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Your Time, Your Way

Carl Pullein

Showing you ways to get control of your time through tested techniques that will give you more time to do the things you want to do.

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#434
Today · 13 min
Are You Overcommitted Without Realising It?
An overflowing task manager and a crowded-out calendar are rarely ever caused by using the wrong tools. The problem happened well before you entered the task or added the appointment to your task manager or calendar. And that’s what we’re looking at this week. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about my Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Apollo 13 Lunar Module Start-up Procedures The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |431 Hello, and welcome to episode 431 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you were to look at your appointments for tomorrow right now, how much time do you have that is not already committed? Two, three, four hours? Now look at your task manager: how many tasks are overdue or scheduled for tomorrow? In the uncommitted time you have tomorrow, are you confident you can complete all those tasks? Most people who do this little exercise, if they are being honest with themselves, will answer “no chance”. And this is the top reason why so many people are struggling with time management and productivity today. And there is a word for it: Overcommitted. It’s not the tools they use or any other complex reason. It’s simply because they’ve allowed themselves to become overcommitted. This week, I’m looking at how this happens and what you can do to unravel the problem so you are operating within your natural capacity, not overworked or under pressure, and not feeling like you are sinking under the weight of unrealistic deadlines and commitments. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Douglas. Douglas asks, “Hi, Carl, I know you tell people to keep their task manager clean and tight, but I find that impossible. I’m collecting 20 or more things into my inbox each day; I often have 4 or 5 hours of meetings, and I have to deal with at least 130 emails and messages each day. How would you get all that under control?” Hi Douglas, thank you for your question. I did some quick maths on the numbers you provided and noticed that if you are collecting, on average, 25 new tasks a day, have 130 emails and messages to deal with and only have 3 ½ hours of non-meeting time each day, that would mean you would have only 1 minute and 13 seconds to spend on each item. Yet those numbers assume you are not taking time for lunch or coffee or a glass of water. If you were to include a 30-minute lunch break and 15 minutes to get water and coffee each day, that would leave you with less than a minute available for each email, message, and task. Is that realistic? Based on that quick calculation, the issue here is one of capacity. You’ve no capacity left. All that’s needed to completely destroy your day is an urgent, last-minute meeting request, an issue that prevents you from doing any of your planned work or simply an IT problem that doesn’t allow you to do the work you planned. I can assure you, Douglas, you are not alone here. There are millions of people all around the world struggling with the same thing. They’re overcommitted. Which is why it’s completely irrelevant what tools you’re using. The first thing I would advise someone in this situation is to do the maths I did above. Now, I know I do not have all the information. I don’t know what work you do, your position in the company, or whether you lead a team. But what I do know is you’ve gone beyond your natural capacity, and now you will be building up enormous backlogs. You will be struggling to meet your deadlines, and I bet when you get home you’re exhausted. This exercise will tell you how much capacity you have. If the meetings you attend each day are non-negotiable, you will need to find a way to reduce the number of tasks you receive. Which means you will likely have to do something uncomfortable. Reject requests. Now I know this is very hard to do. Nobody likes disappointing someone. But the choice is: either you disappoint them when they ask, or you disappoint them when you cannot deliver what you promised on time. And I think failing to deliver on your commitments is the bigger disappointment. Think of it this way. If you say no and they ask someone else who can deliver, then you’ve actually helped them. Sure, your pride may be slightly hurt, but this isn’t about your pride. This is about setting yourself realistic expectations on what you can and cannot do. However, there is another possible solution. Cap your daily meetings. If, when you do the little exercise on how much non-committed time you have, you realise that you will need four hours of meeting-free time each day, then you cap your meeting time at 3 hours per day. This will then leave you with 4 or 5 hours for your tasks. Now there are various ways to do this. You could use a calendar service such as Calendly or Acuity to open blocks of time for people to schedule meetings with you, or you could tell people that you’ve reached your meeting limit for the day and ask if you could meet on another day. You will be surprised how accommodating people can be. Another consideration is to reduce the meeting times to 30 minutes. This has the added advantage that people will get to the point much faster, and you’ll find you still cover everything that needs to be covered. I’ve learned many things over the years I’ve been coaching and helping people with their time management and productivity, but one of those lessons stands out: Every “yes” has an invisible “no”. In other words, every time you accept another commitment, whether it is a meeting or a piece of work, you are saying no to something else you could have done with that time. But it goes beyond that. Meetings have a nasty habit of generating more commitments. Another meeting, more emails and tasks, for example. And pieces of work generate what Cal Newport calls “admin costs”; these are the little extra tasks, such as finding information, following up, and answering questions. They are the invisible “nos” rarely ever considered. So in your situation, Douglas, there are a few questions to ask yourself: Do all your regular meetings require your presence? If not, perhaps you could drop one or two of them. If you can, don’t allow the saved time to be replaced by other meetings. Protect that time. Save it for the things you have prioritised. The goal here is to gradually withdraw from these meetings. If you manage a team, perhaps you could delegate attendance at some of these meetings to one of your team members. They can then report back to you with a summary of what happened. What are you collecting? You mentioned that you collect around 20 new items on average each day. That seems like a lot. What are you collecting? There are some things that will need to be collected; you may need to contact someone for information or organise the purchase of new equipment. But if you are collecting emails to respond to and articles to read, then your task manager is not the best place for them. Emails and messages have their own self-contained apps. Keep everything within these walls. For instance, if you have a Slack message to reply to but need to think about it first, flag the message. Or you can use Claude or ChatGPT to find all your unresponded messages for today. You could even set this up as an automation With email, it’s easier. You can create an Action folder for emails you need to respond to and drop them in there. Then give yourself some time later in the day to respond to them. The goal here is to reduce the pressure on your capacity, and one of the fastest ways to do that is to reduce friction points. For example, if you get an email you feel you should respond to and then move it to your task manager, that’s a lot of additional time—remember “admin cost”? It’s far faster to drag and drop it into an Action folder. A great question to ask yourself is: What has to come out of my week to make it more realistic? Juggling your current commitments around, fiddling with your task manager or trying new tools is not addressing the real issue. The real issue is a capacity one. You’re trying to do far more than you can do. You won’t find the solution until you address that. I would begin with: How much time do you need to stay on top of your work? That could be an extra five or six hours a week. Now you have something tangible to work with. For those of you who have watched the film Apollo 13, there’s a scene where the character Ken Mattingly is in the lunar module flight simulator, and they are trying to find a start-up procedure that would not draw more than 20 amps. This meant they had to find out what they could turn on and what they could not. After hours of testing, they finally had a start-up procedure that draws just under 20 amps. I will put a link to the clip in the show notes, as it is a great illustration of what we sometimes have to do with the time we have. It’s finite, and often the only things we can do are the essentials. There’s no time for the “would like to do” or low-value tasks. In many ways, an issue we all share is that we think time is infinite, when it’s the opposite. It’s finite, and how we allocate our time each day is largely our choice. The key is understanding that there are always trade-offs and consequences when we allocate our time. If we say yes to one thing, we say no to another, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. As I am writing this script, I am not responding to an urgent email or talking with my family. Equally, when I am chatting with my wife, I am not writing feedback for my coaching clients. So, Douglas, look at your calendar. How are you allocating your time each week? What can you remove to free up time for the things you want to spend it on? It won’t be easy, and you will feel uncomfortable doing it. However, I can assure you that it is possible and when you have done it, you will feel lighter, more focused and appreciate your time in ways you’ve never considered. Plus, the bonus is that other people will begin respecting your time more than they do today. 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.
#433
August 23 · 14 min
Why Everything Feels Like It Needs to Be Done Today
Have you ever wondered if your time management and productivity issues might not be about the amount of work you have to do, but rather the way you think about that work? That’s what we’re looking at today. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |430 Hello, and welcome to episode 430 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. Since I began helping people directly with time management and productivity, I would say that around 60% of people’s struggles come down to the way they organise their work, around 35% come down to the way they think about it, and only 5% come down to the volume of work coming in. Talk to practically anyone today, and they will tell you they are busy. It’s almost like a badge of honour. The number one reason people say they don’t exercise is that they don’t have enough time. Is that really true, or is it that they value doing something else more? I’m reminded of something the legendary Jim Rohn used to say: “Don't mistake movement for achievement. It's easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is: Busy doing what?” If I look at my to-do list right now, I guess I am busy. I have this script, a newsletter and a long-form article to write. I also have to record three YouTube Shorts videos, edit them and record this podcast. I have around five pieces of feedback to write for my coaching clients, do my exercise, take Louis for a walk, and cook dinner. Yet, I don’t feel busy. The reason is that I understand that it doesn’t all have to be done today. All I have to do is decide what can be done today and do that. The truth is, we all have far more to do than we can do at any one time. And equally true is that it doesn’t have to be done right now or even today. 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 Elaine. Elaine asks, hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who is always busy and never has time to do their most important work? Hi Elaine, love the question. Short and sweet. I would first refer you to the Jim Rohn question ” Busy doing what?” If you feel constantly busy from the moment you wake up until you go to bed, the first thing I would suggest is to look at what you are doing during your waking hours. Write down what you are doing over a period of 48 hours or so. Not just your professional work, but your personal things too. I would also add that you write out what you would prefer to be doing instead. Write these down side by side. Draw a vertical line down the middle of a page, and on the left write what you spend your days doing, and on the right what you would prefer to be doing instead. Be completely honest. If you discover, for example, that you spend 90 minutes a day on social media and a further 2 hours watching TV, write that down. You’re not going to necessarily remove those. Instead, what you want to be asking yourself is whether spending time on the activities you currently spend time on is worthwhile. Initially, you will try to justify spending time on these activities. This is the same response we have when someone challenges one of our opinions. Our natural instinct is to defend ourselves. When you first write down these activities. Don’t judge. Just write them down. All you want to know is precisely where your time goes. I’ve found that if you leave it for a few days and come back to it, you will begin to look at things a little more objectively. Instead of trying to justify the expense of your time, you begin to ask questions such as: Do I really need to do that? And is this regular event I attend worth all the extra work it produces? Often, the problem for many people is that everything they want to do requires time. Just sitting and thinking requires time, as does making a cup of coffee. Time never stands still. And the problem with time, or rather, the way we measure time, is that we have 24 hours each day. That’s the one immovable part we have to deal with each day, but at least that gives us one constant. That can be worked with. If you were to study the habits and routines of highly productive people, you would notice that they all have strong barriers between the three basics of their lives. There’s time for work, time for family and social life, and time for self. There’s no discipline involved. It’s just a strict division of time between the three. Their wake-up time is consistent. For example, if they wake up at 7:30 am, they wake up at that time every day, including weekends. Then they do something that I find most unproductive people don’t do. They follow the same routine. It’s their morning routine. Morning routines are interesting because each person’s is different. Yet, the most stressed-out, overwhelmed and exhausted people I work with have no morning routine. They crawl out of bed, rush out the door and start on their work. There’s no moment for themselves. These are the people who immediately pick up their phones to check for messages and start replying. No tea or coffee or even a bathroom break. Just open eyes, open phone, start the workday. Think about what’s happening there. You come into the conscious world, and before anything else, you allow other people’s priorities to take control of your day. And if you have young kids, when you leave the bedroom, your kids need attention; perhaps you need to get them ready for school, make their breakfast, all this with a brain full of all those messages you just read from your phone before you left the bedroom. One of my favourite YouTube channels is Harry’s Garage. The channel is about cars, and Harry often reviews very expensive Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, Range Rovers, and Aston Martins. These are highly tuned performance cars, yet Harry will always remind us that when you start a car cold, before you can put it through its paces, you need to give it time to reach optimal operating temperature. Funnily enough, that’s the same for you and me. You’re not going to be at your best the moment you wake up, which means any decision you make first thing is unlikely to be the best decision you make. So, try starting your day slowly. Give yourself thirty minutes and make sure those thirty minutes are focused on you. When it comes to work, set a strict start time for yourself. So, to keep the examples in line, let’s imagine you start your work at 9:00 am. Then do not consider work before then. That may take a little adjusting to, but if you develop a strong set of morning routines, you won’t be thinking about work until it’s time for work. Then, here’s a trick. Do not allow anything to be scheduled for the first 30 minutes of your day. This is your getting a heads up on the day time. It’s when you can say hello and chat with your co-workers, deal with any emergencies and check to make sure there are no fires lurking in your inbox. Those thirty minutes are also a great time to review your plan for the day. Now, when I say “plan,” I simply mean making sure you know where your appointments are and what your must-do tasks for the day are. It’s a simple two-minute review and gives you time to map out your day. Mapping out your day is just about deciding when you will do your must-do tasks. Your meetings are fixed, so what you are looking for is the gaps in between and deciding what you will do in those gaps. Now here’s the thing: just as it’s important to have a strict start time, there also needs to be a strict closing time for work. Let’s imagine that you set 6:00 pm as your end-of-work time; this means that around 5:50 pm, you stop what you’re doing, review what you’ve done, and reschedule anything you didn’t get to. Then look at what you have on your calendar for tomorrow, and decide on your two must-do tasks. That’s it. Done. Then it’s family and social time. Now, as you listen to these words, it may sound like a lot. But is it? What you are doing is automating as much as you can so you are not rushing around trying to decide what to do next. It’s all this decision-making that’s mentally exhausting you. If you can automate these decisions by having a morning routine, a work closing-down sequence, and mapping out your workday, you’ll find that you feel less busy, more in control and much less tired at the end of the day. We feel so busy all the time because we tend to look at long lists of things to do. For example, if you look at your Slack messages or email, you are looking at each individual message. It’s natural. It’s a long list of stuff you feel you must attend to. Yet, if you were to treat your Slack or Teams messages and email as one task, all you need to decide is when you will handle them. For example, if you decide that at 4:30 pm you will work on your messages and spend an hour on them, then it doesn’t matter how many messages you have in there. You will respond to as many as you can. Another quick tip: start with the oldest first. These can often be dealt with much faster than messages that have just come in. Don’t worry, if you stay consistent with this, you’ll soon find yourself getting back on top of them. Now, for those of you who tend to procrastinate, the science behind it is fascinating. Procrastination is a perfectly normal human reaction. It has nothing to do with laziness or any other human condition. It’s actually what psychologists call an “emotional regulation response”. When you look at a long report or a messy inbox, your brain sees a threat. It anticipates boredom, failure, or making a fool of yourself. And so your brain sets off an alarm to protect you. And how does it protect you? By pushing you towards easier tasks. Cleaning your desk or looking at social media, for example. (Or, in my case, cleaning a fountain pen and refilling it) Incredibly productive people aren’t immune to these negative emotions. Instead, what they have done is build systems and processes to do their work. “It’s 4:30 pm, time to do my communications.” Oh, it’s time to work on that report”. These systems make it extremely difficult to not do the work. This is why putting in place strict barriers around your personal, social and professional life works. You are not allowing your brain to set off an emotional response. You turn up, you know what to do and do it. And this planning does not take much time. Planning the day may take 5 minutes; reviewing your plan in the first 30 minutes of your workday may take 2 minutes. That’s it. Then you follow your plan. Sure, there will be interruptions, distractions and other people’s emergencies. Deal with them as best you can, then get back to your plan. If you have to revise your plan, do so. This does not mean you’ve failed. All it means is you’ve adjusted your plan. I hope that helps, Elaine. 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.
