This week, I have a special episode for you. 

A second interview with Dr Kourosh Dini. 

In this episode, we talk about rationalisation and how to change our approach to many of the false beliefs that come from it.

We also discussed pens and paper and a little more about managing ADHD.

Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work.

Newsletter: https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/ Waves of Focus https://wavesoffocus.com/ on SMART goals https://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/

Is it possible to expand time? Literally, no. But there is a way to find more time if you’re willing to use these techniques.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Subscribe to my Substack 

Take The NEW COD Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script | 345

Hello, and welcome to episode 345 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

Common phrases you will hear are “I don’t have time” or “I wish I had more time”, and yet you already have all the time you need.

The problem is not time, the problem is often the amount of things we want to do in the time we have. 

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, life was simple. Find food and water, make babies and stay safe. Neglecting either of those three things would result in some serious issues—the biggest of which would be death. 

Given that human evolution is slow, we are not best suited to deal with hundreds of emails and messages, requests from bosses, finding child care, commuting to and from work and all the other modern-day accessories we’ve chosen to add to our lives. 

We cannot expand time, yet if we are unwilling to reduce what we want to do, we will feel overwhelmed and that more modern ailment, the fear of missing out, or FOMO. 

However, there are a few techniques you can use that will give you enough time for the things you want to do if you are willing to try them.

But before I get to how, allow me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Giles. Giles asks, Hi Carl, I’ve done your “perfect week” exercise and realise that my problem is I want to do too much. There isn’t enough time in the day. Do you have any tips on fitting in hobbies and still get enough sleep?

Hi Giles, thank you for your question. 

The good thing is you’ve discovered that no matter what you want to do or feel you must do, you will always be limited by the amount of time available. 

And, now that you’ve done the Perfect Week calendar exercise, you can see what you have left after taking care of your work and family obligations. 

One of the first realisations about finding time was when I learned of Ian Fleming’s writing routine. 

Ian Fleming wrote a new book each year from 1952 to his death in 1964. He never missed a year, even in the year he had his first heart attack in 1961. 

In the early years, Fleming worked For The Sunday Times as their foreign editor, yet he negotiated a two-month vacation each January and February. During those two months, he would fly off to his Jamaican home, Goldeneye and almost from the first day, would begin writing the next book from 9:30 to 12:30. 

After lunch, he would nap, and then the day’s socialising would begin. 

Around 4 pm, he would go back to his writing desk for an hour to review what he had written that morning, and that would be it. 

Four hours a day for six weeks. That produced the first draft of his next book. 

For the rest of the year, he worked his regular job in London. Dealt with any rewrites and began marketing the book that was being published that year. 

If you were to analyse how Ian Fleming managed his time, he wasn’t looking at the day-to-day. He looked at the year as a whole. 

He knew he needed six weeks to write a new novel each year, so he made sure those six weeks were blocked out in his diary before the new year began. 

That’s just six weeks out of fifty-two. 

This is similar to blocking time out for your core work. If you know you need ten hours a week to do your core work, hoping you will find the time is not a sustainable strategy. You won’t, so it will be more a case of hoping you will find the time. 

Those ten hours need to be locked in each week.

Ian Fleming would never have written fourteen James Bond novels if he had “hoped” to find the time to do so. He had to find the time and then protect it. 

You have 168 hours a week and twenty-four each day. Squeezing everything into those twenty-four hours will be tough—almost impossible. Yet, if you were to schedule for the week, where you have 168 hours, things become possible. 

I see many people anxiously trying to find family time every day. It would be nice if you could do that, but you are dealing with other people and your 6 to 9 pm might not be convenient for them. 

Instead, you could agree with your family that certain days or evenings are for family time. For instance, my wife and I ensure that Wednesday afternoons and Saturday evenings are protected for family time. 

It’s lovely because while it is flexible, there’s no need for us to be trying to schedule time. It’s already protected. 

This is all about expanding time. Looking at an individual day is tough; there are a lot of emergencies and unknowns that pop up. However, if you were to establish what you want time for each week (or month), block the time out so you know you have the time to do it, you will always have the flexibility to move things around if things change. 

For example, this week, my wife had an exam to do on Wednesday afternoon, so we rescheduled our family day out to Thursday. All I needed to do was to move a few of my other commitments around so I could still get all my work done that week. 

You can apply the same principles to your work commitments. If you require ten hours a week to get your core work done—the work you are employed to do, not the work you volunteer to do—you can pre-protect that time on your calendar. 

Now, I know many people will object and say they cannot do this because they have to attend meetings. 

That’s fine. Let me ask you a question. What will do more to get the project completed? Having a meeting about the project or working on the project?

If the project objectives have been communicated clearly and roles defined, meetings should not be needed. 

One of the best ways to regain time is to become less accessible. Most people’s time management problems start by being too accessible. Of course, this will depend on the type of work you do. A salesperson, for instance, should be accessible to their customers. But perhaps not necessarily be as accessible to their admin departments or even their sales manager. If you’re producing the results, I can promise you your sales manager will leave you alone. 

When I first began teaching time management and productivity, I was available on all social media channels. I was on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and email. Just to stay on top of all those channels was taking me three hours a day. I don’t have three hours a day to manage all those channels. 

So, now I push everyone towards email. I have a process for dealing with email. Over the years, I have refined it to a point where I can handle over a hundred emails in less than an hour. 

And the final point to make here, Giles, is you don’t have to do everything now. 

Imagine If there’s a period each year when things go a little quiet at work. Perhaps in the summer, it’s quieter than at other times of the year. Maybe July and August is a good time for you to do some of the bigger projects. Then, when you enter the busy times of the year, you can work on the smaller projects. 

One way you can do this is to use a tool such as Todoist, Asana, or Trello that allows you to create boards. You can then create four columns and spread out the activities you want to do. 

For example, in quarter 1, I focus on my biggest projects of the year; I like to kick off the year with a bang. Q2 is focused more on processes and making them more effective and efficient. 

Seeing everything I want to accomplish over the year organised in quarters stops me from becoming anxious about all the things I want to do. 

This also gives you a plan for the year, which in turn helps you to be more focused. 

Again, you can be flexible here. Feel free to move projects around the year so you are working on the right projects at the right time. 

Time can be your friend or enemy. If you don’t harness it, it will be your enemy. If you take control of it, you will find you do have sufficient time for the things you want to do. Perhaps not this week or next, but when you look at things over a quarter or a year, many things become possible. 

I know some of you would like to build an exercise programme into your life. Yet the thought of joining a gym, or yoga class puts you off because you have go to the gym, spend an hour exercising, then shower. After all that it will have eaten up two hours of your time. 

You don’t have to do all that—certainly not initially. You could do some bodyweight exercises at home or go out for a walk. That won’t take up much of your time. I do twenty minutes every day at home. 

As your fitness improves, then you may wish to add a few gym sessions. But that’s not a requirement of being fit and healthy. 

I hope that has helped Giles. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too. It just remains for me to wish you a very very productive week. 

This week, how to process your task manager’s inbox quickly and effectively so you can get focused on what needs to be done.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Ultimate Productivity Workshop 

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Take The NEW COD Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script | 336

Hello, and welcome to episode 336 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One issue that pops up regularly in my coaching programme is an overwhelming inbox. There are too many unclear items left to fester and fill up space, with no clear pathway to dealing with whatever needs to be done. 

Now, it’s true that you need to collect things. If you’re not collecting your commitments and ideas, you soon find yourself forgetting to do the important things you have committed to. However, collecting is just the first part of a three-part process. You also need to organise what you collect and then do the work. 

There are no shortcuts around this. These are the three principles of task management. Collect whatever needs to be collected, organise what you collect and then do the work. 

This is something I have learned the hard way. I’ve collected thousands of items over the years, and in my early days, before I had learned the basic principles, that meant my inbox filled up and just became an overwhelming mess. It was a place I never wanted to visit because it just reminded me of how unproductive and disorganised I was. 

I know those basic principles now: I collect stuff, regularly organise what I collect, and then do the work. 

Today’s podcast is about organising what you collected. I will tell you how to quickly clear your inbox, sort out the important from the unimportant, and, more importantly, get comfortable deleting stuff that is low in importance. 

Oh, and before I forget, Friday this week—that’s the 6th of September— sees the opening session of my Ultimate Productivity Workshop. 

This is your chance to learn the fundamental principles and put them into practice so you can become a master of time management and productivity. 

There are just a few places left, so if you want to become better organised, more productive, and in control of your time, join the workshop today. Details for the event are in the show notes and on my website, Carl Pullein.com.

Okay, on with the show, which means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, “Hi Carl, I am really struggling with my inbox. I put a lot of stuff in there, from ideas to things my wife asks me to do and emails that need a response. 

Each day, I feel I am collecting thirty or more things, and then it takes forever to clear the inbox. I hate doing it, so I don’t. And, of course, that just makes things worse. What can I do to make keeping my inbox manageable. 

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for your question. 

The good news is there are a few changes you can make that will help to reduce the overwhelm caused by an overloaded inbox. 

Let’s first deal with the three questions to ask when you process your inbox. These three questions will clarify what you have and help you to determine if you really need to do them or not. 

The first question is, “Do I need to do it?”

This is designed to clear tasks that have already been done or are no longer relevant because events have moved on. 

You will often add a task like “Find out if Margo has all the documents she needs.” Later that day, Margo may ask you a question about the documents. You now know she has them. The task can be deleted or modified if the question requires you to do something. 

Or you may have been asked by someone to do something only for them to tell you later that the task no longer needs to be done. 

These can all be deleted. 

Similarly, you may have added tasks to look up something or find out more about something, only to look at the task later and wonder what you were thinking. You are no longer interested in the idea. Again, delete these. 

