Afleveringen
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Backlogs… A rather bigger part of life that we probably wish wasn’t. Did you know that there are three types of backlog, two of which you don’t really need to worry too much about? Let me explain.
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Script | 344
Hello, and welcome to episode 344 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Let’s be honest: somewhere in our carefully organised lives, backlogs will build. It could be email, the ever-increasing list of house repairs, or the daily admin life generates.
With everything going on in our lives, it would be easy to believe that finding the time to stop these backlogs from growing is impossible.
Yet, when you understand the three types of backlogs, you can develop a process that stops the backlog from growing.
The three types are the growing backlog, the stalled backlog and the shrinking one.
You don’t need to worry about the shrinking backlog. It’s doing what you want it to do—shrinking. That could be getting your receipts together in preparation for doing your taxes. You’re gathering and sorting them, so the backlog is shrinking. This generally happens when the tax submission season is almost upon us.
The stalled backlog is also a little less urgent. It’s not growing, but you need to watch it carefully because this kind of backlog can start snowballing—house or car repairs, for example, often do this.
The most dangerous backlog is the growing one. This often happens with email and admin tasks and can occur when you try to expand your business too fast without adding resources.
Before we go any further, let me first hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janice. Janice asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to get my life organised but don’t have time because I have so many things to do. My email’s a mess, and every weekend, I spend all day cleaning up my home. How do you get on top of things when you are far behind?
Hi Janine, thank you for sending in your question.
This is a tough one. It can feel like we are stuck between wanting to get ourselves organised and realising that we have such a big backlog of stuff to do that it would take several months to break even—so to speak.
The strategy here is to first determine what kind of backlog you’re dealing with. Is it growing, stalled, or shrinking?
If it’s shrinking, keep doing what you are already doing. It’s shrinking, so it’s doing what you want it to do. Don’t stop.
The one that needs immediate attention is the growing one.
Imagine that you have over a few thousand emails in your inbox. It’s making finding important emails slow and cumbersome, and you want to get it cleared.
The challenge is that more emails appear every day, and that number is not fixed. Some days, you may receive 150+ new emails, while other days, perhaps it’s eighty. Either way, until you can achieve a net gain—i.e., processing and clearing more emails than come in—the backlog will continue to grow.
With email, I would first clear out the older emails. There will be a point where you’ve ignored an email for so long that it would be embarrassing to respond to it now. Where is that point?
For me, that’s two weeks. It would be embarrassing for me to respond to any email that’s been sitting around for two weeks or more. You may be more tolerant than I am. You may be happy responding to emails older than a month or two. Where is your limit?
Once you know your limit, take any email older than your limit and move it to a new folder in your email program called “Old inbox”. This way, nothing has been lost, and you can go through that list when you have time. That list will no longer be growing. You’ve put a stop to it.
Now, to prevent the backlog from growing, you will need to clear whatever emails remain in your inbox first, so you start from zero.
Now, here’s where you will need to be cautious of FOMO—the fear of missing out. This can paralyse you because you are fearful that you might be deleting something important. Fear not. Always remember with email if you have been sent something there will be a copy of it somewhere.
If for whatever reason you do need something you’ve deleted, you can reach out to a colleague and get a copy.
One of disadvantages of digitalization is we no longer see things piling up. Back in the day when most of what came across our desks was paper, it was very easy to see backlogs growing. The pile was physical and you could see it. With digital, it’s very easy to go into Ostrich mode. (Although ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand)—this is the out of sight, out of mind theory.
When I was working in a law firm in the late 90s, the majority of communications were through letters. Each day I would get in the region of a hundred to hundred and fifty pieces of mail. That needed processing. The advantage was I could see it all in my physical inbox and my goal was the clear that by the end of the day.
With email, the only way to see it is to open my inbox. That makes it easy to ignore it—which surprise surprise creates backlogs.
Admin is another area where backlogs can grow. Like communications, admin will grow each day if you are not dealing with it consistently.
This can be keeping your receipts organised, maintaining your company’s CRM system or, in the medical profession, keeping patient notes up-to-date.
If you are not protecting time for these each day, backlogs will grow.
If you’ve watched the brilliant film, Apollo 13, or read about that incredible story, one thing that will strike you is the astronauts followed checklists and routines to ensure everything was working as it should be.
The cause of the catastrophic explosion on board Apollo 13 was a simple routine task of stirring the oxygen tasks.
Astronauts are highly intelligent people. Yet, they know they cannot rely on remembering to do important routine tasks. They use checklists.
The same goes for pilots, surgeons and the military.
Each have checklists for daily mundane tasks that if not done will result in backlogs or something much worse.
You too can do something similar. Think of a shift at work as having a few key parts to it. Meetings, focused work and then routine work. Your routine work will likely be responding to actionable emails and messages, updating any internal customer management systems and your own admin.
This means estimating how much time you need for each of these activities.
The good thing here is you already have the data. How long, on average does it take you to update your company’s internal client relationship management system? How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications?
You can only work with averages here, but averages are enough. Some days you will get more than your average, yet other days you will get less.
If you’ve never measured how long it takes you, give yourself a week to track how much time you need in these areas. Again, you can only work with averages but that will give you an indication of how much time to protect each day for getting your work done.
One area I find people resisting this change is work they perceive as being more important. Meetings for example, seem to have a disproportionate level of importance. Sure, if you have a meeting with an important client, that will likely be more important than staying on top of your admin. But what about all those internal meetings? Are they really important or are you just showing up to show your face?
I cannot imagine a pilot or surgeon skipping their pre-flight or pre-operation checklist because they have an internal meeting. That would be a firing offense. So why do you do it?
We all will be different here, but I find if I spend an hour a day on my communications and thirty minutes on admin, I will, on the whole, end the week with no backlogs—certainly nothing overwhelming. That’s just ninety minutes a day. Ninety minutes that prevents stress, anxiety and missing something important.
Now, there will be some days when that will not be possible. Days when I am travelling, for instance, often mean it’s difficult to sit down and deal with my communications and admin. However, it’s worth working on the principle that one is greater than zero, so spending twenty minutes on communications and perhaps ten minutes on admin helps to keep things from spiralling out of control.
Yet, perhaps the most important thing is to identify where backlogs occur in your life. That would be the first step.
One area I never thought of was household chores. It’s easy to ignore that pile of washing in the corner of the bathroom until you find you have no clean underwear. Then it becomes an issue.
Now, on Tuesday’s and Saturdays, I do the laundry. It’s only fifteen minutes, but ensures I have a supply of clean clothes at all times. Plus, I can do it in between sessions of work. It gets me away from the screen and is far better for my eyes.
And I hate coming into the office and not having a clean coffee mug. Now, before I leave the office for the day, I will ensure the cups and tea pot are washed and ready for the next day. That’s less than five minutes a day.
One tip on dealing with the stalled backlog. Because it’s stalled you don’t have the same sense of urgency. Yet, it still needs to be dealt with. What you may find works is to identify it when you do your weekly planning and allocate a little extra time the following week to deal with it.
For example, if you have a pile of documents that need to be processed from last month, give yourself thirty minutes or so around you lunch time or mid-afternoon to work on it. Depending on how big it is, you will find that within a week or two that backlog has gone.
I hope that has helped Janine.Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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What can you do to simplify your productivity system to keep you focused on what’s important each day? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script | 343
Hello, and welcome to episode 343 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Oh dear, I seem to have opened up a storm with some people with one of my recent YouTube videos on managing a task manager.
That also resulted in a few questions about keeping a system simple.
The question is, what is a time management and productivity system meant to do for you?
The answer is easy—to inform you of what needs to be done and ensure you are prepared and in the right place at the right time.
When you strip productivity systems down to their basics, as long as your calendar is accurate and tells you where you need to be and when, and you have a way to see what tasks you should be working on today, you have a system that works.
Yet, it can be tempting to want more. A way to organise tasks by your energy levels or to know how many days are left until the deadline is reached, for example.
The problem here is that you have no idea what your energy levels will be, and deadlines change… A lot… and for the most part, they are arbitrarily added, which means you know they are not real deadlines—ah, more fiddling.
While all these extras are nice, there is a danger of becoming dependent on them. That’s when it becomes a slippery slope. They pull you into fiddling with your tools, which prevents you from doing the work you need to do.
Which ultimately means you don’t have time for the things you want time for.
So, this week, a very simple question and for that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Martha. Martha asks, Hi Carl, how would you make productivity simpler?
Hi Martha, thank you for your question.
The first place I would start is to clean up and organise my calendar. It’s your calendar you refer to when you need to know where to be and what you are committed to doing.
This involves removing conflicts. Conflicts occur when your calendar shows two meetings at the same time or your next meeting begins before a previous meeting ends.
You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one. If you have a meeting start before you are able to get there, inform the meeting organiser so they can either accept your late arrival or move the meeting to a more convenient time.
The sooner you do this, the better it is for everyone concerned.
I use a scheduling service for my coaching client appointments. That service will not allow any conflicts to occur and automatically puts in a ten-minute buffer between meetings.
That’s always a good practice to follow. Make sure you have buffer time between meetings. Meetings occasionally overrun, and you need to reset yourself before the next meeting.
The next step is hard for many people. Throughout our working lives we’ve become conditioned to be available at all times for our customers and bosses. And while you should not ignore these people, you are employed to do a specific job.
I know it’s become common for companies to create job titles and job descriptions in the vaguest possible ways but underneath that vagueness, there will be a set of core work activities we are expected to do—what was once called “our duties”.
What are your duties? What do you need to ensure is done on time each day or week? That’s your core work. What does doing your core work look like at a task level?
For example, if you were employed as a construction worker (a vague job title) and were given the responsibility to build the perimeter wall. At a task level, laying bricks would be your core work.
Now within that, they may be other tasks such as ensuring you have a sufficient supply of bricks and cement and that you laid the guide lines to ensure the bricks were laid straight. What do those activities look like at a task level. What do you need to do (and how frequently) to order bricks and cement?
By looking at things from a task level, you put yourself in a better position to estimate how much time you need to complete your work.
For instance, if you find you need to place an order for bricks and cement every Monday morning and it takes you thirty minutes to do that task, you can create a thirty-minute block of time for admin every Monday morning.
If you must place the order before 10:00 AM, then you may decide to create a time block every Monday morning called “ordering” and use that time to order any other supplies you may need that week at that time.
What you need to order can then be held in a note you add to throughout the week so you have everything fully complete the task on Monday morning.
That then leaves you free to focus on building the wall.
Taking the time to establish your core work gives you a way to automate prioritising. Core work always takes priority. It’s what you will be evaluated on if you are employed, and it’s how you earn your living if you are self-employed.
Where your calendar comes in to all this is once you have established your core work, make sure you have time protected for doing that work each week. Core work rarely changes, after all, it’s what you are employed to do. The details will change—I don’t write the same blog post or make the same YouTube video each week—but the work doesn’t change unless your job changes.
And I use the word “protected” deliberately here. If you give up that time for another meeting, or something that’s fleetingly urgent, you will still need to catch up somewhere.
To give you a benchmark, through my coaching programme and when I analyze my own core work, in total most people require between fifteen and twenty-hours a week for their core work.
If you are working an average thirty-five hour week, that still leaves you with fifteen to twenty hours for meetings and voluntary work.
There will be other “duties”. Managing your communications and daily admin, for example. If you were to protect ninety-minutes a day for these activities, that still leaves you with seven to fourteen hours a week for all the unknowns.
This is why your calendar is the most powerful tool in your productivity toolbox.
What about task lists? These are still helpful. Apple probably called their to-do list the best way—Reminders. Ultimately, if you have established what your core work is, and protected sufficient time on your calendar to get that work done, your task list is there to remind you of the things you want to complete that day.
You tasks will fall into three categories. The must dos. These must be done at some point in the day. If you promised to call a customer back today, then you must do it. You promised.
Then there are the should do tasks. These are the tasks that while don’t necessarily need to be done today, getting them done will ease the pressure on the rest of the week. Most tasks fall into this category.
If you were to give yourself twenty must do tasks today, and you are already committed to five hours of meetings, you won’t be going to bed tonight. You “must do” those tasks. So when you choose your must dos make sure you limit them to two or three tops.
And finally there are the could do tasks. These are context based tasks. For instance if you have to visit a customer in the east of the city and that’s where the pet supermarket is, you could call in after you meeting to buy dog food for your dog. Buying the dog food would be a category three task—it’s context based.
Now all this only works if you are consistently doing your daily and weekly planning sessions. Failure to do these will mean you miss opportunities to do your category three tasks and you will be unclear when deadlines are due.
The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to stop and look at the bigger picture of what’s going on in your life. Perhaps you’re attending your cousin’s wedding next month and you need to buy an outfit. If you’re not doing a weekly planning session it would be easy to miss that commitment and that will leave you rushing to buy something a few days before.
The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to reset and ensure you are doing the right things at the right time.
The daily planning session is simply checking your calendar for your appointments and comparing that with your scheduled tasks for tomorrow. Do you have a doable day? If you have five or six hours of meetings or are scheduled to attend a training session, having twenty to thirty tasks on your task list for the day would mean you have an impossible day.
It’s better to learn that when you can do something about it. You could reduce your task list or if you need to do something important, you may need to reschedule a meeting. The person you’re meeting will appreciate that and it demonstrates how organised you are. Win win in my view.
And that’s it. Focus on making sure your calendar is up to date and accurate—that’s the driver of your day.
Your core work and appointments Come first, then tasks. If you need time to complete a particularly important or urgent task, make sure you protect the time on your calendar.
And to make sure it all works, do your daily and weekly planning sessions consistently. And on the daily planning, I don’t know how anyone could start their day not know what they want to accomplish that day. Knowing gives you energy and a determination to get it done.
I hope that has helped, Martha. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Did you know that your calendar is the only productivity tool that can protect you from burning out and overcommitting yourself and, if used correctly, help you bring balance into your life? No? Well, let me explain in this week’s podcast.
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Script | 342
Hello, and welcome to episode 342 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Professor Barry Schwartz explains how too many choices can slow us down, create confusion and reduce sales.
You can see this in recent times with the explosion in new productivity apps. Thirty years ago, the only tools you had to manage your time and your work were diaries.
There was a lot of different styles to choose from, but the price point of these diaries helped to make choosing a diary reasonably simple.
Many companies gave away diaries as gifts to customers, some issued all their staff with one, while some people would go out an buy their own—I was one of those.
Yet because a diary can only show you the same thing—your twenty-four hours or seven days—people were much more focused on the doing part, and less on collecting and organising. And let’s be honest, if all you have is a diary, there not a lot of organising you can do.
While we now have digital calendars, task managers and notes apps, really only two things have changed. The speed at which we can collect information and the increase in the number of potential tools we can use to help our productivity.
Unfortunately, that increase in productivity tools has caused a lot of confusion. Many people confuse events—something that happens at a specific time on a given date—and tasks—something that can be done at any time.
When that happens, the only outcome is going to be overwhelm and a lot of rescheduling. Not a very productive way to go about your day.
This week’s question goes to the heart of this issue. So, without further a do, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weeks’ question.
This week’s question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, hi Carl, I’m very interested in your ideas around how to use a calendar versus using a to-do list. Could you explain your thinking around this?
Hi Jeff, I certainly can.
In Your Time, Your Way, I mentioned when I visit companies I notice that those people who began their careers in the early to mid 1990s are generally more organised than their younger colleagues.
Of course that’s not a scientific observation, but I wonder if that’s down to how large corporations in the 1990s often sent their staff on time management training courses. You don’t hear of those courses much today.
It’s also likely that those who began in the 1990s developed solid time management practices and have not changed their approach much over the years. I’m sure they’ve switched over the a digital calendar, but a lot still carry round note books.
I remember seeing an interview with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, in around 2015. He was interviewed in his then office, and while there was an iMac on his desk and a MacBook Pro on a table behind him, there was also a notebook and pen. This was after the Apple Pencil had come out, which, in theory, meant he no longer needed to carry a notebook and pen.
Tim Cook will have begun his career in the mid to late 80s, and while at IBM, he will have been sent on a time management course—I do believe, IBM worked with the Franklin Quest organisation back then—which meant he will have gone through his career with a solid knowledge of time management principles.
So, that’s a little background. Now, how do we use our calendars today so we are operating at our most productive each day?
Well, first we need to know to difference between a task or to-do and an event.
A task or to-do is something you can do at anytime. For example, if you need to respond to a question from a client via email, you could do that at 9:15 am or 2:35 pm. There’s no fixed time. Similarly, if you want to finish off a report for your boss, you could do that at 10:00 am or 3:20 pm.
As long as you finish the report today—your plan, it doesn’t really matter when in the day you finish the report.
