, designing, or marketing. Your categories will depend on the kind of work you do.
Once you have established your categories, you protect time each day (or week) to work on those categories.
For example, I have a category for âprojects.â I block Wednesday mornings for project work. This means that when I plan for the week, the majority of my project tasks will be scheduled for Wednesday.
The important thing is you do not add too many categories. The less, the better. To give you a benchmark, I have eight categories. Mine are:
Writing
Audio/visual
Clients
Projects
Communications
Admin
Planning
Chores
It can be difficult to establish your categories at first, and the temptation will be to add more categories than you need. This is a mistake because very soon, you will have too many categories, which slows down your processing.
If youâre familiar with COD (and if you are not, you can take the free courseâthe link is in the show notes), the purpose of Organising is to get everything in the right place as quickly as possible. If you have too many categories, it will slow you down and involve far too many choices. You may experience the paradox of choice, where too much choice paralyses your thinking.
So, what are your categories? Well, you will likely have communications and admin. We all have to communicate, and email and Teams/Slack are pernicious and never-ending. Having some time protected each day to deal with your communications will keep you on top of these and prevent you from being overwhelmed.
And there will always be bits of admin to deal with. Requests from HR, banking, filing, and expenses to process etc. You may not need a great deal of time for admin each day, but itâs worth protecting thirty minutes or so to stay on top of this.
However, aside from your communications and admin, what other categories do you need? This depends on your core work.
For instance, if you are a journalist, two categories spring to mind: research and writing. This is the core of your employed work and is what you are paid for. If you spend six hours out of an eight-hour working day in Teams or Zoom meetings, that leaves you with just two hours to manage your communications and admin AND do some writing.
No chance. Itâs not going to happen. Something will have to change if you want to spend more time doing what you are employed to do.
One way to do that is to ensure before the week begins, you have enough time to meet your core work objectives. That comes first. After that, you will see how much time you have left for meetings.
Simple, yes. To put into practice, perhaps a lot more difficult. But itâs one of those important adjustments worth working on.
This means, if you were a journalist, you would have your writing and research categories blocked in your calendar before the week begins.
Now, in your case, JosĂ©, you mentioned how to determine what type a task is. I would see any task that comes from a customer or client as something more than admin unless it was updating a customer relationship manager or a spreadsheetâwhich would be admin.
If a client requests a copy of an invoice or receipt, I would categorise that as client work. Itâs important because itâs a request from a client. It might be small to you, but your client may need that invoice or receipt urgently. (Remember, not everyone is as efficient as you are.)
Itâs also a quick win for you, as a task like this would be a quick task.
Consulting is an interesting category. That perhaps is something you do as part of your client work. For example, I donât consider my coaching work a separate category. Coaching is relatively straightforward as I am with the client. Itâs an appointment on my calendar. The resulting feedback I write for the client comes under the category âWritingâ - As I have four or five coaching appointments per day, this means I have four or five feedback reports to write each day. Hence, I have a writing block on my calendar most days.
Similarly, with sales, is that a category of task, or is it an appointment with clients? Sales activity may be prospecting, writing proposals or following up with clients (although that could be under the category of communications)
Now, this leads me to an important aspect of this. You do not need to be absolute here. What matters is that the work gets done. Whether something is categorised as communications or sales activity doesnât really matter. What matters is that the task gets done when you intend it to happen.
There inevitably will be some grey areas. You could say that writing feedback for my coaching clients is a communication taskâafter all, it involves writing to the client. However, I chose to categorise the task as a writing task.
And thatâs important. I chose to categorise it that way, and I am consistent with it.
Perhaps in your consultancy work, JosĂ©, you prepare reports for your clients. How would you categorise writing those reports? Is it writing, or is it client work? How you categorise it doesnât really matter as long as you are consistent with your categorising.
Why go to the trouble of categorising your work in the first place?
Well, doing so helps you to prioritise your work more effectively. For instance, as a consultant, your top priority each day could be your clientâs work. When you begin the day, and you see three tasks related to client work, you know, without any further planning, that those three tasks will be your priority for the day.
Likewise, chores could be low-priority tasks for you, in which case you can decide whether you will call the bank at lunchtime or leave it until later in the week.
Categorising your work is another way to automate the decision-making process. Having to decide what to do based on a long list of potential things to do overwhelms you and leaves you exhausted at the end of the day. By pre-determining what your core work isâthe work that is important as opposed to work that feels important but, in reality, is disguised low-value busy work.
At the heart of this method is pre-determining what is important and what is not. Only experience will tell you this to any accurate degree, and there will always be some grey areas. Fortunately, with experience, these instances of grey areas will reduce.
If you are moving away from trying to decide what to do from a long list of tasks each day, moving to a categorised list will be uncomfortable at first. You will make mistakes and miscategorise tasks. Thatâs fine. Itâs certainly nothing to worry about. Itâs by making mistakes you will learn for the next time.
And, I should mention, you will never be perfect. There are too many different types of tasks coming at us each day that may defy a category. The important thing is not to worry too much about these. They will be rare, but will happen.
So, if you are new to the idea of categorising your tasks, the way to set this up is to create tags or labels in your task manager for the types of tasks you generally get. Try to avoid being too specific. Your tasks are specificâfor instance, âcall Jenny about next weekâs board meetingâ would come under your category communications. Likewise, your follow-ups would be communications too.
Itâs also a good idea to keep these labels or tags to a minimum. The more you have, the slower you will be.
Once you have your tags set up, you then create time blocks in your calendar for working on those types of tasks. So, in my case, I have an hour each day set aside for communications. This means when my communication time comes up, I only need to see my list of communications for that day. Nothing else matters for the next hour. I know if I stick with this each day, I will never have a backlog or be overwhelmed, even if, on some days, I am unable to clear them all.
All this ultimately comes back to defining your role at work. Most of us are pretty clear about our roles in our personal lives (e.g., mother/father, son/daughter, community member, etc.). Itâs our work roles that we struggle with.
Giving yourself some time to think about your roles will help you to develop the right categories for your work, and that, in turn, will help you to organise your task list so it works for you rather than be a source of stress and overwhelm.
I hope that has helped, José. Thank you for sending in your question.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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This week, itâs COD week. In a special episode, Iâll walk you through the fundamentals of what all solid productivity and time management systems have.
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Script | 318
Hello, and welcome to episode 318 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Now, some of you may be wondering what COD means. Well, itâs not a type of fish. COD stands for Collect, Organise, and Do, and these three parts of a productivity system are the critical foundations you need to develop if you want your system to work effortlessly.
COD came about several years ago following a research project I did. In it, I went back to 1960 (not literally) and looked at all the time management and productivity systems I could find to see if there were any common denominators.
There were multiple systems and approaches, from Hyrum Smithâs Franklin Planner system to Stephen Coveyâs First Things First and Jim Rohnâs notebook and planning method. And, of course, I didnât neglect to look at GTD (Getting Things Done) and the multiple variations that came from that.
There were four standout features of all these systems. The first was to collect everything into a trusted place. The second was to organise or process what you collected. The third was to plan the day, and finally, there was doing the work.
When I developed COD, I wanted to give you a simple framework on which to build your own system. A system based on how you prefer to do your work. Many of you will like routine, others perhaps like flexibility. What COD does is give you a three-step process you can customise to work in the way you want to work.
Let me begin with collecting.
Nothing will work if you donât collect whatever comes your way in a trusted place. Here, there are two key parts. Collect everything and put it somewhere you trust you will see later in the day.
Scribbling tasks and ideas onto PostIt notes can work, but I have observed that they often get stuck on computer monitors, whiteboards, and many other places, which means you donât trust that you will see them later in the day.
What works best is having a central place for all these tasks, appointments, and ideas. That could be a task manager on your phone and computer or a pocket notebook you carry with you everywhere you go.
What matters is you use it consistently, and you trust it. This may mean you need to practice to develop the right habits. But this practice is well worth it.
The second thing about your collecting tool (or UCT, as I call it, Universal Collecting Tool) is that it should be fast. If there are too many buttons to press or you keep a notebook in your bag and you have to retrieve your bag to get your notebook, you will resist and start to believe you will remember whatever you were going to collect in your head. And that will never serve you. It will forget to remind you to add it to your inbox.
The second part of the process is organising what you collected. Here, you want to choose something that works for you. I recommend using the Time Sector System, but you may find organising things by project works better for you.
What matters when it comes to organising is that you can quickly organise what you collected that day into their appropriate places. For instance, a task would go into your task manager, an event would go to your calendar, and an idea would go into your notes app. Where you put them will depend on how you have each of these tools set up.
With your task manager, what matters is the things you need to do show up on the days they need to be done. Nothing else really matters.
A side issue is that if you are going in and out of your task manager looking for things to do in individual projects or lists, you will be less effective. When you are tired, you will just scroll through your lists of tasks, causing you to feel depressed about how much you have to do and how little time you have to do them.
This is why being clear about when something needs to be done prevents that scroll. You trust that what you have on your list of things to do today is the right thing to do today.
Thatâs why I recommend the Time Sector System as your organisational system. It focuses on when you will do something, not how much you have to do.
There are only twenty-four in a day, and youâre not going to be able to get everything done in a day. Be realistic about what you can and cannot do in a day.
And then thereâs the doing.
And this is what itâs all about. Youâve collected all this stuff, and itâs organised, so you know where everything is, what appointments you have, and what tasks need to be done today. If you have ensured the first two partsâthe collecting and organisingâhave been done, the doing part will largely take care of itself.
But what is important about doing? Thatâs doing the things that matter, and remaining focused on what you have decided is important.
When you donât have any kind of system for collecting and organising, you will find you get pulled into doing things for other people at the expense of what you are meant to be doing. It can be easy to spend four or five hours helping someone else to get their work done, only to find yourself with precious little time left to do the work you are expected to do.
This is where you will find yourself building mountains of backlogs and with no time to get them under control.
It doesnât mean that you cut yourself off from other people. What it means is you begin the day with a clear idea of what needs to be done.
If you do have everything organised and you are spending five or ten minutes each day planning the next, you will find that out of a typical eight-hour day, you will likely need three or four hours for your own work. That still leaves you with four or five hours where you are available for other people. If you are structured and disciplined, you will find managing your own work and the requests of others easily manageable.
Yet all this begins with the collecting and organising.
That is the most powerful part of COD. Itâs essentially a process you follow that ensures the right work is getting done at the right time.
And that is the way to think about itâa process. Throughout the day, you collect. Then, at the end of the day, you spend ten minutes or so organising what you collected, and for the rest of the time, you do the work.
There are other parts to building a productivity system. Ensuring you have enough time protected each day for doing your important work, which means blocking time on your calendar.
I find it interesting that with the advancement of technology, we have focused on doing more rather than using technology to protect our time for the important things in life.
I remember years ago envying bosses who had secretaries. Secretaries protected their bossesâ calendars by making it difficult for people to make demands on their time. Technology can do this for you today. Services like Calendarly allow you to specify when you are available for meetings with other people, and they can choose a suitable time from a list of available times.
There are Do Not Disturb features on your phone and in internal messaging services that tell people you are busy. Technology can do all the things the best secretaries did twenty to thirty years ago. Use them. They will make your life a lot less stressful.
The final part of doing is the art of prioritisation. In the COD course, I have a section on the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. This is a simple method for choosing what to work on each day. The principle is that each day, you dedicate ten tasks to be done. These tasks do not include your routine tasksâthe low-value maintenance tasks. These are bigger projects or goal-moving tasks.
Two of those tasks will be nominated as your must-do tasks for the day. These are the tasks you absolutely must do that day, and you will not stop until they are done. For instance, today, my two must-do tasks are recording this podcast and continuing my research into the profession of archiving.
When I did my planning last night, I highlighted these two tasks in my task manager and blocked time out on my calendar for getting them done.
There are other things I need to do today, but those two tasks are the must-dos.
This is how COD helps you. It gives you a framework and a process for doing your work and living your life.
If you adopt COD, you will find you have a system for managing your workload. However, beyond COD, there are a few other things you need to develop.
The first is how you will manage your tasks. As I mentioned before, I recommend the Time Sector System, which emphasises what needs to be done this week and pushes everything else off your list until it becomes relevant. This act alone significantly reduces that sense of overwhelm and encourages you to be realistic about what can be completed in a week.
Then there are the higher-level objectives in your lifeâyour long-term vision and goals for getting to where you want to be.
However, without the basics in place, you do not have steps to get there. After all, a goal without a set of steps to achieve it is a delusion.
If you are struggling to get things working for you, I encourage you to take the COD course. Even if you already have a system, the course will give you ideas and methods that will help you make your system even better.
Itâs a free course and will take less than an hour to complete. Plus, you get free downloadable guidance sheets and so much more.
The link to the course is in the show notes, and you can get further information from my website, carlpullein.com
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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Do you feel your digital notes are not giving you what you want? And, is there a right and wrong way to manage all these notes? Thatâs what we are looking at today.
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Script | 317
Hello, and welcome to episode 317 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Over the last few years, thereâs been a lot of discussion around how we manage our digital notes. There have been hundreds, if not thousands of new notes apps promising to do wonderful things for us and there have been numerous ways to organise all these notes from Tiago Forteâs PARA and the Second Brain to the Zettelkasten system.
The question is do any of these apps and systems work?
I feel qualified to answer this question as I have been down every rabbit hole possible when it comes to digital notes. Iâve tried Michael Hyattâs Evernote tagging system, Tiagoâs PARA and I even developed my own system, GAPRA. But, ultimately do any of these work ?
And asking that question; do any of these systems give you what you need? Perhaps is the right place to start. What do you want from a notes app? What do you want to see and how?
Before we get to the answers here, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Susan. Susan asks, Hi Carl, Iâm having difficulties trying to understand how best to use Evernote. I just do not know how to organise my notes. I have thousands of notes in there going back at least five years and itâs a mess. Do you have any suggestions on how best to clean all these notes up?
Hi Susan, thank you for your question.
I donât think you are alone. The popularity of books like Building A Second Brain and the number of YouTube videos on this subject suggests many people are struggling to know how best to organise their digital notes.
But, I wonder if what we are doing is over-complicating something that should be very simple.
Iâve recently been reading Walter Isaacsonâs brilliant biography of Leonardo Da Vinci and on the chapter about his notebooks Isaacson points out that Leonardo Da Vinci instilled the habit of carrying around a notebook into all is students and apprentices. It was something Leonardo did himself and everything he collected, wrote and sketched was random in order.