If the task still needs to be done, then move on to the next question, which is: 

What do I need to do?

This question concerns properly defining the task. It’s not good to have a task that simply says, “Tony script.” 

That might have meant something to you when you added it to your inbox, but if you do not need to do the task for a week or two, when the task comes back you’ll be unsure what needs to be done. Make it clear. 

Rewrite the task as something like, “Send Tony the amended voice-over script.” This makes sense. If you are sending Tony many different scripts, you would add the name of the amended script to send so there is no confusion. 

Another type of task to watch out for is the “follow-up” or “chase” task. These are often not tasks. They may be vehicles for completing a task. For example, if you asked Roger for a copy of the script to send to Tony, the task is not really to chase Roger. 

The task is to get a copy of the script to send to Tony. Until you have that script in your procession the task is not complete. Adding another task to chase Roger duplicates the original task. 

Instead, after asking Roger for the task, make a note that you asked Roger for it, add a date you asked, and then reschedule the task. 

Every task in your task manager needs an action verb attached to it, such as call, write, read, review, design, sketch, reply, etc. If a task does not have an action verb, it has not been properly defined. 

You will find that adding a verb helps you to estimate how long something will take. 

For those tasks that are difficult to estimate the time it will take, you can use the “start, continue, finish” method. 

I use this method for a lot of project tasks. For example, when I was writing Your Time Your Way, every Monday to Friday, I had a repeating task that said, “Continue writing book”. This meant I could decide how much time I had available to write the book and not worry about the task itself. 

I knew I was never going to finish writing the book in one day, it was the kind of task that jut needed to done little by little. So, I allocated ninety-minutes a day, five days a week and repeated that for six months. That got the book done. 

The third question is: When am I going to do it?

This is where most other time management and productivity systems go wrong. Establishing whether you need to do the task and defining what needs to be done is pretty universal in the productivity world. Yet, it doesn’t matter how well you define a task if you don’t have time to do it. 

Once you commit yourself to a task, you need to know you have time to do it. That means asking, when are you going to do it? 

How do you do that? Open up your calendar and your task manager and have them side by side. Some task managers can show you your calendar at the same time. Todoist, Tick Tick, and in a couple of weeks, Apple Reminders will do that for you. 

What you are doing is looking to see where you have gaps in your schedule for doing the work. 

Now, the task could be grouped with other similar tasks. Doing your expenses, for instance would be an admin task. Responding to an email would come under your communications. 

But, some tasks may be too big and require a few hours to do. The question then becomes will you do in one go or split it up? 

Your calendar will guide you. You will be able to see where you have time; if not, you can decide whether something else needs to be rescheduled for you to do the task by the date it’s due. 

Now, when you start going through your inbox and asking these questions, you will be slow. Remember when you learned to ride a bicycle? You didn’t jump on the bike and go. There was a slow process of learning and building muscle memory. 

The same will happen when processing your inbox. It will be slow at first as you’re building your mental muscle memory. 

I’ve been asking these three questions for years. It takes me very little time now, yet it was a slow process when I first began. The only option you have is to stick with it. As time goes on, you will get faster and faster. 

You will also pick up the patterns. The different requests you get will fall into similar groups, which helps you quickly decide what something is and how long it will take. 

Be patient and follow the process. 

And… Do not be afraid to delete stuff. If it’s important, it will come back. 

If you are using the Time Sector System, you have a bit of an advantage. With the Time Sector System, the only tasks that matter are the ones you need to do this week. Anything else can be moved to your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or Long-term and on Hold folders. You can decide when you will do those tasks when you next do a weekly planning session. 

So there you go, Jeff. 

This is a process game. The more you follow the process, the faster you become. You also get comfortable deleting and delegating tasks. The goal is not to accumulate tasks; it’s the reverse. The goal is always to eliminate. The less you have to do this week, the more focused you will be and the more flexibility you have for dealing with the unknowns that will inevitably come in. 

I hope that has helped answer your question. Thank you so much for sending it. 

Don’t forget Friday is the start of September’s ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP. You can register by going to my website. If you are already registered, I will be sending you the workbook in the next day or two. 

Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

What elements do you need to have productive days consistently? That’s the question I’m exploring this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 247 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 247 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One part of the productivity mix that rarely gets talked about is personal maintenance. By that I don’t mean the organising, structuring, apps or systems, but the deeper maintenance areas that are generally neglected, yet in the end have a bigger impact on your productivity than anything else. 

For instance, how effective are you when you don’t get enough sleep? I know from my own personal experience if I get less than six hours sleep, my productivity is terrible. I generally can do an hour or two of focused work in the morning, but after that I find it difficult to focus, I often have to take a nap and my mood and energy levels are low. That’s certainly not a great place to be if have a lot of deadlines to meet. 

This week’s question is about the non-obvious productivity essentials that when in balance, helps you to stay organised, focused and calm no matter what is thrown at you. 

So, with that said, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Jenna. Jenna asks, Hi Carl, I’ve read a lot of your blog posts and I understand the importance of using a task manager, a calendar and notes, but I often find myself wondering if there is something deeper or bigger that is also important for being productive. Is there something I am missing?

Hi Jenna, thank you for your question.

Yes, you are right. There is a deeper, more personal part to being more productive than just using task managers and calendars. The task managers and notes apps you choose to use is the sexy part of productivity, yet really when it comes to measuring your effectiveness, the tools you use will have very little effect. 

What will have an effect are less sexy, so don’t get talked about enough. Let me begin with sleep as I have already mentioned that. 

We know that getting a good night’s sleep leaves you feeling great. You have more energy through the day, you can focus better and your mood is positive. According to Matthew Walker, a renown sleep scientist and author of the book: Why We Sleep, get less than six hours sleep and all sorts of problems will manifest themselves. For instance, a lack of sleep effects your appetite. Your body will tell you you are hungry when in reality you are not. This will lead you to snack, and more likely snack on the wrong kind of foods—donuts, bread, cookies and other sugar rich foods. 

Not only does a lack of sleep contribute to weight gain, but because of the types of foods we crave when suffering from a lack of sleep, we get the post meal slump, which leaves us feeling tired and unfocused. 

Then in the evening, when you should be spending some quality time with the people you care about, your mood is not great. You’re tired, have a serious lack of energy and will be uncommunicative. Over time, this will put a strain on your relationships which in turn will result in you being focused on the problems that causes instead of the work that needs to be done. 

Now, how much sleep you need at a personal level will be different from other people. I know from my own experiments, I need around six and a half to seven hours, other people need closer to eight. 

To find out how much sleep you need, you can do a simple experiment. For seven days, sleep with no alarm. Let yourself wake up naturally. This might not be possible when you are working, but it is a great experiment to do when you are on holiday or taking a vacation. 

Make a note of how many hours sleep you got, and then average it out once you have seven straight days of data. That will give you your daily sleep requirement. 

Once you know your sleep requirement, build that into your daily schedule. For example, I generally need to wake up around 7 AM, and I like to read in bed before going to sleep, so my bedtime is 11:30pm. This way, I can read for thirty to forty minutes before going to sleep. 

Your sleep time needs to be protected. It’s huge part of being effective every day, so compromise of what you each day, but never compromise of getting your sleep requirement each day. 

Next up is physical exercise. Now, we are not talking about going to a gym every day or running every morning. Of course, if that’s what you like to do, do it. But exercise really means movement. 

Human beings are designed to move. We are not designed to sit around all day. 

So what does this mean, how much movement do we need each day. Well, this is difficult to measure, but for most people we need to be doing at least thirty minutes walking each day. Those thirty minutes should be strung together. 

Now, if you are over thirty-five you need to be doing a little lifting each week too. From around the age of thirty, you will be losing between 3 and 8% of your muscle mass each decade, which increases exponentially after sixty. That might not sound very much, but over time this is going to make you weaker and less effective with your daily activities. 

Again, this doesn’t mean you need to be going to a gym. But you can take advantage of cleaning chores. I wash my own car for example, it has me moving my arms, shoulders, squatting and lifting. I also clean my office twice a week. I will move the chairs, sofa and tables to get the vacuum in, all designed, not only to keep my office clean, but to get some movement in. 

You were designed to move, so move. 

Another area to look at is your diet. We know what you eat has a huge effect on your health and well-being. Eat a diet rich in processed foods and refined carbohydrates, and your health will decline to a point where your future self will not be spending time doing activities you enjoy, but rather spending it in and out of hospital. Is that the vision you have for your later years? I hope not. 

What we want is to live an active, healthy life and that involves enough sleep, a little exercise and a good diet. 

There’s a lot written on diet and eating well and I’m certainly no expert in this area. However, my wife and I decided to remove refined carbohydrates from our diet earlier this year and it’s been amazing. I no longer feel hungry through the day. My energy levels remain consistent through the day and I feel fantastic. No more headaches, indigestion or fatigue. 

If you want to learn more about what to eat and when, I would recommend books by Dr Jason Fung, particularly the Obesity Code and Dr Mark Hyman. These doctors have done a lot of research into what to eat for optimal health and will open you eyes to how a lot of the food we are eating is damaging our health and well-being. 

So, there are three foundational areas where, with a little attention, we can build a strong support system to our productive ways. 

Ultimately, you will be at your most productive when you are well rested, physically fit and supported by the right kind nutrition.

However, that takes care of your physical well-being, what about your mental well-being. Something that has gain a lot of attention in recent years. 

Part of the problem here is society has become a lot more do, do, do, with little time for rest, rest, rest. However, we need time for ourselves, to reset, think and reflect. 