And event on the other hand is time specific. If you have a meeting with your boss at 10:00 am in your boss’s office. You’d better be there at 10:00 am.
If it takes you thirty-five minutes to get to your office, that means you will need to leave your home around 9:15 am to be sure you will be at your boss’s office by 10:00 am.
A wise person would block 9:15 am 10:00 am for travel time as well as the meeting time on their calendar.
That’s basics.
Now, given that your calendar is about specifics, and your task manager is about options, we can better manage all the stuff coming at us.
Your calendar can be used as a very powerful tool if you trust it. By trusting your calendar, I mean that you don’t ignore it. That you check it each morning to see what you are committed to and if you cannot do something, you will reschedule it.
One way to get the most out of your calendar is to use a method called time blocking. Time blocking does not mean you block every hour of your day, what it means is if you need two hours to work on that report, you would block the time out on your calendar.
You can become very tactical here too.
One way is to establish when you are at your most focused. Most people will either be early birds or night owls. According to author Daniel Pink, only around 3% of the population are at the most focused in the afternoons.
If say you are more focused in the morning, you can block two-hours out between 9:30 and 11:30 am for “focused work”.
This means, that each morning between 9:30 and 11:30, nobody can schedule appointments with you. Your calendar is blocked for doing your most important tasks.
Knowing that you have this time protected does a lot for your stress levels. You know you have two uninterrupted hours for getting on with your work.
And often, having two uninterrupted hours for doing critical work is all you need to stay on top of your projects.
Unless you are nomadic, it’s likely that being able to block the same time each day for focused work will be difficult. There will always be a need for flexibility. Yet, if you were only able to protect two-hours three times a week, you would still have six hours of uninterrupted time each week.
Imagine what you could do in those six hours.
I protect two hours each morning for writing on a Monday and Tuesday, and the four hours is enough for me to get all my writing done for the week. Occasionally, I will need to move things around, but for the most part, those times are fixed and that gives me the confidence that I have sufficient time each week to get my committed writing projects complete.
What all this means is your calendar is the hub for everything you do. It will tell you if you have enough time for doing your work, and where you need to be on any given day.
If you need to collect your daughter from School on Thursday at 4:00 pm, that will be on your calendar. If it takes you thirty minutes to get to your daughter’s school, you would block time from 3:30 pm to collect her.
This also means you would be unwise to schedule a meeting after 3:00 pm (meetings have a habit of overrunning). You would not be focused in the meeting, you’ll be clock watching and stressed.
Instead, you could use the thirty-minutes to respond to your communications, or even plan the next day.
You calendar should also be the first thing you look at when you plan your day. Whatever’s on your calendar is fixed. You’re committed to it.
If you see you have six or seven hours of meetings today, how much time will you have for your tasks? Not much.
If you begin the day, with six hours of meetings and a task list of thirty or more tasks, your day’s broken before it’s begun. You won’t be able to do everything on your task list and attend all those meetings.
Either you cancel meetings or your remove some of the tasks, leaving only the critical ones.
Today, for example, I have five hours of meetings and my to-do list has five tasks. It’s still going to be a busy day, but it’s doable… Just. I suspect already, that one or two of those tasks will be pushed off to another day.
I don’t care. The most important parts of my day are the confirmed appointments.
If I find myself with some critical tasks that must be done, then I will have to find time on my calendar to do them. I’m comfortable rescheduling meetings if necessary to complete an important piece of work. You should be too.
Your calendar is never going to lie to you. It only shows the 24 hours you get each day. How you use those hours is largely up to you. If you open up your calendar to everyone, there’s no point in complaining you don’t have time. You do have time. By allowing other people to schedule meetings with you without first consulting you, you are allowing g them to steal your time.
If you need time for exercise, to be at your son’s school concert or to finish any important piece of work, it’s on you to protect that time on your calendar.
Your task manager and notes app will not help you here. You can throw a hundred tasks into your task manager and date them for tomorrow And tomorrow you will have a hundred tasks to complete.
You task manager will never tell you that you don’t have time to do all those tasks. Only you calendar will do that.
So there you go, Jeff. That’s how to use a calendar. It’s your connection with the real world. It never lies to you and it’s a tool you need to be in control of.
Thank you for your question, Jeff, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very very productive week.
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Is there a gulf between what you want and where you are? That’s what we are looking at today.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
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Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Subscribe to my Substack
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Script | 341
Hello, and welcome to episode 341 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Many time management and pro ductivity problems result from a disconnect between one’s goals and what one is prepared to sacrifice to achieve them.
If you want to spend more time with your family yet are not prepared to say no to working beyond your regular working hours, there is a disconnect.
If you want to lose twenty pounds yet are not willing to cut back on sugary treats and exercise a little, there is a disconnect.
And, if you want to be more productive yet are unwilling to protect time on your calendar for doing the work you want to productively do, there is a disconnect.
It is sad to watch people desperately scramble for any excuse for not doing the things they say they want to do. It’s easy to find excuses, but much harder to be honest with yourself and accept that whatever you say is important to you is not important at all.
As the saying goes, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”.
Worthwhile goals take time. Often, you will need to learn new skills, gain experience and build endurance. There will be setbacks and sacrifices to be made. And, of course, time to be found.
That’s all part of what makes achieving goals exciting. If it were easy to achieve your goals, you would feel empty and unfulfilled and likely not bother trying to improve yourself.
It’s an interesting topic, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Suzie. Suzie asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to find the time to do everything I want to do. I’ve done your Perfect Week exercise but never seem to be able to fit everything into my week. My Perfect week looks great; my real week is a mess. Is there anything else I can do to fit more into my week?
Hi Suzie,
Thank you for your question.
This is something I come across a lot in my coaching programme. An ambitious person discovers there are not enough hours in the day to do everything they want to do.
Often, it’s someone who works a full-time job from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, who wants to exercise for an hour every day and start their own side business in the evening.
Now, all of that is possible, but it won’t be if you also want to spend time with your family, go out every weekend with your friends and watch episodes of your favourite TV show each evening.
As David Allen says, you can do anything you want, but you cannot do everything.
One of the first things you can do is to begin with the basics. How much time do you need to sleep and eat? Typically, people require between six and eight hours of sleep each day.
If you sacrifice sleeping time, what’s going to happen? You’ll first become tired and easily distracted; if you continue not getting enough sleep, you will become sick. How will that help you do the things you want to do?
So, get the basics right first. For any human to operate at their optimum level, they need the right amount of sleep, healthy food and some exercise each day.
Lack of sleep, poor-quality food, and sitting around all day will destroy your energy levels, mess with your emotions, and result in you not getting very much done. Get those three things right first.
The next step is to look at your calendar. Where can you protect time for doing what is most important to you? This will depend on what it is you want to do.
For instance, if you want to start building your own business, you may only be able to do this in the evenings after work. Perhaps, if you are more of a morning person, the only time available might be early in the morning.
Author John Grisham used to write his books before going to work in the morning. He’d wake up at 4:30 and write for two hours before getting ready for work.
However, it comes down to how much you are willing to sacrifice to pursue your goals. If waking up at 4:30 AM is not something you are willing to do to work on your business dream, that’s fine. Nobody will judge you. That’s simply a choice you have made.
There’s very little I would wake up at 4:30 AM for.
This isn’t just about our dreams and goals. Perhaps you want to be a great parent—who doesn’t? What does being a great parent look like?
Maybe you decide to have a family meal every evening at 7:00 pm, where you talk with your kids about their day and what they learned is important. Doing this is not impossible.
Yet, if you also value your career and rarely make it home before 7:00 PM, what are you elevating above being a great parent?
These are hard truths we are often afraid to address. Yet, if you want to live the life you want, you need to face them. What is more important, your relationship with your children or your career?
Again, there’s no judgment here, and the choices you make are entirely yours to make. But some choices need to be made to have that feeling of fulfilment.
The work vs family dilemma has always been fascinating to me.
Often, when you look deeply at it, it’s not really about the work itself; it’s the fear of being unpopular at work. Saying no to colleagues asking for help with their work so you can finish a project you’re working on risks being unpopular.
We worry about what our colleagues will think of us if we refuse to help them with their work. So we say yes to helping them, which means we need more time to finish our work.
And because time is fixed, that means the extra time we need to finish our work must come from the time we would ordinarily spend with our family. And after all, our family will understand, won’t they? Won’t they?
Another one is the importance of taking care of your health today to live an active and healthy retirement. When we’re in our thirties and forties, most people don’t worry about this at all. We prioritise our careers and social life above our long-term health.
Yet, if you were to visit a doctor and they told you that if you don’t change your diet and get some exercise, you will be dead in six months, the chances are you will make significant changes. Suddenly, your career and social life become less important than your health.
If you were to think about it for a few minutes, getting a little exercise and being more mindful about your diet is not difficult. It’s a choice you can make today.
All of this is why spending some time looking at your areas of focus and deciding what is important to you as a person is critical. Without knowing what is important to you, you will drift from one thing to the next.
This means defining what family and relationships mean to you. How does that fit with your career goals, finances, lifestyle, life experiences, and purpose?
These are important questions, and if you were to spend time defining what they mean to you, knowing where to spend your time will naturally follow.
What are you willing to sacrifice to live life on your terms?
Is the risk of upsetting your boss by not responding to her text message immediately worth it to spend undisturbed time with your family? Or is serving your customer professionally worth risking being late to a meeting with your colleagues and becoming unpopular?
When you know what your areas of focus mean to you, these choices are easy to make. You, in effect, make the decisions before they need to be made.
The upside to this is you gain respect. Not just respect for you and your values but also for your time.
The real danger is wanting more than you are willing to sacrifice for.
Building a business takes a lot of time and effort - are you willing to sacrifice time with your friends and family to build that business?
To stay organized and on top of your work, you have to say no to many people. Are you willing to say no to new things to keep up with the work you are paid to do?
To spend more time with your family, you need to reduce your work time. Is that a sacrifice you are willing to make?
Being more productive is never about doing more. It’s about knowing what is important to you and spending the appropriate time needed there. It means you must be comfortable saying no and not worrying about being unpopular or occasionally upsetting people.
After all, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time. You can only please some of the people some of the time.”
So, Suzie, before you go back to your “perfect week” calendar, spend some time with your areas of focus and prioritise what is important to you right now. Define what each of those areas means to you.
Once you have done that, return to your perfect week calendar and ensure you have enough time for the things you most value in your life.
I promise you that if you do that, you will feel more fulfilled, more focused, and much more productive.
I hope that has helped. Thank you so much for sending in your question and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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One of the biggest drains on your time (and productivity) is a disorganized workspace. This week, I’m sharing some ideas for getting organised so you can find what you need when you need it.
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Script | 340
Hello, and welcome to episode 340 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I remember watching videos by David Allen—author of Getting Things Done—where he explains the importance of having an organised workspace.
These videos were recorded before the digital takeover, yet the principles remain the same whether we deal with paper or digital documents.
If your stuff is all over the place, you will waste a lot of time trying to find what you need, and it’s surprising how much time you lose.
This week’s question caught my attention, as getting and keeping your workspace organised is an overlooked part of the modern productivity movement. It won’t matter how clever your digital tools are if you don’t know where everything is or how to organise your notes so you can find what you need when you need it in seconds. You’ll still waste much time doing stuff you shouldn’t need to do.
As I researched this, I could only find advice on keeping desks and physical files, notes, and documents organised. There is little advice on keeping a digital workspace clean and organised. Well, that is apart from some older articles about how an untidy computer desktop slows down your computer and makes finding anything slow and cumbersome.
Now before I go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alice. Alice asks, Hi Carl, How do you keep all your files, notes and other digital things organised? I’m really struggling here and would love some advice.
Hi Alice, thank you for your question.
One of the first things you will need to do is allocate a single place for your digital documents. Today, most people are comfortable storing all their personal files in a cloud storage system, such as Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, or Apple’s iCloud.
If you are concerned about security, an external hard drive also works.
Now, just as before the 2000s, you will likely have two places: one for work and one for your personal stuff. Your company will probably dictate your work storage system.
The important thing about storing documents and files you may need is accessibility—i.e., how fast you can access the files.
In the past, if we wanted a file for a client named Rogers, we would go to the filing cabinet, locate the letter R, and find the file for Rogers there. If it wasn’t there, one of our colleagues probably had it. (And how frustrating was that)
Today, all you need to do is open iCloud, One Drive or Google Drive and type in the name of the client you are looking for. You will then be presented with a list of all the documents related to that client.
And perhaps you may already be seeing a problem.
In the past, everything was kept together in a single file folder; today, client notes can be found everywhere. We have CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management software) that track communications with customers and clients. However, these are only as good as those who enter the data.
We receive phone calls, emails, perhaps text messages, and all the documentation generated by orders, invoices, and quotes. If the people entering the data are not timely and perfect, time can be wasted just looking for all that stuff.
Those CRM systems may track documents related to that client, which makes things a little easier. But do you trust them?
So, how can you keep your workspace organised and in order?
First, choose your tools. Your calendar and email will likely already be selected for you in your professional environment. Fortunately, you should have freedom over your task manager and notes app.
Rule number one. Use only one.
By this, I mean one task manager, one notes app and one calendar.
Now, it is okay to use a separate calendar for your work events; after all, you may only be able to access your work calendar through selected devices. I would always advise you to try to connect your work calendar to your personal one where possible.
By this, I mean that if you use a Google or Apple calendar for your personal life, you can subscribe to your work calendar. Not all companies allow this, but I’ve found that most do.
This way, you have all your events viewable in one place. (Wasn’t life easier when we all carried our own diaries? No interference from outsiders)
Your to-do list and notes, however, are entirely within your realm. Avoid the temptation of using your work’s Microsoft To-Do or Trello. You want to have your complete life together, not scattered everywhere.
You may need to call a client early in the morning, and if all the details are separated on your work’s system, that call could easily be missed. Similarly, you may need to contact your bank. If that task is on a personal system, unless you look at that system in your lunch break, you’re going to miss it.
Now here’s a quick tip. Use a daily note.
A daily note is a note you create each day to capture meeting notes, ideas, things to look up, and other useful bits of information. Each note’s title is today’s date.
As you create a new note each day, you have a reference—the date. If you number each item you add to the daily note, you now have a transferable reference to link to tasks and calendar events.
For example, imagine I captured an idea for a YouTube video, added it to my daily note, and assigned it the number 1.
That means the reference number for that idea is today’s date plus 1. I can use that reference for any task or project from that idea. You can go one step further by adding a link to the note for your task, so all you need to do is click the link and boom, you are right where you need to be.
I would also advise you to keep your digital notes separate from work. I once had a client who was a university professor. She used her university’s OneNote to organise all her research notes.
She then left that university, and within two or three hours of leaving, the system’s organiser deleted all her notes. Seven years of research gone in seconds.
Of course, you should keep confidential information off your personal devices, but a large part of what we keep in notes is not confidential and is usually meeting notes, ideas, and possible solutions to difficult problems.
Once you have your tools and storage places sorted, it comes down to making sure what you need when you need it is quickly accessible.
To do that, learn how to search your computer. On Apple devices, this means learning to use Spotlight. It’s a powerful tool that means I can find coaching client feedback simply by typing their name into the search box. I can also find digital copies of my passport, car insurance, residency permits and my address in Korean (I find it’s faster to copy/paste than to type in Korean)
Everything I need frequently is instantly to hand.
And that’s another reference to the pre-2000s. An optimised workspace meant that you had the files you were working on and anything else you needed quick access to within arms reach of your desk.
Anything you didn’t need was stored in filing cabinets a few steps away from you.
There’s the famous picture of Rose-Mary Woods, President Nixon’s secretary, demonstrating how she accidentally erased 18 minutes of the tape recordings during the Watergate investigation. If you Google the picture, you can see that everything a secretary would need was on her desk or next to it (or rather coincidently, within arms reach)
For Windows computers, look up Universal Search. That will explain how you can search for everything on your computer from a single place.
The final part of the puzzle is file naming.
For years, I’ve used a file name system that includes the date, the file type, and the name. For example, if I had a client named Bill Tanner and wrote a proposal for him, the proposal title would be 2024-09-25-proposal-Bill Tanner.
If I need to amend the proposal, I would change the date. This way, when I search Bill Tanner, I will see all the proposals I have written grouped together.
I’ve found that adding version numbers to the title doesn’t work either, and it’s not as easy to get to the latest document. Searching by date puts the very latest version on top every time.
And I do still recommend keeping your desktop clean. A cluttered desktop causes distraction. A clean desktop helps maintain focus.
Now, before I finish, I should mention your phone. This can be a complete mess. I was in the bank the other day, and some twenty-somethings were opening an account. All they had with them was their phones, yet when the bank clerk asked them for different documents, they took ages to find the information on their phones.