We are very fortunate that many of these notebooks survive today and what we get to see is the complete randomness of what he collected. In these notebooks there are designs, sketches, thoughts and to-do lists all on the same page. It was this randomness that led to Leonardo discovering new ways to connect ideas to solve difficult problems and to paint in a way no one else had ever done.
And, I think, this is where we have gone wrong with our digital notes. Itâs the randomness of your notes that will lead you to discover new ways of doing things. It will help you to be more creative and help you develop your ideas. If you try and strictly organise your notesâsomething a digital notes app will doâyou lose those random connections. Everything will be organised by topic, thought or idea.
That does not mean that you want complete randomness. There will be projects, goals and areas of interest that you will want to keep together. A large project works best when all related notes, emails and thoughts are kept together. After all, they are connected by a common desired outcome. This is where your digital notes will excelâeverything together in one place.
This is why having a project notebook or folder is a good idea. You can keep all these materials together and it gives you a central place to review your ongoing projects.
Then, there are what I would describe as critical information materialsâthings like your clothing and shoe sizes for the various places you buy things from. You may collect your receipts in organised months, and if you trust your digital notes, you may want to keep information such as your ID numbers, driving licence details, and health insurance certificates.
Again, digital notes are great for storing this kind of information as they make it easily retrievable whenever you need it.
What about everything else? The random thoughts and ideas you have. Well, if you want these to be useful to you at some future date, you will want to keep them random. Why is that?
Your brain works at a very high level of illogicality. This is the opposite of what a computer does. A computer operates on very strict logical lines. Even AI works logically. AI will look at data and information and give you answers that are already in existence. This often seems amazing because we had not thought of those ideas before, but someone did. Thatâs how AI found the answers.
And of course, as we recently discovered with Googleâs AI models, there are the biases of the people programming the softwareâall based on existing thoughts and ideas.
Itâs these notes that if you want to develop new, creative ideas that link uniquely together, they want to be maintained in a random way.
Paper notebooks make this easy. Each new thought or idea is added to a page in your notebook chronologically, and over time, your ideas will fill that notebook in the order you have them. There may be blocks of similar thoughts and ideas you collected around the same time, but on the whole, they will be completely random. Perhaps on one page, you have some ideas about how you will redesign your back garden and on another page, you have drafted out some ideas about where you and your family will go on their next holiday.
This becomes a little more difficult with digital notes because your computer and the apps you use will want to organise them logically. However, you can create randomness here, too, if you use an archive folder.
Many people think of their archive as being one step short of the trash. Itâs where things you are not sure what to do with go. But stop a moment. Where would historians be without your countryâs national archive? What are museums? Essentially, museums are archives of interesting things people may want to see. And there is the archive at the Vatican that holds so many treasures and documents.
An archive is not a glorified trash can. Itâs a treasure trove of history. And if you create an archive notebook or folder in your digital notes you will be creating your own digital archive.
Now, because places like the National Archives in the US or UK or the archives at the Vatican City are always adding new stuff, it would be impossible to organise all these documents by theme. They may be tagged by theme, but they are organised by the date they entered the archive. If I wanted to find documents related to the Titanic, I would begin my search around April 1912. If I wanted to get a snapshot of life in 1964, I would just go to the section that housed documents from 1964.
You can do the same with your own archives. Once you have created a notebook or folder called archive, you can create sub-folders or sub-notebooks by year. Then, as you archive notes, you just add them to the year they were created.
This approach will give you the all-important randomness, yet you still have some organisation.
You can tag these notes if you wish; I do. But, and this is an important but, donât try and be too clever here.
Imagine you were researching the Vietnam War and wanted to know how and why the war escalated in 1965. If you were at the US National Archives, you might begin your research in 1965, then Vietnam. So, the tag would be Vietnam. If you wanted to narrow down your research, you might look at the documents related to President Johnsonâs decision-making, so perhaps there would be a tag for presidential papers. Beyond that, you would be trying to fine-tune things too much. You would likely see from the results you get which documents relate to meetings.
In your archive, you may have taken a trip to Paris in 2018, and while there, you came across a fantastic restaurant. Perhaps you took at picture of the menu and saved that into your notes. Now, you have two ways of retrieving that information today. If you remember the year you were in Paris, you could go straight to your 2018 archive, and as your notes will be in date order, you could scroll down to the date you were in Paris.
The alternative is if you tagged the note âParisâ, you could do a search for âParisâ. And within seconds you will have retrieved the information you wanted.
Thatâs how you want your notes to work. Keep them simple, so that if you want to retrieve information at a later date, you would be able to find things quickly.
What Iâve noticed is when we try and be too strict about how we organise our notes we are always fiddling and changing things. While this can be fun, at first, it becomes a drag on your productivity because the more time you spend organising, the less time you spend doing the work you need to do.
You could create separate notebooks for places and topics, but unless these are lifetime interests, keeping everything in their separate notebooks will not make retrieval any faster, and you lose that all-important randomness.
Another area where randomness really helps is with your ideas and thoughts. Iâm sure youâve had an idea about classes you may want to take or a business idea you want to investigate. You may have had ideas about starting a blog or podcast or writing a book. Many of these ideas will be passing ideas and you soon move on to the next idea. If you were intent on doing something about the idea you would begin. If you donât begin, itâs likely a passing idea.
These passing ideas are the gold you do not want to delete. They could contain the seeds of something very special. However, on their own, they may seem redundant after a few weeks or months. Itâs these notes you want to keep in your archive.
In a year or two, you may feel compelled to skim through one of your archive years, and you begin to see connections between all these ideas. Leonardo Da Vinci, sketched the mouth he eventually gave the Mona Lisa twelve years before he began painting the Mona Lisa.
Individually, these notes may mean nothing. But together, they could be your next great idea.
So, Susan, look at what you want to collect and save. Keep your projects together, these you will be working on frequently. And all those random notes you collect, store them in archives by year. As these build, you will be creating a gold mine of ideas and thoughts you will never regret keeping.
I hope that has helped and thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
-
This week, Iâm answering a question about the basics of building your very own time management and productivity system.
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Script | 316
Hello, and welcome to episode 316 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Do you ever feel there is too much conflicting advice on productivity and time management? There are those who tell you never to look at your email first thing in the morning and others who do (me included). Then there are those who advocate time blocking and many who donât. And there are the proponents of the Getting Things Done system or, as I discovered recently, people who swear by their Franklin Planners.
Itâs a confusing landscape, yet if you look at almost any way of doing things, there will always be conflicting advice. Thatâs because humans have different ways of doing things and varied tastes. There are those who say a stick-shift car is better than an automatic; others will give you different advice on how to raise your children.
So, how do you navigate all the advice on time management and productivity? Thatâs what weâre looking at this week.
This weekâs question comes from Meg. Meg asks, Hi Carl, Iâm a recent convert to your YouTube channel, and I wanted to ask if you have any recommendations for time management systems. Thereâs a lot of different advice, and I just want something I can use and stick to.
Hi Meg, thank you for your question.
Iâve always felt when it comes to time management and, by extension, productivity, the best place to start is with what you want to know and when.
By this, I mean, what do you want to see on your calendar, and when do you want to see it? You can set up notifications on your calendar to alert you to upcoming events, and you can choose when those notifications appear. For instance, if you work from home, perhaps you may only need a fifteen-minute alert before a meeting. If you work in an office or travel to meet clients, you may prefer to see when your next appointment is thirty minutes or an hour before.
Getting fundamentals like this right for you would be a great place to begin.
Next would be how you manage your calendars. You will likely have a work and personal calendar. I know many people also have shared calendars with their families. The question here is how you want to be able to see all these calendars.
Separating them by keeping your work calendar only on your work devices and your personal calendars on your personal devices can give you a nice clean edge between your work and personal life but can also create conflicts.
If you were sent on a one-day training course, you may need to leave home a little early to arrive at the training site. If you were also committed to taking your kids to school on that day without seeing them all on the same calendar, it would be easy to double-book yourself.
Think of it this way: you live one life, not multiple. Yes, you may have different roles in your lifeâa parent, a brother or sister, a son or daughter and an employee, for instance, but all those roles are just a part of your one life. When thought of that way, would it not make sense to keep that one life on one calendar?
You could separate your roles by creating different calendars within your calendar app. Each role could be allocated a different colour on a single calendar. This way, you would see everything on one calendar and easily manage conflicts, such as attending a training course and taking your kids to school.
If you work with a company that is very strict about sharing company data, you may not be able to have all your different roles in one calendar. If that is you, you could block your work times out on your personal calendar so you can identify when you have work commitments. Your calendar only needs to show you where you are meant to be. You can always refer to your work device for the details.
This will mean a little extra work when you do your weekly planning, but checking your work calendar for any unusual start or finish times shouldnât take more than a few minutes.
How best to manage your notes can be confusing. There is a lot of conflicting advice in this area. There are thousands of different note apps and multiple ways to organise your notes.
But letâs step back a little and think about how YOU want to use your notes.
Some of you may want to store important project information in a single place, and many of you may want to keep your ideas centrally so you can access them when you need new ones. Thereâs something about seeing all your random ideas together that can create connections between them you never thought of.
Many parents like to keep their kidsâ drawings in a digital archive, and a notes app is great for doing that. Imagine all those pictures collected over the years and being able to see them wherever you are, whenever you want. In years to come, you may use them to tease your kids.
The thing is, how do you organise all this stuff?
Itâs likely you will be collecting work-related information as well as information you want to use personally. Do you keep these separate or in one place? Again, this will depend on what your employer allows you to access outside of your work devices. You will likely find having everything in one place is the most convenient. This avoids having to remember where you put something and will make finding what you are looking for seamless.
If you have no choice, keeping your work-related notes only on your work devices should not be a big inconvenience. As with having separate calendars, it does mean you will need to review multiple places to ensure you havenât missed anything important.
Organising your notes can be a bit of a minefield. This is where there are still a lot of ideas and methods.
One way to look at this is how people organised their notes before the digital world. After all, the digital age is relatively new and we are still experimenting with methods. People used old grey filing cabinets for hundreds of yearsâthey must have learned a thing or two about filing effectively.
With filing cabinets the most common way to organise was alphabetically. In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen also recommends organising files alphabetically. Perhaps a âif it ainât broke, donât fix itâ approach would work best for you here.
You can keep your folders or notebooks flexible; for example, you may wish to have a folder called âInsuranceâ, where you keep all documents related to your insurance policies. Remember, unlike filing cabinets, you can find the right document from a simple search using your keyboard so you do not need to create sub-folders for each type of insurance policy.
While there are frameworks such as Tiago Forteâs PARA (PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive) and my GAPRA (GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas, Projects, Resources, and Archive), Iâm coming around to believing these more complex structures are unnecessarily complex.
Todayâs notes apps have excellent search features. You can add a note, and as long as you remember a title, keyword, or date range, you will be able to find it in seconds.
The biggest difference between the digital and analogue worlds is how the digital world connects. You can have your calendar, to-do list, and all your notes on a single device in your pocket, and anything you collect will be synchronised to all your digital devices. I still marvel at how I can save a blog post or news article for reading later from my phone and move it to my iPad, and the article I just saved is there waiting for me to read.
If I go back to what you want to see and when, you may want to see your calendar in the morning while you are drinking your morning brew. This means having your todayâs calendar on your phone makes sense. A quick tap on your calendar app and todayâs appointments are there.
What about the things you need to do today? When would you want to see those? Perhaps the first time you need to look at these is when you sit down to begin your work day. Seeing that on your computer before you begin makes sense. A bigger screen will make a list seem less overwhelming, and you can decide when these to-dos will best be done.
The most important thing, Meg, is not to overcomplicate things. When we complicate things, systems and frameworks break. You donât need overly complex structures for your notes. All you need is a simple alphanumeric filing system that makes sense to you. Your to-do list only needs to show you what needs to be done today. Tomorrow, next week and next monthâs to-dos are not relevant today.
The goal should be to begin the day knowing where you need to be and what needs to be done. Anything that supports that will always work. Anything that leaves you having to make too many decisions or think too much about what to do does not.
I hope that has helped, Meg and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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This weekâs question is all about how I use the technology I have to be more productive and better manage my time.
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Script | 315
Hello, and welcome to episode 315 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Thereâs a lot of technology today that helps us be more productive. Our computers make producing work easy compared to twenty-five years ago. Itâs also made producing some kinds of work a lot cheaper. Imagine the cost of studio time if you wanted to record an album in 1999. Today, all you need is a laptop and a microphone, and you are good to go.
However, with all that wonderful technology, itâs likely we have a lot of devices lying around gathering dust. I have a camera with four or five lenses sitting in a gorgeous canvas camera bag I havenât used in over five years. Now, all I take with me when we go on a trip is my phone. Iâm not a professional photographer; I donât need all that equipment.
And donât get me started on all the apps I find I need to purge every once in a while because I donât use them anymore. Then, there are all the subscriptions you may be paying for that you are not using.
As an example, I recently discovered I had a Fantastical subscription. I used to use Fantastical. It was a cool calendar app that allowed me to have all my Todoist tasks and events in one place. Shortly after seeing what that did to my calendar, I stopped that integration (it was horrible. It made it look like I had no time at all for anything but work and meetings). Why was I paying for a service I was not using? I donât know, but it did cause me to go through all my app subscriptions to see if there were any more. (I found four more services I was paying for I was no longer using).
This weekâs question addresses the heart of this technology overwhelm, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This weekâs question comes from Mark. Mark asks, hi Carl, I was wondering what digital tools you use to get your work done. You seem to be using a lot of tools, and I thought it must be very confusing to decide what to use.
Hi Mark, thank you for your question.
I remember hearing an interview with Craig Federighi in which he explained Appleâs thinking on its products. He talked about how sometimes you work on your laptop, and other times, you may find the environment more suitable for an iPad. A good example of this would be when working at your desk, you may prefer the laptop, and if you attended a meeting, the form factor and mobility of an iPad might work better. It certainly did for me when I was teaching.
I would create all my teaching materials from my computer, but when I went to the classroom I took only my iPad. That was all I needed to teach with.
Today, I no longer teach in classrooms; I work from home. However, I do like to step away from my desk and work somewhere else occasionally, and when I do that, I will only take my iPad with me. Itâs great for writing and fits nicely into a small shoulder bag I carry when I go out.
But letâs look at how I use each individual device, and I will explain why.