This does not mean hours spent watching mindless TV shows and escapism. What it means is pursuing activities that bring us joy. For instance, doing puzzles, spending ten minutes a day meditating and reflecting. 

How can we bring these elements into our lives? Well, create a personal morning routine. You only need thirty minutes, but those thirty minutes are packed with setting you up for an amazing day. 

To give you an example of a morning routine. I start my day by making coffee, while my coffee is brewing, I do two minutes of stretches. Nothing strenuous, just some light shoulder and core stretching to get my blood flowing. 

Once my coffee is brewed, I sit down and write my journal for ten to twenty minutes. This has become my favourite time of the day. I get to reflect on how the day went yesterday, capture my thoughts and brainstorm ideas that may have come to me through the night. 

I end my journal writing by listing out my two objectives for the day. Then my day begins. 

I would also recommend you have an evening closing down routine. This does not need to be a lot of time. For me, it’s really about deciding what must be done tomorrow and a quick look to see what appointments I have the next day. In all, I would say my closing down routine takes around five to ten minutes. 

Finally, give yourself thirty minutes or so with the people you love and care about. One thing my wife and I have done pretty much since we began dating over twenty years ago is to chat for at least thirty minutes each day. We both live busy lives, but no matter where we are in the world, we will alway have our thirty minutes. 

We humans are social animals. We need that connection. No matter how busy you are, you will always be able to find thirty minutes or so to connect with the people you love. Make it a part of your day. You will never regret it. 

So, there you go, Jenna. Many of the things I’ve mentioned here, I know is common sense, yet so many people neglect these basic areas. It’s why I have written and spoken about designing your “perfect week”. This is where you create a bank calendar in your calendar app, and pollute it with the activities and routines you want to adopt. Doing it this way you will surprise yourself how much time you really have. 

I hope this has helped and thank you for your question, Jenna.

And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

So, you’ve created a fantastic system for keeping yourself organised and on top of everything being thrown at you, and you’re happy with the apps you have that support you. Now, how do you stay consistent using your system?

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 246 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 246 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

A common issue I come across with becoming better organised and more productive is staying consistent using the system you have developed. 

The fun part of becoming more productive and better managing your time is the setting up of a system, choosing the apps you are going to use and getting stuff into that system. The hard part is staying consistent with it over time. 

The problem is once the excitement of creating something new is over, you still have to do the work and the work has to be done day after day. That’s the boring part and it’s then that most people’s systems break down. 

This week’s question is all about this and I hope my answer will shed some light on another part of a strong, supporting system that often hides in the shadows but needs to be developed so your system disappears into the background and a process of doing your work comes to the foreground.

That means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, Hi Carl, for years I’ve been searching for a productivity system that I can stick with, but I have never been able to stay with any system. I’ve tried them all from GTD to your Time Sector System. It’s always exciting at first believing this time I have the right one, only to find after two or three months I’m a disorganised mess again. Am I missing something?

Hi Greg, thank you for your question.

I don’t think you are missing anything essential, but you may be missing one element. That element is a process.

Let me explain. Your productivity system is only a system. It’s a place to collect things you need to pay attention to. Things like email and messages that require replies, tasks that come your way and meeting requests that need to be put on your calendar. 

However, a productivity system is just that, a system. Once you have that in place you need to develop the processes that allow your system to work and it’s the process that is boring. It’s just something you do day after day. 

However, while at first following a process can be boring, over time it disappears into the background and becomes more of a habit you no longer need to think about. A task comes to mind, and you collect it into your task manager. A meeting request drops into your inbox and you check your calendar to make sure you have the time to attend the meeting. These actions are done automatically without thinking.

Unfortunately, to get to that point, you have to go through boredom. It’s boring to look at the same list every day and check off the tasks. It’s boring to sit down for ten minutes at the end of the day and plan the next and it’s boring to review the same projects week after week in a weekly planning session. 

Once the excitement of a new system and set of apps disappear, you’re left with having to do the work and that’s not fun. 

I’m reminded of a story Simon Jefferies, a former British Special Forces soldier talked about when he was going for selection to the special forces. The first part of that selection process is two weeks in the Welsh mountains in the UK where every day you are given a map reference point, which you have to memorise, a heavy backpack and told to get there within a certain amount of time. The problem is, you don’t know how long you have to get there. Oh, and each day the weight of your backpack is steadily increased. 

Simon talked about simply focusing on the process. Waking up at 4:30 AM, preparing his feet, putting his boots on and doing the climb. When he finished, he made sure he ate a meal that would aid recovery, sorted his feet out, washed and dried his socks and got to sleep as quickly as he could. 

His goal was to pass selection and he knew if he followed a process every day and focused on getting through the day, he would achieve his goal. 

It was boring, but it helped him through the relentless pain, tiredness and boredom of climbing up mountains every day. 

Most people quit—to give you an example, around 200 people start selection every year, and by the end of that first two weeks, 60 to 70 per cent have dropped out. 

Giving myself ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to process my inboxes and plan for tomorrow is boring. But I also know the consequences of not doing it. Not knowing what my important tasks are for the day and where my appointments are before I start the day never leads to a good result. Something will inevitably be missed and that always leads to a lot more work as I scramble to get back on top of my work. 

My goal is to have an effortless day. To get my most important tasks done and to move projects forward. I know, that those ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day give me an advantage and stack the odds in my favour. Not doing it leaves me vulnerable to the unexpected things I should have known about and missed appointments and tasks. 

Following the process is not about the new and shiny apps, it’s about doing the work. New apps, and new organisation systems don’t help you do your work. They destroy your productivity because you are having to learn how to use these new apps, transfer all your old data across and deal with the unfamiliar. The more familiar you are with your apps and system, the more productive you will be. 

So how do you build days that feel effortless? Well, start the day the same way each day. I recommend you develop a morning routine that you enjoy—something to look forward to. For me, that’s a cup of coffee and sitting down for ten to twenty minutes with my journal. For others that could be ten minutes of meditation, a walk in nature or some exercise. Choose things you enjoy doing. 

The first forty-five minutes of your day needs to be dedicated to you. If you have a young family, adjust your wake-up time so you get your morning routines in before your kids wake up. It’s about making your morning routines a non-negotiable part of your day and not something you will sacrifice at the first opportunity. 

Next is to find a period of two to three hours each day for deep, focused work. Now this applies to weekends too. You may not be focusing on your work-related tasks on a weekend, but there are always things that need doing around your home on a weekend. Treating weekends differently to the working week will not serve you. Morning routines are done seven days a week, not just for work days. The same applies to your two to three hours of deep focused work. 

Us humans were not designed to sit around all day doing nothing. We’ve evolved to be incredibly smart, flexible organisms and our bodies need movement. Now we are not talking about 180 mile bike rides or 20 mile runs on a weekend, but a gentle walk for thirty to forty minutes, cleaning your home and going out to the supermarket for the weekly shop all things you could build into your weekend routine. 

Now, as for when you do your deep focused work, that will depend on the kind of work you do. For me, I have control over my schedule each day so, I fix my focused work for between 9:30 and 11:30 AM. I also have another focused work session between 7 and 9pm. That’s the nature of my work. I create content and coach people. I do my calls generally later in the evening or early in the morning and I protect my afternoons for exercise and errands. 

For you it may mean you need to find two to three hours of focused work between 9 am and 5 pm. I would try to do your focused work as early in the day as you can. It’s less likely those unexpected emergencies will arise in the morning—they have a habit of rearing the ugly heads in the mid to late afternoon. 

Now, this is where your daily planning and focus time connect. It’s during your daily planning, that you decide what needs to be done in your focus time. Don’t leave it to chance. If you do that, you’ll open up your tasks manager and look for something to do and you will be presented with a long list of tasks. Inevitably you will seek out the easiest tasks. What you do in your focus time needs to plan in advance so that when the time arrives, you get straight into it. 

The biggest challenge with all this is it takes time to develop the processes and develop habits. Following this advice for one day is a great start, but it has to be repeated the next and the next until you do it without thinking. I cannot imagine going to bed not knowing what I need to do tomorrow. Equally, it would feel incredibly strange not to wake up in the morning, make coffee and sit down for at least ten minutes to write in my journal. These are habits I’ve worked on for the last five years or so. 

Now you might think finding new apps to play with is all part of the fun, and in a way, you would be right. But that approach is never going to improve the thing you want to improve—your time and task management. However, when you focus on your processes for doing your work, you will find not only do you get the joy of creating something yourself, but you also get to tinker and optimise your processes over time. 

I’ve been down the road of app switching and while there is an initial buzz in setting up a new app, it will inevitably descend into disappointment when you discover something you used in your old app doesn’t work in your new app. And then the search for another new app starts. 

Building your own processes is far more fun. You have ownership of the process, you get to share it with your colleagues and it will grow with you. 

I hope that has helped, Greg. Remember, you won’t find what you’re looking for in a new system or app. You will find what you are looking for in your processes. Look at these, build your own and enjoy the process of optimisation and fine-tuning.

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. 

What do you need to pay attention to if you are to build yourself a solid, sustainable productivity system?

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 245 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 245 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

I am usually asked to help someone when their productivity and or time management has collapsed. This usually happens because, since the day they started their first job, they have been able to breeze through their work, relying on their boss or customers to tell them what to do. 

I know when I started my work life, for the best part of the first ten years, there was also someone in the background telling me what I needed to do next and holding me accountable.

Inevitably, there comes a time when you will be given responsibility for your own work. You’re given more freedom to decide what to do with your time and you too now need to guide new members of the company and tell them what needs to happen next. 

It’s at this point if you do not have a system to manage your work, projects and responsibilities that things begin to crack and fall apart. 