#432
August 16 · 15 min
Why You Never Have Time for Your Most Important Work
When filling up your car with fuel, how do you know when it’s full? Well, the fuel filler nozzle clicks off. A sensor triggers the fuel to shut off. Yet did you know that the sensor is programmed to trigger when the fuel tank is 85 to 95% full? There is an intentional air pocket left in the tank to accommodate the fuel’s natural expansion due to heat. Now ask yourself: how do you know when your calendar is full? Do you have a safety gap to allow for unexpected events that will naturally occur in the week? Most people do not, and that’s what we’re looking at this week. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |429 Hello, and welcome to episode 429 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. There was a time in the 2010s when hustle culture took hold, and the dream was to become the next “tech-bro”, as they were called. This meant working 18-hour days, seven days a week, with calendars bursting with meetings and every minute scheduled for whatever work these dreamers did. It didn’t work. Pretty soon, the hustle culture trend morphed into a self-care trend, when rest and relaxation became the priority, not the stuffed calendars and 18-hour days. Remnants of these trends still exist. There are people adopting AI and building apps today, in the hope that they will be the next hyper-successful business leaders. And a cursory look around YouTube will show you plenty of videos about slow living and mindfulness. And as with most things, there’s a happy medium somewhere that, when found, brings you the success you wish for without the burnout, stress and overwhelm. To find that happy balance requires one observation. Your natural capacity. And that’s what this week’s question is all about. So, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Sarah. Sarah asks, hi Carl, what would you advise someone who never gets round to doing their most important work because their calendar always fills up with meetings. I was promoted last January, and since then all I seem to have been doing is sitting in meetings every day. I never have time to stop and think about strategy or even reply to my messages and emails. Hi Sarah, thank you for your question. This is a very interesting question, as you may have noticed, I’m a little obsessed with calendars. That’s because it dawned on me a few years ago that it doesn’t matter how many tasks are on my task list or how many articles, notes or reports I should read if I never have the time to do or read them. The only thing that really matters each day is how I will spend my time. And that means the only productivity tool available to me is the calendar. You see, your calendar is honest. It cannot lie to you. All you get are the 24 hours each day, and you plot out how you will spend the hours. Now, I know it’s not always that simple. Some of you will discover that people can schedule meetings on your calendar without your knowledge, and many of you will likely already have some recurring meetings that happen every week or even every day. So, technically, it’s unlikely that you will ever begin with a blank calendar. However, if you allow someone else to control your calendar, that is where many of your time management and productivity problems begin. You bypass a key part of managing your calendar—the decision stage. Let’s break this down. When someone makes a request on your time, you have a decision to make. It’s a simple yes/no decision, but it’s an important decision all the same. Do you say yes and accept the commitment, or do you say no and reject the commitment? If you say no, that’s it. It goes no further, and it doesn’t end up on your calendar. If you say yes, you make a commitment, and that commitment goes onto your calendar. This applies whether it’s a meeting or a task. Tasks still require time. They may not initially go on your calendar, but they still need to be done, which means you will have to find time to do them at some point. So, every time you take on a new commitment, you are putting more pressure on your capacity. Your capacity is the work you can realistically do each day or week. And we all have a capacity. Now, this introduces an issue most people miss. Every commitment you accept has a time cost beyond the actual thing itself. A one-hour meeting, for example, often requires some preparation time, and then you need to be in the place where the meeting is being held, even if it’s an online meeting. I do my coaching calls using Zoom, and for each session, there is at least fifteen minutes of prep time and 2 or 3 minutes to set up the computer for the call. Today, I have four coaching calls; that means I need to find an additional hour beyond the four hours of calls. It’s not four hours; it’s five. You might think the proposal you must send today will only take thirty minutes to finish, but that does not take into account interruptions, the possibility that you need to ask someone for further information, and then have to wait for them to come back to you before you can finish. There’s a good chance that your thirty minutes turn into 90 minutes. What all this means is that if your calendar is packed with meetings and time blocks without any buffer time, you’re going to go beyond your capacity for the day. This relates to the difficulty we all have predicting how long a task will take. We don’t know. Not with any degree of accuracy. And that’s because each day is different, with different distractions, emergencies and interruptions. For me, recording and preparing a YouTube video generally takes six hours. Yet, yesterday it took me eight. I have a process for making my videos that I’ve developed over ten years, and I create a video every week. You would have thought by now I would be able to predict with accuracy how long a video would take to prepare. Not a chance. My wife was at home yesterday; there was an unexpected issue with one of the tools I use for making videos, and in the middle of making the video, there was an urgent message I needed to respond to. None of those disruptions was predictable. Yet they happened despite all the safeguards I have on my calendar and in my processes. The job still got done; the video was finished and handed over to my video editor for cleanup and polishing. Yet because of the lessons I’ve learned over the years, the one task I had to get done yesterday was the video. Nothing else mattered. What all this means is that it’s important to be in control of your calendar and be self-aware enough to know your capacity. If you don’t know where your limit is, you’ll be like a fuel tank with no air pocket. You’ll burst or, worse, explode. Not in a literal sense, but you’ll exhaust yourself, make more mistakes that need rectifying later (more pressure on your capacity) and miss deadlines, which is not great for your promotional prospects or for your business’s reputation. Unfortunately, the solution to this is not easy. It can go against all your human instincts to be helpful and courteous to other people. The first step is to look at your regular meetings. Ask: How did that meeting come into your life? Some meetings are unavoidable. A weekly team meeting where everyone updates the boss on their project progress, discusses progress on various proposals, sales or other work, and alerts colleagues of any unforeseen issues or delays. Yet, there will be other meetings where, when you ask yourself how they got into your life, you realise it was because you tried to be nice to someone, but a meeting that brings you or the other attendees no real value. These meetings should be removed. One-to-ones with your team members or boss may also be important meetings, as they add value to theirs and your work. Really, what you are doing is a meeting audit. Do you really have to be in all these meetings? Given that you are in a leadership position, you may be able to delegate some of these meetings to your team. This is great, as it helps them develop their skills, removes a commitment from your calendar, and you only need a short summary from your team member about what happened. Next up, I would suggest putting a cap on your meetings each week. But before you do that, ask how much time, on average, do you need for strategic thinking and doing your important focused work? How much time, again on average, do you need each day to deal with your communications? I say “on average” because you can only work on averages. You will be interrupted; there will be days when your energy levels will be low, and conversely, there will be days with no distractions or interruptions, you’re feeling great, and you can get a lot of work done. For example, I allow six hours for doing my videos each week. Yet, some weeks it takes me four; others, like yesterday, it can take eight. The important thing is that when the week began, I knew how much time I needed for the important work I needed to do that week. Once you know how much time each week you want for your deeper, focused work and handling your communications, that will tell you how much time you have left for meetings and other appointments. However, don’t be tempted to fill all that time with meetings. Hold back. There will inevitably be some emergencies that require an ad hoc meeting. Protect time for those. So, let’s say you need 12 hours a week for your strategy work, admin and communications; that leaves you with around 28 hours for meetings. Remember, though, you will likely want an hour for lunch, so that reduces it to 23 hours. I would push back further and limit meeting time to 15 hours a week. That becomes your cap. Once you reach fifteen hours of meetings for the week, then you push any new requests to the following week. I know this can be difficult to do at first. It’s more so if you’ve always said yes to meetings in the past. Suddenly declining meeting requests can cause some surprise from your colleagues. But think about the consequences. Every thirty-minute meeting you accept, that’s thirty minutes you cannot work on anything else. Remember, there’s also the admin cost of accepting that meeting, which will likely steal a further 15 minutes from you. A question I teach my coaching clients to ask themselves when considering a meeting is: What are the consequences of accepting this meeting request? Another question to ask yourself is: What would happen to my email and messages backlog if I were to spend thirty minutes or more each day dedicated to working on it? You’ll be surprised how easy it is to stay on top of it if you have a dedicated block of time for responding to your actionable emails. Sure, there’ll likely be a backlog at first, but this is where consistency soon clears any backlog. So there you go, Sarah. I hope that helps. Find your limit, limit your meetings per week and protect time for the important parts of your work. I know, simple in theory, but difficult to do. You don’t have to do all this immediately; you can gradually reduce your meetings per week and slowly build up your strategy and thinking time. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. And just a reminder, if you want to learn realistic, practical methods for getting the most out of your time both professionally and personally, then I have places available in my brand new Productivity Academy. I will put the details of this in the show notes for you. I’d love to welcome you there. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
#431
August 9 · 14 min
Why You’re Too Tired to Plan Tomorrow
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” That was Theodore Roosevelt, giving his thoughts on making a decision, and in this week’s episode, I am answering a question about why we may be trying to solve a time management problem the wrong way. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |428 Hello, and welcome to episode 428 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’ve followed this podcast for any length of time, you will have heard me talk about processes and routines. It’s these little things that have the effect of automating your daily decision-making requirements. If you always start your day in the same way, you no longer have to decide what to do when you wake up. You do it automatically. And this is important. Reducing the number of decisions you make each day prevents something called “Prefrontal Cortex Overload”, which is often called “decision fatigue”. And it’s not woo-woo science. It’s very real The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that deals with executive function. These functions include impulse control, evaluating something, and making choices. Basically, decisions. When your prefrontal cortex becomes tired and fatigued, you find it harder to make logical, objective decisions, and instead your brain begins to use the amygdala, the part of your brain that controls emotions. In effect, you begin making decisions based on how you are feeling. And that leaves you picking the easy and exciting over the important, mundane tasks. It also leaves you with little discipline, which often means you eat unhealthy food and stay up later than you should. When overwhelmed, the brain defaults to the path of least resistance by delaying decisions, defaulting to the status quo, or refusing to choose at all. You then procrastinate, feel exhausted, anxious and overwhelmed. When you set up processes and routines as well as setting some “if this then that” rules, you reduce the burden you place on your pre-frontal cortex. And all that explanation now brings me onto this week’s question. Which means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. Some say she’s always on holiday; all I know is she’s called “The Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Fabian. Fabian asks, hi Carl, you recommend that you should do your daily planning at the end of the day, not at the beginning. But I am always so exhausted at the end of the day that I find I just cannot do any planning. Is there anything I can do to consistently plan at the end of the day? Hi Fabian. Thank you for your question. When I read your question, my thought was that it might be because you are not getting enough sleep, or that your work causes you to make decisions all day about what to work on next. Nothing is pre-planned or pre-decided. Both of which could be the underlying reason for feeling exhausted at the end of the day. If you’re not getting enough sleep, the effect you will experience would be the same as if you were experiencing decision fatigue. An inability to make decisions. And that is why, at the end of the day, you find it so difficult to plan the next day. After all, what is planning? It’s making decisions about what you will work on tomorrow. So, if a lack of sleep is the issue, then the fix would be to look at your sleep cycle and make adjustments there. However, for most people, the problem is making too many decisions throughout the day, leaving them feeling mentally drained and lacking in any motivation to do anything. This is where routines, processes and rules come into play. Every productive day is the result of hundreds of decisions: What deserves my attention? What can wait? What should I ignore? What should I delegate? When is “good enough” truly good enough? If each time you come up with something new and you have to decide whether something deserves your attention, whether it can wait, or whether you could ignore it, you’re tapping into your prefrontal cortex’s energy reserves. And your prefrontal cortex does not have an 850cc engine that only draws a minuscule amount of energy. No. It has a full-throated V8 and drinks fuel like it’s put a straw in a lake and called it a warm-up. This is why pre-establishing what your core work is matters. Once you know what your core work is and what that work looks like at a doing level, you are pre-deciding what deserves your attention. It’s the work you are employed to do. It’s important and must be done. Now, all you need do is decide when you will do it. And with core work, given that the type of work you’re doing will be the same, you can pre-block time each day for doing it. For example, you could protect 10 am to lunchtime for doing your core work each day. That means you are no longer deciding what to do each day. You’ve pre-decided; it’s blocked on your calendar, and all you need to do now is turn up and do the work. It’s always fascinated me that the most stressed-out people I’ve come across in my professional life are the ones who’ve told themselves they can’t do that, and that they have to be available for everyone immediately they ask. Complete nonsense, of course, but there really are some people who believe that. In this situation, a person is constantly having to decide whether they should respond to this person or that person. Who is more important? Should I call my boss, or perhaps send her a text message? “Oh shoot! This person’s been waiting 10 minutes. I must call them immediately!) It’s also why the least stressed-out people are the ones who are comfortable turning on Do Not Disturb on their devices when they sit down to do some focused work. They’ve made the decision that for the next hour or two they will work on a specific type of task. If something was a genuine emergency, they would be told somehow. I remember last year, when we were changing our car, that the sales manager we dealt with was wonderfully laid-back. Within a few days of starting the process to change our car, I worked out that he would respond to our messages between 11:00 am and 12:00 pm or between 4:00 and 5:00 pm, depending on when we messaged him. It was consistent, and I was hugely impressed. When I picked the new car up, I asked him about it, and he said he gets so many messages and emails each day that he wouldn’t be able to do any work if he responded instantly to everything that came in. So, he does an hour before lunch and an hour before he finishes the day. Brilliant. And I bet you he never gets any complaints about it. So, having a process for dealing with your communications is just as important as having time protected for doing the work that matters each day. Then we come to your routines. If you were to have a small fifteen-minute closing down routine at the end of the day, this would again minimise the decisions you need to make. For example, at work, I will close down by clearing my desktop and tidying up my desk. I clear out Todoist and process my inbox. Then I open up my daybook and plan out tomorrow by writing in my appointments and the most important things I have to do tomorrow, and that’s it. Done. It tells me that my workday is now finished. There can also be other things you might do too. For example, at home, perhaps before you go to bed, you load the dishwasher and turn it on, or if you don’t have a dishwasher, you wash all the pots and mugs before going to bed. That’s a routine. A going-to-bed routine. Pre-decided, and after a few weeks, you would feel uncomfortable if you didn’t do that. And then there are your rules, or standards. Again, this helps you make pre-decisions so that, on a day-to-day basis, you don’t have to. For example, I have many of my coaching clients make a commitment to respond to their emails within a specified period of time. Let’s say you set a rule to respond to all your emails within 24 hours. This means that any email that is close to your time limit must be responded to today. Anything else can wait. For emails that will require you to do a lot of work, the response time still holds, but the response is to reply with something like: “Thank you for your email. I will get it back to you as soon as I can” This way you filter out the genuinely urgent from the non-urgent. If the person you’re responding to comes back to you saying they need it by such and such a date, now you know it’s important, and you can prioritise it accordingly. If they respond with, “Thanks”. You know it can wait. The difference between a rule and a routine is that routines happen automatically. You do the same thing at the same time. A rule is conditional. A sort of “if this, then that”. If I have a presentation to do this week, I will protect an hour the day before for preparation, for example. Processes are pre-decided methods for doing the different types of work you do. For example, “if I get a sales enquiry, this is the process I follow.” What these routines, processes and rules do is they reduce the number of decisions you need to make each day. This helps to prevent you from overloading your decision-making abilities, which in turn reduces the amount of mental fatigue and tiredness you experience at the end of the day. Daily planning the day before is a decision-reducing routine. When you plan the day before, it leaves you knowing exactly what you need to do when you begin the next day. No decisions to be made. You know exactly what needs to be done and when you will do it. You can then preserve your energy for the decisions that may need to be made if something changes and you have to decide what you will work on. The new circumstances. This is why NASA’s Mission Control in Houston in the 1960s practised every possible eventuality before any mission. It was this practice that enabled the brilliant people in Mission Control to get the Apollo 13 crew home safely in April 1970. They had practised that eventuality so many times that the decisions required were already made for them. So there you go, Fabian. I hope that has helped. Turn your daily planning into an end-of-day routine. Create a checklist to guide you (again reducing decisions). This daily planning will also help reduce the decisions you need to make the next day, which in turn will leave you feeling less exhausted at the end of the day. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. Don’t forget, my Productivity Academy is now open, and we have a date for our first live event. Sunday, 30 August. The topic will be where to start and a general Q&A session. Not to be missed. Joining now will give you plenty of time to do your homework before the session. I’ll leave the details of the Academy in the show notes for you. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
#430
August 2 · 15 min
Why You’re Still Overwhelmed After Trying Every Productivity System
Are you on a mission to find the best productivity app or system, and find that no matter how many apps or new methods you try, you still find yourself overwhelmed, backlogged and stuck? Well, this week I want to tell you about a new way I can help you. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Productivity Academy The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |427 Hello, and welcome to episode 427 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. Eleven years ago, I began writing blog posts on time management and productivity. My goal was simple. To help people navigate the rapidly changing world of time management and productivity. In 2015, it seemed almost every day a new task manager or notes app would come out promising to make organising your day easier. This meant established productivity apps such as OmniFocus, Things, Remember the Milk and Todoist had to change to keep up. So these apps started adding features, changing their design languages, and everything started to become more complicated. AI today is doing exactly the same thing. Promising a lot and forcing established productivity tools to add more and more features, whether we want them or not. When trying to decide if a new productivity tool is all that it promises to be, I’ve noticed that many of these promises are repackaged things that already exist. For example, I’ve been using an app called TextExpander for fifteen years now. TextExpander inserts pre-written “snippets” of text through a keyboard shortcut. I use it for writing dates so I don’t need to look up the date. All I type is “Edate”, and it will give me the date in the UK format: day, month and year. I also have some pre-written thank you emails there too. They are written by me in my writing style, and a simple keyboard shortcut will give me the email. While TextExpander won’t send the email for me, all I need to do is hit Command and return on my keyboard, and it will send it. Then we have tools such as Calendly and Acuity. These tools allow you to set up times on your calendar that people can pick from to set up an appointment with you. Once set up, this works in the background, and you have nothing to do. No back-and-forth negotiating a time. People just click on a link, and these tools deal with time zone differences and all the admin. No need for AI to get involved. AI will inevitably change the way we work; for many people, it already has. However, there are some principles that never change. There will still be 24 hours in a day, you will still be able to only focus on one thing at a time, and you won’t be able to be in more than one place at a time. Your energy will fluctuate, and you will need to get enough sleep. The need to manage our time is still there. We still have friends and family, work commitments and perhaps some hobbies. They all need time. And the principles of time management will not change. If you want to do something, it will require time. Whether that’s cleaning out your car or sitting on the sofa chatting with an AI bot. Time management and productivity skills will still be needed no matter what advances AI brings to our workplaces and lives. Thinking about all this led me to look at how people are engaging with my Learning Centre. This is where I have courses and programmes to help people become better at managing their time and become more productive. As I was looking, I noticed something interesting. The people who have made the biggest positive changes in their lives weren’t the people who bought the most courses.They were the people who kept learning. They perhaps began with my COD course, my free productivity fundamentals course, then went on to purchase the Time and Life Mastery programme or the Time Sector System course. Some went on to join my coaching programme so they could have guidance on building their own, tailor-made system. This highlighted a mistake many people make with time management and productivity. They approach it as if it were a destination. Find the perfect app, read the right book, take the right course, watch one more YouTube video, then they’ll finally be organised. Yet that’s not how it works, and you’ve probably noticed. A few years ago, the trend was minimalist desk set-ups. This is where people stripped everything from their workspace so all they had was a small plant, a simple lamp and a laptop attached to a large monitor. YouTube was full of videos of people showing off their desk setups. They looked great, but did absolutely nothing for their productivity. Now the trend is to have books and notebooks everywhere. The plants survived, but the little desk accessories have reappeared. Minimalism seems to have lost its appeal. Few people have been able to stick with it. It seems keeping things minimal is challenging and time-consuming. I also saw something similar when I was at university; I studied part-time. 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm every Tuesday and Thursday. On our first day, there were just over 200 students crammed into the lecture theatre. All excitedly looking forward to their graduation day four years later with an LL.B Honours degree. I remember the professor in charge of the course telling us that 70 to 80% of those in that lecture theatre would not graduate. Not because the course was particularly difficult. It wasn’t. But because committing six hours a week to attending lectures for four years would be a commitment beyond most people. And on our graduation day, there were just 24 students left. Almost 200 students had quit! It didn’t matter what tools or processes you had. What mattered was understanding the basic principles of time management. Turning up consistently and doing the work. It had nothing to do with academic ability or how smart someone was. The people who graduated were the ones who turned up constantly and managed their time so they were able to attend the lectures and do the reading (there was a lot of reading to do for a law degree) week after week for four years. Being good at time management and consistently productive is more like fitness. Let’s say you wanted to get fit. You wouldn’t expect to take a three-hour course on weight training and suddenly become stronger. Fitness doesn’t work like that. The same is true of playing the piano, learning a language, cooking, and photography. These are not one-time learning experiences; they’re continuous. And learning to better manage your time and be more productive is no different. Our lives and work change. We may begin as a junior administrative assistant, but within a year or two we are managing a team of four people and overseeing projects. You start a family; now suddenly you have a little monster waking up every two or three hours screaming through the night. And as your kids grow up, you have commitments to take them to and pick them up from swimming or football practice. The time management skills you learned at school and university don’t work in the workplace. And as you change jobs, you need to learn new ways to manage your time both professionally and personally. The real challenge isn’t knowing what to do. If you’ve followed this podcast or my YouTube channel, you will already know you should plan your week and day, spend less time reacting to emails and messages, and protect time for your core work (at least I hope you do). The challenge is applying what you know consistently while juggling meetings, deadlines, family commitments and the unexpected events that arrive every day. This is why consuming more productivity content isn’t going to create the change you want. As James Clear’s Atomic Habits (a fantastic book) shows: Information fades; your habits remain. Over the years I’ve noticed something about many of the people I’ve coached. The ones that become brilliant at managing their time don’t just complete a course or have one or two coaching sessions and disappear; they keep coming back. They ask questions, refine their systems, and they adapt as their careers and family lives change. They come back to ideas we implemented years ago and learn new ideas because they now have different challenges. My best clients have been with me for over eight years, and they are the ones who’ve seen incredible changes, so much so that they’ve inspired me! I realise now that when my driving instructor told me years ago that: “You don’t learn to really drive a car until you’ve passed your driving test.” the same is true about your time management and productivity: you don’t become more productive and better at managing your time until you start practising what you learned. All this got me thinking about what productivity education should look like over the next five to ten years. I don’t believe it’s about creating more courses, and it’s certainly not about developing more complicated systems, packaging them up and selling them. Instead, it’s about creating a place where people can continue learning, refining and improving over time, just like many of my coaching clients have done. They understand that becoming organised and in control of their time isn’t a project; it’s a lifelong commitment. And like every commitment, it works for those who stick with it. So, going forward, I will be introducing more live training events for you. I started doing a few live training events in 2023, and some of my favourite moments have been in those sessions. I’ve been able to answer questions, explore new ideas and help people apply what they’ve learned to their own situations. Standalone courses don’t allow me to do that, because we are all different, with different professions and responsibilities; no ‘one size’ will fit everyone, and that’s frustrating as a teacher. Live training changes that. It gives you a place to ask me questions directly related to your challenges. That is what I want to make an ongoing part of the learning experience, not something that only happens occasionally. The courses and programmes give you the technical knowledge and theory. The live training gives you the practical skills to put what you learn in the courses into practice in ways that work for you. It’s the difference between learning to drive by reading a book or getting in a car with an instructor and actually going out there and driving. All this thinking led me yesterday to launch my Productivity Academy. It is the result of months of work, giving you a place where you can keep coming back, get answers to your questions, and work with a group of people on a similar journey as yourself. And it includes monthly live training sessions that you can join, ask questions, and have the principles applied directly to the way you work. It will also give you access to all my current and future courses, along with a recommended roadmap for taking them. My overall goal hasn’t changed. That’s to help as many people as I can become better at managing their time and being more productive so they can enjoy the things they want to enjoy doing. But I realise I need to do more, and the best way I can do that is to increase the live training element, which will allow me to help you navigate the current and future ways we work. If you’ve already purchased several of my courses, please don’t think you need to replace them. You don’t. Those courses remain yours exactly as before. The Academy is simply a different way to learn. The courses will give you the theory and know-how. The Academy will give you the practical skills (and some accountability) to put what you have learned into practice. If you enjoy learning independently, nothing changes. If, however, you’d like regular guidance, monthly training and access to everything I create going forward, I think you’ll really enjoy becoming an Academy Member. I will put a link in the show notes to the Academy’s website, and feel free to email me if you have any questions. I hope to be able to “meet” you in one of our live training sessions soon. Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you a very, very productive week.