My phone is always with me, which means itâs the perfect UCT (Universal Collection Tool). I have my phone set up so I can quickly collect tasks, ideas and articles I would like to read later.
I use Drafts, an amazing little app that connects with Todoist and Evernote. With Evernote, I have it set up so that if I have a blog post or YouTube video idea, I can send it directly to my content ideas note without having to open Evernote. Drafts also allow me to dictate my ideas, which is essential as I have most of my ideas when I am walking my dog, Louis. I can then collect my ideas and keep an eye on Louis at the same time.
When I am out and about, I process emails from my phone, but I rarely respond from there. There are better tools for responding to actionable emails. I have a process for email management which involves clearing my inbox between sessions of work and then setting aside an hour later in the day for responding. I will respond usually from my computer, but if I am away from my office, I will use my iPad.
And, of course, I use my phone for instant messages and occasionally scrolling social media when waiting for my wife (A daily activity haha).
I also have an old iPad Mini. I love that iPad. Itâs my content consumption device, and on there, I will read blogs and articles I have collected through Readwise (an app for collecting articles you want to read later) and books through the Kindle app.
This iPad mini is not connected to any messaging service (Except Apple Messages) or email. Itâs purely for consumption.
I should say I am not into gamingânever have been, so I have no gaming devices or apps. My guilty pleasure is reading and watching historical documentariesâwhich YouTube provides me in abundance. I will watch these on the big TV at home late at night when I am winding down for the day.
My iPad Pro (I think the 3rd edition) has the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil connected, and as I mentioned, I use that as my main mobile device. The keyboard is wonderful to type on, and the Pencil is great for highlighting sections in documents. Strangely, I donât ever use it for writing. Iâm a fountain pen user, and the Apple Pencil (or any stylus, for that matter) doesnât feel right for me. Plastic on glass doesnât work (in my humble opinion). The feel of a 14 carat gold nib on some fountain pen-friendly Japanese paper has got to be experienced to be believed.
I also use my iPad Pro to listen to music when I am working. The battery on that thing lasts forever. I have a Bluetooth speaker in my office that has incredible bass (I love deep house music when I am working; the bass really helps)
My computer is for the heavy lifting: recording this podcast, editing my YouTube videos, and creating workbooks and documents. I also do a fair amount of my writing on my computer too. I also prefer to clear my actionable emails on my computer. All my design work is done on my computer from creating thumbnails for YouTube videos to workshop banners and online course materials.
And thatâs it for devices. Now apps.
My primary productivity apps are Apple Calendar, Todoist and Evernote. I have experimented in recent months with Apple Notes, and while Apple Notes is an excellent note-taking app, Evernote has some features that Apple Notes does not. Primarily the ability to create note links that can be pasted into Todoist. You can do this in Apple Notes, but itâs fiddly, and I hate things that are fiddly.
Todoist is where I keep my tasks. It has a beautiful and simple interface, and in the ten years I have used it, it has never let me down. Todoist is on all my devices, as is Evernote, but⊠This is where Evernote is currently weak; I find the mobile version of Evernote poor. The text is too small, and there are too many button presses to get to where I want to be. However, as I use Drafts to get notes into my system, thatâs something I can live with.
And thatâs a good point to make. Iâve used Todoist for over ten years, and Evernote has been my go-to notes app for almost fifteen years. This means I have learned how to use these apps properly, Iâve come to trust them, and I donât have to waste time trying to figure out how to do a particular action. Iâve learned everything I need to learn to use these apps optimally.
Apple Calendar has been my calendar app of choice for pretty much the last twenty years. I did try Fantastical for a couple of years, but the additional features were not very useful to me. Certainly not worth a subscription.
Now for the miscellaneous apps.
I use Acuity for my coaching scheduling service. This means my coaching clients can book a call whenever they want to, and thereâs no back-and-forth trying to find a mutually convenient time.
As mentioned earlier, I use Readwise for my book highlights and for collecting articles. This is a recent change as previously I used Instapaper, but they are doubling their prices in May, and they donât offer anywhere near the service Readwise does. The great thing is as I read a book and highlight a section or add a note, those notes and highlights are synced to Evernote in a notebook called Readwise.
For all my writing, I use Ulysses. This is a fantastically minimal writing app that, in full-screen mode, is just a dark screen with white text. There are no distractions at all and I can focus all my attention on my writing. This is synced with iCloud so if I am out and about and only have my iPad with me, I can carry on writing where I left off.
I recently looked at the number of words I have in Ulysses, and itâs now approaching three million. That just blew me awayâthree million words in eight years. I wrote my book, Your Time, Your Way in Ulysses, as well as all my podcast scripts, blog posts and newsletter articles. Itâs a treasure trove of all my writing, and itâs all archived in iCloud. Thatâs one of the best things about not app-switching. You begin to create an archive of all your work in one place.
There is an exception to my writing process. I send my coaching clients written feedback after each call, and for that, I use Appleâs Pages, which is Appleâs version of Microsoft Word. Pages allows me to use a saved template for all my feedback.
For my admin and financial tasks, I use Appleâs Numbers. I donât need the complexity of Microsoft Excel; my spreadsheet needs are simple.
And thatâs about it. The only other item I use to get my work done is paper. I use an A4 Rhodia notebook as my planning book. This is where all my projects, weekly planning and YouTube video ideas get developed. I also returned to writing my journal by hand after using Day One for five years. That was because I felt my life was beginning to be dominated by screens, and itâs nice to get more use out of my fountain pen collection.
The most important thing for me is to keep the tools I use to a minimum. Iâve been down the road of trying out a lot of apps. What I discovered is that itâs not the app that does the work. Itâs me. And for me to do my work in the most efficient and effective way possible, I need as few distractions as possible. Simplicity is my keyword when it comes to apps. The longer I need to spend trying to learn to use something, the less time I spend doing work. Which in turn means I spend less time with my family and doing the things I want to do. Not a very good way to manage time or be more productive.
I hope that answers your question, Mark. Thank you for sending it in and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
-
What can you do when your calendarâs full, your task manager is bulging at the seams, and you find yourself stuck with nowhere to turn? Thatâs what we are looking at today.
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Script | 314
Hello, and welcome to episode 314 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Do you feel, or often feel, that no matter what you do, there is always too much to do? Hundreds of emails that need responding to, several projects all coming to a close at the same time, and a demanding personal life?
Itâs a horrible feeling, isnât it? It feels like thereâs no room to move or do anything you want to do. Turn up each day, and the noise destroys your energy, willpower and sense of being humanâthe ârinse and repeatâ approach to life. It leaves you exhausted at the end of the day, yet with a feeling you got nothing important done.
The good news is all is not lost, but you are going to have to do something that every instinct in your body will tell you canât do. Yet, if you do not do anything, these miserable days will continue forever.
Those who have managed to drag themselves out of that pit of despair have had to do something that was uncomfortable yet brought them the organisation and calm they were looking for. The good news is the action you need to take is not so dramatic that you need to quit your job. In fact, once you commit to taking action it can be a lot of fun. (No, really!)
So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Anthony. Anthony asks, Hi Carl, Can you help? I am completely overwhelmed with emails and tasks. I have three deadlines coming up at the end of this month, and I am so far behind I know I will miss those deadlines. How does anyone stay on top of their work?
Hi Anthony, Thank you for your question, and I hope you had time to renegotiate your deadlines before the end of February.
Okay, where to start? When anyone finds themselves caught in a spiral of never-ending tasks, emails and projects, there is only one thing you can do, and that is to stop. And this is the part every instinct in your body will scream NO! I donât have time.
You are right in one respect; you donât have time, but then you donât have time to do your work either, do you? So, really, thereâs nothing to lose by stopping altogether.
Let me explain why stopping altogether, at least for a couple of days, is the best thing you can do.
A lot of what you have accumulated likely does not need doing, but it is swirling around in your head or in your task manager telling you it does need doing. Itâs only when you stop, step back and look at everything as a whole that you begin to see what needs doing and what likely does not. You wonât see that unless you stop.
Letâs take email as an example. At what point will responding to an email become embarrassing for you? A week, two weeks, a month or three months? If you have not replied to an email after three weeks, do you think the person who sent the email to you is still waiting, or do they even remember sending you the email in the first place?
Where is your line?
You see, there is a professional consideration here. If you have not responded to an email for three weeks, what do you think the sender will feel about you if they get a reply now? Unprofessional? Disorganised? A mess?
The thing is, if you have failed to respond to an email for three or more weeks often the best thing you can do is to leave it. Archive the email and move on. If it is important or does need your attention it will come back at some point. I would say if it has been a few weeks, the chances are things have moved on already anyway, and you wonât need to worry about it.
In my email system, Inbox Zero 2.0, I advise you to pick one of two options. A hard or soft email bankruptcy. Most people choose the soft email bankruptcy; this is where you select all the emails you have not responded to that are older than two to three weeks and move them to a new folder called âOld Inboxâ. Then clear off the remaining emails in your inbox.
For these older emails you can go through them at leisure over the next few weeks and decide what to do with them. The reality is most people end up deleting this folder after a few weeks because they realise nothing in there is worth keeping.
The hard email bankruptcy is more effective but scary. Do the same as you would do with the soft email bankruptcy, but instead of moving them off to a folder, you hit the delete key and delete them.
You donât need to worry about any retention issues; if you received an email, there will be a copy of it. Someone sent you the email in the first place, and anything you delete will sit in your trash folder for at least 30 days unless you change the defaults.
Just this action will get you back on top of your email.
However, to prevent the problem from reoccurring, you will need to change your email management practices. The best advice I can give you here is to set aside an hour a dayâevery dayâto deal with your communications. Staying on top of email requires time each day. Miss just one day, and you will require double the amount of time the next day. Itâs just not worth it. If you want a future where you are in control of your mail, you will need to deal with it every day.
Iâm reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche (thatâs the philosopher with the amazing moustache) who, among other things, popularised the Stoics term Amor Fati - which loosely translated means âloving your fateâ. We all have to live with instant messages and emails today which means either we learn to love dealing with it or allow it to become a burden.
I prefer to find ways to make dealing with email a pleasure. I set the environment. Some great music, a comfortable chair and a warm dog sat next to me while I plough through as quickly as I can the emails I need to respond to today. Oh, and donât forget the obligatory cup of British tea. Perfect. Now, for me, emailâs a joy!
Now for the tasks in your task manager. Again, this will require some time out. Whether you have a few hundred or a few thousand tasks in your task manager, the best thing you can do is to go through this one by one and delete those that are no longer necessary, or you feel you have no time to get to this year. Your goal here is to reduce this list by at least 50%.
Your task manager really needs to be only concerned with anything you need to do in the next three months. Anything beyond that is either going to change significantly or wonât get done. Anything that you think needs to be done beyond three months can be put on your calendar as an all-day event. Or if you are not sure when you will do it or even if you ever will, you can create a list in your notes app and dump them there.
Task managers only work if they are clean and tight. In other words, if anything on your task list is something you may like to do or sounds like a good idea today but doesnât really need to be done it should be removed.
Only tasks you know need to be done should be there, and nothing else. Wishful tasks should be in a project note or a master would-like-to-do listâin your notes. Your notes app can be the dumping ground for these, never your task manager.
The problem with dumping everything in your task manager, whether they need doing or not, is your task manager will soak them up willingly but will also want to remind you of them at some point. So what do we do? We add a date or a tag or label so we donât forget them. And now youâve just created overwhelm for yourself. These tasks will come back on random dates, and you will be swamped. Now, you will either reschedule them or give up altogether with the task managerâa great tool if used properly.
So, clean up your task manager and make sure only things that need to be done are on there, and nothing else.
Finally, letâs look at your calendar. The chances are when you look at your calendar, you are going to see the underlying problem fairly clearly. It is here where you will see how you are managing your time. Which is, after all, the essence of everything.
I mentioned earlier about setting aside some time each day for dealing with your communications; the question now is, what else do you need time for each day?
Itâs likely you will need time for dealing with administrative tasksâthose little things that need to be dealt with. Things like managing your personal finances, expense reports, arranging your next vacation and such like. What about family time or time for exercise, etc? How much time do you want for these activities each week?
This is where your calendar becomes the master. You can allocate time for these activities and block them out on your calendar so you wonât be tempted to allow anything else to get in the way.
How many meetings do you have, on average, each week? Are you spending too much time in meetings? Do you need to attend all those meetings? Could you be excused from some of them? These are questions you can ask yourself when you go through your calendar.
Could you find two to three hours, three to four times per week for deep-focused work? If so, block the time out now. Create the space you need to do the things you want to or need to do. Only your calendar will tell you if you have the time.
You may look at your calendar and instantly see you have overcommitted yourself. If thatâs the case, what can you do to remove some of those commitments? Who do you need to talk to?
To get in control of your time and work, there will likely be some difficult choices to make. The issue is, though, if you donât make those difficult choices today, the problems you are trying to solve will come back again and again.
If you try and resolve these issues without stopping and stepping back, youâll only find yourself putting it off. There has to be a break-point. Why not do it now and get things back under control today?
Alternatively, you could block out a weekend in the near future to get everything under control. Two days, where you are completely on your own to get everything sorted out, can be great for your mental well-being. You get to see where the problems are, and once you see them, you can spend time finding the solutions.
I hope that has helped, Anthony. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.
-
Where does technology help, and where does it hinder your productivity? Thatâs what weâll be exploring in this weekâs episode.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Working With⊠Weekly Newsletter
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carlâs YouTube Channel
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The Working With⊠Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 313
Hello, and welcome to episode 313 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Over the last ten years or so, thereâs been an explosion in the world of productivity technology. Prior to around 2010, most of our technology use was to create documents and presentations and send and reply to emails. We were in control, and technology served us.
Today, technology is creeping more and more into our lives. Now, you can use apps that will look at your task manager and your calendar and tell you when to work on what. Microsoft Outlook suggests times for focused work (not taking a walk or a rest, I notice), and many developers are promising more and more automation.
The thing is do we really need that?
When it comes to time management and productivity, I believe itâs important to retain control. My calendar or task manager telling me to work on the report when I feel exhausted is only going to leave me feeling guilty if I do whatâs best for meâtaking a rest.
Now, donât get me wrong here. I think technology is great, and one of my favourite features of Spotify and Apple Music is how these apps use my listening history to create random playlists. I love playing those playlists. I like how YouTube serves up recommendations, again, based on my watch history. This is useful. I find documentaries I would otherwise have missed. However, I get to choose what to watch and when.