So, this week, I am looking at what you can o to avoid this from happening and to help you transition from where you are today to the next level—whatever that may be—be that promotion to management or starting your own business.

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 Riccardo. Riccardo asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently been promoted, and I’ve found myself drowning in work. I am having to take a lot of work home and working late into the night and at weekends. Do you have any tips on managing a sudden increase in workload? 

Hi Riccardo, thank you for your question and congratulations on your recent promotion. 

One of the most important things you can do to be prepared for increasing workloads is to have a ‘how can I do it better mindset’. When I learned the power of this simple question, a lot of positive changes happened for me. 

To give you one example, many years ago, not long after I became a teacher, I was assigned what was called a free talking class. This class took a topical news article, which we read out in class, then discussed it. Having one of these classes a week was manageable, but when I had to prepare fief articles for the week, what was originally an hour of preparation turned into six hours. 

I had to find a suitable article, highlight difficult words and phrases and create three to five questions to get the students talking. 

Spending six hours on a Sunday looking for and preparing articles was not my idea of using my time on a Sunday well. So, I asked the question: how can I do this better?

I soon found I could spend the week collecting articles into a read list as I was reading the news each day—this was something I did every day anyway. If I came across an article that might be suitable for my free talking classes, I could save the article (I had to use my browser’s bookmarks for this back then—no easy-to-use read later services then) and all I needed to do on a Sunday was to prepare the document. I managed to reduce those six hours down to ninety minutes. 

It’s a simple yet powerful question we can all use with tasks and jobs that we feel are taking too much time—How can I do it better? 

If you are ever feeling overloaded and stretched to your limit, it usually means the processes you have in place are too complex, or you haven’t fine-tuned them, so they work seamlessly.

One of the reasons so few people ever become consistent with daily and weekly planning is because the first few times you do it, it takes a long time. It would not be unusual for your first weekly planning session to take two hours or more. Likewise, your daily planning will likely take thirty-plus minutes when you first begin doing it. 

However, those first few are important because as you are doing them, you learn what needs looking at and what doesn’t. 

In David Allen’s Getting Things Done Book, he advocates reviewing all your projects each week. Yet, most of your projects don’t need reviewing so frequently. I have about twelve projects left for this year. To follow the GTD standard, I’d be reviewing projects that are not moving forward right now. That’s a waste of time. I know these projects are not moving forward, nothing needs to be done on them for the next two to three months, so I don’t review them. 

The only projects I look at are my current, active ones. These are moving forward and all I am looking for is what needs to happen next. 

Let me give you an example of a small project I have at the moment. 

I am re-doing my profile photos so I can update my website. This small project was complicated a few weeks ago when I had my eyes tested and ordered a new pair of glasses. These glasses took a couple of weeks to arrive, and now they are at the opticians having the new lenses put in. 

This is complicated by a big public holiday this weekend, so I don’t expect my new glasses to arrive for around ten days. As I don’t know when they will arrive, I cannot book an appointment at the photographers. So, this project is on hold for now.

This means that when I did my weekly planning on Saturday, that project was skipped. Everything I needed to do is done. I’ve got the new glasses, my eyes have been tested, and I now have to wait for ten days or so for the new glasses to arrive. Nothing will happen next week. So, that project is not reviewed.

Now, I do have the next task in my task manager—book photographer—but it is in my next week folder. Nothing needs to be done this week, so I don’t need it coming up and distracting me. I will see that task when I do my next weekly planning session, and I can decide if I want to bring things forward or not then. 

Everything you do can be improved by a process. Once you have a process in place, you can then apply the question: how can I do it better? To the process. 

Now, you didn’t mention what your old role was and so I don’t know what changes have occurred with your new role, Riccardo, but let’s say you were previously a salesperson and now you are a sales manager. This is actually quite a big change in a person’s work. 

You’ve gone from managing customers and prospects to managing salespeople who do that. So, the first step is to establish what your new core work is.

Is it allocating targets to your team? Developing forecasts for your boss? Hiring new salespeople? Training your sales team? 

This is the first step. What is your core work? Once you know what your core work is, what does that look like at a task level? 

Let’s take forecasting as an example. We might be told our new responsibility is to present a monthly sales forecast every month at the departmental heads meeting. That’s great. We know what one of our core tasks is. However, what does that look like at a task level? 

The danger here is we add a task that says: Prepare this month's sales forecast, yet is that really the task? What does that involve? 

It could be you need to collect current sales data, review last year's sales data and calculate your forecast based on market conditions and past sales. That’s not a single task. That’s a minimum of three tasks. 

If this were your core work, you might have a task in the second week of the month telling you to collect the data. In the third week, you could add a second task to read up on the current market environment and perhaps add the new figures to your sales forecast file. 

Now, what was possibly a four-hour task has been broken down into tasks that take no more than an hour or so. 

You set these tasks as recurring tasks in your task manager, so they come up when they are due, so you no longer need to keep them stored in your head. 

Now to deal with the current issue of having to take work home with you, what is the work you are taking home? What’s preventing you from dealing with that work while you are at work? 

Now, a lot of this extra work is caused by too many meetings throughout the day and interruptions throughout the working day. 

The first step here is to gain control of your calendar. This begins by blocking times out in the day when you are not available for meetings. The great thing here is you do not need to block a great deal of time. Most people find if they can get two hours a day for focused work, that is enough to stay on top of the critical work. This leaves six hours each day for meetings and being available for other people. 

Ideally, you want to block the same time out each day, but that may not be possible. If not, create the blocks, and when you do the weekly planning and move them around so they fit into your days for the following week. 

Next up dealing with interruptions. Here you need to learn to say no. That’s hard, particularly for salespeople, because they come from a place where everything is possible and yes is the default. 

Again, this doesn’t need a lot of effort. I remember when I was working in a law office, my boss had a fantastically simple system. If he need time to work on a difficult case, he would close his office door. This meant we all knew if his door was closed, we could not interrupt him. If it was open, we could walk in and ask anything. 

My boss closed his door around three or four times a week, and everyone knew the “code”—so to speak. 

Don’t be afraid of closing your door. If you explain to your team when your door is closed not to disturb you, your team will respect your request. 

I remember, no matter how urgent something was, if my boss’s door was closed, I would have to wait. If I had a screaming client on the end of the phone, I would calmly explain my boss was unavailable at the moment, but as soon as it was available, I would ask him and get back to them. For four years, I never had an issue with that. 

So, Riccardo, the first step is to list out your new core work. What does that look like at a task level? Get those tasks set up in your task manager or calendar as recurring tasks or events. 

Get comfortable blocking time out on your calendar for focused work. Then when you are in a focused work session, make sure nobody disturbs you. 

Finally, make sure you are doing a weekly daily planning session. Remember, not all projects need attention every week. All that really matters is what needs your attention next week. In the daily planning session review your tasks and appointments for the next day and make sure they are realistic. Don’t try and be a hero and convince yourself you can attend six meetings and clear fifty tasks—you can’t, and you won’t. Get real. 

I hope these ideas help, Riccardo. 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. 

Podcast 244

Becoming more productive and being better at managing your time is not about the hustle culture or squeezing every spare minute out of the day. It needs to be more human than that. That is what we’re looking at this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 244 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 244 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

Productivity has a bad name. Many believe it’s about maximising your time doing work, so your company can squeeze the most value out of you without having to pay you more. 

But becoming more productive and better at managing your time is and should never have been, about companies exploiting their workforce. Personal productivity is about building balance into our lives. A life where we can earn a reasonable income and have time to spend with the people we care about without becoming overwhelmed, stressed or burnt out. 

But how can we do that with all the demands on our time? Well, that’s what we will be looking at in this week’s episode. 

Which means, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Ann. Ann asks, Hi Carl, how do I convince my team that becoming more productive is to help them, not just the company? Every time I try to teach them to be more productive or be better with their time, they don’t want to know.

Hi Ann, thank you for your question. 

This is one of the sad things about the work of time management and productivity. For a lot of people, they think it’s all corporate mumbo-jumbo and is designed to “exploit the workers”. 

Now, perhaps in the early days of mass manufacturing, that was the case. Hungry, ambitious factory owners wanted to squeeze every last drop of energy from their workers so they could maximise their profits from their endeavours.

However, we’ve come a long way since then. Today, we are much more aware of the need for adequate rest. Indeed many countries have laws protecting workers from exploitative bosses. The European Union countries have what is called the Working Time Directive which sets limits on the number of hours workers can be asked to work in a week. 

In recent years, we’ve had the hustle culture trend—where if you want to build your own business you need to be pushing 100 hours+ each week. This has been widely advertised by the likes of Elon Musk and Gary Vaynerchuk as a good thing. 

Well, is it? To me that depends. 

In the early days of starting my own business, the business was my total focus. I was working up to eighteen hours a day because I was working two jobs. I had my regular teaching work and in my spare time I was developing my online business. 

The thing is I never felt exhausted or close to burn out because I was loving every minute. I couldn’t wait to start the day and I never wanted the day to end. Sleep, back then was an inconvenience to me. 

But that kind of working is not sustainable in the long-term. 

And that’s the key to this. There will be times when you need to pull out all the stops and work long hours. But that should never be the default position. 

Very much like when we lived an agrarian life. The years went in seasons. The spring time was for planting, the summer was for nurturing and protecting our crops. The autumn was the harvesting of those crops and winter was for relaxation and maintenance. Spring and autumn were our busiest times. During those periods we were working from daybreak to sunset, likely seven days a week. In the summer and winter, we worked less hours. 

Now the way I see productivity and time management is by getting to grip with how we are using our time, we can build balanced and sustainable lives. We have time for our relationships, to take care of our health and to develop our knowledge and skills while working a full-time job. 