Rather amusingly, an elderly gentleman, armed with a plastic wallet of essential documents, completed his business at the bank far faster than those twenty-somethings.
When the clerk asked him for a document, he pulled it out and handed it over instantly. It was a real eye-opener for me. Perhaps paper is faster than digital… Sometimes.
What I’ve learned is to keep all your frequently used apps on your Home Screen. Learn how to use widgets—they can be a real-time saver when you need them.
Oh, and one more: when flying, use your airline’s app. Place it on your Home Screen. It’s incredible how often you need that at the airport or in a taxi when they ask you which terminal you need to go to.
And there you go, Alice. I hope that has helped.
It comes down to doing a little cleaning up and getting your important files and apps where you need them. Remember, it’s all about accessibility.
Thank you, Alice, for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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Podcast 339
How do you prioritise your tasks and estimate how long something will take to do? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script | 339
Hello, and welcome to episode 339 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This week, I have two common questions to answer: The first is how do I prioritise when everything’s urgent, and the second is how do you know how long a task will take?
Your areas of focus and core work determine one, and the other is impossible.
Before I answer the question, I’d like to let you know that I am now on Substack. There will be a link in the show notes for you to subscribe.
I have a crazy plan to write on Substack every week and, over a year, complete a book. The book will tackle the time management and productivity problems we face today and use subscriber comments and questions to enhance the book. If it’s any good at the end of the year, I will publish the book.
So, please help and become a subscriber. You can become part of something very special. Okay, on with the episode.
Let me deal with the impossible issue first. How do you determine how long a task will take?
The problem here is you are human and not a machine. This means you are affected by how much sleep you got last night, your mood, and whether you are excited by the task or not.
You will also be affected by things like jet lag, whether a close family member is sick or if you had a fight with your spouse or partner that morning.
This is why I don’t recommend task-based productivity systems. They are not sustainable. Sure, some days you can do all your tasks and have oodles of energy left in the evening. On most days, you’ll struggle to do two or three of them.
I usually write my blog posts on a Monday morning. I’ve been doing this for eight years. I write roughly the same length each time—around a thousand words. Yet, some days, I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes; others, it takes me ninety minutes to write 750 words.
I cannot predict what type of day I will have. Yet, what I do know is that if I sit down and start, I’m going to get something done. And that’s good enough.
This means I know I have two hours to write, and something will get done as long as I write in those two hours. I want to finish everything, but if I can’t, as long as I’ve got something written when I return to finish later, it will be much easier than if I had not started.
However, that said, sometimes time constraints can help. If you know you have a deadline on Friday, and you also know you still have a lot to do, putting yourself under a bit of pressure to get moving on the project can help tap into your energy reserves. The trouble is that this is not sustainable or productive in the long run.
Doing that means you will neglect other parts of your work. Emails will pile up, your admin will become backlogged, and you will neglect other things you should be doing, meaning you will need to tap into those reserves repeatedly.
And that becomes a vicious circle.
What works is to allocate time for your important work each day. Instead of focusing on how much you have to do, you focus on your available time.
Imagine you are in sales, and you have follow-ups to do each day. If, on average, you need an hour to do your follow-up, that would be the time you protect each day for doing your follow-ups. Some days, you will complete them in less than an hour; others, you won’t. But it doesn’t matter. As long as you do your follow-ups daily, you will always be on top or thereabouts each week.
And let’s be honest: When dealing with phone calls, nobody knows how long they will take. It’s just not something you can predict.
Now, on to the question of prioritising your day.
This comes back to knowing what is important to you and your core work—the work you are paid to do (not the work you volunteer to do).
All the classic books on time management start with you thinking about what you want before you dive headfirst into sorting out the mountain of work you think you must do.
You see if you do not know what is important to you, everything that seems remotely urgent will be important to you. And that is not true at all.
It could be argued that not knowing what is important is just plain laziness. You’re delegating an essential aspect of your life to everyone else because you cannot be bothered to decide. If you don’t determine what’s critical, then everything becomes critical. That’s the easy way out—although the consequences are never pleasant.
I remember when I was a trainee hotel manager. I did two years in night management. When I joined the night team, I inherited three night porters. One of them was aggressive and would speak his mind if he didn’t like something or felt it was a waste of time. One was a stickler for doing only what his job description said, and the third one was gentle and willing to do anything asked of him.
As their manager, guess who I got to do the little things that popped up randomly during the shift? The third one.
As a manager, I didn’t have time to argue with the two other night porters about whether something needed doing or was part of their job description. So, I dumped everything onto Martin. (Sorry, Martin)
If you don’t know what is important to you and what your core work is, you will be dumped on. And that is often the main cause of why you have far too much to do.
To overcome this at work, know what your core work is. Then, prioritise that work. For instance, if you are a photographer, you are paid to take photos. So, taking and processing those photos will be your most important work. Nothing should ever pull you away from doing that work.
Similarly, finding new clients will also be an essential part of your work if you are a freelance photographer. That may involve curating an Instagram account and perhaps some other social media.
Any activity or task involving those parts of your work should always take priority over everything else. Researching new lighting, redesigning your website or helping a family member find a good photographer (assuming you cannot do it yourself) are not your priorities.
What I find helps is to list your core work tasks—the tasks you need to do each day or week and then ensure you protect time in your calendar for doing that work.
Once it’s protected, nothing but an emergency will move it.
This work is your core work and, therefore, your priority. It’s where your income comes from and what you will be judged on for promotion. Screw this area up by doing low-value stuff for other people may make you liked and popular, but you will be swamped, stressed out and exhausted at the end of the day.
You need to set boundaries.
Setting boundaries does not mean you become unpleasant towards your colleagues. It means there’s a time and a place for work and a time and place for socialising. Don’t mix the two up.
Here’s an exercise you could do. List out your core work—the work you are paid to do. Then, calculate how long you need, on average, to do that work. As this is your core work you should have some data—it’s likely to be on your calendar.
If you don’t have the data, monitor it for a week or two. That will give you sufficient information to make the calculation.
Remember, you won’t necessarily be perfectly accurate. You’re human, after all. But all you need is an average.
Let me give you an example. I know if I protect twelve hours each week for doing my core work, I will be able to get it all done. This means if I were working a regular forty-hour week, I would still have twenty-eight hours available for meetings, dealing with emergencies and anything else unexpected. Surely, that’s enough time?
You, too, will likely find you don’t need much time for your core work. However, until you know what that work is and have calculated how much time, on average, you need to complete the work, you are flying blind. And your brain will tell you you don’t have enough time.
Externalise it, write it down, get it into your task manager and calendar and protect the time.
Over the last 100 years or so, many books have been written on time management and productivity. Professors, senior executives, and business titans have studied the subject relentlessly, and in almost all cases, they have come to the same conclusions.
To be on top of your work and live a balanced life, you must know what you want time for. If you don’t know that, you will quickly find yourself wasting that precious resource. (And, of course, building huge backlogs of stuff you’ve neglected)
So, there you go. First, you will never be able to accurately calculate how long a task will take. You are not a machine; you’re a living, breathing human being susceptible to emotions, low energy, and sickness. Stop trying. Instead, allocate time for your work, get as much done as possible within that time, then take a break and move on.
Getting started is the most critical thing. It’s better to do 25% of the task and only have 75% left. At least you’ve started and will know how to finish.
And secondly, be very clear about the work you are paid to do. That’s your prioritised work. The work you volunteer to do should never be prioritised over your core work.
I hope that helps.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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What is the Eisenhower Matrix and how can you use it to help you focus on the important things in life.
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Script | 338
Hello, and welcome to episode 338 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
You may have heard of the Eisenhower Matrix, or as Stephen Covey called it in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the Productivity Matrix. It’s a matrix of four squares divided up between Important and urgent (called quadrant 1), Important and not urgent (quadrant 2), urgent and not important (quadrant 3) and not urgent and not important (quadrant 4).
It’s one of those methods that gets a lot of attention after a book has been launched. Yet, this matrix was first introduced to us by President Eisenhower in the 1950s after President Eisenhower mentioned in an interview that "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.
This “quote” was first spoken by Dr J Roscoe Miller, president of the North Western University at that time.
So, it’s questionable if Eisenhower ever applied this method to his work, but whether he did or he didn’t, it is an excellent framework to help you prioritise your work and help you to get focused on your important work and aspects of your life.
This week’s question is all about this matrix and how you can apply it to your life so you are not neglecting the important, but not urgent things that so many of us neglect because they are not screaming at us and because they need an element of discipline which so many people find difficult today.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Michele. Michele asks, hi Carl, I recently read your book and saw that you wrote about the Eisenhower Matrix. I’ve always been fascinated by this matrix but have never been able to use it in my daily life. How do you use it to get things done?
Hi Michele, thank you for your question.
This matrix is one of those things that once you’ve learned and begin to apply it to your daily life, you soon forget you are using it.
Let me explain. Much of what comes our way is “urgent”, or it is to the person asking us to do something. That could be your boss, a client, your spouse or partner or your kids. Whatever they want, they want it now, and only you can give it to them.
Then, there are quite a few things that are important but not urgent. These include taking care of your health, planning your week and day, sitting down for a family meal at least once a day, and self-development—whether that is through reading books, going to night school, or taking courses.
These are often neglected because the urgent and important drown them out.
Ironically, if you consistently take care of the important and not urgent things, you will spend less time dealing with the urgent and important. Yet, most people cannot get to these quadrant 2 tasks because the quadrant 1 tasks are swamping them.
It becomes a vicious circle.
The bottom part of the matrix—the not important things—is what you want to avoid. these are the urgent and not important and the not important and not urgent things. (What’s called quadrants 3 and 4).
The urgent and not important things (quadrant 3) are the deceptive things. These are unimportant emails dressed up to look important. Most emails and messages will come under this quadrant.
One of the things I’ve noticed when I begin working with a new client is the kind of tasks they have in their digital task manager. 80% of the tasks there are not important tasks. It’s these tasks that are drowning out the quadrant 1 and 2 tasks (the important ones).
I am starting an experiment to see if using a paper Franklin Planner for three months can still be done in 2024. One thing I’ve already noticed is because I have to write out the tasks I need to or want to do today, I am much more aware of the kind of tasks I am writing. My daily task list is much shorter than when I do this digitally.
As a consequence, tasks that are not important (urgent or otherwise) rarely get onto my list.
This paper-based task list has reversed the type of tasks on my list—now, 80% are important.
So, what kind of tasks fall into these different categories?
Let’s begin with the easiest one: Quadrant 4. These are the tasks that are not important and not urgent.
These tasks include watching TV, scrolling social media, reading political news, and anything else that triggers you in some way.
While checking social media or watching TV may be beneficial sometimes, these activities should be undertaken only after you have completed your important work for the day.
What about quadrant 3–the urgent and not important. What kind of tasks are these? Well, quite a few emails are. These could be something you want to buy, but you are not ready to do so yet. However, a last-minute offer might expire at midnight (urgency), so you feel you have to act.
No, you don’t.
I don’t need to buy my winter sweaters in September—the temperature is 28 degrees outside (around 85 degrees Fahrenheit), and it’s still quite humid; I can wait until the end of October. Yet the email is urging me to act now. It’s not important.
You’ll also find many requests from colleagues that fall into this category. “I need it now!” “I have to have it immediately!” only for you to find a few minutes later that it’s unimportant and they don’t need it now.
Busy work also falls into this quadrant. When I was teaching at a university, the admin department was always sending reminders to teachers to send the attendance record for that day’s class. It was framed as urgent, yet in the grand scheme of things, attendance records were not important to me as a teacher.
As a teacher, ensuring my students learned was important. Not some box ticking exercise to keep the administration team happy.
I was never late in sending my attendance sheets, but I did find it annoying that almost immediately after the class finished, there was a message asking me to send the attendance sheet.
I soon got to ignoring those messages—they were sent out to all professors.
This is the bottom part of the matrix—the place you want to stay away from as much as possible. Likely, you will never be able to remain entirely out of it. After all, there’s a new season of Taskmaster starting this week, and your favourite sports team could be heading towards the finals, and every game is on TV.
(Although watching a favourite TV show or sports team could arguably be placed in the quadrant 2 area—after all, it’s a form of relaxation—well, perhaps not if you support the Leeds Rhinos rugby team)
Now, the top part of the matrix, the important area, is where you want to spend as much time as possible. You can think of this area as the proactive area.
The urgent and important quadrant—quadrant 1—includes your core work tasks, customer requests, and some requests from your boss and colleagues (the important project/process-driven requests).
These tasks are often deadline-driven—hence their importance.
Then there is quadrant 2—the important but not urgent quadrant. This is possibly the most important quadrant because, as I mentioned, the more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent areas.
Your areas of focus drive quadrant 2. It also includes planning, thinking and self-development.
For example, exercise, reading, weekly and daily planning are all quadrant 2 tasks. As is spending time with your family, learning and reading.
All healthy pursuits will come here.
The problem is that there’s no sense of urgency. These important tasks are often sacrificed for the important and urgent tasks of Quadrant 1. Spend too much time in Quadrant 1, and it will grow and grow.
If you pull yourself away and try to move towards your quadrant 2 area, your quadrant 1 area will shrink—a good thing.
So, how can you implement this matrix into your own life?
Identify what each quadrant looks like in your life. Where do the urgent and not important (Quadrant 3) tasks come from, and why? Ask the same question about Quadrant 1—urgent and important, why are they urgent?
What is the underlying reason these tasks become urgent?
You will likely find that you are not doing something from Quadrant 2. For example, not doing a weekly planning session will always cause things to become urgent because you never get a chance to see the overview of what you have going on.
That’s how deadlines creep up on you.
Not giving yourself ten minutes at the end of the day (or first thing in the morning if you are an early bird) to plan the day will leave you at the mercy of events (quadrants 1 and 3).
Creating an Eisenhower Matrix on paper and writing out the different activities you do in each category can help you prioritise. And that’s not just related to work. It’s a life-changing prioritisation exercise for your whole life.
You can see what you should be doing and what needs to change so you have more time for what you want to do in your life.
It will also show you what needs to be eliminated to find that time. Anything in the bottom half of the matrix should eliminated (although that may not be possible 100% of the time)
I hope that has helped Michele. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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What are the time-tested principles of better time management and productivity? That’s what I’m exploring in this week’s episode.
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Script | 337
Hello, and welcome to episode 337 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
If you have read books on time management and productivity, you may have picked up that there are a few basic principles that never seem to change.
Things like writing everything down, not relying on your head to remember things, planning your day and week, and writing out what is important to you.
These are solid principles that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The tools we use may have changed, but these principles have not and never will.
What is surprising are the attempts to reinvent time management. New apps and systems seem to come out every month claiming to be “game-changing”—I hate that phrase—or more ways to defy the laws of time and physics and somehow create more time in the day than is possible.
Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin Planner, an icon of time management and productivity, always said that time management principles have not changed in over 6,000 years. What has changed is the speed at which we try to do things.
Technology hasn’t changed these time management principles; all technology has done is make doing things faster.
Today, I can send an email to the other side of the world, and it will arrive instantly. Two hundred years ago, I would have had to write a letter, go to the post office to purchase a stamp, and send it. It would arrive two or three months later.
Funnily enough, I read a book called The Man With The Golden Typewriter. It’s a book of letters Ian Fleming sent to his readers and publisher. He often began his letters with the words “Thank you for your letter of the 14th of February,” yet the date of his reply was in April.
Not only were things slower fifty years ago, people were more patient.
So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Lisa. Lisa asks, Hi Carl, I’ve noticed you’ve been talking about basic principles of productivity recently. Are there any principles you follow that have not changed?
Hi Lisa, thank you for your question.
The answer is yes, there are. Yet, it took me a long time to realise the importance of these principles.
The first one, which many people try to avoid, is establishing what is important to you. This is what I call doing the backend work.
You see, if you don’t know what is important to you, your days will be driven by the latest urgent thing. That’s likely to come from other people and not from you.
Stephen Covey wrote about this in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, with his Time Management Matrix, also called the Eisenhower Matrix. This matrix is divided into Important and urgent, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, and not urgent and not important.
The goal of this matrix is to spend as much time as possible in the second quadrant—the important but not urgent. This area includes things like getting enough sleep, planning, exercising, and taking preventative action.
The more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent and important and urgent and not important areas.
Yet, unless you know what is important to you, the only thing driving your day will be the things that are important to others. That includes your company, your friends and family. They will be making demands on you, and as you have no barriers, their crises will become yours. You, in effect, become part of the problem instead of being part of the solution.
When you have your life together, you can offer calm, considered solutions to those you care about. You also know when to get involved and when to stay well away.
Yet, you can only do that when you know what is important to you.