I was reminded of this recently with the sad death of BBC Radio 2âs DJ, Steve Wright. I was able to open YouTube and type in Steveâs name and was able to listen to some of his most iconic moments. I discovered long-lost recordings of himâstuff I would never have been able to find ten years ago.
These are some examples of where technology works and enhances our lives.
But (and there are many buts here) that nicely leads me to this weekâs question. Which means, itâs time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Scott. Scott asks, hi Carl, what do you think of apps like Motion and others that will organise your appointments and tasks for you so you no longer need to do any planning?
Hi Scott, thank you for your question.
Letâs look at where technology has an advantage. Communications. Digital communications are brilliant. They are instant, and because of that, the number of phone call interruptions has significantly reduced over the years.
Phone call interruptions are the worst, arenât they? Your phone rings, and itâs like an alarm call that we feel obligated to answer. We have no idea what the caller is calling about or how long it will take, and that creates its own anxieties.
Today, I can see whoâs calling and can decide whether to answer or not. I can also put my phone on silent so I donât get that horrendous shock when the phone rings.
And I know a lot of you may have a downer on email, but compared to what we had thirty years ago, itâs far better. And, no, we are not getting more emails than letters. Itâs about the same. The difference is with letters, we did not feel they had to be replied to instantly, and we could take our time.
Although, as an aside, in the past, large companies employed people to work in the mail room. These wonderful peopleâs job was to sort the mail, so you only got the correspondence that mattered. Sadly, these people are gone now, and we are left to sort our own mail. Thatâs where the problem is. A large proportion of people donât set up rules in their email service to filter out the rubbish from the stuff that matters.
Give yourself a couple of hours to set up some rules, and in effect, you will have given yourself your own mail room staff.
Digital calendars are fantastic. Rather than having to carry around a large diary with all your appointments, you can now have your calendar on all your digital devices, which makes it so easy to see where you should be and with whom. Itâs also a lot easier to make appointments with people with services such as Calendarlyâwhere you send a link to the other person, and they can choose the best time for them based on your availability.
Now, things go wrong when you blindly accept meeting requests. When we had paper diaries, we had to manually enter the appointment, and we could see instantly we had already committed to something else. We either asked for another date or cancelled the previous appointment.
Today, I see so many people with conflicts in their calendars where they are doubleâand even triple-booked. I mean, come on. Your digital calendar makes it easy to see your conflicts. Sort them out. You cannot be in two meetings at the same time. Donât let that happen.
The problem here, itâs far more difficult to rearrange a meeting or appointment after you have accepted it. When you get a meeting request, and it conflicts with another commitment, decline it. Or, if itâs more important than the commitment you currently have, give yourself a few minutes to sort out the conflict.
And, technology has really helped with creating reports, presentations, books and videos. Technology has brought previously prohibitively expensive tools to us all for less than $100 a year.
When I look back over the last ten years, I have been able to produce four books, over a thousand videos, 300 podcasts and millions of words in blog posts and articles. Itâs mind-blowing what a computer and an internet connection give us the ability to do.
And yet, I suppose itâs human nature to go too far. Itâs like discovering chocolate cake for the first time. That first experience leads to you wanting more and more and more. Forget vegetables, fruit and other healthy foods. I want cake!!!! And more of it.
Of course, only eating cake will have negative consequences, and I feel this is where time management and productivity technology is beginning to go. Just because you can doesnât mean you should.
As I alluded to, allowing your calendar to schedule your day for you is not necessarily a good thing. Your calendar does not know if you have the flu or didnât sleep well last night. It doesnât know whether you had a fight with your partner over the breakfast table or had a car accident on the way to work. All it knows is you have a ton of work to do in your task manager, and you have eight meeting requests. Itâs programmed to schedule all that for you.
Perhaps doing all that work and attending all those meetings is not the best thing you could do that day. Maybe the best thing you could do is go back to bed or take a walk to clear your head.
On planning, I think we need to be careful here. What makes humans different from other mammals is our ability to make choices. We can choose to do one thing over an alternative. Now, each choice has a consequence, and we have sufficient intelligence to weigh the consequences against each other. Louis, my little dog, does not have that ability. Sure, he can choose to attack his squeaky ball or not, but he has no concept of the consequences.
If we allow technology to make those choices for us and we blindly follow them, we lose the very essence of being humanâour freedom to make decisions about what to do.
Doing your own planning allows you to choose what you will work on and when. For example, last night, I slept well, and I had two appointments cancel on me this morning. This gave me two extra hours I was not expecting and I chose to clean up my office and write this script in that time. I didnât need to go to my task manager to make this decision. I looked around my office and realised things needed to be tidied up. That took me twenty minutes, and this script will take around ninety minutes.
I could have chosen to read, take Louis out for a walk or go back to bed. But I chose to do work. I wanted to work, and I loved it. If a computer was telling me to do this and then that, it would take the joy out of making decisions.
Task managers are great for collecting tasks and for having everything in a central place. Where task managers are less good is showing us what needs to be worked on and when. Only you know whatâs important right now and how much energy you have to do your work.
For example, over the years, Iâve come to learn when I am at my most focused and when I struggle with focus. Afternoons are a struggle if I need to sit down and focus. Yet, I find focusing very easy in the morning and later at night. This means I can structure my days based on when I know I will likely be at my best for doing specific types of work. An app based on AI is going to be using data from all over the place and will likely be based on the average of other people. You are not the average of other people. You are you, and you are unique.
When it comes to digital note-taking and information storage, technology is fantastic! You can quickly grab an idea, a webpage or a document and save it into your notes. You can then later do a search for that idea or document on any device in any location, and within a second, you have it in front of you. Thatâs way better than how we used to do it with large, cumbersome filing cabinets that were in a static location. Finding something often took hours.
I also like the idea that AI is then able to summarise that information into bite-sized chunks. That helps us. We have the choice to be able to go into the document for a deeper read or read the summary.
However, with all that said, technology helps us when it can speed things up that donât need us to make decisions or choices. Technology does not help us when it starts to make those decisions and choices for us. That is where we should push back.
This means your planning should always be done by you. You decide what to work on based on the information you have to hand. You can make it fun by pulling out your pens, highlighters, and a pad of paper and letting your brain think without technology influencing your decisions.
Great thinkers from the past scribbled their thoughts down on paper, and humanity is so much the better for it today. You donât want to lose that abilityâthe ability to think, decide and make choices of your own. Itâs what makes you special and unique.
Thank you, Scott, for your question and that you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
-
How important is your calendar in your productivity toolbox? I would argue that itâs the most important tool you have and the key to finally getting control of your time.
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Script | 312
Hello, and welcome to episode 312 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Reading the comments on some of my YouTube videos, I see a lot of people trying to make their task manager their primary productivity tool. I would argue this is a mistake. A to-do list or task manager is, at its heart, a list of things you think you need to do. And no matter what you throw at it, your task manager will willingly accept it. And that is exactly what it should do. Make it fantastically easy to collect stuff.
However, after you have collected stuff, what next?
It doesnât matter whether you have fifty, a hundred or a thousand tasks in your task manager. What matters is when you will do those tasks. Thereâs no limit on what you want or need to do; thatâs infinite. Your limitation comes from time. You only get twenty-four hours a day to do all this stuff, and somewhere in those twenty-four hours, youâll need to sleep, eat and wash.
Given that the limitation on what you can get done each day is time, that means that the primary tool in your productivity toolbox is always going to be your calendar.
So, with that introduction complete, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Pablo. Pablo asks, hi Carl, I noticed that you seem to be very careful about what you put on your calendar. It looks so clean. How do you keep it looking like that?
Hi Pablo, thank you for your question.
Your observation is correct. I am very protective of my calendar. To me, knowing where my commitments are and where I have space is important each day. It allows me to control my day and to ensure I am not pushing myself beyond my healthy limits.
I have an unhealthy fascination with the routines of highly successful people. Itâs always interested me to learn how immensely productive people manage to get their work done. Iâve learned about Winston Churchillâs afternoon naps and late-night writing. Of Leonardo Da Vinciâs polyphasic sleeping, Maya Angelouâs hotel writing room and Albert Einsteinâs love of sleep.
One thing these incredible people had in common was their understanding that to get work done, you needed to protect time. Painter Picasso hated interruptions and would go to great lengths to protect his painting time. Maya Angelou would hide herself away in a hotel room between 7:00 am and 3:00 pm to do her writing and thinking. Ian Fleming screamed at anyone who dared to interrupt his 9:00 am to 12:00 pm writing time.
I find it strange that so many people want to become better at managing their time and get more work done yet refuse to take any action to achieve that goal. Itâs not the tool that will do the work for youâonly you can do thatâitâs carving out the time you need to do it.
And thatâs where your calendar becomes your most powerful tool. Itâs the only productivity tool that will never lie to you. You get a new twenty-four-hour canvas each day, and you are given the freedom to create any kind of day you wish.
You could choose to call in sick and stay in bed all day if you wished. However, you will then need to deal with the feelings of guilt and FOMO that inevitably come when you do something like this. Every decision you make has consequences.
I recently did a video on getting control of your calendar, and in my example, I had meetings and blocks of time set aside for doing my important work. There were so many comments on how neat and tidy my calendar looked.
Yet, I see so many people with two or three meetings scheduled at the same time. Why? I mean, you cannot attend all three meetings, so why do you still have three meetings booked at the same time? I donât think my calendar looks neat and tidy. The difference is I will never allow myself to become double (or triple) booked.
I know you are busy. However, surely, when you receive a calendar invite, the ten seconds it takes to check your calendar to see if you have anything else booked in at that time is not beyond the realms of possibility. Just clicking âacceptâ without checking will cause you so much damage. Check before you accept. That should be a non-negotiable rule.
Not checking is like driving through a crossroads without looking. Sooner or later, youâre going to get hit by a 40-tonne truck.
One question you will find helpful to ask each day is, âWhere is my protected time?â Your protected time is the time you set aside for doing your most important work. That could be writing the proposal that is due at the end of the week, or it could be taking your kids to the park to play. Whatever needs to be done will always require time.
To make things easier for myself, I protect 9:30 am to 11:30 am each day for doing creative work. Usually, that involves writing, but once a week, it will be recording a YouTube video. I know that at the start of the week, I have the time to do all the creative work I want to do that week because I have protected that time. And I chose the word âprotectedâ deliberately. It is protected from everything but a genuine emergency. This means I refuse meetings at that time. Even my wife knows not to schedule anything between 9:30 and 11:30 am. (And that took a lot of training!)
So far, out of twenty-four hours, I am protecting two hours. That leaves me a lot of time for other things, yet each day, something creative is being produced. This is one of the most powerful lessons I learned from people like Ian Fleming, Maya Angelou and Benjamin Franklin. Protecting time for the important things.
Now, I would also recommend you protect a further two hours in your work day for admin and communications. If you are one of those people who is always reacting to every message and email that comes your way, you will, at the very least, feel frazzled. Itâs extremely tough on your brain. Itâs like trying to drive economically while constantly stopping and starting. Itâs not smooth, and your carâs engine (or battery) will be taking a pounding.
The most economical way to drive is smooth, and thatâs the same with your brain. By blocking a little time each day for responding to your messages, you will be operating at your most efficient. So, schedule time for doing your admin and communications.
I like to do my communications around 4 pm. After dinner, I do my admin. By doing my email (and other messages) at four PM, I avoid email ping pongâthatâs where you end up having to respond to the same email twice in a day because you give the other person time to reply. Do your communications at 4 pm, and you will significantly reduce the number of emails you get each day.
And admin time is for all those little things that you collect that just need to be done. Expenses, sales admin, filing, booking hotels or flights, etc. Anything that gets collected that sit around because they are neither urgent nor important.
Now, a quick tip here. Match your task managerâs tags or labels with your time blocks. This way, you can give yourself a focused view of the tasks that need doing. For instance, I have a label for admin tasks. When I do my admin at the end of the day, I open up a filtered view that shows me only the admin tasks that are due today. This way, I am not distracted by anything else.
If you follow this example, you will be allocating four hours a day for specific tasks. Your important work gets two hours, and you allocate an hour each for communications and admin. Four hours out of twenty-four will put you on top of your work and avoid the build-up of backlogs.
When I look at the daily routines of people like Winston Churchill and Ian Fleming, they spent around four to six hours a day doing focused work and managed to get an incredible amount of work done each day. Yet these two people were very social people. They were entertaining guests almost every day and writing hundreds of lettersâwhat we did before electronic communications. The key to their productivity was their non-negotiable focus time.
Think of your task manager as support for your calendar, and let your calendar run your day. Protect itâitâs the only time you have.
There are other things I will do, too. There are some days when I need to wake up very earlyâwell, very early for me. On those days, I know I will need to take a nap at some point. So, I will schedule nap time. This way, when I do find myself tired and unable to function properly, I can jump into bed for an hour or so. No guilt. Just complete rest. Itâs as Churchill said: you get to do a day and a halfâs worth of work in one. You get an energy boost and can work more effectively in the afternoon.
This is why I keep my calendar clean. The only things I am committed to get on there. AND⊠More importantly, if I am invited to a meeting I will always check before committing. I hate having to renegotiate meetings. Itâs time-consuming and involves a lot of back and forth.
Hereâs another quick tip for you. Use a scheduling service. These are great. You choose the times you are available for meetings, and if anyone requests a meeting with you, you can send them the link to schedule a meeting. Thereâs some human psychology going on here. The person requesting a meeting is unlikely to ask for a meeting outside of your allocated times because they also know it is time-consuming to do so. Itâs far easier for them to pick a time from your availability. I can promise you this will save you a lot of time and also make structuring your day far easier.
And there you go, Pablo. Thatâs how to keep your calendar clean and tight. Itâs the most powerful productivity tool you have, and itâs worth protecting.
Thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
-
Do pen and paper have any role in your productivity system these days? If not, you might be missing out on something very special.
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Script | 311
Hello, and welcome to episode 311 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
A few weeks ago, I posted a video on YouTube that demonstrated how I have gone back to using a penâor rather, a few of my old fountain pensâand some paper to start planning a project. Iâve since added doing my weekly planning on paper too.
This video and a subsequent follow-up video garnered a lot of interest and some fantastic questions. It also goes back to a question I was asked on this podcast last year on whether it was possible to create an analogue version of the Time Sector System.
This weekâs question is a follow-up to that question, and I hope my answer will encourage you to explore some of the unique ways the humble pen and paper can aid in your productivity journey.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Tom. Tom asks, hi, Carl, I recently saw your video on going back to pen and paper. What was your thinking behind that decision?