It’s not just about our work. Work is a part of our lives, but it is only a part of our lives. 

When you think about it, the average person works forty-hours a week, yet a week has 168 hours. That’s roughly a quarter of our week. What do we do with the other three quarters? 

Becoming better at managing your time and ultimately more productive allows you to complete all your work tasks within those forty hours, so you can enjoy the other 126 hours. That may mean ensuring you get at least seven hours sleep each evening. Taking some time out for exercise to protect your health and for spending quality time with the people that matter to you. That to me is the best reason for getting better at managing time and being more productive. 

But it is more than that. Being more aware of time and what we do with the time helps us to focus more on what is really important to us. 

It’s true at some point, our career will be high up on our list of priorities. Most people want to advance their careers, perhaps they have a goal to become a leader in their organisation, or ultimately to start their own business. There will be times when eight hours a day will not be enough to achieve what you want to achieve. That’s fine, as long as it’s temporary. 

What I find with the most productive people is they make their productive and time management practices a part of who they are. They develop processes that while are flexible to deal with the unexpected, enable them to have the time available for exercise, family and friends. 

I remember reading an article about Cheryl Sandberg a few years ago, that described how her mornings were focused on getting her children ready for school. She ensured there was always time for a family breakfast before her kids headed out to school and she headed to the office. Equally, she made sure she was there when her kids returned from school later in the day. 

It’s her time management and productivity practices that help her to manage her family life as well as her professional life. Any article you read about Cheryl Sandberg will show you where her priorities lay. 

And that’s where your Areas Of Focus step in. It’s these eight areas that inform you where you priorities are. Once you know what your areas of focus are, what they mean to you and what you need to do each week to make sure you are giving sufficient time to them, you can build those activities into your weekly life. 

For instance, keeping fit and healthy is a core area of focus for me. So, I have a two hour block each day for exercise. One my favourite times of the day is the hour my wife and I take Louis for his daily walk. He gets on with his thing and we can talk and laugh. 

While we don’t schedule these walks on a weekly basis, it’s something we do plan each day. 

A couple of questions you can ask your colleagues, Ann, is what is important to them? What would they like to spend more time doing? This moves the narrative away from the word “productivity” to something more interesting. 

Now, you may get answers like spending more time sitting on a beach drinking cocktails. That’s fine, because what you want to do is to connect the notion of better time management and productivity with the idea that by being more intentional with their time, they can build habits and practices that will enable them to do more of the things they want to do. 

Nobody wants to be sitting on a beach with a cocktail in hand worrying about what’s in their inbox. While you might be at the beach, you’re not mentally there. You’re still at work. That’s not a good place to be. 

Having processes and systems in place allows you to completely turn off from work and focus yourself on being present with the things you are doing in the moment. When my wife and I are walking Louis, I’m not thinking about the email I need to respond to or the next YouTube video I will be recording. I am present. 

Time management isn’t really about managing time. You cannot do that because time is a fixed resource. What we can manage is the activity we do in the time we have available. So, the only question we need to answer is what are we going to do with the time we have each day? 

How much sleep do you want to get each day? How much time would you like to spend exercising, socialising, resting and doing your work? This is where creating a calendar and calling it your perfect week helps. 

With your “perfect week” calendar, you start with the things you want to do on a regular basis. For instance, I like to have ninety minutes each day for exercise and an hour a day for walking Louis. I try to get seven hours sleep a night and I like to have an hour at the end of the day for reading and learning. 

So, these are scheduled on my perfect week calendar. In total, I like to have ten and a half hour a day for sleep and my own activities. Eating takes up around two hours a day—I like to cook dinner as it gets me away from the computer screen. So in total I get to spend half my twenty four hours on myself and family. The remaining twelve hours can be given over to work. 

Now as it’s my own business I run, twelve hours is perfect. For me my work is a way to help people which is my biggest motivator. Helping people regain a better relationship with their time so they are spending it doing the things they want to do is my purpose in life. 

That doesn’t mean I do spend twelve hours a day working. Some days I do, others I don’t. For instance, I won’t do any work on a Saturday night. That’s reserved for meeting friends or watching British detective dramas—it’s a hobby of mine to watch these shows trying to work out who did it. 

It’s when we can get to decide what we do with our time that we regain control over our time. Remember our work is twenty-five percent of the week. The remaining seventy-five percent is ours to chose what we want to do. 

I hope that explanation helps you, Ann. I think the secret is to change the way we see time management and productivity. It isn’t just a bout our work. It’s about our life. If we want more time to do things we want to do, we need to manage the activities we do in the time we have available. 

I hope that has helped and thank you for your question.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

What’s the easiest way to become more productive and better manage your time? That’s what we are considering this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 243 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 243 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

I have a confession to make. I cyber stalk very productive people. In particular, I stalk authors who publish books every year without fail, content creators who never fail to publish a podcast, blog post or YouTube video every week (or more frequently in some cases) and business leaders who manage multinational companies and still have a private life. 

I’ve also had an interest in the people in the companies I’ve worked with who were the top managers or salespeople. 

I am fascinated with how they do it. How are they so productive with the work they do? 

The truth is, they all share something in common and this week’s question relates to this commonality. 

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 Martine. Martine asks: Hi Carl, you’ve mentioned in a few of your blog posts and videos that you get a lot of inspiration from highly productive people. What I want to know is, are there any special habits or tricks these people use that most people don’t?

Hi Martine, Thank you for your question. 

You are right; there are a few tricks these people follow that the vast majority don’t. I suspect that the reason most people don’t follow these tricks are multifaceted, and they are not easy to follow. 

First, there is an inherent human characteristic that will always prevent you from becoming more productive, and that is the need to be liked. We have this need to some degree or another. 

The so-called “culture wars” are a great example of this. People are queuing up to be a part of their chosen tribe, and social media has given them a voice. They want to be liked by their tribe so much, that they will say increasingly wild things. 

Left or right, there seems to be a rush to be the most outraged because someone had the audacity to disagree with something their tribe believes “passionately” about. 

Yet, what makes humans so great is our diverse opinions. It’s fascinating to learn why someone believes the things they do. Learning about those beliefs and thoughts behind those beliefs has helped the human race to progress at an incredible speed. 

However, this desire to be liked means we will sacrifice our dreams and goals and the things that are important to us, so we can be a part of the crowd. 

I saw this a lot when I first arrived in Korea twenty years ago. I was told that family was very important to Korean people. Yet, when I arrived here, I discovered that the majority of married office workers thought nothing about staying late in the office because their boss and co-workers were staying. 

Nobody would leave the office until the boss left. It caused me to stop and question how could their family be so important when they put being in the office until 10 or 11pm as a higher importance than getting home to be with their family. 

Over time I was educated. These office workers (mainly men in those days), felt that earning their salary and getting promoted and ultimately getting more money was their way of taking care of their family. Nobody questioned this thinking back then. 

Now, I should caveat this. This is generally no longer the case. The younger generations who have now come through into the workforce don’t do this in most cases. But in some small to medium-sized companies, that sentiment is still living and breathing.

It was another example of being a part of the tribe. The time was an extension of their family. 

Now the most productive people I’ve met do not subscribe to this mentality. They are driven, focused and know precisely what they want out of the day. 

A few months back, I watched an interview with Sylvester Stallone. While most of us see Sylvester Stallone as an action hero actor, he’s also a prolific writer. 

Every day, he’s working on writing a script. 

The thing that stood out for me about him was each day, he will spend four hours writing—with his phone switched off, and he’ll spend ninety minutes to two hours exercising. That six hours a day is taken up with the things he loves doing. 

After that, he’ll eat with his family and socialise. But nothing gets in the way of the two things that are important to him. 

John Grisham, the author, writes every day. He wakes up early, goes to his writing room and will spend the next four hours writing. Once again, no phone, no interruptions. From 6:30am to 11:00am nobody can reach him. He’s working on his next novel. As he gets closer to finishing the book, he wakes up earlier and earlier, often beginning his writing at 4am. 

Stephen King, another great author, does something similar. He writes for a set period of time each day. 

Now, when you analyse this, there’s nothing difficult about it. They know what they want to do, and they get on and do it. 

I recently finished learning about Charles Darwin. He also had a set routine. He’d wake up early, go into his study, and for the next four to five hours, he would research and write. Nobody was allowed to disturb him. 

Now for most of us, we may not have the luxury to spend our days doing the things we love in the same way Sylvester Stallone, John Grisham, Stephen King and Charles Darwin have been able to do. But, that misses the point somewhat. 

What these amazingly productive people know is that if you want to produce work that you are proud of, you need to spend time each day working on it. No excuses. Thinking, planning and dreaming produce nothing concrete. It’s only by committing time each day to working on your craft that you will become incredibly productive. There is no other way.

Now for the majority of us, not answering a colleague’s email message within a few minutes or instantly responding to a text message would be unthinkable. I mean, what would you colleague or friend think of you if you didn’t reply instantly? 

Then there are those people who believe their purpose in life is to wait around for the next contact by a client and to be instantly available for them—I mean, isn’t that excellent customer service? 

Well, perhaps not. You see if you are constantly being interrupted, how will you ever be able to deliver the real service your client wants? Your client wants results—however, they interpret that—I mean, how many people say oh customer service is excellent, they answer the phone immediately? 

Answering the phone immediately is not great service. Great service is delivering outstanding results for the client. If the client needs to wait an hour or two while you finish delivering real customer service to another client, they are not going to complain. They will have the confidence that you will deliver the same level of outstanding service for them. 

It always amazes me that people with degrees, PH.Ds and MBAs see outstanding work as being measured by how fast you respond to an email or message. 

No, that’s not outstanding service. That’s wanting to be liked by the tribe. 