#429
July 26 · 14 min
Your To-Do List Is Hiding the Truth About Your Time.
What drives your day? Your calendar or your to-do list? Or perhaps your boss? The answer to that question will determine whether you are or will be productive each day. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Time Sector System here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |426 Hello, and welcome to episode 426 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you were to look at the paper planners of the 1980s and 1990s, you would instantly see they were all built around your calendar. Some of the more sophisticated planners had a to-do list and a place to keep notes. Most were just a vertical list of times and the day’s date with a small area at the bottom for notes. And there was a reason for that. People working in the 20th century understood that no matter what you wanted to do each day, it would require time. Dropping your kids off at school likely involved a twenty-minute detour on your regular commute. Restocking your paper-clip box would require you to walk to the stationery cupboard to fill it, another ten minutes, and then there was all the travelling around to meet people. (No Teams or Zoom in those days). Needs drove how we managed our time, and your diary was the only tool that could prevent you from overloading yourself. You could see in an instant whether you could sit down and type out the report or proposal. Because, given that there were no smartphones or tablets, and laptops were prohibitively expensive, you also had to be in the right place in order to do much of your work. I fondly remember the days when I left work at the end of the day, and there was no way a client, colleague or boss could contact me until I arrived for work the next day. My work Email was only on my work desktop, and that was in the office. Now, somewhere along the timeline, those barriers have been broken down. Your work can, and does, follow you home. I recently saw a before-and-after picture of people sitting around a resort swimming pool in the 1990s and one in the 2020s. In the 1990s, people were sitting around the pool talking or reading a book. In the 2020s, people were staring at their phones. No talking, no books. Just eyes glued to a screen. It’s quite sad really to see. It’s also why your clients, colleagues and bosses are on holiday with you. If you’re carrying your work life on your phone, then there’s no escape at all. It would require a superhuman effort to avoid occasionally looking at your emails and messages. I know some people can do it; most cannot. Today’s episode is about how to put your calendar back to where it belongs: being your primary productivity and time management tool. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the recently returned Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Judy. Judy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say many times that your calendar should be your primary productivity tool. I really struggle with that because I have so many tasks to do, and so I find myself beginning and ending my day in my task manager. Do you have any suggestions on how to make my calendar my primary focus? Hi Judy, thank you for your question. There is a problem with task managers today, and that is their sophistication. Before we went digital, if you used a to-do list, you needed to handwrite it each day. While this may not have been very convenient, it forced you to only write out the tasks that needed to be done. Remembering to watch a TV show or read a newspaper article would rarely, if ever, be written on a to-do list unless it was something you genuinely wanted to do. Even then, when I think back, I knew that The A Team would be on a Saturday at 6:00 pm, and that Ally McBeal was on a Sunday night at 9:00 pm. And I was always at home at those times, and if I wasn’t, because there were no streaming services, I wasn’t going to see the show then unless I set the video recorder, and to do that you needed a doctorate in Theoretical Physics. Today’s digital To-do lists are fantastic. You can add tags and labels, set start and due dates, make tasks recurring, and create multiple lists. All great features. And if your to-do list can do all that, what’s the point of using a calendar? You can put events and date reminders into your task manager and have one single place to see everything you have to do. Doing things this way immediately poses a problem, though. You remove the time constraints a calendar gives you. With a calendar, you can see your day as a whole. You get your 24 hours, and if you tried to over-schedule yourself, you would instantly see it with multiple appointments at the same time. You can then act and reschedule things or cancel a meeting or two. With a task manager, you cannot see that. All you get is a list of things to do. And if you’re not curating that list each day, the list just gets longer and longer. Then you find important must-do tasks get lost among low-value, would-like-to-do-someday tasks. This then requires a lot of time to sort and organise. But rather more damaging is what this does to your sense of control. Maintaining all this in your task manager creates a sense of overwhelm, and the increase in decision-making required leaves you feeling exhausted at the end of the day. When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool, you only need to decide what type of work you will do at any given time in the day. For example, imagine it’s the tax reporting season, and you need to get all your finances in order. Not a small task, and something you likely need four or five hours to complete. If you were to have a task in your task manager that says “do taxes”, that’ll be a task you will keep rescheduling. It’s not a pleasant task to do, and you know it will take you four or five hours to do. However, if you managed this on your calendar, you could schedule a couple of hours on Saturday morning one weekend and a further two hours the following weekend. Now you know you have the time protected. All you have to do is turn up and do the work. Not turning up and doing it is an entirely different problem. That’s not respecting your calendar, which is never a good habit to have. One other thing you will notice about scheduling this kind of work on your calendar is you see it there well before the time, and that helps you to mentally prepare for the task. Perhaps you decide to get all the paperwork ready on the Friday evening so you are ready to go first thing Saturday. On a task list, a task like this will likely be buried away somewhere, and you only see it when you do your daily planning that day. I’ve always found historical figures’ to-do lists fascinating. People like President Eisenhower, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Maya Angelou and Margaret Thatcher’s to-do lists never contained any dates. Now, people like President Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher had diary secretaries. These were people who managed their calendars and informed them at the start and end of each day what their schedule was for that day. This is something I’ve found Siri and Alexa superb at. I can walk into my office in the morning and ask what my appointments for the day are. I can also ask them to block out time tomorrow or Friday for doing a specific piece of work. With AI coming on board, that feature can only get better. If I say to Siri, “schedule a deep work session on Friday morning at 9:30”, Siri will inform me that the cleaner will be coming at 9:30 am, and I can decide to keep the focus session or change it to a time I will not be interrupted. Each week I write a script for this podcast. I usually do this on a Thursday morning after my meetings. Today, my last meeting was cancelled, so I was able to get to writing earlier. I haven’t needed to look at my to-do list once yet, and it’s already 11:00 am. My day began at 8:00 am with a one-hour meeting. It finished at 9:30 am. Originally, my plan was to finish my meetings at 10:15 and begin writing at 10:30 am. As it happened, because of the cancellation, I was able to begin writing at 9:45. I don’t need to change my calendar; I knew that once my meetings were finished, my next task was to write. So I did. So where should a task list fit into your overall system? Task managers are great at collecting stuff you have to do. Far better than calendars, as a calendar will demand a date at the very least. Task managers don’t need a date. You just add a task to the inbox, and there it will sit until you decide to do something with it. If you follow the Time Sector System, you process your task manager every 24 to 48 hours, and when you do so, you decide when you will do the task. It will either be this week, next week, later this month or next month. On your calendar, you protect time for the different categories of work you do. For instance, if you write proposals, then you would have time protected on your calendar for writing proposals. You will likely also have time set aside for dealing with your communications (emails and messages, etc.), and admin. Then at the appointed time, you use the tags or labels in your task manager to pull up the tasks that match that category of work. That’s an oversimplification of the system. If you want to learn more about the Time Sector System, I recommend checking out the course I have for it. I will put the details in the show notes. This ensures you are not over-scheduling yourself or attempting to do more than you can do. It also teaches you to say no. You can see whether or not you have the time and space to do the work being asked of you. If you consistently follow this method, backlogs no longer grow, and you stay reasonably on top of your work, although being on top of your work at all times is rarely achievable. The biggest, more positive change you could make to your productivity system is to put your calendar back in its proper place. Namely, make your calendar your primary productivity tool and use your task manager as a support tool that tells you what to do when you sit down to work. I should add that for some of you this change will be uncomfortable. If you’ve allowed your calendar to fill up with meetings, leaving you no time to do the work you are meant to do, sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it won’t make the problem go away. This is when you may have to have a conversation with your boss. More than five hours of meetings a day, and you’re not going to be able to do much work beyond responding to messages. When you take into account toilet breaks, making coffee, and your lunchtime, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else. I hope that has helped, Judy. 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.
#428
July 19 · 13 min
How to Protect Your Most Important Work When Everything Goes Off Plan
The legendary American Football coach, Vince Lombardi, said: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up." Now that’s true in American Football, and it’s also true in life. No matter how well you plan your day or your week, your plan will inevitably get attacked by outside influences. A disorganised, reactive boss, a tired son or daughter who won’t get out of bed in the morning, a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or your accountant telling you that you need to pay a big tax bill. These are all sudden, impossible to plan for attacks on your carefully planned day. Having a plan is one part of a productive day. Having an arsenal of tools to defend your plan is another. And it’s that part that most people never prepare for. In this week’s episode, I will share with you a few ideas that will help you defend your plan and show you how to get back on track if you are prevented from following it through. Let’s go. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |425 Hello, and welcome to episode 425 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. Whenever I ask a client how their week went, most answers are negative. They usually go something like: “Well, it started well. I got everything I wanted done on Monday and Tuesday completed, but then I had to suddenly go out to see a customer on Wednesday morning, and that just threw me off track. I didn’t get back to the office until 4ish, and then I had to report back to my boss. That went on until 6:00 pm. Argh! It was a disaster” Well, was is a disaster? Perhaps not. All it was was one day out of five that did not go as planned. It’s possible that a day like this will have put you behind on your plan for the week. It could also mean that getting everything you want done that week will no longer be possible. But that does not necessarily mean it’s become a disaster. The issue really is not preventing things from going wrong; that would be a challenge beyond almost everyone. Instead, the focus should be on recovering from an unexpected event or interruption to minimise the damage to your plan. And in this week’s episode, I will share a few ideas to help you quickly get back on track after one of these inevitable, unexpected events. But before I do that, I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, but sadly, once again, she’s sunning herself in a resort somewhere, so I’m afraid it’s me reading out the question again. This week’s question comes from Will. Will asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve finally become consistent with my weekly planning (thank you for the tip about doing it on a Saturday morning). My problem now is when I look at my plan at the end of the week, I’ve got practically none of it done. There’s always some emergency that throws me off my plan. How do I get myself to stay on track?” Hi Will, Thank you for your question. Now, the first thing I would tell anyone is not to go for perfection. If you have ten things that you plan to get done over the next seven days but only manage to do seven, I would say that was a pretty good week. You did seven important things that you wanted to do. That’s a 70% success rate. I’d take that. The reality is you are unlikely to ever hit 100%. I know I never have; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has. There are just too many things that can happen that will throw you off track. Plus there’s the human side of things too. We often expect to be able to do far more than is possible, and then there’s always a missing piece of information that you need to ask someone else for, and they are away all week at a conference and won’t be able to send it to you until next week. There could be a proposal you submit, anticipating approval, only to have it sent back to you for adjustments that will then require resubmitting. None of these can be anticipated; building in some buffer time can help, but it’s still not likely to give you a 100% success rate. If you are hitting 100% consistently, that’s likely to suggest that you are not pushing yourself hard enough to develop, but that’s a whole different story. One trick I often suggest to my coaching clients is to build in a “catch-up” afternoon, or, if you can, a “catch-up day”, later in the week where you avoid scheduling meetings or other commitments and keep it free for catching up on anything you may have fallen behind with. For example, I don’t schedule anything on a Thursday afternoon. I often have meetings mid-morning (I think of it as a calls day), and one task: writing this script. Other than that, there’s nothing. This means that if I am behind on anything, I have a whole afternoon to catch up. (There’s always something I will be behind on) This week, I am behind on a few videos I want to record. Should have got them done yesterday, but I ran out of time. So, this afternoon I will be recording. Another tip is to look at your weekly plan not as a task-level plan, but as a set of objectives. In other words, plan for bigger things such as making progress on a project, getting four exercise sessions in, clearing a backlog or resolving an issue with a customer. This is a reason why I developed the Weekly Planning Matrix. It’s four squares representing four areas of your life: Core work: the work you are employed to do. (Just as an aside here, if you’re a part of my Learning Centre, last week’s Learning Note has an excellent example of how Warren Buffett identified his core work) Projects and issues: these are the higher-level things you want to make progress on professionally. Personal: For things that need addressing in your personal life, such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment, deciding how many exercise sessions you will do, etc. And finally, the radar, which is for things you do not need to do anything about but should be aware of. For instance, if your in-laws are coming round for a few days later this month, or you’re waiting for a package to be delivered. Because you’re limited for space in each square, you become mindful about trying to do too much. If your projects and issues square is full, and next to that you see all your core work tasks, you will instantly see if you are being over-optimistic about what you can get done that week. I’ll leave a link to a video I did on doing the Weekly Planning Matrix in the show notes for you. The next idea is related to your daily planning. Because it is almost inevitable that an unexpected event will occur at some point during the week, your daily planning can be used to reassess your weekly plan. Let me give you an example from my week this week. I planned to record some additional videos on Tuesday, but when I went to set things up, I discovered that the local government had decided Tuesday was a great day to dig up the road right outside my office. Jackhammers, reversing vehicle warning beeps, and road cleaners were all in full operation. It was an orchestra of wonderful modern city life noise That plan had to be scrapped. So, I looked at my calendar and saw that Thursday afternoon was clear (it always is, remember, for catch-up), so I moved the time block to Thursday afternoon. Now, I did that calendar adjustment as soon as I realised I wasn’t going to be able to record the videos, but I could easily have left it until later in the day, when I did my daily planning. That’s why your daily planning is so useful. It allows you some time each day to step back, reassess your plan for getting the important things done and make any alterations based on the new information you have. And that brings me onto the timing of your daily planning. Time and time again, when one of my clients switches over to planning their day the evening before, they tell me that it was life-changing. It’s life-changing because you will immediately discover your evenings are more relaxing. Once you’ve planned the day, your brain lets go of all the stuff you’re feeling a little anxious about. It quietens down. You also find you sleep better because you know what you will be doing the next day and that all your “bases” are covered, so to speak. No more “oh Crikey. I forgot to do X” just as you’re drifting off to sleep. And when you begin your day, you’re already clear about what needs to be done. That gives you a tremendous amount of focus and prevents you from going looking for trouble by looking at your actionable email, sifting through Slack or Teams messages or going into Jira looking for open tickets. Now, I know all that’s well and good, but what happens if one of these legendary Unexpected Events happens when you’re in the middle of doing your most important work for the day? This is the proverbial Vince Lombardi’s “getting knocked down” situation. And as Vince Lombardi says, it’s all about getting back up again once you’ve been knocked down. The only thing I’ve found that works here is that once you’ve dealt with the Unexpected Event, pause. Yes, that’s right. Stop. Just briefly. Look at your calendar and see when your next committed appointment is, and take a look at your prioritised task list and see what’s left to do. Often you will find that now that you no longer have the time you thought you would have, some of the remaining tasks can be rescheduled to another day. You may need to send a quick message to someone who is expecting something from you, but what you want to be doing is resetting your priorities based on the time you have left. For those of you who wisely set aside time to deal with your actionable emails and messages, you could reduce the time you spend there. For instance, if you have an hour protected for admin and communications later in the day, cut it to 30 minutes. Remember, with things like messages and emails, one is always greater than zero. Giving yourself thirty minutes today means you’re not going to have to find an extra hour tomorrow. What was that old proverb, “a stitch in time saves nine”? Something like that. I would add an extra tip here. Something I’ve found very helpful. That is to reassess your prioritised task list between each session of work. Emails and messages, for example, can be devastating to even the best-laid plans. Given that most of us check our messages between sessions of work anyway, there’s always the danger that you’ll find an Unexpected Event” that requires thirty minutes or so of your time. So, give yourself a few minutes away from your desk and mentally re-evaluate your plan for the day. Be comfortable switching things around. For example, if you have to attend an unplanned meeting after lunch, you may find that moving your communication and admin time forward will reduce any pressure you may feel after the meeting. So there you go, Will. 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.
#427
July 12 · 13 min
You Don’t Need More Time. You Need Fewer Choices.