Hi Tom, thank you for your question.
In many ways, the reason for the âexperimentâ was something I tried when I was flying over to Ireland for the Christmas break. I decided to take a pen and notebook with me to see if my planning and thoughts would flow better on paper rather than how I usually do it through a keyboard.
The idea came from a video I had seen with Tim Ferriss, where he discussed how he finds his ideas flow better when he puts pen to paper. Plus, I have seen Robin Sharma, Tony Robbins, Andrew Huberman and read about many historical figures such as Presidents Kennedy and Nixon as well as Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming and Charles Darwin all take copious notes on paper.
I wondered if there was something in it.
When you think about it, the chances are you spend far too long in from of a screen these days. If itâs not your computer, itâs going to be your phone or TV. We just donât seem to be able to get away from them. When you pick up a pen and a pad of paper, you are no longer looking at a screen. The whole effect on your eyesight is going to change.
This is certainly something I was beginning to feel. Pretty much everything I do involves a screen. Thereâs even a heads-up display in my car! I just donât seem to be able to get away from them.
Then thereâs the type. I was recently looking through some of my old planners from 2009 and 2010 and found myself being transported back fifteen years to what I was thinking back then. It was a wonderful, nostalgic journey. My handwriting was unique; I could tell which pen I used and even the ink I was using back then.
I can look at a digital document I created ten years ago, and itâs boring Helvetica in black. It pretty much looks the same as any document I create today. Thereâs nothing nostalgic.
Thereâs a wonderful video on YouTube by Adam Savage (yes, the Adam Savage formerly of Mythbusters) where he shows an exact copy of one of Leonardo Da Vinciâs Codecs. WOW! I was blown away. It looked gorgeousâeven though Da Vinci wrote backwards. The aged paper, the diagrams, the pen strokes. Everything looked so beautiful.
So, as I was thinking about how I could bring pen and paper back into my system, I realised the one area where paper, for me, always works better than digital is in planningâwell, certainly the initial planning stages. I also find despite Appleâs attempts at creating quick notes using the Apple Pencil, itâs still not faster than having a notebook next to you on your desk with a pen.
Now, one problem many people face with using pen and paper is you end up with a load of half-empty notebooks all over the place. I can assure you if you think there are too many productivity apps around, wait until you begin going down the notebook rabbit hole. Thereâs thousands of different styles, colours and papers. Youâll learn about the incredible quality of Japanese paper and what constitutes fountain pen-friendly papers. Youâll learn about dot grids, grids, graph and lined paper. Then there are the coversâleather bound, ring bound, sewn, bonded and WOW! So many decisions.
Youâve been warned.
And if you start investigating fountain pens, youâll find yourself in serious trouble. YouTube is full of videos on what constitutes the best pens for all kinds of writers. Youâll learn about grail pensâpens everyone wants in their collection. I confess I have a soft spot for the Namiki Urushi and a Montblack 149.
Anyway, donât say I didnât warn you.
Now, back to how I am utilising pen and paper in my system.
I have two notebooks. The main one is my planning book. This is an A4 lined notebook where I will begin any planning session. I write the title of what I am planning at the top and then brainstorm in one colourâusually blue.
Now, I find the best place to do this is at the dining table, not at my desk. There are no screens on the dining table. So all I have is my notebook and my blue inked fountain pen. This is what call my first pass.
Now, the trick here is to write whatever comes into your head and write anywhere on the page. Remember, this is the first pass. It doesnât matter how good or bad any idea is. Just get it out of your head. Even the craziest ideas may contain a seed of something special.
Once youâve finished and can think of nothing else, close your planning book and leave it for twenty-four hours. Let your subconscious brain do its thing.
After twenty-four hours or so, come back to your note and, with a different colour pen, expand your initial thoughts. You could also bring your highlighters to the table if you prefer.
One reason I use royal blue as an ink colour for my first session, is a simple pencil looks great next to royal blue. But I do like to use black, green colours too.
What you will find is youâll begin adding more ideas, and the initial ideas you had will sprout new, better ideas.
This is what I call the first pass. If there is time pressure, I will move on to the next step now. However, I prefer to have time to run a second and third pass just to get all my ideas out.
So, what is the next step? This is where I scan the paper note into my notes app. From here, I can pull out the key points and ideas and begin developing the project or video idea. Thereâs often research to be done at this stage and also to decide what action steps I need to take. All of which will likely require a computer.
The second notebook I have is my scratch pad. Now, this could be down to my age, but even at school, I always had a pad of paper and pen next to me for jotting down quick notes and random thoughts. Thereâs something comforting about having it next to you. I could, for instance, be writing this script and suddenly have an idea, and I can quickly write it down on my scratch pad for later. Once itâs written down, itâs not going to be forgotten. I can deal with it later.
This notebook is an A5 ring-bound notebook. Itâs a perfect size for scratching down ideas, and the ring binding allows me to lay the book flat on my desk.
At the end of the day, I will go through the captured notes to see if anything needs to be transferred to my task manager. Anything I have dealt with previously, I will simply cross out.
However, the most important thing here is stepping away from the screen, and all the distractions a computer will throw at you and just focusing on thinking about the project, goal or whatever you need to think about.
Thereâs something about the feel of a pen on paper that no digital tool can replicate. Iâve tried things like Remarkable 2 and many of the other so-called âpaper replacementsâ. Sorry, but they cannot replicate that exquisite feel of a fountain pen nib flowing across paper. I suspect this is why fountain pens are still popular among so many writers today.
Handwriting is in our DNA - from the thousands of years old cave paintings to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics weâve been writing for years. Keyboards and typing are relatively modern, and anything you type looks the sameâafter all we generally use the same fonts for everything.
With handwriting, youâre creating art. Itâs unique. Each new note is going to look different from a previous note. You can choose different pens and colours and take them anywhere and just sit and write. It is such a different experience from sitting at a computer screen and typing. That difference will give you different ideas and thoughts.
Funnily enough, I have returned to writing my journal by hand again after five years in the digital journaling world. While it was very convenient to be able to add a photo to each new journal entry, I realised when I was reading through my old planners and handwritten journals there was something so different about what I was reading. I rarely read through my old typed journal entries, but I was captivated by my old-written journals. I could have sat there for hours reliving my life though a handwritten page.
So, there you go, Tom. That is why I have returned to the analogue world.
I would also add, that I have started doing my weekly planning on paper too. If you are familiar with my Weekly Planning Matrix. You can draw out the four squares in your planning notebook and give yourself twenty minutes to think about what needs to be done next week. If feels like you are tapping into a different way of thinking which is clearer, more focused on the bigger picture and in a way more emotional than trying to do this digitally.
I hope that has inspired many of you to go out and get yourself a notebook and pen. Have a go at it. See what happens. You might just fall in love with pen and paper all over again. Just be careful, thereâs a whole world out there of notebooks and pens. For me, my trusty old fountain pens and some Rhodia notebooks do the trick. (Although, O confess Iâve ordered some of the famous Japanese paper to test)
Thank you, Tom, for your question and thank you, to you too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
-
Are you restricting yourself too much? Attempting to stick to a too-embracing structure? It might be time to loosen up a bit.
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The 2024 ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP
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Script | 310
Hello, and welcome to episode 310 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Having some kind of structure or routine built into your day is important if you want to consistently get the important things done. The trouble starts when you try to stick to that structure or routine too rigidly. It begins to limit what you can do and holds you back from accomplishing the things you set out to accomplish. Plus, if your plan is interrupted by the inevitable âemergenciesâ, the plan is usually thrown out the window, and everybody elseâs problems become the focus.
Iâm all for building a structure around your day and week. Itâs this structure that will ensure you get the right things done on time every time. But sometimes, something will inevitably come along and stop you from sticking to your routine or structure, and then, if you donât have built-in inflexibility, everything will come crashing down. Either you drop everything, which leads to a build-up of backlogs, or youâll stay too rigid and miss an opportunity that could lead to bigger and better things.
This weekâs question goes to the core of this dilemma, and I hope to give you some ideas to prevent it from happening to you.
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Andre. Andre asks, Hi Carl, I love the idea of having a structured day, but I am having a hard time sticking to my plan. I never seem to have enough time to get all my work done, and I have a huge backlog of emails and project work to catch up on. Itâs causing me so much stress and worry. Do you have any advice?
Hi Andre, thank you for your question.
You are right to create a structure around your day and week. Aside from weekly planning, I would say if anyone wants to become better at managing their time and ultimately more productive, they are going to need some form of structure to their day.
However, as with most things, this can be taken too far. Take time blocking, for example. Time blocking is an excellent way to make sure you have enough time to do the critical things that need doing, yet if you try to micromanage your dayâthat is, you block your whole calendarâyou only need one meeting or one task to overrun by just a few minutes and your day is destroyed. For time blocking to work effectively, you will need plenty of blank spaces.
For example, you may wish to block two hours for some deep work in the morning, say, between 9:30 and 11:30, then an hour for managing your communications and an hour for clearing your admin tasks for the day. That way, if you work a typical eight-hour day, you have four hours for anything else that may come up.
However, this rigidity may also be coming from outside forces.
I love reading contemporary history. My favourite era is between 1945 and 1990. These were transformative years in both the US and Europe. I am particularly interested in how creative people, like Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, managed their days.
What was noticeable was with few exceptions, there were no rigid working hours. If you worked in a factory doing physically demanding work surrounded by dangerous machinery, there were laws in most countries preventing you from being forced to work beyond eight hours. For the rest, you worked until the work got done.
And between 1940 and 1980, there were no computers helping you to do your work. If you needed to write a report, you either sat down at a typewriter and typed it yourself (no delete key with typewritersâif you got a page wrong, you began again), or you may have been lucky and were allowed to hand the work to the typing pool for typing upâand then you either needed to handwrite the report or dictate it.
And donât let anyone tell you that people got less mail in those days. People got a ton of mail each day (often quite literally). It wasnât electronic mail; it was physical mail, and responding to that wasnât as simple as hitting the reply key and typing. There were conventions to a written letter. You could never write, âPlease find attached the file you requestedâ. You had to include a greeting and an ending, then sign it by hand, stick it in an envelope and take it to to post room.
There were a lot of late nights in the office getting work finished back then. Probably a lot more than we have today. I also remember in the 1990s regularly having to come into the office on a Saturday to clear files that needed clearing before the start of a new week.
Yet people adapted, and the work got done.
In many ways, we might be attempting to structure our days in the wrong way. Let me give you an example.
Iâve recently been reading a biography of Winston Churchill. Now, Churchill had an unusual structure to his day. He would wake up around 8:00 and while in bed, read the newspapers and deal with his communications. Heâd read his letters, call a secretary into his bedroom and dictate the replies.
He would get out of bed at 11 am and take a bath. Often, heâd have a secretary outside the bathroom door taking more dictationsâthat could be a speech he was preparing or one of the many articles or books he wrote.
Let me pause here. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, only a privileged few could afford to hire their own secretaries or assistants. Today, itâs relatively affordable to hire a virtual assistant, or you could learn to use the dictation features on your digital devices. This means you could dictate in a Churchillian wayâwhile taking a bath and while reading your emails in bed.
After his bath, Churchill would come downstairs for lunch. This wouldnât be a sandwich while sat at his desk. It was a full hour affair with wines and champagne. After lunch, heâd walk around his garden, feed the fish in his pond, and often paint. This was his rest time. A time when he spent some time thinking and relaxing.
Then, at 4:30 pm, it was nap time, and again, this wasnât a quick twenty-minute nap. It was a full ninety minutes. After his nap, it was another bath, then some card games with his guests or family before a full dinnerâincluding an array of alcoholic drinks.
At 10 pm, Churchill would disappear into his home office (or âfactoryâ as he called it), where he would work solidly for the next four to five hours. Then it was back to bed.
If you look at Churchillâs daily structure, it was solid. It got the important work done, and it was conducted on his terms. It was unconventional by the standards of those days. His âclassââthe upper classâwould usually disappear to their clubs after dinner for meetings and socialising. Yet, Churchill got a huge amount of work done. He wrote almost fifty books in his lifetime, thousands of articles for newspapers and was a full-time parliamentarian.
I tell you about Churchill because his daily structure is a great illustration of what you can do when you work within your own ideals. Churchill was a night owl, not a morning person. He took advantage of that by doing his most important creative work late at night. Tim Ferriss, the author and entrepreneur, is another person who likes to do his creative work late at night.
When people see my calendar, they think I am working too much. Yet, if you look closely, I do my creative work in the mornings, then take the afternoon off (in the same way Churchill did) then return to my work after dinner. I get four or five hours of rest from work every day and can enjoy it in daylight when the cafes are open and when I can actually enjoy living close to the beach. I am also a night owl.
What Churchill did was have some solid structures in his day. These were his wake-up time (8:00 am), lunch and dinner times. If he had guests for dinner, he would stay talking with his guests until late into the evening but would still return to his home office to work until he was tired enough to go to bed.
I fear many people have come to believe it is bad to work after they finish work. But do you really ever finish work? Iâm not suggesting you always take work home with you, but if you have backlogs and project deadlines approaching, perhaps giving yourself an extra hour or two in the evening to do a little more work isnât such a bad thing.
Think about that for a moment. You have the choice of two evils. The stress and anxiety of worrying about all the work piling up and not getting done. Or extra time in the evenings to get on top of the work. One will lead to health issues, and the other is inconvenient.
I remember reading about Michael Dellâs work routines when his family was still young. He would ensure he was home by 7 pm every evening for the family dinner. After dinner, he would play with his kids until they went to bed and then go to his home office to work until midnight.
Hopefully, your days wonât be destroyed too often, Andre, but it is going to happenâthatâs inevitable. The key is to be flexible. Over time, you will learn to distinguish between the genuinely urgent and the false urgencies. The thing is, and the reason I told you about Winston Churchill, is you have options beyond nine til five.
Tim Cook is famous for waking at 3:30 am and doing his emailâhe is clearly a morning person. Former President Jimmy Carter would go to the Oval Office at 7 am every morning to read through the reports he needed to know about that day before having a meeting with his security advisor at 8:30 am.
Productive days are not built by accident. They are built on structure. We can learn from immensely productive people like Churchill and build a structure around meal times and rest.
Insisting you must not work in the evenings is admirable, but if you have outstanding work to be done and a backlog of emails and other messages, what is that doing to your stress levels? Would it not be better for your long-term mental health to spend a few evenings or early mornings getting on top of that backlog so you give yourself less stress and more free time in the long-term?