The first step to becoming more productive is to know, at a task level, what is important to you professionally and personally. It’s no good being one dimensionally productive—that is being productive at work and Never working on your own personal projects. It’s about knowing what’s important. 

That could be supporting your kids in developing their sporting abilities by taking them to practice two or three times a week and being present—not sitting in your car responding to emails. Or it could mean taking your partner out once or twice a week to do something new. You know, being present with them and not doing it out of a sense of obligation. Doing it because you want to spend time with them. 

It could be about dedicating Saturday to doing odd jobs around your home. Planning the week ahead and getting some fresh air. That’s being personally productive. 

When it comes to your work, this means knowing what your core work is. It’s just like Sylvester Stallone knows his core work is to develop scripts and stay in good shape so he can continue to act. He knows he needs time each day for this work. There can be no excuses. If he does not do this core work, the work will ultimately dry up. 

That same principle applies to you too. I know you are not Sylvester Stallone, or John Grisham or Stephen King, but you do still have core work. What is it? Make sure that however much time you need for this work, you protect that time. Allow no interruptions while you are doing it. After all, it’s what you are paid to do. 

This means, when a colleague, a client or even your boss is messaging you, you don’t allow it to interrupt you. They have to wait. We are not ignoring them. We just know our priorities, and whatever your core work is, you get that done, then you attend to your messages and calls. 

When I was teaching, I always made sure my phone was off. I was employed to teach. My boss could wait until I finished the class. Teaching my classes was my core work. It would have been wrong for me to stop my class while I took a call from my boss. It’s equally wrong for you to allow any interruptions while you are doing your core work. 

Attending to your core work is not going to take you long. You could break things up. For instance, writing a blog post takes me around an hour. After I finish writing, I will respond to messages and process my email inbox. Then I get back into my next core task—planning this week’s YouTube videos or writing this script. What are we talking about here? Two hours tops before you need a break. Use those breaks to respond to your messages. 

It might not make you the most popular person in your company, but you were not employed to be the most popular person. You were employed to do a job. Do that job first. You will always be judged on your results. Not by how nice everyone says you are. 

The number of people I’ve worked with who lost their jobs and couldn’t understand why is countless. The usual cries of but I was always helping my boss and colleagues with their work. How could they fire me? Well, while you were helping all those other people, you were not doing the job you were employed to do. 

So there you go, Martine, that’s the secret. Be selfishly obsessed with getting your core work done to highest possible standard. It won’t make you popular, but it will get you results. 

And also never neglecting the important people in your life. Your work is one thing; your personal life is what stays with you. Make sure you are spending an adequate amount of time with the people that matter most to you.

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. 

How complex is your system? How complex do you need it to be? That’s what we’ll be looking at today. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 242 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 242 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I published a video on how I have my whole system set up. In that video, I shared how I bring all the apps I use together to get my work done. 

I was rather surprised that a few people felt that my system was too complex. I didn’t understand why at first, and then it dawned on me. Of course, it looks complex. It was put together on a slide, and everything looks complex when it is broken down into small pieces and laid out in a diagram. 

The truth is, it’s not complicated at all. It works beautifully, and I get everything I need into my system in seconds. There are no obstacles; I just know what to do when I need to add a task or collect an idea. 

But, to someone not familiar with the way everything works, it will understandably appear complicated. I’m sure if you broke down your system, I would feel yours was overly complex. However, it’s nothing to do with how many apps you use, it’s how you use your apps that matter, and that’s what we are going to explore in this week’s episode.

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 Stuart. Stuart asks: hi Carl. I saw your video on how you have your system set up, and I felt that you have a very complex system. How do you manage all those apps and still get your work done? 

Thank you, Stuart, for your question. 

Now, this is an interesting one, and it’s certainly a good example of why we should not be copying other people’s systems. What works for me is unlikely to work for you. 

You see, everyone’s way of working will be different. Not only do we do different jobs, but we also have different expectations put upon us. However, the questions are how do you know what to do and when do you do the work?

As long as you know that, it really doesn’t matter how many apps or processes you have in the background. What matters is you are getting your important work done. 

I noticed from some of the comments on the video that some people see Ulysses, my writing app, as a note-taking app. I suppose Ulysses could be used as a note-taking app, but it wasn’t designed to be a note-taking app. It was and always has been a writing app. 

I’ve been using Ulysses for writing my blog posts, these scripts and all my newsletters for well over six years now, and in that time, I have everything I have written. That includes 250 thousand plus words of blog posts and over five hundred newsletters. There will be over a million words written in there, and naturally, there’s very little I don’t know about Ulysses. 

A big part of my work is writing, I will write around 10,000 words a week, and I want a dedicated writing tool that will allow me to get on and write in a distraction-free environment with an app that has never let me down. Ulysses does that for me. 

And that’s really the whole point of choosing apps that work for you and the work that you do. 

I’m reminded of an analogy I wrote a few years ago: a carpenter doesn’t use a Swiss Army knife to build a table. They could do it, but a carpenter will always use the right tools for the job. 

Another thing you need to take into consideration when choosing apps is how you will be using them. Theoretically, I could use Apple’s Pages or Google Docs for writing my blog posts and newsletters. And if I only used a laptop for writing, that certainly would be a consideration. But I don’t always write using my laptop. 

There are a lot of times when I am in a coffee shop waiting for my wife, and I find I have thirty minutes or so. Now, I could sit there and scroll through social media, or I can open up Ulysses and continue writing the blog post I started on my laptop that morning. Ulysses on my phone is brilliantly simple. No menus, no distractions. Just the written words and a keyboard. 

I remember when I did some extensive testing of Notion a couple of years ago. Notion was great on my computer but was a nightmare on my phone. This made it unworkable for the way I did my work. Now for those who largely do their work on a laptop, Notion works fantastically. For those like me who need a lot more flexibility in devices, it wasn’t good enough. 

So when it comes to my system, I use Drafts almost exclusively on my phone for collecting. For those of you who are not familiar with Drafts, Drafts is a simple note-taking app that allows you to collect tasks and ideas and send them to pretty much any app you have on your phone. 

For example, if I collect a task in Drafts, When I open Drafts, I am presented with a blank screen and the keyboard. I can then type immediately what I have in mind, tap a button at the top of the keyboard, and it’s directly sent to Todoist. The original ‘note’ is then deleted. This is three seconds faster than trying to add something directly into Todoist on my phone. 

However, when I am on my computer, using Todoist’s keyboard shortcuts is the fastest way to get something into Todoist, and that is how I do it. 

For me, speed is everything. The less time I spend collecting and organising, the more time I have for doing the work. 

One thing I have learned over the years is the more features an app has, the slower it is going to be. Often that doesn’t matter too much on a computer, but in the mobile environment, the fewer features, the better and faster the app will be. 

Now, for you, having a single app for all your tasks and notes could be your preferred system. There’s nothing wrong at all with that—if it works for you. 

I recently tested that when I was looking at Craft—a relatively new productivity app. Within an hour or so of testing, I realised it didn’t fit comfortably with the way I work. While the desktop app was great, trying to get things into Craft quickly on my phone (or iPad) was not so good. It, therefore, failed my test. 

Your testing could be different. You are likely to have different criteria for how well an app works. 

Over the last week, I’ve reflected on the apps I use. Do I have too many? Could I streamline my system? On analysis, the answer is no. One of the most important parts of becoming more productive is to have a set of apps you are settled with. Sure, there are always going to be new, exciting apps appearing, but none of them is going to instantly make you productive. You will have months of learning a new way of doing something—it won’t be instinctive, and the time cost of moving all your existing notes and tasks to new apps is never going to be a good use of your time. 

A few months ago, I looked at Obsidian. A great app, but I soon realised I would need time to learn the syntax. Obsidian extensively uses Markdown—a simple syntax method to quickly add bold, italics and links. Now, I do know a little Markdown, but it does not come naturally to me. 

On the other hand, I have a few clients who are computer programmers or software engineers. Writing that way does come naturally to them, and Obsidian works great. 

I can’t stress enough how important it is to find apps that work the way you work. Once you find them, stick with them. Learn everything you can about them. Find the fastest way to get stuff into them, learn how to search them and make sure you make the app yours. 

You cannot do that in a few weeks. It takes time. Give it time. That patience, and yes, frustration at times, pays off in fantastic ways. 

Sometimes, Evernote or Todoist don’t sync immediately. Over the many years I’ve been using these apps, I know this can happen from time to time. I also know exactly what to do to fix the problem. It may take me two or three minutes to get things syncing properly again, but that doesn’t mean I have to ditch the app and find something else. 

Things will inevitably go wrong. Often, it’s not the app; it’s the device. If you are unfamiliar with an app, you won’t know the difference. You’ve got to give yourself time to learn these things. 

With all that said, to get to the hub of your question, Stuart, I don’t think I use too many apps. I use apps for the jobs they were designed to do. Todoist manages my tasks. Evernote manages my long-form notes, such as research, meeting notes, client notes and my projects. 

I do have specific uses for apps like Apple’s Reminders. That manages my family’s grocery list. My wife isn’t into productivity apps, so she prefers using Apple’s built-in apps. So, we use a list in Reminders for our grocery shopping. This does have its advantages for me too. While I am cooking, I can add items to the shopping list using Siri. 

I will leave you with this thought. Using my iPhone every day is simple. I’ve had an iPhone since 2009. However, if I were to open the phone up and look inside, it would seem incredibly complex—It is. I’m pretty sure the only thing I would be able to recognise is the battery. But that’s not the point. The point is the phone works. It does exactly what I want it to, and it does that well. 

I hope that has helped, Stuart, and thank you for your question. 