Socrates, that wise philosopher of the 5th century BC, said: "The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less." And the consensus across the centuries has always been clear: happiness isn't a destination you reach by wanting or accumulating more, but a state of mind achieved by reducing what you want. This week, I’m exploring the common problem of wanting to do more and more, yet never finding the time to do what you want. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Perfect Week Calendar Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |424 Hello, and welcome to episode 424 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 most common questions I get asked is: How do I find the time to do everything I want to do? And as David Allen said in his book Getting Things Done, you can do anything you want, but not everything. In other words, you can do all the things you want to do, just not all at once. This is a problem all humans have faced since the dawn of time: we are limited by the number of hours we have each day. And before we acknowledged time and dates, we were still limited by daylight hours and the need to sleep. In many ways, truly understanding that we will always be limited by time is the first step to discovering peace and happiness. I remember many years ago having an argument with a colleague about why the iPhone’s constraints were better than Android’s lack of constraints. This was back in the day when you really didn’t have many options for what you could add to an iPhone’s home screen. The date and time, design, and colours were fixed, and the apps you downloaded were presented as Apple allowed them to be. Android phones, on the other hand, let you download widgets, move your app icons wherever you wanted, and install thousands of different themes. What was interesting is that my colleague was always fiddling with his phone. Never being happy with the way his home screen looked. I had no choice. Which meant I wasn’t fiddling with my phone all the time, trying to find the perfect setup and design. I was therefore happy with what I had. Funnily enough, now that Apple does give us more choice as to how our phone home screens look, I do waste a lot of time trying to find the right colour combinations and layouts. (And I’m still not happy with it!) So with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of things I want to do, such as learning to play the guitar, reading more books, and taking my kids out on the weekend. Yet I never have time to do any of these, and when I do, I’m so exhausted that all I want to do is sit and watch TV. It’s so frustrating. Do you have any ideas on how to fit all these things into my week? Hi Scott, thank you for your question. I’m not sure whether you have completed the “Perfect Week” calendar exercise yet, but I would recommend it. This is an exercise where you take a blank weekly calendar and map out all the things you want to do each week by when you will do them. Start with your personal life, then add your professional life. I will put a link in the show notes to a video I did on this. This exercise tells you whether you are being overambitious. You will quickly see if what you want to do is realistic, impossible, or somewhere in between. What most people find when they do this exercise is that they are being wildly unrealistic. I’m currently reading Sir Alan Lascelles’ diaries from 1940 to 1945. Sir Alan was the Private Secretary to King George VI at that time, and it’s interesting to see how he spent his days. Sir Alan loved going to the theatre, gardening and reading books. Those were his main hobbies. However, being a senior member of the Royal Household, he was also in demand from the King and the government of the day. Yet, what I learned is that even during the war, because his “interests” were small, he was able to maintain all of them. Take gardening, for example; Sir Alan’s home was outside London. So during the week when he was required to stay at Buckingham Palace, he could not attend to his garden. But at weekends, when he was not travelling with the King, he would spend his days pottering about in his garden. During the week, when he was in London, he would combine lunches and dinners with meetings with government officials, and maintain his social life by going to the theatre with friends and family. Now, in those days, people engaged in what we would call “knowledge work” today had much more flexible hours. Most mornings were spent doing their most important work. The work that required focus. One thing Sir Alan did each day was take a walk with the King for an hour, where they would discuss the affairs of state. In many ways, this was their daily meeting, though neither of them really considered it one. This walk invariably took place just before lunch. Lunch, again, was usually business, but occasionally it would be with his wife or son, or a friend. Afternoons were often meetings, and they ran into dinners. From the diaries, it seemed that most evenings were spent meeting with a colleague or an official to discuss business. If he didn’t have a business meeting in the evening, he would go to the theatre with his wife or a friend. What’s interesting about this way of living is that there were no real-time barriers between work and personal life. Some of those evening meetings went on into the early hours of the morning; other times, if there were no meetings in the afternoon or evening, people would go shopping or take afternoon tea with a family member or friend. There were instances where an important communique needed to be written, and Sir Alan would be up late at night writing it. I would say that Sir Alan was working around 50 hours a week, but they were not evenly distributed. Some days he’d work 18 hours, the next maybe only 4. Our obsession with the “work-life balance” has distorted our lives. Now we are trying to cram so much into our 8-hour work day that we leave ourselves exhausted at the end of it. There’s no energy left to do the things we want to do. All we are fit for is crashing on the sofa and watching TV or scrolling our social media feeds. What people like Sir Alan did was to spread their work more evenly throughout the day. They would take a walk for an hour mid-morning, have long lunches with friends, have business meetings in the evening over dinner, and often work on an important piece of work late into the night. Now, it’s true that in the 1940s TV was not a thing. All people had for entertainment were the radio and record players. So reading books, going to the theatre with friends, and gardening were likely easy to do. Today, we do not have any more time than they had in the 1940s. We still have the same 24 hours a day. What has changed is we have far more options than they had. And that’s where the problem is. It’s not time. It’s the options we have. The activities you mention, Scott, should be entirely possible. Spending an hour or so each evening playing the guitar should not be a challenge; neither should reading a book for 30 minutes before bed. If you were to get home around 7:00 pm, have dinner with your family, and then practice the guitar around 8:30, would that be impossible? If not, what would you do instead after dinner? Likewise, if you want to take your kids out at the weekend, what’s stopping you? What are you doing instead? One of the best things I’ve ever done was to strip out the artificial lines between doing my work and my personal life. Now, I do my most important work in the mornings and, wherever I can, avoid meetings at that time. I keep the afternoons relatively free for chores and family outings and do some work between 8 and 10 pm. That could be meetings, project work, or dealing with my communications and admin. I’ve recently started reading books for 30 minutes or so after lunch. I find it refreshes me, and I’m ready for whatever’s in store for me in the afternoons. I used to read the news or look at social media at that time, which often drained me mentally. Reading a book does the opposite. I’ve noticed that with my team too. We don’t have any regulated work times in the company. People can work whenever they feel like it. My Marketing Manager likes to do her work early in the morning; my video editor prefers the evenings. We work on timelines. For example, I supply my video editor with that week’s videos on a Wednesday afternoon, and she has until Sunday evening to complete the edits. As the boss, the only thing I care about is receiving the edited videos no later than Sunday evening. The final issue most people face is wanting to do too much. Reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books, we learn that Lord Peter had two hobbies. Playing the piano and collecting books. When he’s had an exhausting day or was stressed about something, he would either pick up a book or play the piano. They were his go-to relaxation methods. What do we do today? We get ourselves stressed out because we want to learn to play the violin, take up pickleball, go to the movies with our friends or our partner, learn to cook, clean out the wardrobe, redecorate the bedroom, read more books, and write in a journal every day. Well, you can do any of those things, just not all of them all at the same time. The problem is when we are faced with too many choices, we end up doing none of them. Instead, we’ll end up crashed in an armchair scrolling. One thing you can do if you have multiple things you want to do is divide them into seasons. For example, if gardening is something you want to do, you could spend your time gardening on longer, warmer days. On the colder, shorter days, you could switch to indoor activities. So Scott, first I would suggest doing the “perfect Week” calendar. That will tell you how much time you actually have for all the things you want to do. Then be a little more flexible with how you divide your time in the day. Squeezing all your work tasks into a single 8-hour slot is exhausting. Try to break up your day with longer breaks. I know not everyone can do that, but it is something worth trying if you can. You’ll be a lot less exhausted in the evenings. Finally, be realistic about what you want to do. Remember you can do anything, but you cannot do everything. 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.
#426
June 28 · 15 min
How to Keep Going When the Motivation has Gone
You may have come across the quote: “Motivation gets you started, but discipline keeps you growing." By John C. Maxwell, the author and leadership mentor. Motivation is an interesting concept. It’s often required to get things started, but if you only rely on your motivation to do something, particularly if that something is not easy or particularly enjoyable, it won’t keep you going. This week, we’re looking at how to use motivation to develop the right habits that will keep you consistent. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 2026 Summer Sale page The COD Productivity Method Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |423 Hello, and welcome to episode 423 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 consequences of writing a journal every morning is that you come up with a lot of ideas about how you would like to change your life or the way you work. And many of those ideas can motivate you to try something new. That could mean reading a real book every evening instead of watching TV or scrolling through the news and social media. Or perhaps to go out for an evening stroll after work, or plan your day the evening before, so you can enjoy a more relaxing evening. All seemingly easy to do. And then you decide to do it. The first day is easy, the second a little less so and by the time you get to the end of the week, you’ve lost all motivation and picking up a book or going outside for a walk feels like the last thing you want to do after such a hard day. So you skip it. It’s only one day, it can’t do any harm, can it? And then the next day you don’t do it, and the day after that and so on. Eventually, that great idea you had about changing a bad habit has ended up in the pit of tried-but-forgotten great ideas. It happens to all of us. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you; all it means is that you’re relying on one of the most overrated ways to change something, motivation. Motivation is fleeting; it never lasts, and it hates reality. It’s also affected by the quality of your sleep, how distracted you are, and your overall mood. It’s a very unreliable friend. Great at encouraging you to get started, but terrible at keeping you going when things get difficult. The good news is there is a more reliable way to make changes, but the bad news is you may need to initially feel uncomfortable. Yet it’s worth it. So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Fran. Fran asks, Hi Carl, what do you do when you don’t have the motivation to do what you have planned to do? Hi Fran, thank you for your question. To answer your question directly, I don’t rely on motivation. I remember the days when I smoked, and almost every night, when I went to bed, I would motivate myself not to smoke the next day. Thinking about that now, it’s funny, because as I was “motivating” myself, I was smoking my last cigarette of the day. “No, I won’t smoke tomorrow!” Then, when I woke up in the morning, I would make my coffee, then go outside for my first cigarette of the day. Where was my motivation when I needed it most? It wasn’t there. In the end, I finally quit smoking by removing all temptation from the house and not carrying any money with me when I went out. Just my travel card and a lunchbox. It was tough, but after a couple of weeks, the habit was disappearing, and by the end of the month, I could not imagine smoking again. I’ve seen this time and time again with people. Those who motivate themselves to go out for an evening walk after dinner, for example. It’s easy to do that in the summer, when it’s likely still light outside and the weather’s warm and dry. Then the temperatures cool, the light fades, and the rain comes down. “Ah, it’s cold and raining, I won’t go out tonight, I’m tired anyway, and I left my umbrella at the office.” The one that still surprises me, though, is the daily planning. Daily planning takes no more than five minutes and can be done just before you finish your work for the day or as the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed. Five minutes, and after a while, it can be done in 2 or 3 minutes. And yet, people still struggle. Why? Because they are relying on motivation. I remember when I first read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, and when I read the chapter on planning your day, I was incredibly motivated. I was fortunate that as I was reading the book, I was setting up my Franklin Planner and one of the steps when using a Franklin Planner is to do the “planning and solitude” exercise every day. It was suggested that you give yourself 15 minutes a day for this, and the first thing you wrote at the top of your Prioritised Daily Task list was “Planning and Solitude,” which would be given priority A1. It was the most important task of the day. And that’s what I did every evening. I sat at the table with my planner and planned out the next day. Then, I checked off the Planning and Solitude task. This meant that by the next day, my first task was already complete. And since then, which was the early 1990s, I haven’t missed some form of a daily planning ritual. I cannot imagine going to bed not knowing where I need to be and what needs to be done. I doubt now I could get to sleep without knowing. I even do this when on holiday. Just saying that now means I’ve consistently planned my day for over 30 years! WOW! The people who succeed at staying consistent with their plans are the ones who start small. Often, we will take a course or read a book, get motivated and try to change everything all at once. That’s the hardest way to do it. Recently, I’ve been watching documentaries on how great football managers turn teams around. I’ve now studied Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, Johan Cruif and Mikel Arteta. And there’s a common thread between all of them. When they took over a team, the team was not performing. Often, they were struggling at the bottom of their league. Yet, the change didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, step-by-step process. In all cases, they first fired old players who may have been brilliant, but were unwilling to adopt a new philosophy or were a bad influence on new players. They recruited professional players who were willing to adapt to the new style of play. And in almost all cases, their first season was not great. Then things began to change: the team started climbing the league and eventually winning trophies. These managers treated the necessary changes as a project. It wasn’t about “motivating” the players to play better; it was about having them buy into the new culture of doing things. As Arsene Wenger, the legendary Arsenal manager, said in one interview when talking about his successor following his retirement: “We need someone who understands that football is not just about winning. It’s about how you win. The philosophy has to come first. The results follow the philosophy, not the other way round. The philosophy is not a tactic. It’s a value” In other words, when you decide something needs to change, knowing why it needs to change is important. What’s your reason, your philosophy and the value behind that change? When you know the reason you want to change, “motivation” no longer comes into it. One of my clients works for a company that was advised by a well-known consultancy to change its management methods to an “Agile” system. There was then a flurry of activity by senior management, a great deal of money spent on training, and many employees were made redundant. Ten years later, that company has slowly moved back to the way they managed things before they were force-fed Agile. What went wrong? Well, the motivation was high at the start of the transformation. Senior managers were buying into the vision that the consultancy company was selling. The problem was that there was no clear reason to change. Sales were great, the culture was one of the best in the industry, and people loved working for the company. The company’s sales team had strong relationships with their customers, and while there were areas for improvement, there was no need for a root-and-branch change in how everything was run. Today, the company is struggling against its competition, the employees are demotivated, and sales are average at best. And yet the Agile methods could have worked had the reasons for the change been better communicated. My client still has no idea why the company changed its management methods. Without a strong reason to change, you will find your motivation runs out very quickly. Talking with some of the members of my Retirement programme, I’m surprised by how quickly they start taking health and fitness seriously after retirement. We go through our working lives sitting for 8 hours a day, slowly and quietly destroying our posture and mobility. We don’t sleep enough and eat convenient food because who’s got time to eat healthily when you have hundreds of messages to respond to, and you’ve got to get the latest marketing campaign finished by the end of the week? And then we go for a medical check-up and discover that we are pre-diabetic, we have early signs of heart disease, we are no longer able to get up out of a chair without using our arms, and we haven’t seen our feet for years. Suddenly, we’ve found the motivation to eat and sleep better. We take those daily walks, and many of us join fitness classes. But to continue with this new, healthier lifestyle requires more than motivation. There needs to be a purpose. Recently, it was reported that former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. He was fortunate that the cancer was caught early, and he’s now in remission. Suddenly, a guy who lived an unhealthy lifestyle of cigarettes, wine, sitting around, poor sleep and extreme work schedules has become a non-smoking, vegetarian, teatotaller Sure, the shock of being within a year of death was pretty good motivation, but why is he sticking to his new lifestyle? Because, as he says, he wants to see his grandchildren grow up. Now that’s a pretty good reason for making these difficult changes. So there you go, Fran. Motivation is great for getting you started, but ultimately, you want a very good reason to change what you want to change. Getting organised, improving time management, and being more productive are nice things to do. You feel more in control of your life, are more relaxed, a lot less stressed, and you find you sleep better. But the most important thing is to know why you are doing it. For me, being less stressed, being more in control of my time, and getting the right things done at the right time give me more time to spend with my family and do the things I love. That’s my “why”. That’s why I make sure I do my daily and weekly planning, why I am strict about what I say yes to and why I will never let my email and messages become backlogged. I hope that helps, and thank you again for sending in your question. Thank you to you too for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
#425
June 21 · 13 min
How to Stop Interruptions.
Zig Ziglar said, “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24 hours a day” When you know where you are going and what you want, you will often find that time will take care of itself. Yet when we have no direction, no idea of what we want, and allow other people to dictate what we do and when, that’s when time, or rather a perceived lack of it, becomes the issue. Today, we’re looking at how to discover our direction and decide what we actually want. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The COD Productivity Method Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |422 Hello, and welcome to episode 422 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 first exercises I ask people to do in many of my training programmes is to establish their Areas of Focus. There are eight areas that we all share. These are: Family and relationships. Career or business Health and fitness Finances Lifestyle and life experiences Self-development Spirituality Life’s purpose The exercise has you define what each of these means to you, and then identify any recurring tasks that will help keep them in balance so that you are living your life based on what you have identified as important to you. The thing about your areas of focus is that, while we all share the same eight areas, how we define and prioritise them will differ. This also changes depending on where you are in life. For someone who has retired, career or business will likely drop in priority and lifestyle and life experiences may move up. Yet the power of knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is in how they help to give you direction and purpose. This week’s question is about how to maintain that balance when competing demands outside of your control clash with your own priorities. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl. I use the Time Sector System, and for the most part it works brilliantly. The problem I have is that my boss and sometimes my family keep demanding my help with things that are not my priority. How can I stay on track with the things that are important to me? Hi Annie, thank you for your question. This can be very frustrating, particularly if you have spent time establishing what is important to you, yet other people keep trying to pull you away from doing the things you want to do. This is where having some structure built into your week can help. Let’s say that health and fitness is high up on your priority list and that you have chosen to exercise three times per week. From that, you can pick your exercise days. These could be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example. The first step would be to lock these “dates” on your calendar. Then make sure they are non-negotiable. For instance, when I was a teenager, I was a competitive 800- and 1,500-metre runner. I was a member of an athletics club and our training days were Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. Those days and times were non-negotiable. I would never miss a training session. My social life, as well as studying for my exams, were built around these days. Pretty soon, everyone in my family circle, as well as teachers, knew that on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, I would not be available for anything. I was training. Many years later, when I went to university, I did night school. Our lecture times were Tuesday and Thursday night, 6:00 to 9:00 pm. I was working full-time at the time, and since it took 20 minutes to get from my office to the university, I had to leave the office at 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I made sure my boss and colleagues knew these times, and not once in four years do I remember missing a lecture. I made sure I never scheduled meetings beyond 4:00 pm on a university day, and my close friends and family also knew when I would be at university. University was easier than the running club. The university worked in semesters; my athletics club didn’t. I remember some of my training partners turning up on Christmas and New Year’s Day if they were on a training night. There’s an old saying, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse” And having worked with over 500 people in the time management and productivity space, I can tell that old saying is true. You will find what is important to you by looking at what you will not negotiate on. I have a friend who is a huge Manchester United fan. He has not missed a home game in over twenty years. It’s now become a point of pride for him. As soon as the new season’s fixtures list is published, he opens up his calendar and blocks the time out for the whole season. I remember early on, when Simon began going to Old Trafford, trying to persuade him not to go watch the game and instead to come out with us. The answer was always “no”. After a while, we stopped asking him. We know he’d go to Old Trafford and maybe, if it was an afternoon game, he would join us later. That was the best compromise we could get out of him. Looking back now, I have huge respect and admiration for him for sticking to his priorities. And that’s what happens when you stick to your priorities: people respect and admire you. It doesn’t happen immediately, but when they see that you do not compromise on what you have prioritised, they stop trying to pull you away. This is why time blocking, when done right, works. Everyone in my circle, from my wife to the people who work with me, knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 am, I am doing focused work. For the most part, that work will be my creative work: writing, recording videos or this podcast, for example. No one interrupts me anymore. They used to. But by sticking to my plan, people left me alone. It’s only two hours a day, but those two hours add up to 10 hours a week. And you can do a lot in 10 hours. But it’s not just that you stick to your plan; it’s also that it gives you confidence when you plan your week. When you know that no one will bother you when you are doing your focused work, you can confidently work with the hours that you have. Most of the anxiety that we feel is not caused by the volume of work we have to do; it’s caused by not knowing when we will be able to do it. Yet there’s a fix for that. Let’s say you have to review and report the sales figures to the CEO each day. As you do that task every day, you will know how long it takes you to do. In this example, you know it takes you 45 minutes, and you have to send the report in by 5:00 pm. Now you have the two most important numbers. When you begin the day, you have access to yesterday’s sales figures, so you have everything you need. That means the question becomes, when will you do it? If that were me, I would do that as soon as the day begins. Get it done early so that if anything goes wrong in the day, it won’t matter. The sales report is done and only needs to be emailed. And in many ways, that’s what you are doing. You’re analysing how long it takes you to do the different parts of your job on average and then using that data to decide when, and if necessary, how often you need to do it. This is like taking your game from being a Sunday League team to being a Premiership team. The Sunday League team turns up and plays. No thoughts about tactics or strategy other than to score more goals than the opposition does. A Premier League team strategises, has a plan, and sticks to it. If they go behind, they stick to the plan. They don’t panic. I recently watched a docuseries on Amazon called All or Nothing. In this particular programme, José Mourinho has just taken over as manager of Tottenham Hotspur. In one of his first games in charge, Tottenham go behind in the first half and panic. They forget the plan, and everything begins falling apart. At half-time, you can see Mourinho calming the players down. He tells them to stop panicking and to follow the plan. He talks to them gently and says when they get back on plan, they’ll soon find a way back into the game. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happens. In the second half, Tottenham are more relaxed, more controlled, and they win the game by three goals. In our lives, there’s always going to be interruptions and demands from others. Some of them you can politely decline, others perhaps not. When you cannot decline, because it’s a demand from a boss or a family member, the good thing is the decision is made. You need to do what’s being asked of you. The key is not to throw out your plan. The key is to get back on plan as quickly as possible. The worst thing you can do in these situations is to panic. That tenses you up, and you stop thinking objectively. Instead, accept, adjust and execute. Accept the situation for what it is. It’s something you have to do that you did not plan for. So, adjust your plan. Appraise how much time will be required to carry out the new instructions, and then change your plan accordingly. Then carry out the work. It’s helpful if you have a few non-negotiables. For instance, experience has taught me that if I do not spend some time each day on my emails and messages, these will quickly get out of control. Ideally, I like an hour to respond to messages and emails, but if I’ve had to adjust my plan, I’ll do 30 minutes. It just helps keep things under control and doesn’t mean I have to find more time tomorrow than I planned for. The most important thing, though, Annie, is that you first decide what is important to you and what is not. This will help you to make the right decisions each day. That’s why going through the Areas of Focus exercise will put you in a much better position. You will know what is important to you, and you can build your calendar around those priorities. After that, when things are demanded of you that you cannot decline, stay calm and composed and adjust your plan accordingly. It’s never the end of the world, and as long as you get back onto your plan as quickly as possible, you’ll soon find that at the end of the week, you’re not far from where you wanted to be. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Annie, and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