Many authors and time management specialists refer to establishing what is important to you in different ways; Hyrum Smith calls this establishing your governing values, Stephen Covey calls it knowing your roles, and I call them your areas of focus.
These are just names for essentially the same thing. Get to know what is important to you as an individual. Then, write them down in a place where you can refer back to them regularly so you know that your days, weeks, and months are living according to the principles that are important to you.
It’s these that give you the power to say no to things that conflict with your values.
Without knowing what they are, you will say yes to many things you don’t enjoy or want to do.
The next principle is to plan your week and day. Again, this is another area so many people avoid. I remember hearing a statistic that less than 5% of Getting Things Done practitioners do any weekly review.
If you’ve read Getting Things Done by David Allen, you’ll know that he stresses the importance of the weekly review in almost every chapter.
People who don’t plan are often driven by the fear of what they might learn, such as a forgotten project deadline, an important meeting that needs a lot of preparation, or a lost opportunity.
Yet, these are the results of not planning. If you were to give yourself thirty minutes at the end of the week to plan the next week and five to ten minutes each evening to plan the next day, many of the things you fear will never happen. You will be alerted to the issues well before you need to act.
For me, consistently planning my week and day has been life-changing. This simple activity has ensured I am working on the right things, dealing with the most important things, and ending the week knowing that the right things were completed.
Prior to becoming consistent with my planning, I was all over the place. I spent far too much time on the unimportant and saying yes to many things I didn’t want to do. I was also procrastinating A LOT.
A huge benefit of planning is that you get to see data. In other words, you learn very quickly what is possible and what is not. When you begin planning the week, you will be overambitious and try to do too much. The more you plan, the more you learn what can be done.
No, you won’t be able to attend six hours of meetings, write a report, reply to 150 emails, go to the gym and spend quality time with your family.
When you know what is important, you will ensure you have time for it because you plan for it (can you see the connection?). You will start to say no to some meetings (and yes, you can say no by offering an alternative day and time for the meeting) and renegotiate report deadlines.
A third principle is to manage your time ruthlessly. By that, I mean being very strict about what goes on your calendar. Never, ever let anyone else schedule meetings or appointments for you.
Your calendar is the one tool you have that gives you control over your day. Allowing other people to control it essentially turns you into a puppet. No, never ever let that happen.
Now, before Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar, we carried our own diaries around with us. No one else could have control of it. If you were fortunate enough to have a secretary (now called an “executive assistant”), you would meet with her (secretaries were largely female in the 60s, 70s and 80s) each week and explain when you were and were not available.
Your secretary would then gate keep your calendar. The best secretaries were pretty much impossible to get past. They protected their boss’s time.
People knew that time was important and for anyone to do their work, they needed undisturbed time. Your calendar was respected.
A person’s diary was so important that the courts would accept it as evidence they were in a particular location. I doubt very much they would do that today.
A mistake is to say yes to a time commitment too quickly. This is how we get conflicts in our calendars. You cannot be in two places at the same time—that’s another law of physics—so you either say no and offer an alternative date, or you have to waste time renegotiating with someone later.
I am shocked at how often I see conflicts on people’s calendars. Clearing these up should be the first thing you do during your weekly planning.
Information you need to know about the day should go in the all-day section of your calendar, not in the timed area. Only committed timed events go in the time area of your calendar.
When your calendar truly reflects your commitments, you can then set about planning a realistic day. If you have six hours of meetings and thirty tasks to complete, you will know instantly that you have an impossible day, and you can either move some of your appointments or reduce your task list.
Ignoring it only diminishes the power of your calendar, leaving you again at the mercy of other people’s crises and issues.
This is about being strict about your time. Wake up and go to bed at the same time each day so you have solid bookends to your day. Ensure you protect time for your important work and your family and friends. And never let other people steal your time.
The final principle is the tool you use won’t make you more productive or better at time management. Tools come and go. In the 1980s, it was the Filofax. In the 90s, it was the Franklin Planner. Today is the latest fashionable app. It doesn’t matter. None of them will ever make you more productive.
What will make you more productive is knowing what is important to you. Having a plan for the day and week so you know what must be accomplished that day, and week. And being in complete control of your calendar.
Get those three things right, and you will feel less stressed, more in control of your life and have a sense of purpose each day. Isn’t that what we all want?
I hope that has helped, Lisa. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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This week, how to process your task manager’s inbox quickly and effectively so you can get focused on what needs to be done.
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Script | 336
Hello, and welcome to episode 336 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One issue that pops up regularly in my coaching programme is an overwhelming inbox. There are too many unclear items left to fester and fill up space, with no clear pathway to dealing with whatever needs to be done.
Now, it’s true that you need to collect things. If you’re not collecting your commitments and ideas, you soon find yourself forgetting to do the important things you have committed to. However, collecting is just the first part of a three-part process. You also need to organise what you collect and then do the work.
There are no shortcuts around this. These are the three principles of task management. Collect whatever needs to be collected, organise what you collect and then do the work.
This is something I have learned the hard way. I’ve collected thousands of items over the years, and in my early days, before I had learned the basic principles, that meant my inbox filled up and just became an overwhelming mess. It was a place I never wanted to visit because it just reminded me of how unproductive and disorganised I was.
I know those basic principles now: I collect stuff, regularly organise what I collect, and then do the work.
Today’s podcast is about organising what you collected. I will tell you how to quickly clear your inbox, sort out the important from the unimportant, and, more importantly, get comfortable deleting stuff that is low in importance.
Oh, and before I forget, Friday this week—that’s the 6th of September— sees the opening session of my Ultimate Productivity Workshop.
This is your chance to learn the fundamental principles and put them into practice so you can become a master of time management and productivity.
There are just a few places left, so if you want to become better organised, more productive, and in control of your time, join the workshop today. Details for the event are in the show notes and on my website, Carl Pullein.com.
Okay, on with the show, which means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, “Hi Carl, I am really struggling with my inbox. I put a lot of stuff in there, from ideas to things my wife asks me to do and emails that need a response.
Each day, I feel I am collecting thirty or more things, and then it takes forever to clear the inbox. I hate doing it, so I don’t. And, of course, that just makes things worse. What can I do to make keeping my inbox manageable.
Hi Jeff,
Thank you for your question.
The good news is there are a few changes you can make that will help to reduce the overwhelm caused by an overloaded inbox.
Let’s first deal with the three questions to ask when you process your inbox. These three questions will clarify what you have and help you to determine if you really need to do them or not.
The first question is, “Do I need to do it?”
This is designed to clear tasks that have already been done or are no longer relevant because events have moved on.
You will often add a task like “Find out if Margo has all the documents she needs.” Later that day, Margo may ask you a question about the documents. You now know she has them. The task can be deleted or modified if the question requires you to do something.
Or you may have been asked by someone to do something only for them to tell you later that the task no longer needs to be done.
These can all be deleted.
Similarly, you may have added tasks to look up something or find out more about something, only to look at the task later and wonder what you were thinking. You are no longer interested in the idea. Again, delete these.
If the task still needs to be done, then move on to the next question, which is:
What do I need to do?
This question concerns properly defining the task. It’s not good to have a task that simply says, “Tony script.”
That might have meant something to you when you added it to your inbox, but if you do not need to do the task for a week or two, when the task comes back you’ll be unsure what needs to be done. Make it clear.
Rewrite the task as something like, “Send Tony the amended voice-over script.” This makes sense. If you are sending Tony many different scripts, you would add the name of the amended script to send so there is no confusion.
Another type of task to watch out for is the “follow-up” or “chase” task. These are often not tasks. They may be vehicles for completing a task. For example, if you asked Roger for a copy of the script to send to Tony, the task is not really to chase Roger.
The task is to get a copy of the script to send to Tony. Until you have that script in your procession the task is not complete. Adding another task to chase Roger duplicates the original task.
Instead, after asking Roger for the task, make a note that you asked Roger for it, add a date you asked, and then reschedule the task.
Every task in your task manager needs an action verb attached to it, such as call, write, read, review, design, sketch, reply, etc. If a task does not have an action verb, it has not been properly defined.
You will find that adding a verb helps you to estimate how long something will take.
For those tasks that are difficult to estimate the time it will take, you can use the “start, continue, finish” method.
I use this method for a lot of project tasks. For example, when I was writing Your Time Your Way, every Monday to Friday, I had a repeating task that said, “Continue writing book”. This meant I could decide how much time I had available to write the book and not worry about the task itself.
I knew I was never going to finish writing the book in one day, it was the kind of task that jut needed to done little by little. So, I allocated ninety-minutes a day, five days a week and repeated that for six months. That got the book done.
The third question is: When am I going to do it?
This is where most other time management and productivity systems go wrong. Establishing whether you need to do the task and defining what needs to be done is pretty universal in the productivity world. Yet, it doesn’t matter how well you define a task if you don’t have time to do it.
Once you commit yourself to a task, you need to know you have time to do it. That means asking, when are you going to do it?
How do you do that? Open up your calendar and your task manager and have them side by side. Some task managers can show you your calendar at the same time. Todoist, Tick Tick, and in a couple of weeks, Apple Reminders will do that for you.
What you are doing is looking to see where you have gaps in your schedule for doing the work.
Now, the task could be grouped with other similar tasks. Doing your expenses, for instance would be an admin task. Responding to an email would come under your communications.
But, some tasks may be too big and require a few hours to do. The question then becomes will you do in one go or split it up?
Your calendar will guide you. You will be able to see where you have time; if not, you can decide whether something else needs to be rescheduled for you to do the task by the date it’s due.
Now, when you start going through your inbox and asking these questions, you will be slow. Remember when you learned to ride a bicycle? You didn’t jump on the bike and go. There was a slow process of learning and building muscle memory.
The same will happen when processing your inbox. It will be slow at first as you’re building your mental muscle memory.
I’ve been asking these three questions for years. It takes me very little time now, yet it was a slow process when I first began. The only option you have is to stick with it. As time goes on, you will get faster and faster.
You will also pick up the patterns. The different requests you get will fall into similar groups, which helps you quickly decide what something is and how long it will take.
Be patient and follow the process.
And… Do not be afraid to delete stuff. If it’s important, it will come back.
If you are using the Time Sector System, you have a bit of an advantage. With the Time Sector System, the only tasks that matter are the ones you need to do this week. Anything else can be moved to your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or Long-term and on Hold folders. You can decide when you will do those tasks when you next do a weekly planning session.
So there you go, Jeff.
This is a process game. The more you follow the process, the faster you become. You also get comfortable deleting and delegating tasks. The goal is not to accumulate tasks; it’s the reverse. The goal is always to eliminate. The less you have to do this week, the more focused you will be and the more flexibility you have for dealing with the unknowns that will inevitably come in.
I hope that has helped answer your question. Thank you so much for sending it.
Don’t forget Friday is the start of September’s ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP. You can register by going to my website. If you are already registered, I will be sending you the workbook in the next day or two.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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One of the most productive things you could do is to start writing a daily journal. In this week’s episode, I answer a question about how to get started journaling.
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Script | 335
Hello, and welcome to episode 335 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Possibly the most productive thing I have done over the last ten years is to write a journal. This habit has taught me many things. For one, it has taught me the value of consistency. The act of spending ten to fifteen minutes every morning before I start the day has given me something deliberate—I sit down and write—which has led to me building out a solid set of morning routines that start my day in a way that’s healthy (mentally) and productive.
It is productive because it gives me a few minutes to think about the day ahead and review my objective tasks—the things I want to or must complete that day. This is far better than rolling out of bed at the last minute, rushing around to get dressed and out the door only to realise I left something important at home.
Writing a journal every day has also given me a space to analyse where I am doing well and where there is room for improvement. It allows me to write how I am feeling and what I am worrying about and consider future directions.
It’s almost as if I have a close friend I can confess all to.
Now, if you search YouTube for journaling, you will find thousands of videos advising how to start. Yet, it can be difficult. What do you write about? Do you use a digital tool like Day One or Apple’s Journaling app, or an old-fashioned paper notebook?
There’s a lot of questions.
This week, I received a question about starting and what I suggest you use. So, I decided to share all the tips I’ve learned over the years so you, too, can begin this fantastic habit.
Before I get to the question, there are just under two weeks until the start of September’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop.
This workshop will teach you how to build your own productivity and time management system from the ground up.
We begin with your calendar and task manager, and I show you how to connect the two so that they work in harmony. This removes the overwhelm we face when tasks swamp our days.
In the second week, I show you how to do an effective weekly planning session and how to get, and more importantly, stay on top of your communications—those hundreds of emails and messages that must be dealt with daily.
By the end of this workshop, you will have a perfectly balanced system that works for you and your work style. What you will learn will eliminate backlogs, help you identify what is important (and what is not), and establish your core work and areas of focus.
You will learn a lot in this workshop. Plus, your package includes four courses, which gives you lifetime access to the four key elements of maintaining your system.
There are only a limited number of places, so if you haven’t registered yet, you can do so with the link in the show notes.
I hope to see you there on the 6th of September.
Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Naomi. Naomi asks, Hi Carl, I saw your recent video on how to get started with journaling. Could you talk a little more about what to write and your recommendations about the best way to write it?
Hi Naomi, thank you for your question.
Let me first deal with digital Vs paper journals.
There are many advantages to writing your journal digitally. For one, you can add a photo each day and set the journal to collect data such as your exercise, the weather, and, if you wish, what you posted on social media automatically.
I spent three years writing my journal in Day One. It was easy. I could write on my phone, my computer or my iPad. I preferred my iPad, but occasionally I would write on my phone.
What stopped me was the realisation that technology was gradually taking over my life. I was no longer doing anything manually and was always on the lookout for more convenience.
Sure, convenience is nice. In theory, anyway, it frees up time for other pursuits. Yet, I found those other pursuits were not productive or healthy. It invariably meant more time on social media and TV watching.
So, back in January, I switched back to handwriting my journals.
I’ve discovered that handwriting my journal has slowed me down. It’s helped me to be more thoughtful and to express myself better in my journal.
It’s also rekindled my love of fountain pens and good-quality paper, which can be a very dangerous hobby—fountain pens and notebooks can get very expensive.
Yet the key here was slowing me down.
Why would you want to rush to get the day started? There will likely be plenty of drama—you don’t want to rush into all that.
The other reason I stopped journaling digitally was that I realised I was spending far too much time in front of a screen. Giving myself ten to twenty minutes every morning with a good old-fashioned pen and paper felt far better than sitting in front of another screen.
If you decide to go down the pen-and-paper route, my advice is to get yourself a good-quality notebook, preferably hardbound.
A hardbound notebook can travel with you, and if you don’t have a table to write on, its binding will give you enough support.
I’d also recommend investing in a nice pen. A fountain pen may not suit you, but that nice pen investment will give you extra pleasure when writing in your journal.
Okay, those are the tools dealt with. Now, what do you write about?
If you’ve never written a journal before, when you start, you may be afraid to share your deeper thoughts and feelings.
I always think of this like when you meet a stranger for the first time. You don’t open up and tell them what you feel or what your opinions are about other people. You are reserved and generally stick to topics such as the weather or the traffic conditions.
So start there. Write down what the weather was like and what you did that day (or the day before).
When I started, I wrote down all the important, meaningful tasks I had completed the day before. And, of course, the weather.
You can even write what you ate and how much activity/exercise you did.
You will soon begin opening up and writing about how you feel. Again, this is very much like when you meet a stranger. As you get to know them, you open up.
Now as you progress and develop the habit of writing your journal every day, you may want to create a few recurring areas.
For example, I have five items in my morning routine. After writing the date at the top of the page, I list these five items (make coffee, drink my lemon water, do my stretches, write my journal and clean my email inbox) in the margin and check them off. This tells me how consistent I am with my morning routines.
I also write in the margin what exercise I did that day.
This year, I have a 366-day challenge to do at least ten push-ups each day, so I write down the number of push-ups I’ve done that day. (So far the year, I’ve done just over 8,000 push-ups)
That gives me a start and some structure to my journal.
After that, I write whatever’s on my mind. This morning, for example, I wrote how much better I feel. This week, I’ve been suffering from a heavy cold, and I felt a lot better this morning. So, that was my opening paragraph.
I also wrote about the weather. It’s been hot and sticky over the last two weeks. Last night, we had quite a lot of rain, and that cleared the humidity a little.
So you don’t have to write anything too deep.
When starting, your goal should be to get into the habit and let nature take its course. After a few weeks, you will naturally open up and write about more deeply meaningful things.
You’ll likely begin writing negatively about your colleagues—we all do that occasionally—don’t worry. No one else is going to read your journal. And writing about your feelings about anything is how journaling can be very therapeutic.
And that’s the whole point of writing a journal. It’s therapy and it helps you to focus on what’s important.