Thank you also you too for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week. 

This week, we’re looking at David Allen’s quote: “what does doing look like?”

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 241 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 241 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

In his book; Getting Things Done, David Allen uses the term: “What does doing look like?”. Now for those of you who have read the book, this quote probably washed over you in the excitement of learning about contexts, next action, ticklers and someday maybes. 

However, these five words connect perfectly to a common issue many people face. We know we need to do something, and we have a reasonable idea of what the finished something is, but we are not clear on what we need to do in order to accomplish it.

This results in tasks that are unclear or seemingly too large to do, and we end up stalling and postponing the task. 

So, this week, we’re going to look at this and see where we can get some clarity. And that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Joseph. Joseph asks, Hi Carl, I find I am avoiding doing a lot of my tasks because I am not sure what exactly I need to do. I might have a task to contact someone about something, but when I sit down to do it, my mind is blank, and I procrastinate and then don’t do it. How do you make your tasks doable?

Hi Joseph, thank you for your question. 

That’s a good question, and it reminded me of David Allen's quote about knowing what doing looks like. 

Essentially this means when you write a task, you need to be very clear about what action needs to be taken in order to complete the task. 

I see this problem a lot when people are working on listing out their core work. One of a manager’s core tasks would be to manage a team of people. But what does managing a team of people actually mean at the task level? 

You will see this also with a project manager’s role. “To facilitate successful conclusions to projects and to report progress to the responsible director”. Great, but what exactly does that mean at a task level? 

This is an important area for all of us when it comes to getting our work done. If we are not clear about what our roles are within the company at a task level, we will find our most important work is neglected, and that can lead to all sorts of problems with our career. 

The first step to breaking these tasks down into simple, actionable steps is to look for the verbs. For instance, if you manage a team of, say, ten people, perhaps one of your roles would be to have regular meetings with your team members to see how they are getting on and to make sure they are clear about their responsibilities. 

Now there are two ways of doing this. The first is to have regular recurring tasks that say: “set up a meeting with Joanne” or “set up a meeting with Joe”. These tasks are clear, and it’s obvious what you need to do. 

Alternatively, you could arrange to meet with Joanne on the first Tuesday of every month and Joe on the second Tuesday. And spread out meetings with your other team members throughout the month. Fix these meetings in your calendar, and you have clear tasks.

To write a blog post, I have four tasks. Plan this week’s blog post, write this week’s blog post, edit this week’s blog post and finally, post this week’s blog post. These tasks are spread out over three days. 

I’ve been doing this every week for seven years, and I know precisely what needs to happen with each task. The planning takes around twenty minutes; writing will take an hour, editing thirty minutes and posting fifteen. Each task is clear, and that means I never procrastinate. When I plan my day, I will see the task, and all I need to decide is when in the day I will do those tasks. 

And that’s an important part of making sure your tasks are clear—when a task is clear, you can anticipate the total amount of time required to complete the task without guessing, which will help you with your time management. 

But how do you know what doing looks like?

This involves thinking about what you have to do. “Contact important customers”, might sound like a well-written task, but how will you contact your important customers? Email, telephone, text message? And who are you contacting? Where’s the list of names? Without establishing these two simple parts to the task, you will procrastinate when you see the task on your list. 

The verb you use is “email” or “call”. And you make sure the list of important customers is accessible. Perhaps link the list to the task in the notes section of the note or turn the task into a clickable link (as you can do with apps like Todoist)

Now, this is the same with projects. Most projects begin with an abstract idea that is not as clear as we would like it to be. Even something as clear as update my Time And Life Master course”. Okay, I know I need to update it, but what do I need to do at a task level to update the course? 

I know the first step would be to list out all the updates I want to make to the course first and to do that, I will need to find time to go through the course class by class, so I can make notes on any changes I want to make. 

So, a simple “update Time And Life Mastery course” might seem clear, but at a task level, there are a number of things I will need to do. So, in this example, in my This Week folder, I do have “go through Time and Life Mastery Course and make notes on new update ideas”. I have this task set to recur every day this week, and I know if I spend an hour a day on it, I will have gone through the whole course by the end of the week. 

I don’t need to add the next task to my task manager because, at this stage, all I need to do is go through the course. When I do my weekly planning session on Saturday, I can add in the next step. Which at this moment would be to outline the updated course, although that could change as I am going through the lessons. 

This is why I don’t like to plan out projects in minute detail at the start. Too many things can change—and often do—and so all that planning time was a waste of time. I know what my project outcome is: a completed update to the Time And Life Mastery course, and I know my deadline. So, now all I need to know is what needs to happen at a task level this week. 

Brainstorming next actions at the start of a project might seem like a good idea; in practice, though, all this is guessing what needs to happen and often leads to an overwhelming task list. Instead, look at the project’s objective, and decide what you need to do to get the project started. 

From there, the “real” next steps will occur to you as you are working on the project, and they can be added to the project note. 

A lot of the work we do is recurring work. Whether you are a salesperson, dentist, doctor or teacher. 

Salespeople need to be communicating with their customers and potential customers. What does that look like at a task level? 

It could involve getting a list from your company’s CRM system every morning and giving yourself time each day to contact people on that list. 

A dentist or doctor perhaps needs to know what patients they will be seeing that day so they can prepare any equipment they need prior the seeing the patient. For instance, if you have a patient returning for a crown fitting, where is the crown? Is it ready for when the patient arrives? 

And teachers will need time to prepare classes as well as teach their classes. How much time do you need to prepare your classes, and what tasks are involved in preparing them? 

These types of tasks are recurring tasks—they are part of your core work. If you set them up as recurring tasks and ensure you have time in your calendar for doing them, they get done. 

It’s no good saying I don’t have time to do these tasks. They are your core work—or part of it—you will have to do them at some point in time. Making them fixed recurring tasks takes the decision-making out of it because you know you must do them. Plus, your colleagues, students and customers soon work out your routines and are much more likely to leave you alone so you can get this work done. 

Understanding what doing your work looks like prevents procrastination because each task is clear, and you know precisely what needs to be done. It’s when we are not clear about what exactly needs doing that we procrastinate and reschedule tasks. 

And here’s a great tip for you. If you find you are repeatedly rescheduling a task, stop and ask yourself what doing that task looks like. The chances are, as the task is written, it is not clear, and that is why you are not doing it. Rephrase the task, and make it crystal clear what you need to do. That’s the way to ensure the task gets done. 

I hope that has helped, Joseph. 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. 

Do you find you frequently run our of time but rarely run out of tasks? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s episode.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 240 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 240 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I’ve been coaching people for around five years now and in that time one problem comes up again and again. That is there does not appear to be enough hours in the day to get everything done. 

Well, the truth is, there is enough time—there’s always enough time—the problem is on the other side of the equation; tasks and appointments. 

If you fill your tasks manager up with an unrealistic number of tasks when you have several meetings on the same day, the problem is not enough time, the problem is you are not prioritising correctly. 

For most of us, appointments—whether they are business meetings or personal appointments—are the priority. They are on our calendar, confirmed and someone else is relying on you to turn up and be present. Tasks, on the other hand, while they may need doing, are less of a priority. Tasks can be done at anytime in the day be that the morning, afternoon or in the evening. 

Problems start to happen when you have five or six appointments for the day and a task list with 40 Plus tasks. There’s no way you are going to find the time to do all those tasks. So what do you do? 

So, with that in mind, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Bryan. Bryan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed the Time Sector System for over a year now and it’s transformed my productivity. However, one problem I continually face is I rarely complete all my tasks for the day. I generally have between two and five meetings each day which take up a lot of time. This means when I get to my tasks for the day, I feel overwhelmed. Is this normal or have I missed something along to way?

Hi Bryan, thank you for your question. 

Don’t worry, it’s unlikely you are doing anything wrong. Part of the problem is the world we live in today. So much to do, so little time to do it. 

However, that said, if you do find yourself rarely completing your tasks for the day, there are a few things you can do to sharpen up your prioritising that will help.

When it comes to your tasks, the strategy I advocate is begin with your areas of focus. These are the eight areas we all share that mean something to us. Things like our family and relationships, health and fitness and self-development. Once you have established what each of these eight areas mean to you, and you know what tasks need performing to keep them in balance, you will know where your priorities for the day are. 

Areas of focus are also important because it is these that will give you your goals. Meaningful goals you set will all come from your areas of focus. Imagine you have become aware that your savings are not where you want them to be. This will come from your finances area and you can decide what savings goal to set for the next twelve months. Or it could be you notice your waistline has expanded a little over the years and you want to do something about it. You could set the goal to lose a few pounds over the next six months. 

Now, you don’t necessarily need to have an actionable task from each of your eight areas. For example, the spirituality area of focus may mean you just need to attend a spiritual retreat once or twice a year, or you go to the Synagogue or Mosque every morning. These are not tasks, these are things you just do. They become a part of who you are. You routine if you like. 

When I look at my areas of focus, I have around five or six tasks each week that come from these. Exercise for example, is not a task, it is an event on my calendar. I make time each day for some form of exercise. It’s a non-negotiable part of my day. 

Once you have established what your areas of focus are, the tasks and events are in your task manager and calendar, you can then look at everything else. 

Work is where most of out daily tasks will come from during the week and it’s here were you need to get smart. 

Start with what you are employed to do. Are you employed to sell product, teach, manage a team or create designs? What is the core work involved here so you are hitting your targets? 

For example, I have a few clients who’s core work is to manage clients. Their role is to develop relationships with clients, new and old, and give outstanding customer service. Now, that’s something to work with. Begin with what “manage client relationships” actually means for you and your company. 

What are the measurable results you and your company want from this? 