#424
June 14 · 14 min
How to Build a Plan That Actually Bends
"A million dollars a shot is my price. But I only take one a year. The rest of the time I maintain my skills." That was Francisco Scaramanga, the villain in The Man With the Golden Gun, played by the superb Christopher Lee. Who, interestingly, was a cousin of James Bond creator Ian Fleming and a regular golfing partner of his. Now, while I certainly wouldn’t recommend following Scaramanga’s career path, there’s a valuable lesson in that line. The reason Scaramanga could ask such a high price was not because he worked all the time. It was because he spent most of his time practising, refining, and maintaining his skills so that when the moment came, he could perform at an exceptional level. And that brings us to this week’s question, which is all about developing, and more importantly, maintaining, your skills at managing your work and your time. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The COD Productivity Method Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |421 Hello, and welcome to episode 421 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. There’s a belief, held by many, that becoming better at time management and productivity is something you learn once and then you’re set. Or all you need to do is buy the latest productivity tool and all your struggles disappear. Hahaha, it’s not quite so easy. Theoretically, it may be possible to add a new app or use a new process for getting your work done. Unfortunately, life doesn’t fit perfectly into the little boxes we create. There’s always something different or new. This is why the idea of plotting out every minute of your day on your calendar doesn’t work in practice. Simple, natural things are not always predictable. You don’t know when you will need a bathroom break, or if a colleague asks you a question, or perhaps you spill your coffee all over your desk. If any of these things happen when you have carefully mapped out every minute of your day, your day is ruined. The missing pieces are flexibility and practice, and that is where this week’s question comes in. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Kathy. Kathy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve recently taken your Time Sector System course and loved it. One thing that’s worrying me, though, is that no matter how well I plan my week, by Tuesday, my whole plan is ruined. Do you have any tips on staying on plan when things become hectic? Hi Kathy, thank you for your question. This is a common discovery. Once you know the theory, putting it into practice can show up bumps in the road that cause problems. One of the first problems people face is changing habits. If, for instance, you’ve never planned a week or a day, getting into the habit of consistently doing so is hard. After all, you’ve spent most of your life so far without having a plan; skipping a daily or weekly planning session isn’t going to cause too many problems. Yet when you are building your system, it’s that skipping that causes a problem. The more times you don’t do it, the longer it will take you to build the essential habits. The goal is to use your new knowledge automatically. When you’re processing your inbox, you instinctively know what to do. It’s like there’s a voice in your head asking the three questions: What is it? What do I need to do with it? When will I do it? When you start, asking these questions can be slow. You’re naturally thinking too much. But when you’ve done it consistently for a few weeks, you think less, and you automatically move things to their rightful place. Today, I can process an inbox of twenty items in less than 6 minutes. When I first started following this sequence of questions, though, it would easily have taken me twenty to thirty minutes. I was overthinking and learning patterns. In one scene in The Man With the Golden Gun, Bond and Scaramanga are having lunch. The lunch begins amiably, but soon turns hostile. At one point, Bond reaches into his coat pocket to pull out his gun. The camera pans to Scaramanga, who is pointing his legendary golden gun at Bond. The surprising thing here is that Scaramanga had to build his gun from a golden cigarette case, a lighter, a fountain pen, and a cufflink. All Bond had to do was pull his gun from his shoulder holster. How was Scaramanga faster? Practice. How many hours would Scaramanga have had to practice putting his gun together to get that fast? I know, it’s fiction. But the point is, you get faster the more you do something. This is why people who continually switch apps are also consistently behind on their work. They remain stuck at being slow. What’s happening there is they have to learn new ways of getting things into their system, and then moving tasks, and learning all the new features. And that doesn’t account for the time it takes to move everything over to the new app. It’s dead time. Instead, sticking with the apps you already have forces you to get better and faster at using them. Then we come to the realisation that no two weeks are ever the same. No matter how carefully we plan something, things will inevitably go wrong. This is where practice and experience come in. I have a client who travels for work a lot. Sometimes he travels domestically; other times he travels internationally, often to the other side of the world, which involves 20 hours of flying time. He found the Time Sector System worked brilliantly when he was working from his office, but it fell apart when he had to travel. When we analysed the problem, we discovered that he was trying to run things the same way while travelling as he did at his office. How many times have you booked a flight, found that WIFI would be available for the flight and thought, ah, I’ll catch up on my email and messages when flying, only to discover that the WIFI doesn’t work? Now, you could respond to your actionable emails while flying, but you won’t be able to send them until you get into a WIFI zone. But that disruption to your plans can leave you feeling very frustrated. The solution in this case was to have a travelling routine. On days when my client was travelling, he reduced his task list to the essentials. Rescheduling or postponing routine tasks He also set up a routine for international travel, using the flight time to plan and clean things up. None of which required WIFI. The first few times he used this new process, he found he needed to make adjustments, but after a few tries, he had it working perfectly. And that’s the key part. Build in flexibility. In my client’s case, it was not to try and follow the same system when travelling as he does when at the office. When you plan your week, allow for the unexpected. One way to do this is to ensure that, when you plan your week, you have time for the essential things. That would be your core work and the parts of your life you have decided are important. Time with family and friends, hobbies and exercise, for example. Once you have those on your calendar, then really you have the beginnings of a solid plan that should be flexible enough. Hopefully, you have already locked in your core work. When I was a teacher, I had an hour each day protected for class preparation. I was teaching around four to five hours a day; those times were fixed each month and were non-negotiable. I had to be in the classroom teaching. The class preparation time did change from day to day, but it was always there, and I tried to fix it around the same time each day, which made it much easier to make it a habit. The unknowns often come from project work. Projects, by their very nature, are unique. Each one requires something different. You will find that while you may not be able to plan precisely what needs to be done at a weekly level, scheduling time to work on your projects each week will help ensure you have enough time to keep these moving forward. If you’ve ever read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you will no doubt remember the chapter: Sharpen the Saw. In the chapter, Stephen Covey uses the example of a wood cutter who’s working so hard that they never stop to sharpen the saw. Over time, the time required to cut the tree increases, not because the woodcutter is getting weaker, but because the saw is becoming blunter. Your time management and productivity skills operate the same way. Sometimes you have to stop and sharpen your skills. For example, I use an iPhone, and every time Apple updates its iPhone operating system, I review my collecting methods to see if anything in the new software will make collecting faster. For example, when Apple added the action button to their phones, it let me map that button to add tasks to my task manager’s inbox. It’s super fast, and after a few days it became automatic for me to tap the action button when I needed to add something. The most productive people I know spend time improving their ability to produce. This is why athletes train, musicians practise scales, pilots rehearse procedures, and surgeons continually update their skills. The performance people see is only possible because of the preparation and practice nobody sees. This is also why the Scaramanga quote fits this question. His point was essentially the same. As he said: “The rest of the time I maintain my skills.” Scaramanga’s version is darker, of course, but the principle is identical. Exceptional performance is not the result of the moment itself; it’s the result of the time spent preparing for that moment. If you find that by Tuesday your plan for the week looks destroyed, allow for that when you plan your week. One way you can do this is to plan your objectives. What is it that you want to get accomplished next week? These could be: To finish an important proposal Get on top of your emails To clean up the garden To exercise a minimum of four times To update your LinkedIn profile With these five objectives, you can then decide when you will do them. One tip here is to front-load your week with these activities. This way, if you do get waylaid, there’s still time to recover in the week. This reminds me of a story from one of the world’s top rugby coaches. When he joined a new team, he found that if the team got ahead early in the game, they invariably won. However, when they went behind early on, the likelihood was they would lose. When he analysed this, he found that the team panicked when they fell behind, dropped their plan, and spent too much of the game taking unnecessary risks to get ahead. He reminded the team that it was an 80-minute game and that what really mattered was sticking to their plan. Tackle aggressively, maintain their defensive line and minimise mistakes. If they stuck to that, they would likely end the game ahead. You don’t win games in the first twenty minutes. You win the game over 80 minutes. It’s the same for you, Kathy; you don’t win or lose the week early on. You win the week by sticking to your plan and making adjustments where necessary, without losing sight of it. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
#423
June 7 · 13 min
How to Get Started With COD
“In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics, you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.” That was Tom Seaver, an outstanding baseball player. And it points to an important factor in managing your time and being productive. And it’s a single word: Consistency. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The COD Productivity Method Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 420 Hello, and welcome to episode 420 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. There seems to be a consistency crisis. If you were to analyse anyone who has been successful at anything, you would find that, hidden behind that success, lies a high degree of consistency in following the basics. Last week, I talked about your standards. Setting your standards and staying true to them. Well, a close relation to your standards is consistency. Yet, consistency is hard. It’s boring, and your brain is often your worst enemy. It tells you that you’re tired; you can take a rest. Or you can skip today. You’ve been busy; it’s okay. But it’s not okay. Not if you want to develop your consistency. So how can you stay consistent, even on your worst days? That’s what we’re looking at today. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Stephan. Stephan asks, “Hi Carl, I’ve been following the COD system for almost a year now, and I know it works. Most days I do well. I collect, and I organise. But I am not consistent. What can I do to get consistent organising and planning my days? Hi Stephan, thank you for your question. Now, before we begin, I am not going to advocate that you turn yourself into a non-communicative monk. There does need to be some flexibility. Yet to succeed at anything, you will find that, somewhere in the mix, something needs to be done consistently. Something in the quote I began this podcast with from Tom Seaver jumped out at me. The line was: “If you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.” I know from experience and from feedback from those who have taken my Email Mastery course that if you consistently spend 30 minutes or more on your actionable emails, your email will never get out of control. The numbers take care of themselves. This means when you plan your day, you ask yourself where you will find time for communications. Managing your communications is not about the number of messages you get. We all get too many. There are messages that need answering, messages for information we should read, and a lot of messages we can ignore and delete. But, when you begin the day, you have no idea how many you will get and of what type they will be. This means you cannot plan for the number or type of message that needs to be replied to. Numbers don’t count. Yet, if you know each day that you will spend at least 30 minutes on them, it’s unlikely you will ever have an out-of-control inbox. Some days you will clear them; other days, you won’t. But as long as you’re consistent, the numbers will stay low. Your consistency will take care of the numbers. When it comes to COD, that’s the collect, organise and do framework. The only area that needs deliberate consistency is the organising. You see, once you have established your UCT (Universal Collection Tool), you will naturally collect everything that needs to be collected. And if you have that set up properly, what you collect will drop into your trusted inbox. However, the key is organising what you collected and that involves asking three questions: What is it? A note, an appointment or a task What do I need to do with it? Move it to your calendar, add it to your notes or process the task so that you can ask… When will I do it? That would be either this week, next week, this month, next month or sometime in the long-term. If you consistently do the organising step, you will become very fast at organising. When I began following COD, I confess it would take me 20 to 30 minutes on some days. That was because I collected a lot, and asking and answering the three questions was slow. But I stuck to it. I went through the exciting first stage, then the boring middle (where you ask yourself if it’s worth it) and finally to the stage where it was automatic. And the benefit was that, as I was pushing through the boring middle, my brain was establishing patterns that sped up the organising stage. Now, I can clear an inbox of fifteen to twenty items in less than 5 minutes. Something that used to take at least 15 minutes. But there are other factors here. The biggest factor, aside from consistency, is that I don’t change my tools. I’ve been using Todoist for 15 years, Evernote for 17 and Apple Calendar for 25. I know these tools inside out. I’ve set up keyboard shortcuts, and they are now part of my muscle memory. When any of these tools update and add features, I will look at the new features and ask myself whether each will improve my workflow and make things faster. If not, I don’t use the new feature. Evernote, for example, has recently added an AI-enabled feature that automatically assigns a title to a note. Nice. But it takes me less than ten seconds to add a title, and I know from the mistakes I’ve made in the past that if I don’t add a title that means something to me, I’ll not be able to find the note as quickly as I would like in the future. So, I don’t use that feature. So, how do you become more consistent? There are two things that will help. The first is to start small. Doing a huge overhaul of your system and adding multiple steps to keep it organised will ultimately fail. You’re asking too much of yourself. Instead, pick one area. For example, when you’ve run COD for a while, you will realise that your notes rarely contain anything urgent. The urgent area will be what you throw into your task manager. This means you can start by committing to yourself to always process your task manager’s inbox at the end of your workday, and to leave your notes, perhaps organising and cleaning up, once a week. When you make this commitment, don’t just imagine you will be able to do this from your laptop while sitting at your desk. Consider how you will do it if all you have is your mobile phone. While I like to do my organising on my laptop at my desk, there are days when I am travelling and cannot. However, checking my task manager’s inbox each day is a must, so I will do that on my phone. I’ve done this from airport lounges, buses, my parents’ living room and once from a motorway service station. Another area where consistency is incredibly helpful is doing the daily planning. Daily planning involves three steps. The first is to check your calendar to see where your appointments are tomorrow and where you need to be in the morning. (20 seconds max?) The second is to curate your to-do list so that your tasks for tomorrow are realistic. (Around two to three minutes) And finally, to decide what your two must-do tasks are for the day. (Another 2 to 3 minutes) When you are consistent with this, it will take you no more than 5 minutes. And best of all, if you are pushed, you could do this from your mobile phone. One of the benefits of consistency is that you no longer need to look at how much you have to do. Because you are consistently planning, clearing your communications, and protecting time for your most important work, all you need to do is ensure you are prioritising the right things each day, and the number of things to do will take care of itself. I recently saw a documentary on Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese football player (soccer player for my friends across the pond). Ronaldo is 41 years old and is playing in a record sixth World Cup this summer. How has he remained at the top of the sport for so long? Can you guess? Consistency. Interviews with former teammates talk of a person who turns up for training an hour before anyone else. Who stays and practices his shooting long after his teammates have finished and a person who prioritises sleep and diet. Ronaldo was doing that long before other professional footballers were. When asked about it, Ronaldo says he learnt early in his career that consistently paying attention to what matters was the key to getting to the top. Being consistently on time for meetings, handing in work on time and doing what you say you will do when you say you will do it are just examples of good manners and professionalism. Not doing so damages your chances of promotion. But I again go back to what I said earlier: don’t try to change everything at once. Pick something you want to improve and start there. It takes time and effort to build consistency. If you have to remind yourself to do something, you’re not ready to move to the next one. Doing my focused work in the morning and allowing 45 minutes each day for my communications didn’t happen overnight. It was a stuttering start. Yet, eventually, it just happened. I no longer needed to think about it. It’s the same with doing my daily planning each evening. Today, I cannot imagine not going to bed without knowing where my appointments are tomorrow and what my must-do tasks are. That’s how you build consistency. One step at a time. Now you mentioned the COD system, Stephan, and on that subject I do have some news. I’ve just cleaned everything up and added a new quick start guide to the resources section. If you’re already enrolled, head over to the course on your dashboard, and you will see the guide at the bottom. If you’re not enrolled and want to learn more about COD, you can do so for free by taking the COD course. I will leave a link for it in the show notes for you. Thank you, Stephan, 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.
#422
May 31 · 13 min
Why Your Standards Matter and How Arsenal Won the Premier League.
If you follow the English Premier League, you will know that Arsenal won the Premier League title a couple of weeks ago. It’s been a tough 6-year journey for their manager, Mikel Arteta, but what stood out is that no matter how hard things got, Arteta stuck to the standards he set at the club and, more importantly, focused on following his plan. He knew that to take Arsenal back to the top, there had to be a plan, and to ensure the plan was followed, standards needed to be set. In this week’s episode, we’re looking at how your standards matter and why having a plan to fall back on will always give you clarity, focus and make better decision-making easier. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 419 Hello, and welcome to episode 419 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’ve followed me for any length of time, you will know I have written and spoken a lot about having standards. Standards for how Long it takes you to respond to emails and messages, and how you manage your calendar, for example. It’s the standards you set for yourself that will ensure that you do the right things day after day. That if things go wrong, you have something to fall back on that feels familiar and keeps you doing the right things. My communication standard is to respond to emails within 24 hours. This means that no matter how busy I am, if I have an actionable email I have not responded to that is approaching the 24-hour limit, I will do whatever it takes to respond, even if that means working a little extra time at the end of the day. This week’s question is related to these approaches. So to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Sonya. Sonya asks, Hi Carl, I love COD and the Time Sector System. Both have really helped me to get much more focused on what matters to me. But what frustrates me is that I still have too many days when I procrastinate and don’t get what I want done. How do you stay so consistent? Hi Sonya, thank you for your question. As I alluded to, it comes down to the standards you set for yourself. I know that sounds easy, and I know it is not, but the standards you set are what help you push through when you are not in the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done. Let me explain. It can be very tempting, when you have just finished reading a book or have taken a course, to be full of enthusiasm to change things. And that’s not a bad thing. But it’s important to be realistic when setting up your processes and new way of doing things. If you were to set up a two-hour closing-down routine at the end of each day, you would fail. It’s too long. Similarly, I’ve seen people get excited by the idea of having a solid morning routine. Then they add so many things to their morning routine that it takes them two or three hours to complete them. That’s never going to promote consistency. There will inevitably be days when you cannot complete those routines, and then you get it into your head that you’re a failure or that having routines doesn’t work for you. Neither of which is true. The place to begin is with your non-negotiables. What must happen every day, no matter what? I know many people, for instance, who will not go to bed until all the dishes have been washed and put away. That might seem a small thing, but to the people who do that, it is their standard. They couldn’t imagine going to bed without doing it. One standard I try to get my coaching clients to follow is to do a five-minute daily planning session before they end their day. That planning session is to review your calendar for appointments, look at your list of tasks, make sure it is realistic and to decide what your two must-do tasks will be. That’s it. Five minutes tops. This is a realistic planning session. You can do it from your sofa and on your phone if necessary. Once you have set it as a standard, you do this every day, including weekends and holidays. Now, weekends and holidays are easier. You will likely have fewer tasks and appointments, but it’s a standard. You do it anyway. Consistency can be hard when you don’t have any clear standards. Yet, those standards need to be realistic. One way to do this is to set minimums. Imagine you decide to read a book every day. Now, I’ve seen people set very unrealistic targets here. This usually begins with deciding to read something like 50 books per year, which is then broken down into reading a book a week. So far so good. But what happens if you read something like Andrew Roberts’ book on Winston Churchill or Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci? Both are over 1,000 pages. Those books will take you longer than a week to read. That’s why this kind of target setting is wrong. Let’s start with what your purpose is here. Is it to read a set number of books? If so, choose short books, and you’ll hit your target. But it’s more likely that you want to build the habit of reading. This means it doesn’t matter how many books you read in any given year. All that matters is that you spend time reading each day. So set a realistic minimum. If you were to set the target at reading for a minimum of twenty minutes each day, it would not be long before you settled into a routine and just did your reading. What happens is that the books you get into and enjoy reading, you’ll read for longer than twenty minutes. Slower, harder books will likely have you reading for twenty minutes. That’s fine; you’re still reading. You did what you set out to do, and after twenty minutes, you can stop. That’s a realistic standard to set for yourself and one likely to become a non-negotiable. Incidentally, you can do this with exercise and dealing with your messages. Set a daily minimum amount of time you will spend doing these activities. And I should say there is some psychology behind the twenty-minute minimum. If you were to tell yourself you will spend an hour on a particular activity every day, your brain will push back. On the days you are feeling tired, a little sick or ‘just not in the mood’, that one hour will feel like an eternity. Twenty minutes, on the other hand, seems achievable, no matter how you feel. Remember, it’s a minimum. Once you’ve done your twenty minutes, you can stop. Often you won’t, but you can if you are still not feeling up to it. I do this with my emails and messages. I like to finish my day with all actionable messages cleared. But there are days when, for one reason or another, I cannot do so. I then apply the twenty-minute minimum. I tell myself I will spend twenty minutes clearing as many as I can. It’s this standard that makes it easy to keep on top of messages. I began this episode by explaining how Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, turned around the club by setting non-negotiable standards. Arteta’s attitude is that if you cannot accept these standards, then you’re out the door. It’s as simple as that. And I saw this with Manchester United’s former manager, a brilliant manager, Alex Ferguson. Ferguson took over the management of Manchester United in 1986. On his arrival, he set about setting some very high standards at the club. It took around four years, but by setting those standards, Manchester United turned the 1990s into Manchester United’s greatest generation. Change is hard. It’s particularly hard to stick to your new set of standards when things don’t seem to be improving. When there’s no immediate payoff. Your old habits don’t want to die, and they will fight to stay around. This is why trying to change everything all at once almost always fails. Instead, start small. Daily planning is an easy place to start because all you are doing is reviewing your appointments for the next day, ensuring your list of tasks is realistic, and identifying your must-do tasks. With practice, you will be able to do this in about two minutes, and the more you practice, the more you see the benefits of having clarity on what must be done and where you need to be each day. From there, add in a weekly planning session. This is where you set your plan for the week and decide your objectives. It is not about reviewing all your tasks and projects. You’re not reviewing, you’re planning. Reviewing is entirely different. The best time to review a project is when you’ve just finished working on it. The project is fresh in your mind, and you will know precisely what needs to happen next. It’s by having a plan that you will find you procrastinate less. You don’t become frozen by the number of things you need to do. You know what your objectives are for the week, and you will do what needs to be done to accomplish them. Commit to your plan, and you will have the energy to push towards it. Without a plan, you’ll procrastinate because all you will see is a mountain of work to do, and you have no idea what to do or where to start. Let me show you this in action: Imagine you have thousands of emails in your email inbox, and you are desperate to get it under control and clean it out. But the sheer size of it freezes you. Where do you start? What would be the best way to go about it? And you’ll be thinking this will take forever. But what if you decided to start with the oldest ones and spend a minimum of 20 minutes a day on this project until it’s done? Let’s be honest, if you’ve got thousands of emails in your inbox, it doesn’t really matter where you start. You’ve just got to start somewhere. Twenty minutes a day, from the oldest to the newest. Now that’s a plan. And you’ll find that by starting with the oldest first, you’ll be deleting a lot. Most of what you have will be out of date, moved on or already resolved. That builds momentum, which in itself generates energy. If you’d like to learn more about setting your non-negotiables, having a plan for the day and a set of clear objectives for the week, my recently released Quiet Productivity Method programme will help you. It’s packed with ideas like these, along with the right set of tools to give you clarity, focus, and a sense of calm throughout your day. I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you to learn more about this immersive programme. Thank you, Sonya, for your question, and I hope this answer has helped. Thank you also to you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.