I find the act of writing what’s on my mind helps me to organise my thoughts, put things into perspective and then focus on the essential things. That could be my relationships, finances, spirituality or how my business is growing.
It also helps me see where I can improve my life. I track my weight each week, and it becomes very clear when my weight is rising, which tells me what needs to be done to get back to where I should be.
And finally, journaling gives you a record of your life. After all, you are documenting your life. And that’s a beautiful thing to do. If nothing else, you leave something for your kids and grandchildren.
One of my family’s most prized possessions is my great-grandmother’s recipe book. It was started in the 1890s and has been handed down from daughter to daughter. It’s incredible to look at. It is tatty and torn, and the pages are stained. Yet, the handwriting is still legible; there are pen and pencil marks.
Your journal could potentially become the same thing. A treasured family possession. Who knows how technology will progress in the future? Perhaps the text files you create today won’t be accessible in ten or twenty years. But a handwritten journal will always be accessible.
We still have 7,000 pages of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks—written 500 years ago. Wouldn’t it be nice for your own life to be celebrated in 500 years?
So there you go, Naomi. I hope that has helped and motivated you to start writing your life. You’ll never regret it.
Thank you for your question and for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very productive week.
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You have an overflowing inbox, you’re behind on projects and your calendar for the next ten days is full of meetings and other commitments. What can you do to get things under control and meeting your commitments? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Ultimate Productivity Workshop
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 334
Hello, and welcome to episode 334 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I know it can be easy for productive people to say all you need to do is this or that, and you, too, will be productive. The reality is it’s not that simple.
It’s not just about getting organised, reestablishing control of your calendar, and learning to use a to-do list properly; there’s also a mindset shift involved.
Many people I work with individually have been told and come to believe that they are disorganised and sloppy with their time management. If you’re told this too often and your actions support it, you begin to believe it. Being poor at time management and productivity becomes an identity.
Once you believe you are bad at these things, it becomes a self-fulfilling habit. Every attempt to become better organised and more productive will fail because you will sabotage your successes.
Your brain has an incredible capacity to reorganise and adapt. Just look at how people adapted to the lockdowns in 2020. There was resistance at first, then the adoption of new ways of doing things. Those who enjoyed exercise found ways to adapt their exercise programmes and work from home—something many people believed was impossible for them- but they soon discovered it was possible.
Your brain can adapt and remodel itself using “neuroplasticity”. All you need is a stimulus—such as a determination to get organised and be better at managing your time—like muscles in response to exercise.
Sadly, most people don’t try. They accept these negative patterns as just who they are. Yet it’s not true. Your mindset and habits are not set at birth. You learn them. And that means you can unlearn them and develop better beliefs and habits.
So, with all that said, it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Wim. Wim asks, hi Carl, for years, I have tried to get myself organised and failed every time. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve read all the books, watched thousands of YouTube videos, and learned all the tricks. But for some reason, I can never do anything I learn. How would you help someone like me?
Hi Wim, Thank you for your question.
Part of the problem for people who struggle to get themselves organised is trying to do too much at once.
While we are good at changing things, we are not very good at changing everything. This is why it’s often said that moving house is one of the most stressful things a person can do. Moving house is exciting, yet it also involves a lot of change.
That makes it uncomfortable. There’s a new home, a new way to get to the supermarket, a different drive to work and new people to get to know in the neighbourhood.
Yet, after a few weeks, our new home becomes normal. We feel comfortable and safe, and the stress of the move disappears.
All change requires an initial period of discomfort. We make mistakes and forget to do something we should have done, and going through the actions feels like a huge effort for a small gain.
But we discovered during the pandemic that we can do it. We can adapt to change and do it quite quickly.
So, where do you begin?
As always, the best place to begin is with the basics. To get organised means learning and implementing the principles of COD—Collect, Organise and do.
When it comes to collecting, how will you gather together all the stuff you either have to do, would like to do or have a passing interest in?
For some, that may mean setting up their phones as their universal collection tool (UCT) or perhaps a pocket notebook.
If you choose to use your phone—possibly the best UCT as we carry these things with us everywhere we go (including the bathroom!) what application will you use?
The application you use for collecting is important because it needs to fulfil two requirements. First, it must be quick and easy to use. Too many buttons to press, and you won’t collect everything. Second, you need to trust that what you collect will be saved and not lost.
A lack of either of those functions and it will fail.
Once you have your collection tool set up, the next area to work on is the habit of processing and organising what you collect. Done frequently, and this won’t take a lot of time. Done infrequently, and it will take too long, which then means you won’t do it.
I generally advise people to clear their inboxes every twenty-four to forty-eight hours. This depends on how much you are collecting. I find people just starting out with a system collect a lot more than seasoned people do.
That’s actually a good thing because for the first few weeks, it’s about building the habit. The old habit of trying to remember things in your head doesn’t work, but it’s an ingrained habit—“oh, I won’t forget that”.
You will. Write it down.
If you are collecting a lot of stuff, clear your inbox daily. If you’re collecting less than ten things a day, you can clear your inbox less frequently. (Although I do advise you to scan your inbox daily to ensure you haven’t missed anything important).
Now, when it comes to organising what you collected is a little more difficult. This requires some thought.
The goal is to find what you need as quickly as possible when you need it.
One thing that will hinder you here is if you have stuff all over the place. I have a policy of using tools for the purpose they were designed. This means I use one task manager, Todoist, for all my tasks.
This stops me from having to find stuff in multiple different places. When I start the day, I know all my tasks will be in one place.
This also helps with trust. I can trust that what needs to be done today will be on my Todoist Today list.
Yet, this didn’t happen overnight. It took many months of learning Todoist and building trust.
When I see people announcing on YouTube or social media that they have switched to another app, my eyes roll. I’ve seen it time and time again. If you constantly switch apps, you never build trust in your system. You’re always learning a new tool, and things slip through the cracks.
Let me say this: you will never become better at managing time or more productive if you cannot settle on a set of tools and stick with them.
You are not missing out if a new app appears and promises to fix your productivity woes. That’s just marketing. Stop falling for it.
The question is, how will you organise your stuff?
I use the Time Sector System to organise my tasks, and my notes are organised using a methodology called GAPRA (Goals, Areas, Projects, Resources and Archive).
I have a lot of resources on these organisation methods on my website, so if you want to learn more about them, head over to Carl Pullein.com.
The final part is to do the work.
This involves getting control of your calendar.
Now, here’s the thing. If you do not control your calendar or are ignoring it, you will always have difficulty managing your time. While your calendar is the simplest tool in your productivity toolbox, it’s also the most powerful.
We all begin each day with the same amount of time. Yet we have different priorities and things we want time for. However, time is fixed. And that’s a good thing. It means you have one constant you can work with.
The number of tasks coming at you is not something you can control. You have no idea what will happen today. You don’t know how many emails and messages you will get; you don’t know what your customers or boss will ask you to do. That side of the equation is not within your control.
Yet, I see so many people trying to control the uncontrollable. That’s often where problems begin.
Instead, take some time and look at the different categories of things you need time for. Communications and admin will be two things. It’s also likely you will need time for chores and planning. On top of that will be the work you are employed to do.
A lawyer will need time to read and write contracts, prepare cases for court and talk to clients. All this requires time. The question becomes how much time do you want to allocate to these activities each day?
For example, I know that if I dedicate two hours a day to content creation, an hour to communications, and thirty minutes to admin, I will never have any backlogs or be very far behind on my commitments. That’s just three and a half hours a day to get important work done.
That means I have just over twenty hours for everything else each day. Take Louis, my dog, for his walk, eat, do chores, sleep and exercise, and, of course, spend time with my family and friends.
We are all different, and we will all have different priorities. Yet, if you control your calendar and are strict with how you allocate your time, you will find you do have time to get everything done. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but you will have time over the next few weeks.
Doing what I call the backend work matters. That’s deciding your priorities and using those to guide your days. If spending time with your family is important, you need to protect time to spend with your family. Hoping you will find time in the future is not a good strategy.
If you’re sick and tired of seeing hundreds if not thousands of unread emails in your inbox, they won’t disappear because you hope they will. You have to deliberately set aside time to deal with them and then protect time each day to ensure the backlogs don’t reappear.
Similarly, if you have projects that are behind schedule, they will not miraculously get back on schedule if all you are applying is hope. You have to set aside time to do the work intentionally.
It’s worth pointing out that no new, brilliant AI-inspired calendar or productivity tool will ever do the work for you either. You do the work. It’s your time, and only you know what is critical and what is not.
This all comes back to the basic principles. Know what is important to you—develop your areas of focus. You can download my free Areas of Focus workbook from my website.
Make sure you collect and organise your stuff, set aside time to do the work, and then do the work.
It will take time to develop these habits. But it’s not impossible if you really want to do it. Allow yourself that time, and within a few weeks you will begin to see notable improvements in your time management and productivity.
Thank you, Win, for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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What’s the difference between a project and a goal? That’s what we’re exploring this week.
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Script | 333
Hello, and welcome to episode 333 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the benefits of becoming more organised is that you begin to analyse what you do and why you do it in a little more detail. You start seeing what is important and what is not, what you need to do, what you can pass off to others, and what you can ignore.
And, most importantly, you understand what your areas of focus mean to you.
However, one area I’ve seen people struggle with is how to define a project and a goal and what the differences are. This week. I hope to clarify that so you know how to use each one.
Before we get to the question, I just wanted to give you a heads-up that September’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming up. Registration is open now, and places, as usual, are going fast.
I know there are no quick fixes or that the road from disorganised to organised is easy and problem-free. But if you follow a few core principles, you can build a system that works for the way you work. That is what you will learn in this workshop.
I’d love to see you there. The dates are September 6th and 13th. Both days start at 8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (that’s 5:30 pm if you are on the West Coast of the US).
Full details can be found on my website or in the show notes below.
Okay, on with the show. Which means handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks, Hi Carl, would you explain the difference between a goal and a project? I find the distinction very confusing.
Hi Janine, thank you for your question. You are not alone in this question. I get asked it a lot.
Let’s start with the basics. A project is a desired outcome that requires time and a series of connected tasks to be completed by a given deadline. A simple example of this would be clearing out your garage. This would be a project in that there will be a number of things that need organising, such as a skip (a British word for a large container that you throw large items away in).
You may need to go to the hardware store to buy cleaning materials and storage containers etc.
For this project, you’d set a date for when you would like to do it—say a weekend—and block your calendar so that’s what gets all your attention on the given day.
The project is complete once you have achieved the desired result.
Now, a goal also has a desired outcome, and it may also have a timeline in that you want to achieve the desired result by a given date.
However, a goal differs in that once the goal is achieved, you will want to maintain it.
A simple example would be if you set a goal to lose twenty pounds by the end of the year. As I am recording this in August, that would give you four months to lose twenty pounds or five pounds a month.
Once you have achieved your goal, though, you are unlikely to want to put those twenty pounds back on. So, a goal’s objective is to take you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future.
I like to think of a goal like acting as a course correction engine burn. If you’ve seen the film Apollo 13 (a brilliant film if you’re interested in project management and dealing with crises).
When a spacecraft goes to the moon, it is dealing with a moving object. The moon travels around the earth. Therefore, you need to anticipate where the moon will be when you arrive at its atmosphere. Get that wrong, and you are in trouble. Too shallow, and you would bounce off into outer space. Too steep, and you would burn up in the moon’s atmosphere.
This means, from time to time, you need to adjust your course, and that’s where the engine burn comes in. You turn on the engines for a few seconds to push you back on course.
That’s how goals work in your life.
If you have established what your areas of focus are—these are the eight areas of life we all share that are important to us. For example, family and relationships, your career, health and fitness and finances. If any of these falls out of balance, you can set a goal to push you back on track.
A simple example would be if, as part of your financial area of focus, you save a minimum of $5,000 per year, and currently, you have only saved $1,000 for the year, you would set a goal to get that back in balance. You could increase the amount you save per month by reducing your spending, or you may decide that this year is proving difficult financially, so you choose to increase the amount you save next year—that would become the goal.
In many ways, goals are a series of repetitive tasks you perform in order to achieve a specific outcome that improves your life.
A project is rarely repetitive. For instance, I have a project at the moment to record the audiobook version of Your Time Your Way. Sitting down to record the chapters is repetitive, but the content I record is different each time, and I need to share the recorded files with my publisher each week.
The deadline for the project is the end of September. Once done, that’s it. My publisher will fine-tune things and add the audiobook to the list of formats available. I no longer have anything to do. The project is complete.
If we return to the weight loss goal, imagine I achieve my goal of losing those twenty pounds; it’s not finished. Now, the goal becomes to maintain my weight and avoid anything that would risk putting those twenty pounds back on. That means changing eating and exercise habits.
Similarly, with the financial goal, once everything is back to where it should be, I need to change or add habits to ensure I don’t fall behind again.
That’s the real purpose of setting goals. To initiate a change that endures.
A project doesn’t do that. Once done, it’s finished. Often forgotten about.
A project could be your next vacation. Before you arrive at your vacation destination, you have a series of tasks to complete. Research hotels, flights, and car hire, for example. Then, book your hotel, flights and car rental. Pack your clothes and get to the airport on time.
When you return home. The project is complete. Yes, you will hopefully have some nice memories and pictures, but for all intents and purposes, the project is complete.
Now here’s the interesting part of goals and projects. Sometimes, a goal can become a project.
Let me explain.
One of my goals is to spend a week at the Goldeneye Resort in Jamaica. It’’s not just a goal for me, it’s been a dream since I was a teenager. Goldeneye is where Ian Fleming wrote all the James Bond books. And, if you don’t know, Ian Fleming is my writing hero.
Today, though, it’s just a goal.
To achieve this goal, I will need to save a lot of money. Goldeneye is not a cheap place to stay, and I’m sure the flights will not be cheap either.
So, if I decide I want to go to Goldeneye in twelve months’ time—let’s say September 2025, I have twelve months to save the money. I would set a goal to save X amount of dollars per month. That goal may involve reducing my expenditure—no more expensive pens, inks and paper (oh no!) and instead putting that money away.
However, the habit I form here is to become more of a saver than a spender, getting into the habit of saving money each month.
Now, once we get to April next year, I would need to book a villa at the resort—that would require a little research. This goal has now become a project. There are a series of tasks involved to ensure my wife and I are on the plane flying to Jamaica in September next year.
In other words, the goal is to save money so I can achieve a dream. Once the money is saved, it becomes a project so we arrive at Goldeneye on the right date.
I can see why understanding the difference between a goal and a project is difficult. Although they have many similarities, their functions are quite different.
Think of a goal as something you use to change a habit. A way to move you towards living to the standards you set for yourself in your Areas of Focus. A project is a tool you use to organise a group of tasks that achieve a specific outcome by a given deadline.
As Tony Robbins says: “The reason we set goals is to give our lives focus and to move us in the direction we would like to go.”
And that is the essence of a goal.
One more distinction here is the number of projects and goals you may have. Often, you won’t have any control over the number of projects you have. They could be given to you by your work or family.
Goals are personal. You get to decide what they are. It’s also important not to try and accomplish too many goals at once. That dilutes your focus and attention.
By their very nature, goals are hard. You are changing habits and moving outside of your comfort zone. If you have too many goals at once, making that change becomes almost impossible. Be patient. Change one thing at a time.
We are all works In progress.
In 2009, I was an overweight, smoking binge drinker. I chose to change that lifestyle and become a healthy, non-smoking runner by the end of the decade.
That involved numerous changes, but the goal was to end the decade healthier, fitter, and stronger than I began it.
I achieved it. Yet, I didn’t quit everything on January 1 2010. I took my time. I began by reducing drinking to almost zero. I also started running again.
By 2014, I had completed two marathons and numerous half-marathons and chose to tackle smoking. By 2016, I had quit smoking, and the final part of the goal was to quit sugar—I managed to do that in 2019.
It took ten years to turn my health and lifestyle around. But it was fun. There were challenges—quitting smoking was the hardest, but as I went through the decade, I developed resilience, a stronger mindset and as I saw the results, I maintained my enthusiasm throughout.
So, there you go, Janine. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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This week is a very special episode.
Earlier, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Kourosh Dini, a clinical psychiatrist who is also very prominent in the productivity world with his Waves of Focus programme and his fantastic weekly Wind Down newsletter (which I highly recommend you subscribe to)
I first encountered Kourosh in 2012 when he spoke at the OmniFocus event at MacWorld. I then began following his work.
In this chat, we discuss focus, ADHD, and much more. There’s so much in this episode, so get your pens and paper ready—you’re going to need them.