Thank you, Andre, for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
-
How much time do you spend organising and reorganising your work each day? A key question to ask if you are seeking better productivity and time management.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The 2024 ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP
The Working With⊠Weekly Newsletter
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carlâs YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With⊠Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 309
Hello, and welcome to episode 309 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.
Deciding to get organised and better at managing your time is a good goal to have. After all, when you know where everything is and what needs to be done, you will see an exponential increase in your productivity, and that means, if managed well, your time management will also improve.
However, there is a fine line between spending too much time managing your stuff and not enough time doing your stuff. When you get caught up in that trap, you are lulled into feeling you are being productive when, in fact, you are not getting anything important done.
There are many reasons why this happens, the most common of which is becoming obsessed with toolsâthe apps and technology that promise to make organising and doing your work easier. No, this does not happen. Sure, a solid set of tools can help, but these tools will never do the work for you. Some of the worst tools will cause you to waste a lot of time organising and maintaining them instead of helping you to do your work more effectively.
Now, before we get to the question, Iâd just like to give you a heads-up about this yearâs Ultimate Productivity Workshop. This will be held on Friday the 9th and 16th February. Starting at 7:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (A little under two weeks away), This workshop will cover your calendar and task management in week one. In week two, we will look at how to manage email and other communications, as well as the all-important daily and weekly planning. By the end of these two sessions, you will have the know-how to build your very own âperfectâ productivity system.
But whatâs more special about this workshop is when you register, you get access to four of my mini-courses for FREE, as well as a workbook for all sessons. PLUS, you get a chance to ask me anything about time management and productivity.
Now, places are going fast, so if you donât want to be disappointed, get yourself signed up now. Full details for the workshop are in the show notes below.
So, what do you need to do to ensure you are spending the appropriate amount of time doing your work and managing the work coming in? Well, before we get to answering that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Kris. Kris asks, Hi Carl, is there a right balance between keeping my tasks and notes up to date and organised and doing the work? I find that keeping everything up to date takes me at least an hour a day and sometimes longer. Itâs very frustrating.
Hi Kris, thank you for your question.
I am always very careful with these types of questions because it is a good thing to use a few tools to help you with your organisation. For instance, a well-maintained notes app will do a lot for your overall productivity because note apps today have incredible search functionality. This is far better than when we were trying to keep all our notes up to date in paper notebooks and file folders.
However, because of this search functionality, we no longer need to spend a lot of time organising notes into folders (or notebooks, as some note apps call them) and tagging. All we need to do today is make sure we are making the title of the note easily searchable. That involves ensuring you have a keyword you would naturally search for and perhaps the date in the title.
After that, all you would need to have in your notes app is a simple folder structure, so you have at least the remnants of a system. A simple work and personal folder system would work today because search is so powerful.
The more complex you make your folder structure in notes, the longer it will take you to keep things organised.
One other tip on notes. Itâs likely that anything you put in your notes is not going to be urgent. Urgent things are normally things we have to do, and we would put those into our task manager or calendar. This means when it comes to cleaning up what you collected, you can do this once a week. I do this on a weekend when I do my weekly planning.
Another issue I come across is prioritising the task manager above the calendar. If you stop and think for a moment, this does not make a great deal of sense. A task is something that can be done at any time. It may need to be done on a given day, but when on that day you do it is not important. For example, you may need to call a client, but no time has been specified. This means you could call them at 9 am or at 2:30 pm. All that matters is you call them that day.
But if you were meeting a client for lunch, that would be a different matter. You would need to be in a specific place on a given day and time. That would be in your calendar.
In those two scenarios, the lunch meeting would naturally take priority over the phone call.
This means your calendar is at the top of your productivity tools hierarchy.
If I were to choose one tool that was kept up to date at all times, it would be my calendar, and to do that will likely only take two or three minutes a day.
But letâs step back a little here and look at the process for managing your tasks. If youâre listening to this, you will probably be aware of the COD system. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do. We need to be collecting the stuff we need to do, then allocate a little time for organising that stuff and finally, we need to do the work. The ideal split between organising and doing is 95% of your time doing and 5% organising. That works out at around twenty minutes a day organising your stuff and the rest of the time doing.
You are collecting all the time, and your process for collecting needs to be quick and with a minimum of friction. Here, technology helps you because you will likely be carrying your phone with you everywhere you go. This means your phone becomes your UCTâUbiquitous Collection Tool.
To ensure that your phone is optimised for this role, you want to make sure collecting tasks, notes and events is as easy as you can make it.
However, once you have all this stuff collected, when will you process it? I do my processing in the evening. Itâs quieter, and I can process all the stuff I have collected without distractions.
Now, processing is not about moving all your stuff from your inbox to your folders. The emphasis needs to be on eliminating, not accumulating. Your thinking should be around asking yourself, âDo I really need to do this task?â not where can I put it?
There will always be more stuff to do than time available to do it, so eliminating as much as you can at this processing stage will save you a lot of anxiety and overwhelmâlists have a habit of growing uncontrollably if not checked.
The great thing about focusing on eliminating rather than accumulating is it reduces the need to spend time organising. The delete key is a lot easier to operate than adding additional information and ensuring the tasks are written in a way you will understand what they mean next week.
The thing is, if you get your processing right the first time and you are not arbitrarily adding dates so you donât forget a task (as opposed to adding a date because the task genuinely needs doing on that date), you will not have too much reorganising to do.
I see a lot of people having to spend a lot of time rescheduling tasks every day because they were being a bit over-ambitious about what they could accomplish in a day. On a given day, that may not seem like a lot of time, but it adds up, and by the end of the week, you will have spent thirty to sixty minutes just rescheduling.
Thereâs an old carpenterâs saying, âMeasure twice, cut once.â Well, in productivity terms, this would equate to thinking twice before dating a task and doing the task once. Every time you reschedule a task, you will mentally picture yourself doing the task and deciding you donât have time for it right now, so it gets rescheduled. Not a very effective way to manage your time.
Think of organising tasks as collect fast, process slow. This way, you will find yourself less likely to waste time reorganising and rescheduling stuff. Thereâs a better chance you will get it right the first time. An extra few minutes when you process will save you a lot of reorganising later.
And now the elephant in the roomâthe tools you are trying to use to organise all your stuff. Be careful here. The more complex and pretty an app is, does not necessarily mean it will be better for your productivity. In fact, I find the more complex an app is, the slower you will be. All those bells and whistles mean more buttons to push.
When I compare my coaching clientsâ speed at being able to find things, Apple Notes seems to be the fastest, and that is the simplest. Notion, Evernote and Obsidian may have a lot more features, but all those extra features mean itâs harder to remember where something is stored. And if you become adept at using search, you will find the complexity of getting something into your system slows you down. Avoid these attractive yet complex apps. They are procrastination traps, and it will take a superhuman effort to avoid playing and fiddling with them when you are tired or not in a very productive state.
I hope that has helped, Kris. If you get your collecting, organising and doing right, you will only need around twenty minutes a day to organise your stuff. The rest of the time, you can spend getting your work done.
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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Podcast 308
If youâre not in control of your time, who is? Thatâs what weâre looking at this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carlâs YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With⊠Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 308
Hello, and welcome to episode 308 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
One of the most common comments I get on my YouTube videos is about who controls your work day. The answer to that question is you. Itâs always been you.
Even at its most basic level, you accepted an offer to work where you work at some point, which was a choice you exercised. Similarly, as each day begins, you could choose to stay in bed and fake sicknessânot something I would recommend, of course, but you always have that choice.
And, you always have the nuclear button optionâto quit at any timeâalthough I hope it doesnât need to come to that.
The problem with all these choicesâchoices you make every dayâis while you are free to make these choices, you also have to accept the consequences of your decisions. So, what you are really doing is calculating the cost/benefit of the decision you make.
Staying in bed might seem a great idea on a cold, wet morning, but you probably know that by 11 am, youâll be feeling guilty, and when thought about further, you will likely begin to feel a little anxious about all the things you might be missing out on.
But one thing you should never tell yourself is you have no choice. You do, and you always will.
Letâs put it this way: you may have an important, critical meeting with your CEO arranged at 11:00 am tomorrow morning, but if a close family memberâyour son or daughter, mother or fatherâis taken seriously ill overnight, youâre going to choose to be at the hospital with your family. (Well, at least I hope you are)
In that situation, you are exercising your choice. You cannot be in two places at once, and therefore, you have to choose your priority.
So, with all that said. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Isaac. Isaac asks, hi Carl, I have tried time blocking, but my boss wonât let me. Every time I sit down to get on with some deep work, heâll call or message me, and I have to answer immediately. How do you deal with these scenarios?
Hi Isaac, thank you for your question.
One of the benefits of getting organised and in control of your day is you get to clearly see what needs to be done each day. Being able to see everything that needs to be done allows you to prioritise your work.
The problems we face, though, rarely come from the work we have to do. They come from the interruptions and distractions coming at us from other people.
But letâs get serious here. Most of us are not working in jobs that involve the life or death of patients. Itâs not like someone in need of urgent attention from us is being wheeled into our offices for our immediate attention. So, letâs get real about how much time we have to do the work that comes at us.
Your boss might like you to respond immediately, but I am sure they can wait, and if you have allowed them to become accustomed to your quick responses, perhaps itâs time to slowly ween them off that expectation.
In my experience, bosses who demand instant attention from their team have been conditioned to expect instant responses. Itâs not often your bossâs fault; itâs yours because you do it, therefore they expect it.
In this situation, you have two options. You can have a face-to-face meeting with your boss and explain the difficulties they create when they expect instant responses and how the quality of your work and productivity would improve if they allowed you some breathing room.
The second option is to re-train them. Slowly, over a few weeks, lengthen your response times. Begin with five minutes, then ten, then fifteen and so on until you find the right balance. When Iâve tried this experiment on bosses in the past, Iâve found anywhere between fifty minutes and three hours can be gained here. If youâre lucky, you may find you have a boss who forgets they ever asked you and never chases you up. (Although, I admit they are rare)
However, Isaac, I was a little concerned with your choice of words, âI have toâ. Do you? I mean, really, do you âhave toâ? In life, there rarely are any âI have tosâ; these are concepts created by ourselves to create a sense of urgency.
If youâre listening to this podcast, you live in a free society, and that means you always have a choice. When we use the words âI have toâ, we are delegating responsibility for our choices to other people. If you do that, you are never going to find a sense of peace or fulfilment. Youâll always be waiting for instructions from someone. Itâs never âI have toâ; it should always be âI choose toâ because that is the truth. You choose to allow your boss to interrupt you.
When you reframe things to âI chooseâ, you take responsibility for your actions and that will give you a little more assertiveness when it comes to working with your boss or customers and clients.
One of the most effective things I ever did when working in a law firm with demanding clients and bosses was to create what I called âprotected timeâ. I learned this when I was working in sales. If I didnât have an hour or two each day when I wasnât available for customers, I would drop the ball on almost everything. I needed that time to sort out the sales admin and to ensure the deliveries to my customers were on time.
When working in a busy law office, I came across the same issue. Always being available meant too many things were not getting done. Sure, I was a hero to my colleagues and clients until they found I didnât get around to doing what they were asking me to do. I was prioritising the here and now, instead of what was genuinely importantâie the commitments Iâd already made.
You cannot sustain that. Allowing all these interruptions is going to catch up with you and not only leave you exhausted and stressed out, but it will also destroy your career.
Now, youâre not likely to be able to suddenly impose one or two hours of protected time each day if youâve allowed yourself to always be available. Youâve set expectations, and you are going to have to change those expectations. The most effective way to change things is to have a talk with your boss. Explain your dilemma and ask him (or her) to allow you one or two hours a day for deep, focused work. Explain to them how this will benefit them and how it will ensure you will be able to produce better quality work and service to your customers.
You could ignore this advice. But if you want things to change, somethingâs going to have to change that change must begin with you and the way you approach your day.
The only way I was able to get control was to initiate the âprotected timeâ protocol. I chose the quietest time of the day to do this. When I was in sales, that was from 9:00 to 10:30 am. When I was in the law office, it was 8:30 am to 11:00 am. After that, the phones lit up, and it was go go go.
But I was relaxed. Iâd got the most important work done that day, and aside from answering some random questions about ongoing cases, it was plain sailing. Sure, there were some days that it didnât work; emergencies inevitably crop up from time to time. But you just deal with those when they come up. They donât happen every day, and if they do seem to happen every day, you can look at your strategies and see where you can make changes.
If youâve got overlapping commitments on your calendar and no space to get on and do the work youâre employed to do, youâve got serious time management problems. Itâs time to stop, look at your calendar and decide what you can and cannot attend.
I know itâs hard. Itâs very hard. As humans, we are naturally wired to please people. But youâre not pleasing people when you let them down by not being able to carry through with your commitments. And then consider the toll on your family life. If you leave yourself exhausted at the end of the day and have to take work home with you, what does that say to your family about your priorities?
I like to think of it this way. I was not employed to be a people pleaser. I was employed to do a job. That could be selling a lot of cars or helping people with their legal problems. That does not mean you should not be polite and respectful, but when someone interrupts you, they are not respecting your time, and that needs to be addressed.
Iâve often said that the best time management hack is the learn to say no politely. The best strategy Iâve found is to say yes but impose your time frame. For example, if a colleague or boss asks you to do something, you can say you will do it once you have completed your current work or project. Then tell them you can do it next week. That often gets them to pause and then say, âDonât worry, Iâll get someone else to do it.â
Thatâs not a poor reflection on you; you will soon begin to shine because the quality of your work will improve. Youâll not miss deadlines, and your reliability will increase. Itâs a win-win for everyone in the end.
Ultimately, it comes down to you deciding where your priorities lay. Iâm reminded of the story of the consultant working for a large famous consultancy who was asked to come in on a Saturday to help prepare for an important presentation the following Monday. She apologised and said, Iâm sorry, I cannot come in on Saturday as I have an agreement with my husband to spend Saturday with him and our daughter. Her boss was frustrated at first but accepted her reason. A few days later, he called the consultant into his office and thanked her. Her refusal to come in on Saturday because of the agreement with her family inspired him, and he decided he would never ask his team to come in on a weekend. He even imposed the family rule on himself, which he later credited for saving his marriage.
Iâm not suggesting taking action on this with your boss will change the culture in your company, but that story is a good example of how sticking to your principles can earn you a lot more respect from your peers.