#421
May 24 · 14 min
A Calmer, More Human Approach to Time Management
Is it possible to remain calm and focused when everything around us is getting faster, noisier and seemingly more demanding? I think it is, and in this week’s episode, I’ll share some of my insights so you, too, can remain productive in a quiet, focused way. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 418 Hello, and welcome to episode 418 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. Recently, I had a call with one of my coaching clients who is completely on board with AI. He’s gone down the usual rabbit hole of ChatGPT, then Claude, then back to ChatGPT, then to Google’s Gemini and now he’s obsessed with Claude again. It reminded me of the late twenty-teens when everyone was switching between Evernote, Notion, Apple Notes, and then Roam Research. It was an amusing merry-go-round. One of the ironic things about my client is that he’d had to wake up at 5:00 am to review the materials for a workshop he was delivering that day because he suddenly thought Claude might not have given the correct information, and he needed to check everything before 9:00 am. I asked him how long he usually took to prepare for a workshop like this, and he replied that it normally took three or four hours. However, he said emphatically, with Claude’s help, it’s taking him around six to eight hours. I did point out the obvious. With AI’s help, it’s taking twice as long, but he dismissed that, saying AI was the future and that by doing it this way, he was learning and would eventually be faster. Fair point. But he did have to wake up two hours earlier than normal. Not something I would enjoy doing. This reminded me that life, whether it’s our personal or our professional lives, shouldn’t be lived at speed. Life should be lived at our own pace. Two YouTube videos I recently watched emphasised this. One was by Matt D’ Avella, and the other was from Samurai Matcha. In Matt’s video, entitled I Tried to Optimise my Life. It made it Worse, Matt pointed out that trying to live a productive life left him feeling frustrated. All the curated lists and time blocks on his calendar just set him up for failure. If he didn’t clear his to-do list or he was unable to follow his time blocks, he’d end the day feeling that he’d failed. This left him feeling miserable all evening and wondering what was wrong with him. Then I watched Samurai Matcha’s video entitled “10 Real Japanese Organisation Tricks”, in which he explained why his girlfriend’s organisation philosophy was brilliant. Her philosophy was that the goal of organising is to always know where everything is. This meant that things were stacked so you could see what was in a cupboard or refrigerator as soon as you opened the door. That clothes were arranged so that, just by looking in a wardrobe, you could instantly see what was in there. It isn’t about having everything look pretty and tidy, only to be unable to find what you are looking for. It’s about knowing instantly where everything is. So there you have one person trying to optimise everything and setting himself up for failure every day. And another who is essentially working by her own logic, making her life as simple and easy as possible. You can guess who was the more relaxed, settled and happy with life. And this is the point. Life’s not about optimising everything. We’re human beings, but we’re trying to turn ourselves into machines that can be programmed to wake up at a particular time, jump into a bath of freezing water, do a two-hour morning exercise routine, spend an hour writing morning pages and then finish it all off with twenty minutes of meditation. That’s not what life is about at all. One way to get started in creating a calmer, quieter way of living is to begin with your non-negotiables. What are the things you must do each day? There are the obvious ones, such as sleeping, brushing your teeth, washing and eating. Most of those our bodies have ways of ensuring we do them. We get sleepy, and we get hungry. But what other things would be non-negotiable for you? For me, taking Louis out for his walk, doing a little exercise and enjoying a cup of tea with my wife when she gets home from university are non-negotiable at a personal level. At a professional level, my non-negotiable is spending 2 hours a day creating. That could be writing, recording or planning. It doesn’t matter what I create; all that matters is that I create something. And that’s it. Together, that’s around four to five hours a day. Once you have established what your non-negotiables are, it becomes easy to say no to things that could interfere with them. Another way to bring some calm and quiet back into your life is to focus on time not what you have to do. Let me explain. Most of what comes at us each day is not within our control. You do not know how many Slack or Teams messages you will get today. Neither do you know how many emails you will get nor what you will be asked to do. What you do know is how much time you can dedicate to these inputs. Over the years, I’ve learnt that if I allow 40 minutes or so each day to respond to my actionable messages and emails, I’ll mostly stay on top of my communications. Sure, occasionally I am behind, but as I can see I am getting behind, I can allow a little extra time to catch up if necessary. I also know that if I have two hours a day to create, I’ll always hit my publication schedule. If you work on projects, what would happen if you dedicated 2 hours a day to quiet, focused work on them? No distractions, no interruptions, just quiet, focused work. From the people I’ve worked with who have done this, they’re amazed at just how much work they get done each week. And how deadlines no longer become stressful or missed. Two hours may not seem much, but over a working week, that’s ten uninterrupted hours. Ten hours you know you will not be interrupted by anyone. The great thing about this approach is that you gain control over your time. And with a little consistency, you soon find yourself on top of your work. You also learn where your limits are. I know my brain gets tired around the 90-minute to 2-hour mark of focused work. Sure, there are days I would love to spend three hours in focused work, but experience has taught me that the extra hour is a wasted hour. I make more mistakes; I start snatching a quick look at my messages and emails, looking for anything to distract me. That pile of washing suddenly needs to be put away, or those cups and dishes need washing and putting away. Once you know your limits, you can work within them. This approach is a more human way to go about your day. It’s not optimised to create impossible days, leaving you feeling exhausted, unfulfilled and disappointed with yourself. It’s set up to work with your strengths and, more importantly, with your biorhythms. Your body’s natural rhythms. The advantage of this kinder, calmer way of going about your day is that you naturally slow down. You have the space to deal with the urgencies and the demands of your bosses, clients and colleagues. And that results in fewer mistakes, leaving you with less corrective work to do. The problem with being human is that we are really quite fragile. My client, who woke up at 5:00 am to fix Claude’s mistakes, will find the afternoon a dead zone. He’ll be exhausted and trying to operate at 100% with less than five hours of sleep. That lack of sleep will likely affect his food choices at lunchtime. He’ll probably grab a quick sandwich or something else high in carbohydrates, which will spike his insulin levels, leaving him feeling drowsy afterwards. And then we’re also susceptible to all sorts of bugs and illnesses, which can have a debilitating effect on our energy levels. Again, not within our control unless we seal ourselves off from the outside world. Not a great idea. I can assure you that the best approach to managing time and improving your productivity is to be human about it. Work with you and your natural state, rather than trying to be like a machine. Take care of your three foundations: get enough sleep, eat healthy and move frequently. Then, have a plan for the day. Not a minute-by-minute plan, but one that takes care of your non-negotiables, allows for some focused work time and has enough flexibility to take care of unknowns that will inevitably pop up throughout the day. Since the 1980s, technological advances have consistently promised us less work and more leisure time. And yet that’s never materialised. Instead, the opposite happens. Smartphones took business communications out of the office and made them omnipresent, leaving us with no place to hide. The desktop computer eliminated the typing pool and left managers and executives responsible for crafting their own letters and emails. Cloud computing eliminated the filing cabinet and placed company documents within our reach 24/7, even when we were supposed to be on vacation. What’s more, all this technological advancement has sped everything up. And it’s this speeding up that has left us with so much more to do. What used to take us three or four days to do is now expected to be done in an hour. That’s where the problem is. Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate this: be human. Make your own decisions about what you work on and when. Wrestle back control of your calendar and protect time to do the things that matter. These are simple steps, not easy to implement initially, but worth putting the effort into implementing them. As Matt D’Avella has discovered, and Samurai Matcha’s girlfriend already knew, keeping things human, simple and logical to yourself is the best way to live in a calm, quiet, focused way. Now, before I go, if what you’ve heard today in this podcast resonated with you and you want to learn more, my Quiet Productivity Method programme will do just that. Recently updated to cover your non-negotiables, the superb daybook system and how to plan your days and weeks so you are living within your time means, this programme will teach you, step by step, how to create a system that works for you. How to find time for what you want, and much more. In addition, you will also become a part of the Quiet Productivity Method community, where you can share ideas, ask questions and join the monthly live sessions that will answer your questions and hold you accountable as you move away from the unsustainable task-based systems of old and towards a sustainable, humane, time-based system. I do hope you can join me. Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
#420
May 17 · 15 min
How to Stick with Time Blocking the Right Way
There’s a conflict in time management and productivity that few people ever talk about. That’s the conflict between being productive and being responsive. It’s almost like the Ying and Yang of life. A sort of Newtonian “everything has an equal and opposite reaction.” While we may want to shut ourselves away and give our full focus to an important piece of work, there’s always someone, somewhere, who wants to interrupt us and keep us from being productive. It’s this that we will be looking at this week. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 417 Hello, and welcome to episode 417 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’m sure we’ve all been there. We have an important piece of work to complete, and we need a good two or three hours of uninterrupted focus to do it. We block our calendars and pre-plan our day to minimise the risk of anything happening that will interrupt our plan. And then the day starts, you turn up for work, and all hell has broken loose. Bosses and colleagues are in a panic, and you’re told you must attend an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. No ifs or buts, you must attend. Argh! It’s enough to have you asking what the point is in making plans when this always happens. Well, not so fast. It’s just Newton’s third law of Motion acting in a way Sir Isaac Newton never expected. The pressure of needing two or three hours of quiet, focused work is matched by the force of people needing your attention right now. Finding the antidote to this phenomenon is what this week’s question is all about. 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 Tim. Tim asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve tried to do time blocking for years and have never found a way to stick with it. My colleagues always seem to have urgent questions or need me to do something right now. Do you have any ideas to avoid this from happening? Hi Tim, thank you for your question. You may have heard of the concept of manager vs maker (or sometimes producer). A manager’s role is to ensure the work is getting done, allocate resources, and hold meetings. A maker’s role is to produce the work. The conflict is between the manager’s need to know what’s happening and the maker’s need for uninterrupted time to produce the work the manager is chasing. In my experience working with teams, the best teams are those where managers trust their teams to get the work done. Where the flow of information is smooth and works both ways, and the need for “update” meetings is minimal. The most ineffective teams are those where managers constantly want to know what’s happening, are unclear about what they want and by when, and don’t protect their team from interruptions. You can tell these managers by the number of “status” meetings they have each week. Every day is full of them. I remember seeing an interview with Toto Wolff, the CEO and team principal of the Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 racing team. In one response to a question, he said: “My role is to hire the best people, tell them what I want, and then get out of the way and let them do their work.” Toto Wolff is not an engineer or aerodynamicist, but he is an excellent leader and manager. Many of the software engineers I’ve spoken with tell me they need about 4 to 6 hours a day to focus on writing code. And even with the help of AI, there’s still a lot of focused work required. AI doesn’t magically produce code. It needs prompting, the right context given and a clear outcome. And the results need to be carefully checked and tested. A lot of focused work. The answer to many of these issues for the people who produce the work is to use time blocking. Now, time blocking often gets abused. I’ve seen countless articles and videos suggesting that you block every hour (and sometimes minute) with something. This is wrong. That’s not time blocking. That’s setting yourself up for failure, bordering on self-abuse. Time blocking that works is when you protect two or three hours a day for deeper, focused work. You then leave the rest of the day open for meetings, interruptions and lighter work such as responding to messages and emails. It’s balancing the need for being productive with the need to be responsive. Yet it’s also about putting in place barriers that help you get your work done, and communicating to your colleagues and bosses that you cannot be disturbed right now. I’ve found it’s that communication step people struggle with. There seems to be a fear that people will think less of you because you are not available to their every whim when they need you. Complete fallacy. The people in your organisation who get the most respect are the ones who are strict about when they are available and when they are not. They have clear barriers, and no one crosses those barriers. The people who get the least respect and are often the ones left behind on the promotion ladder have no barriers. They are always willing to stop and chat about this, that, and the other. These are the people who end up taking their work home and are always the last to submit on a project. As Jim Rohn said, "When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two.” The problem here is that when you don’t set boundaries and are always available, your bosses feel they have to supervise you more. You get caught in a vicious circle. And because you are always submitting your work at the last minute, you’re being interrupted by colleagues and bosses asking how you’re getting on. When it comes to protecting time on your calendar for focused work, timing is everything. According to several studies, around 80% of people are at their most focused and creative in the morning. This means, if you want to produce your best work, do it when you are at your most focused and creative. If that is the morning, protect time in the morning and leave your afternoons open for discussions, meetings and other responsive tasks. To give you one example, I have a client who is a software engineer. She’s the manager of a team of engineers, and each morning at 8:30 am, they have a 15-minute ‘stand-up meeting’ to inform everyone of their plan for the day. (They all follow the Daily Planning Sequence). This informs the team when each of them will be doing their focused work time (usually a three-hour block), what meetings they have, and when they will be available to discuss projects. My client blocks her calendar from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm for doing her focused work, but does allow 9:00 am to 9:30 am to discuss any issues with individual team members or her bosses. Then 9:30 hits, and she shuts down Slack and email, opens up her coding software, and for the next three hours, it’s complete and total focus time. Since she and her team adopted this practice, they’ve never missed a deadline, and no one ever has to take work home. And more importantly, their productivity, as individuals and as a team, has shot through the roof. This has the added benefit of their bosses now knowing not to disturb them during focus time. There’s plenty of time to update projects or gather information before and after a focus block. It works. It’s balancing the need to be productive with the need to be responsive. And during an eight-hour workday, her team is only unavailable for three hours, not all at once. So there is always someone available to field questions from higher-ups and clients, if necessary. Now, there is another block I would highly recommend, and this one will help to reduce and even eliminate backlogs. This is the communications and admin hour. Let’s be honest, Slack and Teams didn’t do what they promised. Make communicating between teams and colleagues easier and faster. All these tools have done is take away the immediacy of email, move it to another tool, and made it noisier than email ever was. We still get far too many communications, and far too many low-value and time-wasting messages. The problem today is the one we’ve faced since the dawn of email: the feeling that we must respond immediately. Now, I’ll take you back to the two opposing forces at play in your workday: the need to be productive and the need to be responsive. If you were 100% productive, you wouldn’t be communicating with anyone and would be focused solely on your work. If you were 100% responsive, you’d never get any work done, as you’d be responding to interruptions and answering questions and messages all day. So, there’s a need to find some balance. In my real-life tests, I’ve found that if you set aside an hour later in the day to respond to your messages, backlogs rarely occur, and if they do, they remain under control. This only works, though, if you are consistent with this method. You’ll never be on top of your messages if you sporadically deal with them throughout the week. But if you consistently spend an hour or so responding to these messages and catching up on relevant threads, you’ll never feel overwhelmed, and if things do build up, adding an extra 30 minutes is often all you need to get things under control. Now, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. You’re open calendar. Time blocking will never work if you do not get control of your calendar and get in first. In other words, your focus block and your communications and admin time should be pre-blocked on your calendar. I’ve seen people wait until Monday morning to find time to get their productive work done, only to discover their calendar is full of meetings. No, no, no. It doesn’t work like that. You have to go into your calendar and begin protecting time today. Perhaps your calendar is now full for the next two weeks. If so, go out three weeks in the future and set up some recurring blocks of time for doing your productive work now. You can change these later if the time you’ve protected is needed for something important, but if you don’t do it now, you will never do it, and the pattern you’re stuck in today will be the same pattern you’re stuck in in three weeks. I would also recommend setting these up as recurring blocks. That makes your life easier, and you soon come to respect these time blocks. This also makes planning the week simpler. Knowing that you’ve got a couple of hours each day protected for your productive work, you can assign dates to your work more confidently. I know when I begin the week, that I will have time on Thursday to write this script. I have time protected for doing so. So there you go, Tim. I hope that has helped. Look at the work you do, calculate where your balance between being productive and responsive lies, and then reflect that in your calendar. I mentioned two hours a day for focused work, but if you are in a role that requires you to be particularly responsive, you may only allow one hour a day. But that is far better than nothing. Good luck, and thank you for your question. Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
#419
May 10 · 14 min
How to do a Reset.