Links
Learn more about Kourosh’s work:
Kourosh’s website →
Waves of Focus →
Kourosh’s newsletter →
Get a $20.00 trial of Waves of Focus membership →
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Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
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Do you feel you never have enough time to do everything on your to-do list? Well, you’re not alone.
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Script | 331
Hello, and welcome to episode 331 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How often do you begin the day with a to-do list that you know will be impossible to complete? What does that do to your motivation? If you are like most people, your motivation will sink, and the day becomes another stressful horror show.
Why is that? Why do we find ourselves with a to-do list longer than any reasonable person could complete in a single day? Is it because we are over-ambitious and over-optimistic about our abilities or because we have too much to do?
Well, this week, we will examine some of the causes of this problem and discuss potential solutions. While not necessarily easy to implement, these solutions will give you the necessary breathing room to create realistic, doable days and leave you with enough energy to enjoy your evenings doing what you want.
Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, may I ask a favour? If you have been kind enough to buy a copy of my book Your Time, Your Way, could you leave a review? Reviews help other people discover the book, learn better ways to manage their time and their lives and reduce stress, which will ultimately help all of us.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Heather. Heather asks, Hi Carl, I have tried for years to use a to-do list, yet after a few days, the list becomes enormous, and I stop looking at it (which makes the list even longer). I’ve tried all sorts of digital to-do lists and even pen and paper, but nothing works.
How does anyone keep their to-do list manageable so it doesn’t become useless?
Hi Heather, thank you for sending in your question.
To get to the bottom of this, we need to go back to some basics. That is to understand the relationship between time and activity.
To start, can we all agree that doing anything requires time? Whether taking your dog for a walk, cooking dinner, or meeting up with friends, all activities require some time.
Can we also agree that each day has twenty-four hours?
As long as we accept these two facts—that anything we do requires time and that there are twenty-four hours in a day—we have a solid anchor on which to build a reliable time management system.
When I accepted these two facts, everything changed for the better. It didn’t matter how much was on my to-do list if I didn’t have the time to complete the tasks.
I remember the days before I accepted this. I used to commute to the university I was teaching at—ninety minutes each way—and then teach for six hours. I had a to-do list with over thirty tasks on it, and I needed to stay two or three hours after my classes to talk with my students.
In effect, my day was doomed the moment I woke up. There was no way I could drive for three hours, teach for six, do two hours of tutorials, and complete thirty tasks. Yet that was what my day looked like each day.
That had nothing to do with time management or productivity. It had everything to do with me being unrealistic about what could be done in a single twenty-four-hour period.
And that is where most of our problems start—being unrealistic about what can be done in a single day.
If you are familiar with my Time Sector System—a way to manage your work and time more realistically—you will know about something I call your “core work”.
Your core work is the work you are employed to do. It does not include work you have “volunteered” to do—those little favours you do for a colleague or looking something up for your boss. It’s just the work you were employed to do.
As a university lecturer, I was employed to teach. My core work involved preparing for and delivering my lectures. There was some additional work, such as setting and grading exam papers, but for the most part, my core work was teaching my students.
Sending attendance records and dealing with class time conflicts for my students was not a part of my core work. I did do those tasks, but they were never at the expense of doing my core work.
Establishing what your core work is gives you some advantages. The first is you know what to prioritise each day. As your core work is what you are employed to do, it naturally follows that it will be your top priority for the day.
The second is you learn how long it takes to do your core work. This helps you see what is possible and not possible regarding the work you set for yourself each day.
Let me give you an example. Today, I run a coaching programme. After each coaching call with a client, I write feedback summarising what we discussed and include a little homework for them to do before our next call.
Writing one piece of feedback takes me, on average, twenty minutes. This means I can write around three pieces of feedback per hour. I didn’t know this when I first started writing feedback; I only learned this by repeating the same task over and over.
This is an average. Sometimes, it may take me thirty minutes to write one; other times, it may take ten minutes. I am human, and so are you—I hope—which means the time it takes you to do something will vary depending on how much sleep you’ve had, whether you are stressed or anxious about something. You could be distracted by a colleague, family member, or anything else from a long list of potential factors.
If you try to strictly limit yourself to a precise timeline, you will become stressed out. It’s not possible. With your activities, you can only work with averages. Time and the number of tasks you have may be fixed and easily identifiable; however, how long it takes you to do the tasks is not. There are too many variables involved to be able to do that.
But averages are fine. Over a week, those things do average out, and you will find that your critical core work is consistently getting done.
However, this goes a step further. Because I know I need one hour a day to write feedback, I can only allow up to three coaching calls a day. If I were to allow four or five calls a day, I would require more time to write the feedback.
Requiring more time to write my feedback would mean I would need to reduce something else. Perhaps I could stop writing my blog posts or newsletters or reduce the number of episodes of this podcast.
Remember, time is fixed—that part of the equation cannot be changed. The only thing that can be changed is the number of tasks you do—i.e. your activity.
Another factor here is that repeating the same task over and over leads to better efficiency, which reduces the time it takes to complete the tasks. If I were to take three of you listeners to a Formula 1 pit lane and we attempted to change the tires on an F1 car as they came in it would take us a long time.
While the tools would be given would be state of the art, and each tyre only has one bolt to undo, our unfamiliarity with the task would slow us down. The pit crews tasked with changing the tyres can do so in less than two seconds. That comes about because they practice. They’ve done it over a thousand times before.
What you can do is look at your core work and calculate how long it takes you to do that work each week. You may need to monitor this for a week or two, but the exercise will give you some valuable data. Data you can use to plan out your week.
For instance, I discovered that if I dedicated an hour a day to dealing with my actionable emails and messages, I would never have a situation where anyone was waiting longer than 24 hours for a response. There are some days where I cannot reply to all of them, but on the whole, I can stay on top of it all (and that’s based on 150 emails on average per day, although not all of them will be actionable).
Responding to my actionable email for an hour daily means I have developed the most efficient method possible. I group all my actionable emails in a single folder. When I process my inbox, I can quickly identify anything that needs action and move it to my actionable folder in seconds. I’ve been following this process for over ten years, and now I can clear around 350 emails from my inbox in less than thirty minutes.
Ten years ago, that would have taken me more than two hours. Repetition is not just the mother of mastery; it’s also the secret to getting faster at doing anything.
Last week, in one of my newsletters, I wrote that hope is a terrible time management strategy. Hoping you will find time to do your work is never going to work. The only thing that works is to get realistic about what you have to do and how much time you have available.
I’ve seen so many people tie themselves in knots, trying to perform impossible mental gymnastics to circumvent this fact.
It’s only when you stop trying to do the impossible and get real about what you can and cannot do in a day that you start to get control over your time.
So far, I’ve talked about the constants—your core work—which is known to you. But what about all the unknowns? The agitated client who needs your help urgently or your boss who forgot an important presentation she is due to deliver this afternoon and needs your help to prepare.
One thing you likely will have discovered is that these unknowns are going to happen. Perhaps not every day, but more often than you would like. How do you manage these?
This comes back to controlling your calendar. Filling your calendar with appointments and time to do your tasks leaves you vulnerable to all these inevitable unknowns. You will need to create space for these.
Again, this is about being realistic. How many meetings do you have scheduled today? When are they? How much time do you have between them?
Perhaps an additional question is: Do you really have to attend all these meetings? Are there some you could excuse yourself from? Maybe not, but it’s worth asking.
I love to ask people if they could guarantee two hours a day where they are undisturbed so they can get on and do their most important work for the day. Would they become more productive? Of course, the answer would be yes.
Why not try that? When you plan the week, find two hours a day for undisturbed, focused work. If you were to look at your calendar next month, could you pre-block those two hours out now? I suspect most of you listening to this could do that. Why not do it now? At least try and see what happens.
There will be days when you cannot do that, and that’s fine. If you could do three days out of five where you could, though, you’ll soon find yourself becoming more productive.
And that’s what it’s all about, Heather. Understanding your relationship with time. Time is fixed; you cannot change that. You only have control over what you say yes to and the number of tasks you complete each day. Focus your attention on that part of the equation. Learn what you can realistically complete each day and then get more efficient at doing that work.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Heather. Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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This week, is it possible to stay disciplined, or is there a better way to ensure you are consistently doing the things you want to do?
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Script | 330
Hello, and welcome to episode 330 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
When I hear people discussing discipline, I am always interested in hearing about their struggles.
Life is always a struggle. We are often torn between what we want to do and what we must do. I would love to watch my rugby team play live, yet the kick-off time is usually around 2 AM in my time zone, and I know I must be asleep at that time.
I’ve discussed the importance of daily and weekly planning many times. If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably know how valuable a solid weekly planning session is to your overall productivity. The question is, how consistent are you?
It’s easy to skip the weekly planning because there’s no immediate penalty. You could go through the whole week without any plan and get stuff done. Unfortunately, this approach leads to doing the work of others and never being able to do what you should be doing.
Whether you do or you don’t do the right things will always come down to discipline. But is that true? Perhaps not. There is another way, and I will show you that by answering this week’s question.
This means it’s time now for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Clyde. Clyde asks, hi Carl, I’ve loved following you and other people who teach time management and productivity skills. I know the concepts and what to do but never do it. I think I am too lazy or lack discipline. Do you have any strategies to help someone like me who lacks discipline?
Great question, Clyde.
Very few people are able to be determinedly disciplined every day. I can think of only one person—David Goggins—who has mastered this. Yet David Goggins was not always like that. If you know his story, it took him many years to develop the resolve and mental strength, and even after all those years, he admits that each day is a struggle.
This means that being consistently disciplined will be an uphill battle for us everyday folk—one we will likely lose.
So, what can we do instead?
I’ve found that we can develop a set of standards by which to live our lives. This can begin with simple things like going to bed and waking up at a consistent time.
You are likely already doing this; if you are, it will be much easier to set that standard.
The great thing about standards is your mindset changes. Instead of thinking, “I have to wake up at 7:30 every morning”, it becomes something you do. It goes from “I have to wake up at 7:30 to “I wake up at 7:30” because that is who you are.
It took me years to become consistent in writing my journal. During those years, I used to think, “I should write a journal.” The problem with that statement is the word “should.” That single word makes it optional. Remove that word, and now it becomes a standard.
I cannot imagine a day not spending ten minutes writing in my journal after making my coffee. I look forward to sitting down with my favourite pen and journal and writing my thoughts, ideas, and fears on a page. I am a journal writer. It’s part of my identity.
Yet I also remember the years of thinking, “I should write a journal”, and never writing one. I began to believe there was a problem with my discipline. The truth was it had nothing to do with my discipline. It was because writing a journal every morning was not a standard I followed.
When I was in my final year of high school, my first part-time job was working in a hotel. I was very fortunate because, in the late 1980s, hotels were still focused on quality and personalised service instead of the standardised, automated service most hotels offer today. This meant that everything had to be pristine and in perfect order from the moment a guest walked into reception.
I remember my induction training focused on little things like placing the pencils and notepads on the conference room tables in the exact same way and how the handles of the tea cups should always be placed, with the handle pointing to the right and the teaspoon placed on the left.
Even how the decoration of the plates must always be pointing in the same direction.
I learned those things thirty-five years ago and still follow the same standards today when laying the table for a family meal.
It doesn’t feel hard to do that. I have set these standards for myself, and I follow them daily without thought or difficulty. There certainly is no discipline involved.
You may have heard the phrase, “We are creatures of habits”. Well, that’s true. We are creatures of habit. If you are not doing a weekly plan, it is because it is your habit not to plan the week. If you are not exercising regularly, it’s because you are in the habit of not exercising. It has nothing to do with discipline. But it does have everything to do with the choices we make.
You can choose not to plan the week, or you can choose to plan the week. The question then is, what is your standard? Are you the kind of person who plans the week consistently or not?
Another way I have seen this manifest is through exercise. When I was a teenager, I was a competitive middle-distance runner. I was a sub-four minute 1,500-metre runner at the age of 16.
When I was training, doing a 10-mile run every Sunday was the standard. It didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, snowing, or a gale was howling. It was 10 am Sunday morning, and I’d put my running shoes on and head out the door to begin my ten miler.
I rarely enjoyed it, but it was just something I did. I did it because I saw the benefit every summer when racing on the track.
Today, I am no longer a competitive runner, yet I still do my longer runs on a Sunday. Doing them on any other day seems weird. It breaks my standard.
So, Clyde, it has nothing to do with being lazy. We are all lazy. We inherited that from our ancestors when food was scarce in the winter months, and we needed to conserve energy to survive. The least active people survived the winters. All animals are designed to be lazy.
Yet, because we are naturally lazy, our brains will fight us when we try to change something about the way we live our lives. Change requires a lot of energy and focus; our brain’s natural instinct is to stop us from doing that. Routines and habits are safe, and so if you are not currently planning your week or blocking time out for doing your important work, your brain will fight you. And it will continue to fight you until your new habits are embedded.
This is why you will fail if you try and change too much at once. That involves far too much mental energy to remember your new standards. Instead, you pick one thing at a time.
I find changing one thing each quarter works best. This gives you three months to focus your efforts on one thing. That allows you enough time to adjust to your new habit or routine.
At the start of this year, I began a challenge to do at least ten daily push-ups. I knew ten would be easy to do when I was squeezed for time or travelling. I have tracked the number of push-ups I have been doing and noticed that the first week was a struggle. I was doing the minimum.
By the second week, I was doing between twelve and fifteen daily. Six months later, I am consistently doing between fifty and sixty a day, and it doesn’t feel any more difficult than when I was doing ten in early January.
Today, doing push-ups before I take my evening shower is something I just do. I don’t think about it. I get down on the floor and do them.
So, where would you begin if everything is not working? I suggest weekly planning. It’s giving yourself a plan for the week that lays the groundwork for better time management and productivity.
Planning the week gives you time each week to step back and examine your life as a whole, refocusing you on what is important to you.
Weekly planning highlights things you may be missing. For instance, you may realise you have not spoken with your brother or sister for a few weeks or have not thought about what you will do for the holidays later in the year.
And it also allows you to look ahead and make sure nothing significant has been missed and, more importantly, to plan out your week so it is balanced between your work and personal lives.
You will find that dedicating the same time each week to your weekly planning helps you become consistent. I’ve found Saturday mornings are usually the best time to do it. The week is still fresh in your mind, and once done, you can enjoy the weekend without worrying about the week ahead.
It’s much harder to be consistent and set a standard if you try to do the weekly planning at different times each week. You set the standard that you sit down and plan the week ahead at 8:00 a.m. every Saturday morning. That’s your standard.
This helps your family, too, because they know you do your weekly plan each Saturday morning. They will leave you alone and let you get on with it. (Hopefully)
This goes with anything you want to be more consistent with. Learning new things, for example, can be done in the evenings before bed. That hour before I go to bed has become one of my favourite times of the day. I get to sit down with my commonplace book and learn something new. Last week, I learned how to make the “perfect” cup of coffee and how to do a proper double-edged safety razor wet shave.
Learning something new each day has become a standard for me. Going to bed now without learning something feels strange. It doesn’t have to be something deep. It can be anything you might be interested in at that moment. The standard you set is about learning something new, not learning something specific.
So there you go, Clyde. Stop trying to be disciplined. That is very hard to do. Instead, set yourself standards. These are things that you just do because that is the person you are. You are the kind of person who clears their actionable email each day. The kind who plans their week and allocates one or two hours a day for doing the important things.
Thank you for your question, Clyde.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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What can you do to be productive when you have a chronic illness or a very unpredictable schedule? That’s what we’re looking at today.
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Script | 329
Hello, and welcome to episode 329 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It’s a daily challenge to protect our time and stay focused enough to get our work done. It becomes even harder when we don’t get enough sleep or are worried about something in our personal life.
Yet, if you are suffering from a chronic illness or recovering from one, this challenge becomes exponentially more difficult. Not only are you trying to get work done, but you will also face unpredictable tiredness, low energy, difficulty consistently doing your work, or even knowing if you can do any work today.
This means planning the week is almost impossible, and you’ll find yourself frequently changing events and meetings on your calendar.
The good news is there are things you can do that don’t make you even more tired.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mia. Mia asks, do you have any productivity tips or advice for those with chronic illness? Or just those who have incredibly unpredictable schedules? I'd love to find a way to be more productive that doesn't feel stressful, but obviously, time management is difficult for me.
Hi Mia, thank you for your question.
With illness, the priority is always to avoid making things worse. This means prioritising rest above everything else. Naturally, this can be difficult as an employee because of your company’s demands. Hopefully, you have an understanding boss.
It’s also tricky if you are self-employed, as your work may be your only source of income.
So, given that you must prioritise rest and recovery, the place to start is with your calendar. Don’t start with your task manager—that will never help you. All that will do is remind you that you have a lot of things to do. It will never tell you if you have the time to do it. Only your calendar can do that.