I hope that helps, Isaac. And thank you for your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
-
How much time do you spend organising and shuffling your work? And how much time do you spend doing the work? Thatâs what weâre looking at in this weekâs episode.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
The Working With⊠Weekly Newsletter
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carlâs YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With⊠Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 307
Hello, and welcome to episode 307 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
One of the great things about deciding to get organised, becoming better at managing time and being more productive is a sense of being in control and on top of everything coming at us. Nothing beats that feeling of knowing what needs to be done and that you have sufficient time today to get it done.
However, there is a dark side to all this. That is elevating the tools and practices above actually doing the work. Itâs great that all your tasks are neatly organised in a task manager, and your notes are all perfectly tagged and in their respective folders. But is the return on the time invested in maintaining all that worth it?
I would go as far as to say that with all the technology built into your appsâ search engines, 90% of what you are doing to maintain all these apps and tools is wasted time. You donât need to spend all that time doing it because a couple of hours spent learning how to search on your devices will render most of these maintenance activities redundant.
And that is where this weekâs question comes in. How much time do we need to spend each day organising and processing? The answer to that is probably a lot less than you think.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weekâs question.
This weekâs question comes from Alysha. Alysha asks, hi Carl, I have been on a quest to get myself organised and become better at managing my time, but all the books and articles I read seem to tell me I have to spend hours each week organising, tagging and filing and I wonder if that is actually the best use of my time. Do you have any thoughts on this area?
Hi Alysha, you make a very good point and one I often find myself despairing at when I see some of the questions I get in the comments section on my YouTube videos.
It seems a lot of people are not actually interested in getting better at managing time or being more productive. They are much more interested in playing with the tools instead of doing the work.
Let me explain. The tools and devices you use to be more productive are around 0.005% of what it takes to be more productive.
To be more productive is about what you are producing. It's not about how well your task manager is organised or how precisely you have your notes tagged or organised.
I mean, letâs be honest here, you can be exceptionally productive armed only with a paper notebook and a calendar. You donât need anything more. All these wonderful digital tools are great, donât get me wrong, but if they become the main focus of your whole system, then they become the distraction and prevent you from doing what needs to be done to be productiveâthatâs doing the work.
Recently, Iâve been re-reading some older time management and productivity books. Books from the late 1980s and early 90s. These books were written before the massive advances in computer technology in the workplace and yet, the problems people were facing back then are the same fundamental problems people are facing today.
There are the parents who are trying to juggle their career with raising their children. Thereâs the busy executive who is struggling to get their core work done because they are always having to be in meetings or dealing with clients calling them all the time. And there are the people struggling to respond to all the letters and messages they receive each day.
The tools and channels may have changed, but the problems in managing all this work have not. Itâs still there, and I am sure it will still be there in fifty or a hundred yearsâ time.
The thing is, itâs never been about the tools. You can have the best, most advanced tools available today, but if you are not getting on and doing the work, you will still have backlogs and be overwhelmed. If you are not keeping control of your calendar and allowing other people to schedule meetings for you, you will be overwhelmed and unable to do your core work.
I was reminded of this recently when listening to David Goggins on the Andrew Huberman podcast. In one part, they talk about all the supplements and protocols we are supposed to be taking and doing. Yet, unless you put on your running shoes and get out and do the run, none of these supplements or protocols will help you. They should never be used as an excuse not to do the work.
Yet, that is what so many people are doing today. They are using the tools to avoid doing the hard thing. The actual work.
If you have a twenty-page report to write for your boss, open up your computer, click on the Microsoft Word icon and write it. If you need to email a client, open up your email app and write it. You do not need to have a thirty-minute debate with yourself about which is the best tool to use to write the report, and you donât need to clear your email inbox to send the email to your client.
What I have noticed over the last few years is a lot of people are using their tools as an excuse to procrastinate on doing the hard work. People will spend hours on YouTube or an app-finding website looking for the miracle app that will somehow miraculously do the work for them.
Itâs a little like the person who wants to lose weight and get fit and invests all their time and money in supplements and training gear but never goes out and does any exercise. You know that will never work. Youâve got to do the work.
Planning and organising do have their place. It is important to know where everything is and what needs to be done. But that should never be at the expense of doing the work.
Yesterday, as I was recording and editing this weekâs YouTube video, my little studio was a mess, and my desktop was covered in footage and screenshots. Everything appeared disorganised and messed up. Yet, the video was recorded, and the editing was done. During the five or six hours I was working on that video, my only focus was the output. I didnât care about how untidy everything looked. That did not matter. What mattered was the video was recorded, edited and posted.
When Iâd finished, then I could clean things up. Move all the stuff from my desktop to the folder and cross off the task in my task manager. Job done.
The focus is always on getting the work done, not how beautifully everything is organised.
One of the biggest problems with digital tools these days is the battle app developers are having to stand out in a very crowded productivity field. In order to stand out, they are adding more and more features, and that leaves us with more and more things to fiddle with.
I see people spending a lot of money on apps like Super Human and Hey email apps. These apps claim to sort your email for you, moving to the top of the list of the emails they think are the most important. Now, I am sure most of the time, they get this right, but the reality is you can do this yourself in apps like Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail. You do not need expensive apps for this.
But as a new toy to play with, these apps are great. They will stop you from getting on and clearing your backlog and give you something new and interesting to play with. But is that the goal? I hope not.
If you want to clear your email backlog, you have to get on and clear it. No app will ever do that for you.
If you have subscribed to hundreds of newsletters and signed up to get the news delivered to your inbox every morning and are overwhelmed by the hundreds of emails you are receiving, perhaps the problem is not the tool but you. You signed up for these. You can give yourself an hour or two and unsubscribe from them any time.
One of the most common questions I get is about how to organise projects. Now, many projects have a lot of moving parts, and tasks need to be done in order to keep them moving forward so the deadlines are met.
But do you really need a complex system to organise these projects? I have a project at the moment to update my free COD course. I have my notes and the outline neatly organised, and each week, I review the project. Yet this week, the project hasnât moved forward. Why? Because I am ignoring the obvious thing. I need to do the work. I need to set up my studio and begin recording it.
I can spend the next six weeks shuffling files, but that wonât result in an updated course. The only way that will happen is if I go into the studio and record it.
And thatâs the same for you, too. If you want to be more productive, then you need to do productive things. That means doing the work. There is no other way, and there certainly is no app out there that will do that for you.
If your car needs washing, then take your car to the car wash centre.
If you need to clean up your home, then when you get home today, do it.
If your email is out of control, then open up your email and get it under control.
If you need to lose weight, put down the cookie, put on your exercise gear and exercise.
None of this is complex. It might be difficult, and you may not want to do it, but if it needs to be done, you will have to do it sometime. Why not now?
The bottom line is if you genuinely want to get control of everything going on in your professional and personal life, you need to do the work. Planning, organising and searching for better tools will not do that. They are less than 1% of what it takes. The only thing that worked forty years ago is the same thing that only works today. Doing the work.
I know this may not be what you want to hear. But the reality is the miracle tool does not exist, and if it did, you would soon find yourself out of a job.
The most effective way to become more productive and better at managing our time is to develop processes for doing your work so you become more effective and efficient at doing it. That way, you will get faster, and that, in turn, will leave you less overwhelmed and with more time to do the things you want to do.
Thank you, Alysha, for your question, and thank you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
-
Are you guilty of attempting to do too much each day? If you are, you may be suffering from something called âhero syndromeâ, and itâs not a very productive way to manage your life.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
The Working With⊠Weekly Newsletter
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carlâs YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With⊠Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 306
Welcome to episode 306 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
I remember a few years ago someone commented on a post I had written about only having 24 hours a day. The lady suggested that this was not strictly true because some people had more privileges than others. For instance a CEO might have an army of assistants, or a wealthy individual may have cooks, nannies and butlers in their home to do a lot of the work less privileged people need to do.
I donât disagree with her. What she pointed out is true. But, no matter who you are, you still only get 24 hours. A CEO is employed to make decisions, meet with key people within the organisation which their army of assistants cannot do for them, and if the wealthy individual wants to sit around all day with nothing to do drinking champagne and canapĂ©s, then good luck to them. Itâs not a life I would like to live.
The key to becoming more productive and better at managing your time is in how you make the most of your twenty-four hours. Knowing what your essentials are would be the first step, but what else can you do to ensure you are making the most of each day while ensuring you are getting enough rest and relaxation? Well, thatâs the subject of this weekâs question.
Speaking of which, that means itâs time for me to hand you over to the Mystery podcast voice.
This weekâs question comes from Richard. Richard asks, hi Carl, Iâve always struggled to get everything I need to do done and when I get home at the end of the day, Iâm just too exhausted to do anything but crash on the couch. Do you have any suggestions on better managing my time?
Hi Richard, thank you for your question.
It looks like what you describe is part of the journey to becoming better at managing your time. The first step is to acknowledge that things could be better. Your question suggests you are at that stage.
One thing I would recommend is to do a task audit. What tasks are you trying to complete each day? Are they strictly necessary and if they are, could you group similar tasks together so you develop processes for getting them done.
Let me give you an example.
Most days I cook my own dinner. I also like to do my fair share of the house chores. So, I found a way to group cleaning up the kitchen and dining room while I cook my dinner. At first it felt a little overwhelmingâwatching my dinner cook while I was cleaning down the fridge or vacuuming the floors, yet today, itâs just something I automatically do. I no longer need to think about what I am doing.
Iâve also taken to sorting out the laundry at the same time now. The laundry room is just off from the kitchen so it just seemed logical to either put a load of washing on or to fold the freshly laundered clothes. Now, I am cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen and dining area and checking the washing.
Now if I put all those tasks onto a task list, it would look ridiculously overwhelming. Yet it isnât. Itâs surprising what you can do in three and 3/4 minutes while you wait for your eggs to boil.
The great thing is, I no longer need any of these chores on my list. When I make dinner, thatâs my trigger to do the chores.
Doing a task audit will likely highlight a lot of inefficiencies. I certainly found a lot. The key is to look at different areas of your life and work and to find better ways of doing it.
It will naturally feel strange at first. Youâre changing a habit and thatâs always hard. Yet, the long-term benefits are huge.
Iâm reminded of a story about the former Ferrari Formula 1 Technical Director, Ross Brawn. When he started his own team, Brawn Racing in 2009, he quickly discovered that he didnât have time to read all the documents and emails he was receiving. One of his team members suggested printing out all the documentation and emails and placing them in a folder he could then read as he was commuting in to work. The commute was one hour each way, so this gave him two hours of reading time each day.
Being self-employed, I generally eat my lunch alone. I use this time for reading articles related to my work. This gives me around forty-five minutes each day for reading.
This way of managing our work is called leveraging time. We cannot change the amount of time we have each day, but we can seek ways to maximise what we do in the time we have.
Wealthy people do this by hiring people to do work for them, we probably do not have that luxury, but we can still leverage our time by being smart about how we use time.
Now, life is not just about doing our employed work. There is a lot more to living life. Thereâs time spent with the people that matter to us and exercise, for example. Where do we fit all that in when we are already busy?
You mentioned in your question you are âtoo exhaustedâ to do anything other than crash on the couch when you get home. Now, unless you are working a job that involves a lot of running around, that tiredness is likely mental tiredness. I would suggest in the evenings you get out and move. Do some form of exercise. This could be taking a walk, or doing a few body-weight exercises for twenty-minutes or so.
I know this will go against every instinct. Youâre exhausted and all you want to do is crash. The problem with this is once you stop and slow down your body is not going to want to get up again. This is when you will likely get caught in the cycle of mind numbing scrolling and streaming TV shows. While there is a time for this kind of activity, doing it every day is not going to be healthy for you in the long-term.
Physical activity in whatever form will help to prevent you crashing at the end of the day. It will reduce your stress levels and help you to sleep better. It will also give you what is called a âsecond-windâ where your energy levels will rise a second time in the day. It will also leave you feeling a lot more positive which in turn will help your relationships because you will be much more engaged in any conversation.
Earlier, I mentioned building processes to help you to maximise your time. I remember discovering processes as the key to becoming much more efficient with the work I do. For instance, I used to get anxious about all the admin tasks that seemed to build up each day. It wasnât until I realised that admin was a part of life that would never go away that I decided to do something about it. Admin tasks are relentless and never go away. Sure, some days you may not have much, but others you willâI refer you to the tax submission season, for example.
Now, I have a block of one hour each day dedicated to dealing with admin. Most days, I donât need the full hour, but itâs there if I need it. What this has done is taken the anxiety of not having enough time away. I know I have time. I have up to seven hours a week for it, and thatâs more than enough to manage all those little admin tasks.
I do this with email, too. Communication is an inevitable part of your life today. If itâs not emails, itâs text messages. The question is, how much time do you need each day to keep on top of it?
The problem with not having a dedicated time for responding to your messages is you will allow incoming messages to distract you. I recently read that the average person is checking email every six minutes! Wow! How on earth would you ever be able to get any meaningful work done if you were allowing yourself to be distracted that often?
Not just the fact you are being interrupted, itâs also the mental energy required to do that much task switching. If you are doing this, Richard, no wonder you are crashing at the end of the day. Your brain was not designed to work that way.
Hereâs the science bit. Our brains work in cycles of 90 minutesâinterestingly it does this in sleep as well. You can focus your attention on deep meaningful work for around 90 minutes. After that you will be fatigued and need to rest. Now that rest does not mean you check email or scroll social media, it means you should switch things around. So, you could break your day up into 90 minute segments. Deep work followed by something light and physical. You do not need to do physical activity for 90 minutes, but a ten to twenty minute walk would do wonders for your focus, mental energy and overall feeling of wellbeing. It gets the blood flowing and clears out your brain ready for the next session of work.
One final bit of advice I can give you is to start with what you want time for. Work is generally eight hours of your twenty-four. Aside from work, what do you want time for? Start with that. Build that into your calendar first. The great thing about our employed work is that time is already fixed. Using the tips Iâve shared with help you manage your work there.
So what do you want time for? How much sleep do you need or want? Get these fixed into your daily routine and calendar and build from there. Youâll be much happier and more energetic this way. The only thing you need do then is to experiment, find the right balance and pretty soon all that end of day exhaustion will disappear.
I hope this has helped, Richard, Thank you for sending your question in and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very very productive week.
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Hello and welcome to 2024! And in this episode, Iâm answering a question about sticking with your New Year plans.