If you’re listening to this, there’s a good chance you’re a human being. (Although the speed at which AI is developing may be not all of you… A big hello to Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT (As Boris Johnson would say it) And, as a human being, you’re attacked every day by emotions, fatigue, viruses and micro-managing bosses and demanding colleagues. You’re not going to be able to stay consistent with your productivity systems and processes. (And even AI gets confused from time to time) You WILL fall off the wagon from time to time As David Allen, of Getting Things Done (GTD), often emphasises, falling off the productivity "wagon" is normal and expected. His most famous quote on this topic is: “If you don't fall off the wagon regularly, you're not playing a big enough game.” So, what can you do when you do fall off? How can you quickly get back on track? Well, that’s what we’re going to look at today. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 416 Hello, and welcome to episode 416 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 most common questions I get is what to do when your systems become neglected following a particularly busy period, a holiday, or illness or even plain, good old-fashioned laziness. It happens to everyone from time to time, and it certainly doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. Yet it can leave you feeling that there’s something lacking, that perhaps there’s something wrong with you. Of course, simply not true. There’s nothing wrong with you at all. It’s another sign that you are a functioning human being. (That’s a good thing, by the way) All that’s happened is you got very busy and attended to the most important work that needed doing in that moment, or that you’ve just got back from holiday (vacation), and there’s a lot of catching-up and cleaning up to do. Both scenarios can leave you with some tidying up to do. That doesn’t mean everything has failed. It just means there’s some tidying up to do. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ernesto. Ernesto asks, Hi Carl, thank you for the Time Sector System. Finally, I have a system that works after many years of trying. My question is, what do you do when, for whatever reason, you fall off the wagon and let things slip? Is there a quick way to get back on track? Hi Ernesto, thank you for your question. Firstly, as I mentioned, this is perfectly normal. So many things can cause us to stop following our system, leaving us feeling anxious about everything that needs cleaning up. The first place to start is by cleaning up your to-do list for today. This is what I call the business end of any task management system. Your today list. With the exception of your inbox, all your other lists are just holding pens of tasks that you have processed and decided do not need doing today. Your inbox is where unprocessed tasks sit until you decide what to do with them. So get your list of tasks for today cleaned up. Reschedule tasks that do not need to be done today, and delete or check off those that have been completed or are no longer needed. This one step will clear the runway and give you a curated list of things that do need to be done today. One of the tricks I have to help me here is to give myself a few minutes each evening to clear this list. Anything I have not completed that day is either checked off if done, rescheduled if not, or deleted if no longer needed. Doing this every day ensures it takes only a few minutes, and by the start of the new day, my today list is curated, accurate, and focused. I’m reminded here of a story I learned from friend of this podcast, Simon Jeffries, a former UK special Forces officer, who mentioned that when he joined the Royal Marines, from day 1, the training instructors began teaching a simple habit that all marines live by: As Simon says, “the military doesn’t take civilians and turn them into soldiers overnight. It can't. Day one of training, the standard is simple... Turn up on time. Keep your kit clean. Look after your rifle. That's it. A few weeks in, the expectations layer. Month after month, the load increases. The standards compound until discipline is second nature — under fatigue, under pressure, under fire. Centuries of trial and error went into that approach. And the reason it works isn't complicated. You cannot expect discipline under fire unless it's second nature. And second nature requires progressive, consistent training.” Now I’ve often talked about the standards you set for yourself. That could always end the day with a clear plan for the next. It could also be to clear your today’s to-do list so it’s reset and ready for tomorrow. Being consistent and making it a non-negotiable, no matter how tired you are, will soon embed this habit so it just becomes second nature. The next list to clean up is your inbox. There’s potential for something important and urgent to be missed here. If you’re like most people, you will be throwing a lot of things in there throughout the day. By the time you get to the end of the day, a lot of what you added will have been forgotten about. It’s this that makes keeping this list under control important. The good news about your inbox is that while you will be adding important things in there, you’re also likely to be adding things that, in hindsight, you do not need to do. These can be deleted. What remains can be processed using three simple questions: What is it? A note, an event or a task. If it’s a note, copy and paste it into your notes. If it’s an event, such as an appointment, move it to your calendar. For what remains, ask yourself: What do I need to do with it? This is about making sure the task is written clearly, so it’s clear what you need to do. And finally, ask, “When will I do it?” That will guide you where to put it now that you have processed it. Is it something that needs to be done this week, or can it wait until next week, etc.? If it needs to be done this week, you will again ask the question: when? When will you do it? Beyond that, everything else can wait until your next weekly planning session. One of the side benefits of the Time Sector System is that you will find many of the tasks you postpone to next week, this month, or next month will sort themselves out and can be deleted. This is one of my favourite aspects of the Time Sector System, the natural elimination of low-value tasks. It’s worth mentioning a couple of tips David Allen, yes, the Getting Things Done David Allen, gave me when we met in Seoul a few years ago. David had been travelling through Asia for around ten days, and I asked him how he stayed on top of everything while he was away on business trips. He said that the most important thing to stay on top while travelling was communications. Emails will back up very fast if you’re not dedicating some time each day to clearing them. Even if all you can find is 20 minutes in the morning before your day begins, take it. One missed day of managing this beast, and you’re going to have to find twice as much time tomorrow, and so on. The second tip is to block off at least half a day when you return to catch up. Process your inbox and clear or reschedule any overdue tasks. David Allen blocks a whole day if he’s been away for a week or more. Half a day if it’s less than a week. Treat this day as an extra day of your trip. Nobody knows you’re back. You quietly get on and catch up with everything you have collected while you were away. I adopted both these tips for all my travels, and they work. If you don’t do this, you’ll be spending the next two to three weeks trying to catch up while getting on with your regular work. Think of it this way: if your regular work naturally takes up your full working day, why do you think adding in a load of catching up will be easily absorbed? It won’t. Make the time for it. Think of the end of each day only happens when you have done a reset and got yourself ready for the new day. I will add that I also have a closing-down routine that involves washing any remaining dishes, brushing my teeth, locking all the doors, and closing the terrace curtains. It takes less than five minutes, but it’s now something I automatically do before going to bed. It doesn’t require any extra energy or thought. It just happens. Doing the daily reset should also be automatic. I remember when I first entered the workplace as a young twenty-year-old and seeing how all my colleagues used to tidy up their desks before going home. Nobody would ever dream of leaving papers, pens, pencils and files all over the place. They were tidied up, and that marked the end of the day. Funnily enough, as I think about it, I still do that today. My work day is not complete until I have a tidy desk and my task list is reset and ready to go for tomorrow. Less than five minutes, and all reset and ready to go. That’s how you guard against falling off the wagon. Having a few small habits to ensure you clean up at the end of each day. I know it’s human nature to overthink things, but if you stop and consider what’s really important, knowing where you need to be tomorrow morning and what your most important tasks are for the day is all you really need to get yourself back on track. And one of those important tasks could be to catch up and clear your inboxes, if that is where many of your current issues are. You get to choose. But do make that choice. Don’t ignore it and make the excuse that you are tired. It’s less than five minutes. Come on, you can do that. Many of the concepts I’ve talked about here and much more will be a part of next week’s live Ultimate Productivity Workshop. 2 sessions, 2 hours each over two Fridays (or Saturdays if you are in Australia or Asia) There are some places left if you want to join us. This workshop has helped hundreds of people finally gain control of their time and build a system that prevents backlogs and keeps them from falling off the wagon. And, given that it’s live, you have the chance to share your own experiences, learn from others and ask questions. There are a lot of exciting lessons in this workshop. I do hope you can join me and let me help you finally make time for the things you want time for. I will include the link where you can learn more and register for the show in the show notes. Thank you, Ernesto, 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.
#418
May 3 · 15 min
The Time Management Secret I Wish Everyone Knew About
What are your priorities today? What about tomorrow? Do you even know? This week, I’m sharing a simple switch you can make that will make prioritising your work almost automatic… Almost. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin What is Time-Based Productivity? Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 415 Hello, and welcome to episode 415 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 do you decide what to do and when? Do you operate a FIFO methodology (First In, First Out) or is it something more nuanced than that? I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that almost everyone has too much to do and too little time to do it. That’s perhaps the reason you are listening to this podcast. It’s further complicated by the scope of what we are asked to do. Today, we have Slack or Teams messages that somehow cut through our defences and turn into long, time-consuming “chats” about a minor issue on a project that isn’t due to be completed for another six months, preventing us from doing the rather more important work we had planned to do that day. Then there is email, treated slightly less urgently than instant messages, but it can again destroy our focus, leaving us distracted and unable to finish the work we need or want to complete. Every day is a challenge. What to do, what is the most urgent, and what is the most important thing you can do today? And if you can work on the most important thing, will you have enough time to do it? If not, would it be better to do something else? Agh! It’s enough to drive anyone around the bend. And it’s not isolated. Every day we have to go through the same decision-making process. It’s exhausting and stressful (Is this the right thing to work on, or should I respond to that email I just received from my colleague?) and can lead to a prioritisation freeze and activity addiction, where looking busy is more important than doing work that matters. This week’s question is about ideas for solving these challenges, so to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, What are your thoughts on organising work into categorised FIFO-style lists, adjusted for priority, and then using time blocks to work through them without expecting every block to result in a fully completed task unless there’s a real deadline attached. Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question. I think you are on the right lines with your ideas there. Let me give you an example of this working. I teach a method called Inbox Zero 2.0 for managing emails. This method has two parts. The first is to clear the inbox. This is about speed, and all you are doing is filtering out the informational emails that don’t need any action, except to archive them and moving any actionable emails to a folder called “Action This Day”. Later in the day, you go into that folder and try to clear it. Now, the ‘secret sauce’ of this method is that the emails in your Action This Day folder are in reverse order. The oldest ones are at the top, and the newest ones are at the bottom of the list. (You can do this from the folders’ settings in Outlook and Apple Mail. I’ve never been able to find a way to do this in Gmail) This means, when you come to ‘clear’ the Action This Day folder, you start at the top and work your way down. You try to clear it every day, but often that’s not possible; sometimes there are too many in there. However, because you start with the oldest, the remaining emails, the ones you were unable to get to, will likely have only recently come in, so the urgency is less than the ones you did respond to. Now, occasionally, an email that recently came in needs to be responded to that day. Here, you would “adjust for priority”, as you aptly call it, Benjamin and respond to these out of their natural order. It’s a system that has worked for years, never letting me down. Because I spend at least 20 minutes a day on my actionable emails, my emails rarely back up; my inbox is cleared every day, and nobody needs to wait more than 24 hours for a response. Now, you mentioned doing as much work as you can within the time blocks you set. That is exactly how to do it. This is also where many people go wrong with time blocking. Time blocking isn’t about squeezing in a specific amount of work within the time you have set. That’s never going to be possible. You see, there are too many variables acting on us each day. The first is that you have no idea what emergencies will happen in the middle of a time block. I’ve worked in offices where I settle down to write an important contract only to be interrupted by a fire alarm that took more than an hour to have the building declared safe. Rare, but does happen. More common are the interruptions from our colleagues. We just do not know for sure that something more urgent will pop up when we are trying to complete a planned piece of work. However, that does not mean time blocking doesn’t work. It does. It does because it allows us to organise our days by what matters most. For example, if you are a lawyer who needs time each day to prepare or review contracts, blocking two hours each day for this work ensures you always have time to do this important work. Blocking time for it means no one in your office can steal that time from you. It’s like you have an appointment with yourself each day to do your most important work. If you do not, for whatever reason, complete as much as you would have liked to, it’s okay, because you can pick it up again in your next blocked time slot. This is more about consistency than time blocking. If you consistently turn up and do the work, you’re never going to be far behind and are unlikely to have any significant backlogs. Yet if you don’t protect your time, it’ll be stolen. Not blocking time for doing your most important work is like parking your car in a high-crime area and leaving your wallet on the passenger seat with the windows wide open. There’s a good chance your wallet won’t be there when you get back to your car. Time blocking gets a bad reputation because people erroneously think it’s about blocking your entire day with activities. No. That’s not time blocking. That’s masochism. Time blocking your whole day wouldn’t work anyway. A traffic jam, a distraught colleague, a micromanaging boss, or a fire alarm would ruin your day, and then you’d waste time trying to reschedule everything. Time booking works when you use it lightly. Look at it this way: You build each day around a few critical blocks of time. For instance, two hours of deep solo work where you get on and write the reports, prepare the presentation, or sort out an issue that’s been dragging on for weeks. Then there’s likely to be time required for responding to all the messages you get each day. I doubt anyone can escape that deluge, but ignoring it will just create bigger and bigger problems further down the line. So perhaps you set aside an hour for dealing with your communications and any low-value admin. (Another area that can backlog pretty quickly if you’re not staying on top of it.) That’s just two blocks, consisting of a total of three hours. Yet it’s three hours, which, if followed consistently, would keep you on top of your critical work and prevent backlogs in the areas most susceptible to them. Three hours that would reduce your stress, lower your anxiety, and put you ahead of 97% of your colleagues. This does not guarantee you will always be on top of your work. As Baz Luhrmann’s 1990s hit says: “Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind… the race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.” But what will guarantee you stay ahead is being consistent with it. When you start each day, ask yourself: where’s my focus time and where’s my comms and admin time? You mentioned categorising your tasks, and that’s a great idea too, Benjamin. Not all work is equal, and sometimes a deadline will need us to adjust our priorities. Now, categorising your work can be a minefield if you are inclined to overcomplicate things. This should be avoided. Think of it this way: When a pilot prepares for a trans-Pacific flight, there are just three categories. Pre-flight, in-flight and landing. Each of those categories has distinct types of tasks to be completed. For us, knowledge workers, it really comes down to a few simple categories. For example, there are four that almost everyone will have (including airline pilots): Communications Admin Planning And chores Chores are always there. We all occasionally have to pick up a prescription, make a dentist’s or doctor’s appointment or take our kids to ballet, football or cricket practice. Beyond these four, it will depend on the kind of work you do. A lecturer at a university may have student affairs, lectures and research as categories. A salesperson may have prospecting, follow-ups and proposal writing. My advice is to keep your categories to no more than eight and make them as general as possible. For example, with the lecturer, student affairs could include grading papers, setting exams, writing references and arranging for one or more of your students to participate in a work experience programme. Once you have your categories, you have a way to prioritise your work. Again, this will depend on your work. For me, my most important priority each day is my content category. I create content every day. It could be this podcast, a blog post or a YouTube video. For a salesperson, the most important category may be prospecting, because without a steady supply of potential customers, everything else will eventually dry up. This now helps you with what you will do in your time blocks. For me, 9:30 am to 11:30 am is my content creation time. It is blocked on my calendar, and everyone knows not to disturb me during that time—including my wife! The salesperson may choose 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm as their prospecting time, and that, again, would be protected as a time block on their calendar each day. The idea is to match your most important categories with time blocks on your calendar. This is how time-based productivity works. It works on the time available to do your work. Not everything has to be done today or even this week or month. When you’re processing your work inbox, you decide what you need to do with something, then choose the best time to do it. There will be other factors to take into account, such as the deadline, who’s asking you to do something and so on. But ultimately, you are deciding when to work on a particular category. This is the opposite of the more traditional task-based systems that treat every task as individually important and as something that must be done ASAP. That way is unsustainable, as I am sure many of you have found out. It creates huge lists of stuff that may or may not need to be done, which just overwhelms you. You cannot do everything at once or even this week. If you want to learn more about time-based productivity, I have added a link to a blog post I wrote about it in the show notes. And just a heads up. The next Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming soon. On Fridays the 15 and 22nd May, 2 sessions, 2 hours each over two weeks. If your calendar is swamped with meetings and commitments, that leaves you with no room to do the work these meetings are generating. If you find your inboxes are overflowing with tasks and messages, and you cannot see a way out of it all, then this is the workshop for you This workshop will teach you, in a live setting, how to move from an unsustainable, task-based system to a more sustainable, time-based one, along with many other lessons to help you get control of your calendar and all those inboxes. I will put the details in the show notes so you can learn more about how this workshop will help you. (Oh, and a warning, be prepared for some homework if you join us) I do hope you will be able to join me. Thank you, Benjamin, for your question. I hope this has been helpful. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
#417
April 26 · 14 min
The Best Ways to Organise Your To-Dos
Podcast 414 "Organisation is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. But if you spend all your time organising, you never do the 'something'." That’s a paraphrase of a quote from A. A. Milne and his book The House at Pooh Corner. And touches on the question I’m asking this week. Let’s go, Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Learn more about the Time Sector System Take the Time Sector System Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 414 Hello, and welcome to episode 414 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 do you organise your work? There was a trend a few years ago to organise our tasks in multiple different ways. There were the original Getting Things Done contexts: @office, @home, @phone, @computer, etc. Some preferred to manage their tasks by project, creating long lists of projects and assigning tasks to them. Most of these trends died out because, ultimately, they were just new ways of avoiding the work while still feeling that the work was getting done. A kind of modern-day equivalent of shuffling papers on your desk. All these trends did was create a longer list of lists, full of spurious tasks that likely didn’t need to be done or had already been done but not checked off. Then there is the idea that we can organise tasks by how much energy we estimate a task will consume. This one still persists, and I will explain shortly why this one doesn’t work. Yet there is one way to manage your tasks that has been around for well over a hundred years and still works, one that almost all top-level executives use, but given that it is simple and we humans love to overcomplicate things, it never seems to get much coverage. Anyway, this is what this week’s topic is all about, so to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ken. Ken asks, Hi Carl, what do you think is the best way to organise tasks? I’m thinking about using energy levels to keep my lists low. Have you had any experience with this method? Hi Ken, Thank you for your question. I have to confess that over the years, I have jumped on every trend for organising my lists of tasks. And, except for two methods, pretty much all fail. They fail for the reasons I alluded to a moment ago. They are too complicated and require far too much maintenance to keep organised. You see, the methods that work are simple, and therefore, in today’s world, they are not sexy. The simplest of them all is one I personally have gravitated back to in recent years. That is a simple daily list of tasks to be done today. These are taken from a master list, which is organised during the weekly planning session into the days you plan to do them on. This method has a built-in safety valve. You can see how many tasks you have allocated to a specific day, and if it looks unrealistic, you can move them to other days to balance out your week. Given that you are looking at this daily list every day during the Daily Planning Sequence, it can be adjusted for any unknowns that suddenly arise as the week progresses. (Which of course always happens) To maintain this method, all you need is two to three minutes a day and around thirty minutes for your weekly planning. Not exciting, sexy or newsworthy. It doesn’t require expensive apps or AI. You can operate this method using a simple $1.00 notebook or a text file on your computer. But it works. It’s flexible, and as long as you are being sensible, you’re never going to feel overwhelmed. This is where other methods go wrong. They often involve a lot of organising, and given that you are not always looking at the lists you are creating, you have no idea what kind of monster is growing. Take organising by projects as an example. I don’t know where this comes from. It certainly doesn’t come from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. GTD, as it is called, organises lists by what David Allen calls “Contexts”. Contexts are created around tools, places or people. For instance, if a task requires a computer to complete it, you would assign it to the @Computer list. If you need to talk to your partner about something, you would add it to your @Partner list, and if you can only complete the task at home, you would add it to your @Home list. The danger with this kind of organising is twofold. First, some of your lists will become enormous. So big that you don’t want to look at them, as they become scary and leave you feeling anxious. And second, some tasks could theoretically fall into two or more lists. For example, if you need to book flights for a trip with your partner, you could allocate it to your @computer list or your @Partner list, and, as you will likely do this at home with your partner, it could conceivably be placed in your @Home list. So where do you put it? So you create a Project called “Family trip to Jamaica” and place the book flights task in there. Excellent. Next, you may add “Book hotel” and then maybe add a packing list and places to visit. Soon, a simple “project” has an array of tasks, some of which need to be done before you go and others when you get there. That isn’t really the problem. The problem is you don’t have a single project like that. You may end up with projects like buying a new car, redecorating your living room, and, not to mention, all the various projects you will have at work. Soon, that project list is out of control. Just maintaining it and reviewing what needs to be done next takes hours. And let’s be honest here, how many of you are willing to consistently spend two or three hours of your weekend reviewing all your projects? For something like your trip, it would be far easier to create a note in your notes app. Here you can keep your flight tickets, hotel reservation confirmation, packing list and places to visit in one place and have a master checklist for everything you need to do. In your task manager, all you need now is a single task reminding you to book your flights, or simply to look at what needs doing next on your checklist. Now you mentioned managing your list by energy levels, Ken. On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. After all, why would you tackle a task that will require a lot of energy when you are not feeling energetic? And when you are feeling low on energy, you can clear off some of those low-energy tasks. Hmmm, but does it work? Well, no. For one thing, your energy levels are not consistent. Some days you feel on fire, and others you feel like you’ve been hit by a bus and dragged through a hedge backwards. The trouble is, when you go to bed, you have no idea how you will feel the next day. Then there is the issue of deadlines. Whether you feel like doing a task or not, if the deadline is 12 pm today, you’ve got to finish it, no matter how energetic you feel. Then there’s the human factor. We are wired to be lazy. This comes from the days when we lived on the Savannah. Food was scarce, and we needed to conserve our energy for hunting food. Then there were the winters when finding food was even harder. Only fatter people would survive winters because we needed to live largely on our fat deposits when we were unable to find food. This is why it’s easy to gain weight and much harder to lose it. Our body wants to store fat. It does not want to let it go. While we consciously know food is not scarce for most of us today, our lizard brain doesn’t know that. And our lizard brain controls our survival instincts, so it will override our conscious intelligence. This means when we are feeling low on energy, the last thing we will do is open up our task managers and pick something to do. Instead, we’ll crash on the sofa or take a nap. And so your low-energy list will keep growing. Then there comes the question of how to define a medium-energy task. What does that mean? It’s likely you will define those tasks differently depending on how you feel on the day you process them. The second way to organise your tasks that actually works is to go by when a task needs to be done. Let’s go back to the flight example. If you are planning your trip for September and want to get everything booked by the end of June, the window to complete that task is from now through to the end of June. Given that you want to do this with your partner, it’s likely you will do this task when you are with your partner. If you are away on a ten-day business trip this week and next, you cannot do the task then, so don’t put it on your list for this week or next. As we are about to start May, I would add this task to my Next Month list. I don’t need to do it now, but it will need to be on my list in June. Hopefully, you are familiar with the Time Sector System. This organises your lists by when you will do them. The only list in play each week is your This Week list. This contains all the tasks you have decided need to be done this week. Everything else is in either your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or long-term and on-hold lists. Each week, you look at these lists and decide what to bring forward to your This Week list. The simplicity of this method is that when you process your inbox, you are asking three simple questions: What is it? - Is it a task, an event, or a note? What do I need to do to complete it? And, when will I do it? In a very short time, you get super fast at processing your tasks, and with the exception of your long-term and on-hold list, none of your lists will grow out of control. Well, not if you give yourself about 30 minutes each week to maintain and update your lists. Given that you are working from a single list, your This Week list, once again, you have the built-in safety valve because you can see how many tasks are on your list before the week begins and can adjust it to be more realistic if it becomes too large. The purpose of your long-term and on-hold list is to eliminate, not accumulate. In other words, every month or so, you go in there and delete tasks you no longer want or need to do. To learn more about the Time Sector System, I have a course that will teach you how to use it as well as a comprehensive blog post explaining why this method works so well in today’s world. I will put links to both in the show notes for you. So there you go, Ken. There are always new, exciting ways to organise your tasks, but ultimately it comes down to what needs to be done today. That’s all that matters at the work level of managing our tasks. Things that don’t need to be done today should never be on your daily list. Your energy levels will fluctuate throughout the day; it’s not something you can control. Energy levels can be affected by the quality and quantity of your sleep, what you ate for lunch and whether you are coming down with a cold or the flu. What you can control is what you do right now. You could take a nap, go for a walk or sit down and attack that list of prospects that you’ve been meaning to contact for the last three weeks. My advice would be to work with what you have direct control over, and that ultimately comes down to when you will do something. I hope that has helped Ken. 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.