Before opening your calendar, though, ask yourself when you will most likely be focused and have some energy. That could be in the morning if you are a morning person or perhaps in the evening if you are a night owl. It’s this time you want to be protecting.
However, there’s an important factor to consider. According to recent research, and as Andrew Huberman points out, we focus in ninety-minute cycles.
In other words, we can focus for about ninety minutes before needing a rest. However, that time will reduce if you are ill or recovering from an illness. Depending on the severity of your illness, the amount of time you can focus on before needing a rest could be very short.
A couple of years ago, I worked with a client who was suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and her focus time was around twenty minutes before requiring a four-hour rest. Fortunately, she was on long-term sick leave, but being an ambitious person, she wanted to readjust her lifestyle so she could better cope when her condition improved.
When you know your focus time ability, you can better plan a schedule that allows you to get at least some things done.
For instance, if you know you focus better early in the morning, plan your focus block of time then. You want to work with your natural rhythms rather than fighting against them. It’s tough when you’re not sick to fight your natural rhythms; when you are sick or recovering from an illness, it will work against you and leave you more tired.
When planning the week, try to book meetings and appointments when you are not at your most focused. There’s something about human interaction that produces its own natural energy.
This means that if you are a morning person, you would schedule a block of time in the morning for doing your most important work for the day, then give yourself a sufficient break before allowing one or two meetings in the afternoon.
The good thing about this approach is if you feel strong and can go a little longer with your focus time, you have the flexibility to do so. Although, be careful here.
I usually need to wake up early Monday and Tuesday morning for calls. I only get three or four hours of sleep on Sunday and Monday nights. I find that on Tuesday afternoons and evenings, I am exhausted. Knowing this, I don’t schedule much work but keep things as free as possible, so I am not trying to push myself too hard.
If I push through on a Tuesday, I am also tired on Wednesday. If I back off a little on a Tuesday afternoon, it will give me time to recover, and I can be back on point on Wednesday.
If you schedule this during a weekly planning session, you can protect time for focused work before anyone tries to schedule more meetings with you.
Okay, so that’s the weekly planning taken care of. Now, how do you deal with the unpredictability of suffering from a chronic illness?
This is where having a weekly objective comes in.
Whether you are suffering from a chronic illness or not, one thing you will likely have discovered is that, being human, your energy and motivation ebbs and flows. Some days, you’re on fire and in the zone; others, everything is a struggle. The trouble is, it’s impossible to predict when this will happen.
The mistake we all make is thinking tomorrow will be the same as today or better, yet that’s not guaranteed. When you set objectives for the week rather than the day, if you do have a bad day or two, you can still recover and get what needs to be done, done.
Another thing to work on is establishing your daily non-negotiables. In my case, they are walking Louis, my little Yorkshire Terrier, getting a minimum of twenty minutes of exercise and spending at least thirty minutes responding to my actionable emails and other messages.
What are your daily non-negotiables beyond getting enough sleep and the right nutrition?
Whatever they are, they need scheduling, so you protect time for them.
I would also recommend scheduling your rest times too. Rest and recovery are a big part of your rehabilitation when you are ill. This becomes a hard must-do each day—whether you want to or not. Not getting sufficient rest will delay your recovery, which is never good.
Scheduling your rest time also brings some predictability to your days and week. If you know you will rest between 10:30 am and 2:30 pm, you can better schedule your tasks and appointments in the day. You have a hard block for four hours in the middle of your day, and whether you need the rest or not, at least you know you have it in reserve.
Now, what about the people with unpredictable schedules? I was thinking about what types of work this would be and thought of firefighters and emergency room medical professionals. No day will be the same; some days could be very quiet, others extremely busy and stressful.
In these situations, you will find that this type of work involves shifts. You’re either on shift or not. When I was working in hotels, we worked shifts, and there was no way I could expect to do any focused work while I was on shift. It was impossible to predict when things would be chaotic or quiet.
To do focused work, you need protected time. If you are not confident you will get the peace and quiet needed, you will be on edge, waiting for the next interruption. This is not a great place to be mentally when trying to do your most important work.
The only real option is to structure your days so that when you are on shift, you allow yourself the freedom to do light, easy tasks such as admin and communications. These rarely need a lot of focus and can usually be done little by little.
You can save the tasks you need to concentrate on for an hour or two when you are not on shift. Once you structure your weeks in this way, if you are asked to produce a piece of work by a given date, you can check your calendar to ensure you have enough non-shift days to do the work you are asked to do.
It’s worth remembering that we are all limited by the hours we get each day. We can leverage this by hiring assistants and other people to do some of our work, but that option is not available for all of us. And you cannot delegate important things such as rest, family time, and working on your health to other people.
When you work shifts, much of the decision-making is taken away from you. You’re on shift, and your job is to help people. For those hours you are working your shift, that’s what you do. If there is downtime, take advantage by doing the little things that have a bad habit of accumulating, but never schedule something important when you are working. Leave those tasks for when you are off shift.
The key, Mia, is to get very strict with your calendar and trust that it will do its job for you. This does involve you not ignoring your calendar. You can reschedule or delete things but not ignore them. You need to trust something, and your calendar serves you. You can trust it.
I hope that has helped, and thank you for your question, Mia.
Before I go, my book, Your Time Your Way, is now available in Kindle, soft back, and hardback versions. The links are in the description below.
Thank you for listening. It is now my turn to wish you all a very productive week.
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This week, what are the basics of time management?
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Script | 327
Hello, and welcome to episode 327 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
A lot has been spoken and written about time management over the years. This has made the whole space of time management confusing when, in reality, time management is simple—or it should be.
Today’s question concerns all this and, more importantly, how to return to the basics of time management so you can regain control and not feel guilty about not doing things when more important things need doing.
Now, before we get to the question, just a quick reminder that Your Time, Your Way is now out in Kindle, Soft and hardback formats. You can get it right now and start building the foundations to live the life you want to live.
Your Time, Your Way is a book, yet to me, it’s much more than that. It’a also a manual to build a resilient time management system that will work in the background for you.
If you have already bought the book, thank you so much. Could you do me a little favour and leave a review? That really helps to get the book in more people’s hands, which can only benefit all of us. The more people who operate using these principles, the easier it will be to manage meetings and requests.
Anyway, back to this episode, and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Robert. Robert asks, hi Carl, what do you suggest I do when, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot get control of my calendar? I try to block time out for my core work, but then I get so many meeting requests I have to either delete them or reschedule. It’s driving me crazy!
Thank you, Robert, for your question.
A good place to start is to look back at your calendar for the last two or three weeks and see where your time is going. How many internal meetings did you attend?
There’s a difference between internal and external meetings. Hopefully, your external meetings—with customers, for instance—are important. However, you should look more closely at your internal meetings. Were they valuable? Did you really need to attend them?
One important metric to consider is how many hours each week you spend in internal meetings.
Internal meetings are, by their very nature, places where you talk about the work. Work rarely gets done. The biggest waste of time for people is those team update meetings. These benefit no one and just drag people away from doing their work. A good manager sets up systems and processes so that their team maximise their work time and minimises their meeting time.
One thing you can do is set a limit on the number of hours you attend each week. For instance, you may choose to limit your internal meeting time to ten hours per week. Once that time is taken, you accept no more meeting requests that week.
This approach has two benefits. The first is you can confidently create time blocks for your core work around these ten hours. The second benefit is if anyone in authority challenges you about declined meetings, you have evidence to show you are being asked to attend too many meetings.
If your manager objects to this limit, you can increase the limit, but you do so in a way that they are fully aware of the time involved and how that will reduce your available work time.
There is always a conflict within a corporation between the managers, whose job is to fill their calendars with meetings, training sessions, and one-on-ones, and the producers—the people who produce the work—whose goal is to minimise events on their calendars so they can get on and do their work.
However, some compromise is needed here. Managers can only do their jobs if they know what’s going on and can give guidance and instruction when necessary. To do that, they need meetings. Equally, producers need to communicate what is being done, where there may be areas of difficulty and to ensure what they are working on is the right work.
One thing that will always destroy any attempts to become better at managing time is to treat everything that comes your way as urgent. That’s never likely to be the case. Most things are not urgent and are tasks that are being passed off to buy the sender some time.
Here’s something you can try when you are asked to do something. Default to doing it next week. This means if you receive a message asking you to do something, you respond with a reply, saying you will do it and get it to them next week. Avoid giving a specific date. Just say I will get it to you next week.
This tests how urgent something really is. The worst that can happen is the receiver replies, telling you it is needed sooner than next week. Okay, now you know it is urgent.
I do this all the time, and I can say that 90% of the time, I get the response thanking me, and that will be fine. The remaining 10% or so usually reply with something along the lines of “Could you do it sooner?”—which still gives me a choice.
Of all the things in the productivity world, the only thing you have that is constant is time. You are not really managing time. Instead, you are managing your activities within that time. This is great because you have at least one constant and that means you can do something with it.
Sadly, the second part of this equation is never fixed and will never stop. That is stuff to do. There will always be something to do. The trouble is because time is fixed; you have to solve a puzzle each day. How to fit in the right pieces of activity into your limited time.
If you do not know what your areas of focus are—the things that are important to you as an individual—and your core work—the work that is important in your job, you never have a reference to decide what should go on your calendar each day. Your areas of focus and core work give you your priorities, which means you can better choose what needs to be done each day. Without knowing them, everything will be important and urgent; in other words, nothing is important and urgent.
This means it’s important to step back and think about what is important—a way to pre-decide what will get your attention and what will not. This avoids having to make too many decisions each day—something that will inevitably leave you feeling exhausted and worn out.
That’s one of the reasons why I stress the importance of establishing your areas of focus and core work. It might take you a few weeks or months even to work these out, but the time it will save you in the long term makes this essential.
If you really want to get control of your calendar, Robert, then begin with what you want time for and fix it in your calendar when you do your weekly planning. If you would like forty-five minutes a day for exercise, then get it on your calendar and treat it as a non-negotiable part of your day.
Taking Louis out for a walk each day is non-negotiable for me. Not only is it important for Louis to get outside, but it’s also important for me as it gets me away from a screen. It also means I am moving—something we humans are designed to do. It’s one hour out of 24. It’s not much to ask.
Also, be aware of how much time you are spending on the hidden task admin. That’s the emails, messages and additional check-ins required when you accept tasks from other people. It’s never as simple as preparing a presentation. There are likely to be additional time commitments such as more emails, requests to add things from other people and, of course, the inevitable meetings.
If you’ve ever been asked to join a committee, you will have discovered that the one or two hours a week you were promised is never one or two hours. You’ll be expected to read reports, agendas, and meeting minutes and submit ideas. Those one or two hours very quickly become six or eight hours a week.
A couple of years ago, I agreed to do a series of interviews for an organisation. I thought a one-hour interview every month would be easy. All I would need would be an hour of research and preparation for each interview and the interview itself—two hours a month at most.
Hahaha, that’s not what happened. The research often took three or four hours; then there was submitting the proposed questions to the organisation, the back-and-forth trying to set up the interview time, and the requests for changes in the questions I proposed. In total, I found that those expected two hours a month turned into ten hours.
This goes back to one of the most basic laws of time management. Things will always take longer to do than you initially anticipate.
If you really want to master your time, getting control of your calendar is the most important part. This means you have to be strict and ruthless. That said, what you will find if you do is people will start respecting your time much more. If you are tow available, you lose that respect. It’ll always be, “Oh, ask Robert; he’ll do it for you”, and boom, you have more work to do.
Saying no every so often is one of the best ways to get your time back. Sadly, so few people have the courage to do it. Instead of finding solutions, they find excuses as to why they are different and must remain available to everyone. Good luck with that strategy. I’ve never found anyone who could make that work.
I hope that has helped, Robert. Thank you for your question.
And if you have not got your copy of Your Time, Your Way yet, you can get it now. The link is in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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Three years ago, I began a journey that came to an end last Saturday. Today, I want to share that journey with you, what I learned and how my journey can help you become better at managing your time and ultimately be more productive.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Script | 327
Hello, and welcome to episode 327 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
My book, Your Time, Your Way, Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived!, was published last Saturday. It is the end result of a three-year journey that began with the idea of putting everything I have learned about better managing time together so you have enough time to spend with your loved ones, enjoy the hobbies you have always wanted to participate in, and so much more without feeling drained, overwhelmed, and rushed.
The book is a manual for taking control of your time and making the things you want to do happen without stress or overwhelm. It gives you a complete roadmap for making time work for you instead of working against you. But more on the contents later.
From a productivity perspective, when you begin a project like writing a book, there is one critical starting point: getting started. What often happens, and is the reason so few people do any of their personal projects or achieve goals, is that too much time is wasted in the thinking and planning stage.
There’s a comfort in dreaming and thinking about landscaping your garden (backyard). That dreaming can be very seductive. It allows you to believe you are doing something about your project—‘I’m doing the planning’—yet nothing is happening. Your garden is not getting landscaped.
This book was two years in the planning stage (I am not immune to being seduced by the dream). I was even telling people, “I’m currently writing a book.” That was a lie. I wasn’t “writing” anything. I was dreaming of writing a book. I was stuck in the planning stage.
To get yourself out of that delusion—as that is what too much planning is, a delusion—you need to start doing something. Every project has a beginning. That could be visiting the local hardware store to purchase the tools you will need or, in my case, when writing a book, to write the introduction (this gives me a mini-outline of what I want to write about). Do that first step.
The next critical part of any project, whether professional or personal, is to decide how much time you are willing to give it each week. You are unlikely to be able to estimate how long a big project will take accurately. There are too many unknowns, and if you involve other people, there will inevitably be delays.
The only thing you have control over is your time. You don’t control other people’s time—even if you are a boss. So, how much time are you willing to or are able to give to the project each week?
Once you know how much time you are giving the project each week, schedule it.
Personal projects can be worked on in the evening and at weekends, while professional ones can be done during work hours.
One thing you will eventually learn about time management is hoping you will find the time to do something is not a good strategy. It never works. If you want time to work on something, anything, you need to protect the time. Whether that is going out for a family walk in the evenings, washing your car or writing a letter to your aunt in New Zealand.
Time management works when you are intentional about it. In other words, you must protect time for the things you want to do.
When the early version of Your Time, Your Way went out to a select group of readers, many commented that it took over fifty pages to get to talking about time. That was intentional.
Too often, books on productivity and time management are about showing you how to squeeze in more and more. That is not the purpose of this book. Not only is that approach unsustainable, it’s also unhealthy. Instead, my approach is to encourage you to start by thinking about your life as a whole. What do you want out of your life? What is important to you?
While we share eight areas—family and relationships, career/business, finances, health and fitness, self-development, lifestyle and life experiences, spirituality, and life’s purpose—how we define these are different for each of us. That means what we want out of these areas will also be different.
The order of priority is also different. As we go through life, the priority of these will change. When you are young, career/business and perhaps lifestyle and life experiences will be high on your list. As you age, health and finances may creep up towards the top. Again, we will all be different here.
Knowing what is important to you is the foundation of a well-lived life. It also shows you how to best use your limited resource of time so you spend more of it doing the things you want to do.
It was very tempting to begin the book with lists of tips and tricks for managing time, but I knew that would not help you in the long term. It’s a quick-fix approach that quickly leads to slipping back into old habits.
When you begin by identifying what is important to you, you give yourself a self-generating motive for getting out of bed with enthusiasm, and it naturally gives you a purpose each day. You are spending a large portion of your day on the things you know are important to you.
But more than that, knowing your areas of focus and what they mean to you gives you clarity that helps you make decisions. If you have identified your family and friends as being important to you and you work in a company that expects you to work late and at weekends, you may wish to consider looking for an alternative job. That could mean you need to change companies or perhaps your career.
Not identifying what is important to you will likely leave you stuck in a job or career that leaves you feeling deflated, unhappy and trapped. Showing you how to do more in less time is not going to help you in that situation. All it will do is leave you feeling more unhappy, trapped and lost.
Your Time, Your Way takes you through the key time management techniques of COD (Collect, Organise and Do) and the Time Sector System. It explains how to choose the right UCT (Universal Collection Tool) for you and how to plan your week and day using the Planning Matrix.
Yet, more than that, it also shows you how to develop a morning routine that will set you up for the day and give you some time for yourself—something often lost when we begin a career and a family and are trying to juggle getting kids ready for school, with ensuring you have saved the presentation file you need today to your OneDrive account.