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Script | 305
Welcome to episode 305 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
So, 2024 is here. A New Year with a lot of potential new opportunities and plans. The challenge you will face (because we all face this challenge) is executing on all the ideas and plans you have for this year without a loss of enthusiasm or energy.
And that will happen because no matter how well you have planned the year, things will not work out as you imagine. Some things will go exactly how you expect them to, but most will not. And thatâs the same for everyone. If you deliver all your plans and projects exactly as conceived, you are not ambitious enough to move forward. Youâre 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, thatâs the topic of this weekâs question, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for the question.
This weekâs 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 havenât 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 thatâs 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 âwhatâ 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. Itâs incredibly hard to begin with. The first sessionâs never that bad until you wake up the following morning. When you step out of bed, your muscles scream out in pain, and youâll 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. Itâs all about turning up and doing the exercise. But it doesnât 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 Iâve discovered about fitness is that itâs 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 thereâs 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 wonât 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. Youâll 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, thatâs 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. Itâs a place Louis, my little dog, likes to cuddle up to me in the evenings, and Iâm 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 donât 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. Itâs the first day of the year, and itâs not about how well or far I run; itâs 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. Iâm not worried about February right now. If I get through January having done exercise on 25 or more days, thatâs a result I will accept. Itâs not perfect, but itâs 25 days of exerciseâthatâs something to celebrate! I can then decide what I will do in February to maintain my momentum.
And thatâs 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. Itâs not what you achieve in one day; itâs 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 doesnât 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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In this weekâs episode, how can you stay motivated and productive in retirement?
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Script | 304
Hello, and welcome to episode 304 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
We often think time management and productivity are the realms of students and busy people trying to maintain a growing career and balance a growing family. The truth is once we begin making decisions for ourselves, how we use our time becomes a deciding factor in what we do each day.
This means once we leave the workforce and take full responsibility for what we do each day, managing our time becomes even more important. If you think about it, when we are in work, thereâs often a time we need to be in the office, an array of meetings and deadlines for projects that need to be completed. These deadlines and commitments are often given to us by our bosses and customers.
Once you retire, those deadlines are no longer handed out by bosses and customers. Now you have complete control over what you do each day. You can go to bed and wake up whenever you like; you no longer need to wait for the weekends or evenings to meet up with friends, and all those activities you promised yourself you would do once you retire can now be done.
Just because you are retired and no longer working does not mean you no longer need to worry about how you manage your time. In many ways, now you have complete control over what you do each day time management and productivity practices are more important than ever.
And that neatly leads me to this weekâs question, and to give you the question itâs time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This weekâs question comes from Kai Yee. Kai Yee asks: Hi Carl, how would you suggest a person apply your systems after they have retired?
Hi Kai Yee, thank you for your question.
One of the things Iâve learned is that no matter where you are in life, there will always be things to do. In many ways, when you are working, managing your time is much easier because your work gives you structure to your day. You have a time to wake up, a regular place to be at a set time each day and a finish time.
When you retire, that structure disappears, and it can be disorientating. You no longer need to wake up to be somewhere at a given time, and without a plan or a reason to get up, time will disappear incredibly fast.
So the first thing you should do is to give yourself a solid structure which means bringing your calendar into play.
What do you want time for each day? You could begin with your wake-up and going-to-sleep times. Get these fixed into your calendar. If I were in the fortunate position to retire today, I would set my wake-up time at 8:30 am and bedtime at 1:00 am. I love the quiet between 11 and 1 am, and I get a lot of reading or learning done at that time. Your wake-up and going to bed times will act as the bookends for your day.
One of the most important things you can do when you retire is to find time each day for exercise. And as I have mentioned before, exercise does not necessarily mean going to the gym or out for a run. All it means is movement.
When you donât have any commitments for the day, it can be tempting to wake up, make your morning beverage sit down and not do anything all day. Time will just slip away.
I experience this frequently when I head over to Ireland for the Christmas holidays. I donât have a structure, so after waking up, I will make coffee, sit down and read the news or scroll social media and before I know it, itâs lunchtime, and I havenât done anything. To overcome this, I give myself some structure.
This year, for example, my wife and I have decided we will go out for a morning run as soon as the sun comes up. The act of getting into our running gear, going out for thirty to forty minutes, coming back and preparing for the day will give us structure and ensure we donât gain too much weight over the holidays.
What is your preferred way to get some movement into your day? That could be going out for a walk or a bike ride. It could mean you go to a gym or an exercise class. Or perhaps you do some resistance band exercises. Maintaining your mobility is going to be very important, and that means you can use movement and exercise as part of your daily structure.
What else would you like time for each day? Perhaps there will be things that donât necessarily need to be done daily but weekly. Get these into your calendar. All of these things are going to give you structure.
There are a number of things that will always form a part of your life. Movement, eating, sleeping, learning, hobbies and socialising. All these are important. The question is, where will you put them into your calendar?
One thing I noticed with my parents, who are both retired, is they still have tasks to do. My father, for instance, has maintained his love of animals and still runs a small farm, not for profit, but to give him something he enjoys doing. Waking up and going out to feed the animals is all a part of his structure, but each week he needs to go and buy feed and do maintenance tasks around his small farm. Repairing fences, fixing leaking roofs and cleaning up are always on his list of things to do.
Itâs easy to imagine that once you retire, you no longer need to keep up with your calendar or task list. Would it be that simple? Just because you stop working, it doesnât mean there in nothing to do. In reality, while some things will drop off your lists, other things will replace them.
I know a lot of people say when they retire, they will redecorate their home and do up the garden (back yard if you live across the pond), yet when the time arrives, nothing happens. It all seems overwhelming. Yet, if you set about planning out your projects and making sure your areas of focus remain the central part of your life, you will have the structure to ensure these things happen. This means you will still need a way to manage all those tasks and appointments.
Always remember, the work wonât get done unless you do the work.
In many ways, the biggest challenge you will face is no longer having someone to keep you accountable for your projects. Instead of a boss or customers expecting things from you, the only person holding you accountable is going to be you, and that can be hard. This is why building structure into your days is going to be so important.
What time will you begin the day? What kind of things will you do in the morning? When will you eat? What time will you finish t the day?
There are a lot of questions you can ask yourself that will help you to build some structure into your day. As with when you were working, consistency and a structured plan are going to ensure the right things are getting done each day.
When you finally finish your working life, it doesnât mean life ends. In fact, a lot of what you likely planned to do in life will suddenly become doable. You have the time and, hopefully, the financial resources to do those things. The only question you need to answer is when? When will you do those things? Once you know when you can then go about working on the how. How will you do them?
All of these questions are no different from when you were in full-time employment.
Itâs easy to believe when you retire, things will change. And sure, they do change, but you will still have stuff to do. That will never change.
So, if you want to get the most out of your retirement, make a plan. Begin at the year level; what would you like to do this year (or perhaps next year now, given that itâs only a couple of weeks away)? Think in terms of projects you want to complete and places you want to visit. Once you have that list, create four boxes, each representing a quarter. Then spread out these projects and activities you want to do across those quarters.
For instance, if you want to work on your garden, perhaps Q2 and Q3 would be the best quarters for that activity. What about the places you want to travel to? When will you do your travelling? And finally, for the winter quarters (Q1 and Q4), what activities could you do in those months?
Having a mapped-out year will give you a sense of purpose. It will give you structure, and it will prevent you from procrastinating.
Procrastination is going to be the biggest challenge you face. You have all this apparent time, no boss shouting at you, and no customers waiting for you. Itâs all on you, and without that accountability, you will suffer. Make sure you build it into your day.
So there you go, Kai Yee, just because you are retired, it does not mean you donât need to maintain your activities. In many ways, it can be harder to motivate yourself. However, with a bit of planning, being clear about what you want and know what needs to be done each day, you will soon find yourself moving towards a healthy, happy and fulfilling retirement,
Thank you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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I and many other people in the productivity world talk a lot about planning your day. However, what happens when your plans are frequently destroyed by other people?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Episode 303 \ Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 303 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
As the Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote âThe best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agleyâ. âGang aft agleyâ can be translated as go awry. This means that no matter how well you plan your day or week, things are not going to go according to plan. Similarly, one of my favourite quotes that is often attributed to Mike Tyson is, âEveryone has a plan until they are punched in the face.â And itâs so true.
One of the reasons so few people actually do a daily or weekly plan is because they believe that no matter what they plan, it is going to be torpedoed once they begin the day. A simple text message or email can derail the whole day. Yet, I still believe it is important to have a plan. Without a plan, you will be waiting for others to give you something to do. You will feel lost and never get anything important to you done, and you are guaranteed to build horrendous backlogs.
This leads me to this weekâs question, and for that, it means itâs time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This weekâs question comes from Sasha. Sasha asks, Hi Carl, what tips do you have for me to harden my system so that it doesn't constantly wobble when life experiences significant deviations outside of the planned week?
Hi Sasha, thank you for your question.
Now, I know there is a little more background to your question. Specifically, managing two young children and both yourself and your wife working full time.
So with that in mind the first problem people face is with being too structured. What I mean by this is being too specific about what you want to get done each day. Most of the things we want to get done around the house do not really need to be done on a specific day. For instance, I like to give my home office a really good clean on a Saturday morning, but more often than not something will come up that prevents me from being able to do that.
Now if I want to follow my calendar religiously, it would annoy me if I was prevented from doing what I had planned, but really, does my office need a good clean specifically on a Saturday morning? No of course not. It would be nice, but it really doesnât matter if I do it on Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. The only thing that really matters is at some point in the week I do it. (But even then that is debatable).
This problem can be exacerbated if you have young kids. With kids under the age of 13, thereâs no way you will be able to maintain a well structured home. Kids were born with the natural ability to destroy all well intentioned plans. And thatâs fantastic. Itâs all part of the experience of raising children. If it didnât happen, youâd miss out on one of lifeâs joys.
I can promise you on the day your kids turn 13 you will miss all that disruption. Your kids are going to go from being entirely dependent on you to wanting to have nothing to do with you as they go through adolescence.
For most of you, I hope, your family comes first. This means if you get irritated because a family member ungently, and unexpectedly, needs you you should be happy. It might be inconvenient, but family comes first. Thereâs no debate. If there is a debate, then perhaps family (or this particular family member) is not really your number one.
One thing Iâve learned over the years is as soon as you involve another living creature in your plans, you are going to need to be flexible. My wife, for example, has no concept of time when it comes to family plans. Sheâs spot on with her time when it comes to friends or strangers, but when it comes to her family, her buffer is two or three hours. I remember not long after being married I used to have to lie to her about when we needed to be at the airport. If check in time was at 9:00am I would tell her it was 8:00am. This meant we were able to build buffer time into our plans. Today, sheâs much betterâI must have coached her well, but it did take ten years to get her to that state.
And there will always be the unexpected. As you say, kids get sick and that changes everything.
Now, as you both work, what contingency plans do you have in place for when a child cannot go to school or daycare centre? This is critical because you cannot plan for a child being sick. This is contingency planning and as soon as the decision to keep you child at home, what needs to happen? Do you call your parents and ask them to take care of your child, or does one of you need to stay at home? Ensuring your contingency plan is in place and ready to roll should the unexpected happen will save you a lot of stress and panic.
Now the question arises; what do you do with all the work you had planned to do when the unexpected takes over your day? Well, if you are planning for the week, all it means is you reschedule what you wanted to do to some other time in the week. Itâs likely you will have a few days to reschedule things over and you may be able to renegotiate some of your commitments.
A few years ago we had a family emergency that became apparent at 7:30am. I had a full day of work planned, yet this was family and I immediately took action to deal with the emergency. This essentially destroyed my plan for the day and the repercussions continued into the next day. However, I was able to sit down for ten minutes later in the afternoon and I messaged my appointments scheduled for the next day to tell them I was going to be unable to attend. I was then able to get back to the emergency.
The most important thing is you deal with the issue in front of you first and once everything is back under control, you can review what you have on your plate and reschedule where necessary.
Life is never going to be a straight line and no matter how well planned you are, things are going to go wrong. In a previous episode I spoke with Simon Jeffries, former UK Special Forces officer and Simon mentioned about when in the special forces you know before you begin things are not going to go according to plan. However, the important thing is to know precisely what you objective is and you stay focused on accomplishing that. Special forces soldiers do consider everything that could go wrong and what they would do in those situations, but the most important thing is they keep their eye on the objective.
If you have ever seen the news footage of the the British SAS storming the Iranian Embassy in 1980, you may have seen one of the SAS soldiers getting caught in the rope he was descending on. His colleagues did their best to cut him down, but the mission still went on. They dealt with the emergency quickly and as efficiently as possible then got straight back to doing what they had planned to do.
Itâs this approach we want to be bringing to our lives too. Things are not going to go according to plan. However, when you are clear about what must be done that day, you put yourself in a much stronger position because you are more focused and disruptions will just bounce off you.
Now you donât want to be setting yourself too many objectives. I only set myself one or two. I know that I will get those done 99% of the time. Yesterday was a very disrupted day, yet I had two things to complete. I needed to go to the bank and record and edit my YouTube video. My wife woke up feeling rather unwell, so I took her to the doctors. While she was there I realised I could call in to the bank, so I did that (thereâs long queues at this time of the year to see a doctor). Once done at the bank, I picked my wife up from the doctors.
I had to go to the pharmacy to get her prescription once Iâd got her home and tucked up in bed. After a short sleep, my wife was feeling a lot better, so I was able to pick up the video recording and editing. There are other things on my list for the day, and a few of those I needed to reschedule, but when I finished for the day, I was surprised how much Iâd actually got done.
The important thing is not to panic. Accept the disruption for what it is, a disruption that needs to be dealt with then move back onto your objectives. Things will always calm down and return to normal, so there really is no need to panic. If meetings need to be postponed or cancelled, get on and do it as soon as you can. If planned work needs to be rescheduled, then do that. Just donât overthink things.
The great thing about having a plan for the week (because you did a weekly planning session) you have a plan to get back on to. This means no matter what disruptions that come your way, you only need a few minutes to review your plan and decide what still must be done and what can be renegotiated.
In worst case scenarios, you may feel the need to do a weekly planning session to get yourself back on track. Thatâs okay. Sometimes thatâs the wisest thing to. I think over the last year, Iâve had to do that once or twice. Itâs not something you will need to do often, but if you feel thatâs the only way you will get back on track, then by all means do it. Youâll feel a lot better and much more focused.
I hope that helps, Sasha. Thank you so much for your question.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
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