#416
April 19 · 15 min
How 1920s England can Inspire Your Productivity
“I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.” I’ve been reading Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Set in the 1920s and 30s, the stories feature an aristocratic private detective in a style similar to Sherlock Holmes. And that quote comes from Lord Peter Wimsey himself. In this week’s episode, I share some of the productivity methods these fictional characters followed, as well as some from the biographies of these authors. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme Interview with Harvey Smith Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 413 Hello, and welcome to episode 413 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. 1920s and 30s England was an interesting time. The country was changing. The First World War broke down many of the class barriers that existed before the war, and while many manual labour jobs remained brutal, conditions were slowly improving. The way people lived their lives was also changing. There was more leisure time, and cars were becoming more common, giving people more freedom to travel, certainly at weekends. And yet, with all these changes, there were still some customs and habits people followed that gave them structure and balance. They also used nature far more than we do today. Lives were much simpler; heart attacks and cancer were rare; there was little waste; and recycling was part of life. It could be asked, what went wrong? I began this episode with a quote from the character Lord Peter Wimsey. Lord Peter was very much in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and throughout the novels, many of Lord Peter’s friends would often accuse him of being “Sherlockian”. What I noticed about these characters was that in the 1920s and 30s, some customs helped people avoid procrastination. You can also see these in play in the Downton Abbey and Jeeves and Wooster TV series as well. The first productivity method you will see is that days were structured around meal times. Breakfast was informal, and people ate when they were ready. However, lunch was always a proper meal, not a quick snack taken at a desk. It would have been unthinkable not to take the one-hour lunch break. Even manual workers would stop for lunch and eat together. Taking a proper lunch break can do wonders for your productivity. First, it gives you a break from doing tasks, and it should always be eaten with other people. But the biggest impact on your productivity was having a natural deadline. Because you were dining with others, you had to stop at the right time. No, “I’ll just finish this and take a quick lunch break”. It was down your tools and go out. This gave you a hard deadline to finish what needed to be finished before lunch. And when you have a hard deadline, Parkinson’s law comes in. This is “work fills the time available” If you have two hours to finish a task, it will take you two hours. If you only have an hour, it will take you an hour. What happens is that you enter a deeper state of focus when you are under time pressure. That’s how Parkinson’s law works. But it can have the reverse effect. If an email would normally take you 30 minutes to respond to, but you have an hour before your next appointment, that email will take you the full hour to write. This is why procrastination is now a thing; in the 1920s and 30s, it was rare. The natural mealtime deadlines prevented a lot of procrastination. Today, those mealtimes are woolly and ill-defined, removing a natural deadline, causing you to procrastinate. What people ate also had an impact. It was largely fish or meat with vegetables. No HPFs (highly processed foods) or low-value carbs. It was foods that didn’t mess with your blood sugar, which leads to the afternoon slump. Alcohol was often also included. How on earth deep focused work got done in the afternoons, I don’t know. Dinner was an altogether different affair. The time was set, and you dressed for dinner too. The ladies wore evening gowns, and the gentlemen wore dinner suits (tuxedo for those of you living on the other side of the Atlantic). This meant if you did have a job and were not of “independent means”, you had to leave work on time to be home in time to dress for dinner. After dinner was interesting. The ladies would gather together in the drawing room for music and conversation. The gentlemen would retire to the smoking room for brandy, coffee and cigars. There, the day’s business was often discussed. This was the aristocracy, not the middle or working classes. Although even the lower classes treated dinner more formally than we do today. It was the family meal of the day, and everyone was expected to be there. After that, people often wrote letters, read books, or, in the case of people like Winston Churchill, went back to their studies and did some more work. And that was something I have noticed. Because there were no fixed working hours for the upper classes, work occurred at all hours of the day. A lot of work happened after dinner, rarely in the early hours of the day. This gave a lot more flexibility for things like admin and communications. Most letter writing was done late in the day. The founder of the British Intelligence Service (MI6), Sir Mansfield Cumming, would retire to his study after dinner to read through all the papers he’d received that day and send out letters to his agents around the world, often until 2 in the morning. Yet Cumming was famous for two to three-hour lunches and late starts to the day. The problems we have today are caused by on-demand entertainment. There’s always something to watch on YouTube or Netflix. And our sofas are very tempting after a nice dinner. Once there, it’s a real challenge to get up. Take those temptations away, and what else will you do? If you think about that for a moment. If a family had dinner together at 7:00 pm, discussed the day, and afterwards joined in an activity, they would be spending quality time together every day. Then at 9:00 pm, you could go back and clean up your messages, clear any admin tasks for an hour or so and still have time for reading or a hobby. It’s often our fixation with work-life balance that puts unnecessary barriers in our day. No personal stuff during office hours and no work stuff in our personal time. And yet, what do we do in our personal time? Spend hours in front of a screen, not talking with our family or friends, instead sending WhatsApp messages and commenting on social media posts. Cal Newport and Tim Ferriss write their books late in the evening. In Cal Newport’s case, he spends time with his young family until they go to bed, and then goes to his home office and writes for two or three hours. Cal Newport is a good example because he’s completely rejected social media, so he has time to write after his kids have gone to bed. Rest was taken very seriously in the 1920s and 30s. A lot of it was social. Parties and weekend getaways. I’ve spoken about Ian Fleming’s work habits before, particularly when he was in Jamaica writing the next James Bond book. But when he was back in London, he still worked in very much the same way. Mornings were intensely focused work, followed by a long lunch, then letters, and then home for dinner, or out with a friend. Afterwards, he would go to his study and edit a manuscript or read through the papers he’d received from his foreign correspondents around the world. (He was the foreign news editor at The Sunday Times Newspaper) The most noticeable thing I learned from this era has been to structure your days around meal times. I now do intense creative work in the mornings, followed by more leisurely afternoons, and then, after dinner, go back to doing some work for an hour or two. I still work for around eight to ten hours a day, but I find that my energy levels remain strong whenever I am working. There are plenty of breaks throughout the day where I can socialise, spend time with my family and still get a lot of work done. And then there was movement. A lot of movement. The 1920s and 30s were a lot less convenient than they are today. This meant we had to walk a lot more than we do now. Weirdly, people have become obsessed with their step count today. They struggle to get even 8,000 steps in. And gyms are everywhere. There were no gyms, and nobody was counting steps back then. They didn’t have to. It was natural to walk 10,000+ steps every day. If you wanted food, you had to prepare it; there was no app to order it. Although the upper classes did have servants who could produce it for them when necessary. But given that refrigerators and microwaves were not a thing then, a sudden order of food would have resulted in a cold meat salad and not much else. As an aside, just do a search for 1950s New York or London and look at the images. There’s a significant difference between the size of people then and people today. Yet, no gyms, no smartwatches calculating steps, sleep cycles, or anything else. It was purely natural. Real food, not processed rubbish, plenty of natural movement, and no gyms. If you want to be more productive every day, move more. This is really what balance is all about. The so-called work-life balance is a modern concept, but what really matters at life level is the movement-rest balance. With the right movement-rest balance, your productivity will naturally increase. You will be a lot less mentally tired, and when you do move, you can map out what you will do next. I find that the biggest benefit of working from home has been that I can get up between work sessions to do the laundry or take Louis out for his walk. It gives me a natural mental break, and I do something physical. That refreshes my brain, and I can come back and do some more mental work feeling energised. I know it will be impossible to turn back the clock and go back to living the way people did in the 1920s. Technology and cultural changes would make that impossible. However, there are things we can do, as people did back then, that will naturally increase our productivity. First, focus on the rest-movement balance. If you’re mentally tired, do something physical instead of collapsing on the sofa. If you’re physically tired, do something mental. And move more than you currently do. We have become alarmingly sedate today. Dance while you’re cooking or making tea or coffee (I do that hahaha) Eat real food, not processed rubbish, and take proper lunch breaks. Get out, move and socialise if you can. Treat them as a non-negotiable. Be relaxed about work-life balance. It’s not natural. There will be times when the best thing you can do is to clear some backlogs in the evening, and equally, there are times when the best thing you can do at 3:00 pm is go out for a walk or hang out the washing. Another aside. The worst invention has been the tumble dryer. Before we had them, we had to hang out the washing. This involved bending down to pick up clothes from the washing basket and then reaching up to hang them on the line. Possible one of the best workouts you would ever get. I know today’s episode has been different. I hope you’ve found it interesting. It’s well worth reading some of these older novels to learn how people used to live their lives. Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very active, yet productive week.
#415
April 12 · 13 min
How to Find Your Purpose in Retirement
Podcast 412 Continuing my series on designing the “perfect” retirement, this week, I share some insights on one of the most common fears of retirement, that of losing your purpose. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 411 Hello, and welcome to episode 412 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. Throughout our lives, there is usually some goal or purpose we are attempting to achieve. When at school, it’s to pass our exams so we can go on to university or to get a job in a specific field. When we begin our careers, we are often driven to work hard to get promoted. Or at least that’s how the theory goes. The trouble is, if you step back from these “goals”, they seem to be pushed onto us by our parents, society and our peers. It’s rare for anyone to step away from this blueprinted path and set their own course. In the past, people who did not follow the well-worn path would have been politely described as “eccentric”, or impolitely “weird”. I remember back in 2002, when I quit law and flew to Korea to teach English, my friends and colleagues could not understand why I would give up a career in law to teach English. Yet, my heart was not in law. It always felt wrong. If I am being honest, I believe my motivation for studying law and working in a law firm was purely about status and about living a life that other people wanted me to live. Coming to Korea turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. I discovered my purpose: to help other people, and I found the medium through which I could do that: teaching. It’s what I still do today. I help people through teaching. In our working lives, it’s easy to have a purpose. It might not be our true purpose, but climbing the promotion ladder does seem to give us a purpose. How high up the ladder can we climb? Yet, chasing the next promotion is never going to be a life’s purpose. It might be a career goal, but ultimately, it will end at some point, and that ending point will unlikely be within your control. I’m reminded of one of England’s top lawyers, Lord Jonathan Sumption. Lord Sumption was a celebrated barrister, rising to the top of the legal profession when he became a judge at the Supreme Court. The mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court judges in England is 70, so when Lord Sumption turned 70, he retired from the legal profession. However, his real passion was never for law. That was his career, and he was very good at it. His real passion was for medieval history, and today Lord Sumption is regarded as one of the leading historians of that era. He continues to write books and talk on the subject. Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs in his brilliant Unleash the Power Within seminar. These human needs are: The need for: Certainty - the certainty that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure, and the need for uncertainty and variety - the need for the unknown and new stimuli. The need for significance - the feeling of being unique, important, special or needed and then the need for connection and love - a strong feeling of closeness to someone or something And then there are the two areas that when we are young, we often dismiss, largely because we are so caught up in our own lives. They are the need to contribute and the need to grow. When I first did the associated exercise related to these needs, I did just that. My top two were the need for certainty and the need for significance. (Typical for someone who creates content, funnily enough) I dismissed the needs to contribute and grow. Yet now, I see that these two needs are the source of our purpose. All living beings need to grow. When we stop growing, we start dying. Just look at what happens to muscles when we stop using them. They weaken and whither. That’s your body doing its job. It wants to conserve energy, and if you’re not using an energy-expensive muscle, it will weaken the muscle. That is just another reason it’s important to make sure you do your resistance training every day. (Or at least three to four times a week). Yet growth is not just about the physical; it’s also about the mental. The need to be continuously learning. This is where our hobbies come in. Hobbies such as learning languages, geology, car mechanics, medieval history, and problem-solving keep our brains active. Our brains continue to grow as we learn. A good reason not to try to figure everything out by using customer service or Chat GPT. Use your problem-solving skills to figure it out. And the contribution is where we get our sense of fulfilment. Passing on our knowledge and what we have learned from our life experiences by teaching others. When I worked in law, it always felt like it was just about billable time. How much could we charge the client? I tried to convince myself that I was helping people, but my bosses were not interested in that part. They just wanted to know how much I had billed that week. When I began teaching English to adults in Korea, that changed. It did not matter how many students I had in my classes. I got paid the same. Now I felt I was contributing to someone’s success. Something changed in me, too. I felt excited to go to work every morning. I’d never felt that before, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. It was because each day I got the chance to help people improve their lives and career prospects, and it was a joy to see their progress. If you were to build a retirement around growth and contribution, you would soon find that your purpose becomes clear. For most of us, our purpose is unlikely to be as grand as bringing world peace or finding a solution to global warming. For some, maybe, but for most of us, not likely. Purpose is often much smaller than that. It could be to raise and support your children so they can navigate through their worlds with positivity and pragmatism. For others, it could be, like me, to teach as many people as I can to be better organised and less stressed. The late Prince Philip, who died five years ago, told his daughter, Princess Anne, that to find your purpose, you should find something that you feel you can make an impact on. For Prince Philip, that meant conserving and protecting the planet, as well as helping young people be active through his Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme. He was talking about conservation and climate change in the 1950s, well before it became fashionable to do so. He was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, wrote multiple books on the subject, and was active in climate science. For Princess Anne, it has been, and remains so today, saving children in war-torn environments, animal welfare and hearing dogs for the deaf. Which then leads us to the second problem here. When we retire, it can be very tempting to fill our calendars with all sorts of work in the name of good causes. Don’t do that. You are not going to be able to have an impact on everything. Instead, you want to look at what you are genuinely interested in. Prince Philip gave a 19-year-old Princess Anne some sage advice when she asked him what she should get involved in. He told her that she would be inundated with offers to be a patron of this or that. He advised her that she could never be a patron of everything, so she should choose those in which she had a genuine interest. Ron Dennis, the former owner of the McLaren Formula 1 team, retired from Formula 1 in 2017 and dedicated his retirement to helping young people achieve their aspirations and to become role models for future generations. His experience of working with people like Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Kimi Räikkönen gave him the knowledge and experience to help young sportsmen and women achieve their dreams. There’s likely to be something that you have an interest in. If that can be coupled with your knowledge and experience, then you have something you can contribute, and that, in turn, will give you a sense of purpose. In many ways, the challenge is not about finding purpose; it is narrowing it down to the one or two things that we feel we can have an impact on. The same challenge we faced when in the corporate world is still there in retirement: overcommitting. This is why it’s important not to rush into things when you transition. Explore, think, test, and experience by all means, but set a deadline for refining your activities into something more manageable. One of the wonderful things about the world we live in today is that we can share our ideas and experiences by writing a blog, recording a podcast, or even starting a YouTube channel. The great thing about these avenues is that they need consistency to grow. A weekly podcast does far better than a podcast that rarely adds episodes. This helps you to bring structure into your weeks. You can set aside a day or two each week for your content production. As your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel grows, that in itself gives you a sense of purpose, particularly if it is contributing to making an impact on something you have an interest in. So, if you are struggling to find your purpose, first, don’t overthink it. It’s rarely about solving the world’s problems; it’s more about helping people to better themselves, and as someone with the experience you have, you are in a very strong position to be able to help. Make sure it is something you are interested in, something you enjoy reading about and something you like talking to other people about. If you wake up excited about doing something related to this, then you’ve found your purpose. One of the most inspiring stories I heard about was about two Canadian gentlemen who loved skiing. Each year, they would go skiing together with their families. When they retired, they both decided to take their ski instructor certification and become ski instructors. And that is what they do today. They are both qualified ski instructors, and each winter they spend their days teaching people to ski. This keeps them fit and strong and brings an incredible social experience. I hope this has helped. If you have any questions around your retirement or impending retirement, let me know. I’m happy to answer your questions in this podcast. And don’t forget, I have recently launched a brand new programme called Designing the Perfect Retirement. This programme sets out a blueprint for you to create a retirement you find fulfilling and inspiring, and that keeps you fit, healthy and active. In addition, this programme gives you access to a community where you can share experiences and advice. I will put the details for this programme in the show notes. It just remains for me now to wish all a very, very productive week.

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