I’ve also included a chapter on managing your email. I know so many people struggle to stay on top of emails and other messages. It can be a never-ending struggle. Yet, the process I teach you in the book will give you a framework you can adopt that will ensure you are never behind with your communications, and you will begin to enjoy communicating through email and other messaging services (no, really you will, I promise)
One of the chapters many of the pre-readers say they enjoyed most was the chapter on common pitfalls. This chapter lists the most common issues you will face as you develop your own system and shows you how you can avoid them or, if they are already embedded, how to get out of them so you unblock any problems quickly and effectively.
This chapter draws on my experience working with people from all walks of life and multiple different jobs, from senior executives to stay-at-home parents, all of whom face different challenges as well as some common ones.
Ultimately, though, no matter how much you have to do, you still only have twenty-four hours each day. Understanding that and knowing what you want time for will give you a huge advantage over your peers—well, the ones who don’t read this book.
It gives you a framework on which to create a structure that safeguards time for the things you want time for—not just in your personal life—which often gets sacrificed by our work life—but also for the critical things in your professional life, such as career development, having enough time each day to deal with communications, and your all-important core work—the work you were employed to do.
While writing this book, I quickly learned that many productivity best practices are not just best practices but laws. To write a book, you need to write. Wasting time trying out different writing tools does write a book. The only way to write a book is to write. That’s the same for anything you want to do. To landscape your garden, you need to get outside and dig, build and plant.
To do that, you will need to protect time. That means blocking out time on your calendar that is dedicated to doing the work.
And, the best law of all—it will always take you longer to do than you imagine. I expected this book to take around twelve to eighteen months. It took nearly forty. I laugh at myself now for being so optimistic. But now the book is available, I can honestly say that the journey has been incredible. Frustrating at times, yes, but that was always going to be part of the journey.
Whatever you want to do, please enjoy the journey. Find the time, protect it and just start. You will discover things about yourself you never knew. You’ll learn patience, how to deal with setbacks and frustration and, more importantly, how to overcome those setbacks. Each project, whether it is writing a book, landscaping your backyard or building a career, will teach you things that you can take with you into your next endeavour and give you skills and know-how for the next time you embark on a journey.
All that remains for me to do now is to ask you to buy Your Time Your Way: Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived! Get control of your time so you can live the life you want to live. The link to purchase the book is in the show notes.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
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This week’s question is all about unpredictability and the struggle to find some kind of structure in your day.
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Script | 326
Hello, and welcome to episode 326 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
In an ideal world, we would be able to set our calendar for the week and allow it to flow from one event to another while getting all our work done in a timely and relaxed way.
Sadly, that ideal world does not exist and never will. Life is unpredictable, and for the most part, we are dealing with other people who likely do not share our priorities or long-term vision and, in some cases, expect you to drop everything to deal with their crisis or problem.
This week’s question goes to the heart of these issues: how do you cope when your carefully laid plans are destroyed by events and the urgencies of the people around you?
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Max. Hi Carl, I work in a job with competing demands. I can plan most things ahead but occasionally get asked, often at the last minute, to complete tasks that require an immediate or 24-hour turnaround. How do I fit these into my planning schedule so my other work plans are not thrown into chaos?
Hi Max, thank you for your question.
When asked what was most likely to blow governments off course, former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan replied, "Events, dear boy, events."
Well, the truth is, it’s not just governments that can be blown off course; we as individuals can also be blown off course by events, too.
Around three years ago, I carefully planned a day to record the update to my Apple Productivity course. I had set up the studio the night before, checked my notes, and went to bed comfortably with the knowledge that nothing could stop me from getting the recording done the next day.
Around 7:00 am, I woke up and noticed our beloved Yorkshire Terrier was looking very sick. He had thrown up his food and was unable to get up off the floor.
He was old and suffered from a heart condition, and I knew something was terribly wrong. My wife was 50 miles up the coast staying with a friend, so I called her immediately, put Barney into the car and set off to pick my wife up before going to the vet.
Barney passed away that day, and for the next two days, I was certainly not in the mood to record anything. The whole day was a nightmare.
Later that day, I looked at my appointments for the next day and cancelled them all. No one objected; everyone understood, and I was able to mourn the passing of my best friend (anyone who has a dog will understand that one) for a couple of days without the worry of work.
Whenever you are thrown off course by events, and your plans for the week get destroyed, it’s easy to think everything’s destroyed. Yet, is it? You see, we always have the power to renegotiate deadlines, put off a few things for a day or two, stop and review what has happened and reschedule a few of the lower-value things.
However, probably the most powerful thing you can do is to build some structure into your day. I learnt this from possibly the most productive and relaxed person I have ever worked with.
Andrew was one of the first bosses I ever had, and he would arrive at work at 8:30 am each day, walk into his office and close the door for 15 minutes. That was his sacred time, and everything could wait until he was finished.
What Andrew was doing was going through his mail (it was paper back then—no email in those days), reviewing his calendar (a beautiful A4 leather folio with a week to view) and writing down the five most important things that needed to be done that day.
He would then open his door, and he was available again.
Andrew would block time out on his calendar each day for doing those five or six tasks. Some would be lengthy, requiring an hour or two; others may be a simple follow-up call with one of his leadership team members.
On the occasions I saw Andrew’s diary, I saw that he always had at least thirty minutes between meetings and blocked time. The time blocks were written in pencil, and the meetings were in blue ink. As he completed his tasks, he would cross them out.
Those gaps in his diary were to deal with the unknowns that inevitably came up each day. The chairman may have called and demanded a change to the marketing plan for that week, or there may have been an accident in the workshop that needed dealing with. None of these were predictable and my guess is you also have a few unpredictable tasks and events occurring each day.
The best thing you can do is plan for them.
While you may not know the precise nature of these unknowns, what you do know is that there will always be a few each day. You will likely not know what the crisis will be, but if you work on the principle that there will be a crisis each day, you can at least leave sufficient time to deal with it.
What about the constants in your day? We all have communications to deal with—email, Teams or Slack messages—and admin.
These are what I call my constants, and as such, I know I will need some time each day to deal with them.
As I’m sure you’ve discovered already, skip responding to your messages for one day, and you have double the amount to do the next day—which means you need double the amount of time as well. If you are already squeezed, how will you find double the amount of time tomorrow? You won’t. And that leads to backlogs building up.
If, in an ideal world, you would like an hour a day for managing your communications, but owing to interruptions and emergencies, you only have thirty minutes one day, take it. Thirty minutes is better than nothing. Doing a little each day will keep the mountain from becoming impossible.
The key is consistency. Be consistent with your constants.
In my world, there’s always content to create. Blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, and newsletters don’t create themselves. Content creation is a daily constant, so I set aside two hours each day for it. For the most part, my content creation time is 9:30 to 11:30 am each weekday morning. However, owing to some unknown, there will always be one or two days when that will not be possible. Okay, so All I need do is look for another suitable time that day, and if that’s not possible, I will have to look for another day.
Every productive person I have met or learned about does this, and every unproductive, disorganised person I have met or learned about doesn’t.
The artist Picasso was available for anyone and everyone until after lunch. Once lunch was over, he’d disappear into his studio and paint for four or more hours without allowing anyone to disturb him. Maya Angelou hid herself away in a local motel bedroom from 7 am until 2 pm. It was only after she emerged from that room that she was available to other people.
You do not have to be that extreme, but the point is if you have work to do, Max, you need to protect time to do it. No one can escape that. Hoping time will miraculously appear is not a great strategy.
The only strategy that works is protecting time and respecting that time.
What I have discovered is that when someone asks you to do something by a certain time, the deadline they give you is based on their estimation of how long the task would take them to complete, given their current workload. It is not based on your current workload or ability to complete the task.
Recently, I was asked to record a two-minute video for a partner. The person asking me had never recorded and edited a video like this before and asked if I could send it over by the end of the week. Given that I was asked to do the task on Thursday evening, I instantly knew it would be a tall order to complete the task. Recording the video would take fifteen to twenty minutes, and the editing would likely take three or four hours.
I accepted the task but asked if I could send the edited video over the next week. The response was, “Great! Thank you so much for doing this for us.”
That was an easy negotiation. Yet, unless you try, you will never know.
I could have panicked, removed some of my planned work, and completed the video by the end of the week, but, as so often is the case, the deadline was not really a deadline; it was a guess and an attempt to make me treat the task as urgent.
You owe it to yourself to explore the potential for negotiation on deadlines.
Every one of us will be different. We do different jobs, and we have multiple responsibilities related to family, friends and our work. Just because I think you can do something by tomorrow doesn’t mean you can. Only you know if something is possible.
And always remember, if you are given 24 to 48 hours’ notice of a deadline, the problem is not yours. It’s the person who left it so late to ask you for help. You are always in a stronger negotiating position in these circumstances.
Now this is entirely different to being reminded of an impending deadline that you have known about for several weeks. That’s on you and is your mistake.
In these circumstances, that would be an indication that your weekly planning is failing and needs looking at.
Ultimately, Max, if the work you do involves frequent last-minute deadlines when you plan the week, these need to be taken into account. I have a flexible day on a Thursday to catch up. I don’t plan any content work on Thursdays. I try to schedule meetings and leave enough free space to catch up on anything that may be behind schedule for the week.
This week, I used that time to send my accountant the VAT receipts she’d asked for and finish this script. Next week? Who knows what I will need the time for?
I hope that has helped, Max. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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This week, it’s time to slow down.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course.
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Script | 325
Hello, and welcome to episode 325 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How often have you rushed to complete a task only to find you did it wrong or misunderstood what was required and wasted several hours doing something that wasn’t required? It happens to all of us, yet it can be one of the biggest drags on your overall productivity. But here’s the reassuring part: it has an easy fix. A simple change in approach can make a significant difference in your productivity and time management.
One of the advantages of the Time Sector System is it helps you to slow down by asking when you will do something rather than saying “yes” to everything and finding you have no time to do it. This then causes you to rush to complete urgent tasks (which may not be important tasks), leaving behind the important tasks.
Speed kills productivity, which may sound ironic, given that we think of productivity as doing things quickly and efficiently. And that is true, but speed ignores the “efficiency” part. Targeted speed is what you want, but to get fast at something takes practice and following a process. Without that practice and a process to follow, you leave yourself wide open to time-destroying mistakes that will need more time to rectify.
And this is what this week’s question is all about.
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from John. John asks, Hi Carl, I have so many tasks, and whenever I try to get them done, I end up having to redo them because I rushed and misunderstood the task or the request was unclear. How do you overcome these kinds of problems?
Hi John, thank you for your question.
This is a speed issue. Now, this might be part of your work culture, or it could be the expectations of your customers and bosses. The demands of others can create a sense that everything is urgent, and this leads to trying to do something that requires a little thought too fast. The result being mistakes are made or the wrong thing getting done.
One of the most important parts of becoming more productive and better at managing time is slowing down. I know that might sound contrary to what you think improving productivity is all about, but you will only improve your productivity if what you do each day is the right thing and at the highest quality you are capable of.
If Toyota wanted to increase the speed at which they produced a car, they could easily do it. Instead of screwing on the front bumper with twenty turns of the screw, they could reduce that to ten. On one car, that might save one or two seconds, yet over hundreds of thousands of cars, that adds up to hours saved.
Yet, it would be a false economy. Within a few weeks, many of those cars would be returning to their dealerships with hanging-off front bumpers. The impact on their dealership’s time and costs would be huge. Plus, it would destroy their reputation for quality. It would be disastrous for them in terms of costs, productivity and reputation.
Yet, so many people fall into this trap every day. They think if they rush and take shortcuts to get more things done, their productivity will improve. It won’t. What it will do is create a lot of unnecessary work fixing the mistakes that were made in haste.
So what can you do?
The first step is to look at the work you regularly do. Where are the processes? We all get email, Slack and Teams messages. What’s your process for handling these?
There are two approaches to your communications. You can react instantly each time a message comes in. We often think this looks good. It shows we are on the ball, quick and efficient. Yet are you? Sure, some messages may require a quick yes or no, but what about those messages asking for your thoughts on something? Do you ever stop and think about your response?
And then what happens to your other work? The work that is likely to be much more important? All this stopping to respond to a message and then starting again is slowing you down considerably. Of course, at the moment, you don’t notice that slow down. After all, you’re rushing from one thing to the next. You’re busy, and you’re moving fast.
But what’s happening to the important work in front of you? It’s not moving forward. You stop, respond to a message, then you come back to the work, and you have to refresh yourself—where were you, what were you writing, where are the reference materials? It’s so easy to lose an hour or two just getting back to where you were before you allowed yourself to be interrupted.
That is not being productive. It’s the reverse.
The biggest gain in productivity in car manufacturing plants was the introduction of robots. Robots don’t get interrupted. They do their job without the need to respond to emails, messages and questions from colleagues. They don’t need to attend meetings. As soon as you turn on the robot, it does its assigned job at the correct speed and in the correct order.
If you were to disrupt the assembly line by misaligning a chassis or not placing a wheel in the right place, that mistake would be catastrophic. Everything would come to a halt until the mistake was corrected.
For some reason, we rarely see that in ourselves. Stopping in the middle of doing focused work to respond to an email or message is disrupting your flow in the same way. It takes a disproportionate amount of time to recover and get back online.
The alternative approach is to develop a process for managing your communications. One way, for example, is to start your day by clearing your inboxes. Filter out the messages and emails you don’t need to respond to, delete the junk, and move your actionable messages to an Action This Day folder.
Then, assign thirty minutes to an hour later in the day to respond to those actionable messages. Fixing that time each day helps your reputation, as your colleagues and clients quickly learn your patterns. That may not always be possible, but each day, having an amount of time for managing your communications takes the pressure off having to respond instantly, and it improves your productivity because you can focus on doing your work to the level of quality expected of you.
This also has the advantage of giving you time to think. Because when you are responding to your actionable emails and messages, you’ve had time to think and respond in a clear, considered way. That improved communication means you receive fewer messages asking for clarification.
For the most part, our work does not need speed. Whether you reply to an email now or in a couple of hours is not going to create an issue (seriously, it’s not!) or responding to your boss’s Teams message this second or in twenty minutes.
We may have conditioned ourselves to believe these things need a speedy response, but they don’t. You will not lose a client because it took you two hours to respond to their email, and your boss will not fire you because it took you twenty minutes to reply to their message.
One thing that will happen if you slow down, though, is you won’t make as many mistakes, and the quality of your work will improve. On top of that, when you remove the sense of urgency, you instantly calm down and feel a lot less stressed.
One thing I urge all my coaching clients to do is set aside an hour or two each day for undisturbed focus work. If you work a typical eight—or nine-hour day, protecting two of those hours still leaves you with six to seven hours when you are available for everyone else. Surely that is more than enough time?
Knowing that you have two hours each day without being disturbed relieves a lot of pressure. However, this only works if you take control of your calendar. It means you plan your week—finding two hours a day and protecting them—and then decide what you will do with that time on a daily basis.
And that is a process: weekly planning to ensure you have sufficient time to complete your important work and daily planning to assign work based on the changing priorities that happen to all of us. If you can fix that to the same time each week and day, you will go a long way towards radically improving your productivity.
It doesn’t matter if you are an accountant in a busy accountancy firm, a lawyer or a salesperson. Everything you do on a regular basis can be turned into a process. I have CEOs in my coaching programme who begin preparing for their board meetings fourteen days before the meeting. The preparation time is blocked out in their calendar, and it’s given an appropriate priority. The steps they take to collect all the information and the document they set it out in are the same each time. They follow a process.
Processes reduce the thinking time required to do a task. This naturally speeds up your work performance without compromising quality. Because you follow the same steps each time, you know where you are with the work. It also helps you to identify areas where improvements can be made.
Whenever I watch Formula 1 racing, I’m amazed at the speed at which the pit crews can change four tyres. Two years ago, the McLaren team broke the record with a time of 1.82 seconds. In the last race in Monaco, almost every team was changing the tyres in under two seconds. That wasn’t an accident. That was a process.
The pit crews will have analysed in the minutest of detail how McLaren was able to do 1.82 seconds and changed their processes ever so minutely. That analysis has saved them, on average, three-tenths of a second. A tiny amount, yes, but in Formula 1, every tenth of a second counts.
If you watch the pit crews at work in a race, they are not panicking. Each person knows exactly what to do and in what order. It’s fast because it’s so smooth, and it’s repeated over and over again.
You are not going to be able to turn everything into a process. Many projects you work on are unique. However, if you look at your work as a whole, there will be multiple individual pieces of work you repeat each day. It’s that work you should be looking at for the potential to create a process.
In my work, I’ve turned writing books, blog posts, newsletters and client feedback into processes. I’ve eliminated unnecessary actions and slimmed everything down so that when I sit down to work on something, I can begin instantly without the need to waste time looking for tools and ideas.
That’s the approach you want to be taking, too, John. Begin with your communications—that’s something we all have to do. Where can you build a process?
I hope that helps. Thank you, John, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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