That could be a given target for referral business, it could be numbers from a customer satisfaction survey or a given number of client contacts each quarter. I know that sounds a bit cold, but you do need to be able to measure something. If you cannot measure it, how do you know you are doing a great job? 

Like areas of focus, you need to set up your core work as tasks (or events) so that these high priority tasks are being taken care of each and every day. These become your priorities. 

I consider myself a content creator, I create content that helps people become better organised and more productive. But what exactly does that mean on a day to day basis?

For me, it means each day I need to create content. It doesn’t have to be a 2,000 word article or a recorded and edited video. It could be creating content, idea development, planning and writing outlines. As long as I am doing something each day related to content creation, I know I am doing my job. 

When I start the week, I know I need to write a blog post, prepare and record a podcast episode, plan and record two YouTube videos and write two newsletter essays. You could say these are my weekly deliverables. 

This means, when the week starts, I need to have the time to create this content scheduled and blocked in my calendar. To make this easier, I fix these in my calendar as repeating blocks of time. It means I don’t have to plan them out each week. I also know when I begin the day on a Tuesday, I have a three hour block in the morning to write. Likewise on a Friday morning, I have a two hour block for recording YouTube videos. 

I don’t want to be trying to find the time every week. Once it’s fixed in my calendar, I am not going to be tempted to schedule meetings or allow meetings to be scheduled over these blocks. 

Now, you may not have the freedom I have to block fixed times each week for doing your core work, but you will have some degree of flexibility. However, you will not be able to do that unless you know what your core work is. This is why spending a little time thinking about what it is you are employed to do and pulling out the actionable tasks that need to be done in order to accomplish your targets and key performance indicators—your KPIs—will pay you a huge dividend. 

Next up is to get smarter about your calendar and task list. In the hierarchy of things, your calendar takes precedence over your task list. Events on your calendar are things that need to be done at a set time on a given day. Meetings, for instance, are fixed so we can have everyone involved at the same place at the same time. 

Tasks, on the other hand, can be done at anytime in the day. Clearing your actionable email can be done mid-morning or late in the afternoon. Putting the final touches to the presentation you are delivering on Friday can be done first thing in the morning or after lunch. As long as it’s done, it doesn’t matter when you do it in the day. 

This means, when you look at your calendar and see you have four or five meetings, you do not want to have thirty to forty tasks on your task list for the same day. You will not complete all those tasks. This is where you need to make sure you do your daily planning. 

So what does daily planning look like?

All you need do with your daily planning is look at your calendar and task list and ask yourself if that is a realistic day. If you have several meetings that take up a large portion of your work day, reduce your task list to accommodate it. 

Start by removing tasks that can be done another day—when you look at your list objectively you will find a lot of the tasks on there can be pushed off to another day. A key tip here is to look again at your calendar and find a day where you have less meetings scheduled. 

If you are getting close to the end of the week and a lot of tasks are building up, look for time on your calendar you can block out for focused work. If you feel you are going to need more time than time available on your calendar, you may want to consider rescheduling some meetings. Don’t be afraid of this, all you need do is ask. 

Sending a message to a colleague asking if you can postpone a meeting until next week because you need to finish some important tasks is not hard. What’s the worst that could happen? They tell you; no. But in my experience, most people are happy to reschedule a meeting, and if not, what have you lost? Nothing. 

Daily planning puts you in control of your day. It will help you to stay focused on the things that are important to you. How long does a daily planning session last? Well, for the most part it’s going to be less than ten minutes. All you are doing is looking at your calendar and task list for tomorrow and asking yourself if this is a realistic proposition. If you feel it is not, reduce your task list. 

If you are new to daily planning, it may take a little longer at first. We are also susceptible to over scheduling ourselves. We think we can do far more than we can in a day. This is where consistency and experience will help you. You will inevitably over-schedule yourself at first. It’s part of the learning process. 

In those first few weeks pay attention to what you are getting done and what types of tasks you find you don’t get round to doing. It’s those tasks—the tasks you don’t do each day—that are your natural low priority tasks. You might tell yourself they are important, but if you are consistently not doing them, no matter what you tell yourself, they are not priorities. If they were, you would do them. 

Try to eliminate these tasks. 

I see people putting tasks like “do a mind-dump” each week, but they rarely ever do them. If you constantly skip these kind of tasks remove them. Mind-dumps don’t want to be done each week anyway—you have enough work to do. Mind-dumps, should be done every three months or so, or when you feel overwhelmed and you need time to get whatever it is overwhelming you out of your head. 

You might think they are important, but if you never do them, drop them. All they are doing is cluttering up your task list and giving you a false reading on how much you need to do. 

I hope that has answered your question, Bryan. Thank you for sending it in. 

And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on how living a disciplined life brings an abundance of benefits. This week’s question was inspired by just that blog post. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 239 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 239 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

So, what is living a disciplined life? Well, it’s not living a regimented life—that’s a kind of life that is very restrictive and doesn’t allow any flexibility. A disciplined life is a life lived with a few core tenets that provide the building blocks for a healthy, productive day. As Jim Rohn said, “Success is a few simple disciplines practised every day.”

This is very much in contrast to living an undisciplined life where anything goes and can, over time, lead to the destruction of careers, marriages, health and dreams. 

The great thing about living a disciplined life is you feel great about yourself. It builds self-confidence and self-respect and is the foundation to living a successful life because those little things you do every day move you closer to living the life you dream of living. 

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 Cindy. Cindy asks, Hi Carl, a few weeks ago, I read your article on living a disciplined life, and it got me wondering about what would you consider being the right sort of things to bring to a disciplined life. A few pointers in the right direction would really help me. 

Hi Cindy, thank you for your question and for reading my article. 

The great thing about building a disciplined life is that we have a blank canvas on which to draw up what we want to focus on. In many ways, this will start from knowing what your long-term, life goals are and what your areas of focus.

If you have taken the time to establish what you want from life and what is important to you in terms of your career, relationships, finances, health and lifestyle expectations, creating a disciplined life around these will give you a fantastic platform on which to build.

For example, if your long-term goal is to build a beach house so you have a place to go for long holidays, then you will need to be disciplined about your finances. To build (or buy) a beach house, requires money. Leaving this to chance is not going to work. Sure, you may buy lottery tickets every week, but the chances of you winning a sufficient amount to purchase a beachside property are very slim. You will need to be deliberate with your savings. How much you spend today, will have an impact on your future goal. 

You will have to become a saver instead of a spender. 

Now imagine you have a long-term goal to travel the world when you retire. Aside from the money, you will need, you will also need your health. If you let your health go now, when you retire, you will find many of the places you want to visit will be inaccessible to you. For instance, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to see the sun rise over the African savanna or visiting the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, both of which require a reasonable level of health and fitness to access. 

I don’t know any people whose long-term goal is to spend their final years in and out of hospital waiting for the next heart attack or stroke. 

Statistics from the American Heart Association state that almost half of American adults have some form of cardiovascular disease. This figure is probably similar for most other western countries. People need to take notice of these statistics. 

Cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer in the developed world today. But it’s not that you are shortening your life expectancy that’s the real problem here. The biggest problem is most people have dreams and goals that they are waiting for—living an active retirement, being able to walk their daughter down the aisle or being able to play games with their grandchildren. If you are not disciplined about what you eat and how you exercise, none of those dreams will happen. 

Living a disciplined life is about getting the basics right and being consistent with them. Having a healthy eating habit that ensures you get the right nutrition and doing some form of exercise every day. A thirty-minute walk each day would be enough. If you can do more, then the better. 

I think the biggest problem with the word exercise today is we associate it with running or going to the gym. That’s just a modern concept. Not everyone likes going to the gym or going out for a run. Exercise simply means movement. Walking, taking the stairs, doing housework (a great form of exercise), doing a little gardening each week or taking your kids out on a bike ride every weekend. All these activities are exercise. 

So what are the basics? In theory, these will differ from individual to individual, but your health is certainly one area you should be disciplined about. Finances would be another. Working for thirty to forty years and having nothing saved for your retirement would be a disaster. I’m no financial expert, but you should be saving at least 10% of your salary each month for your long-term future. 

I like the way Jim Rohn puts this—see that 10% as a tax for your future. If the government decided to raise income tax by 10%, you’d grumble—perhaps get angry—but you would pay it. Stop finding excuses, and start putting a minimum of 10% of your income away each month. 

Another essential would be planning the day. Let me give you an example. 

Each day I have a few core activities that must be included in my day. These are writing my journal (for my mental health), exercise (for my physical health) Taking our little dog out for a walk with my wife (for quality time with my wife and little Louis) and creating something to help people improve their lives (linked to my purpose in life). 

This means when I sit down at the end of the day to plan the next day, these activities are built into my day. There can be exceptions—for instance if my wife is away or we are on holiday—but on the whole, these activities are scheduled on my calendar and are non-negotiable. 

This is an example of living a disciplined life. These core activities form the non-negotiable part of my day. When I woke up this morning, I wrote my journal. Writing this podcast, is how I can help people and once this script is finished, I will be heading out for a run at the local park. After dinner, my wife and I will take Louis out for his daily walk. 

In total, these activities will take up around three hours of my day. That leaves me plenty of time to deal with my email and other work related matters. I have enough time to eat and sleep and perhaps have a little time at the end of the day to relax and learn something. I don’t feel stressed or overwhelmed. I feel comfortable, relaxed and I know at the end of the day I will feel great because the important thing in my life have been given time and attention. 

If you flip that and look at an undisciplined life. The day starts with no plan. There’s no consistency and no reason to wake up except to get to work. This means wake up time is often decided on how much time it takes to boil the kettle and brush your teeth before heading out the door to go to work where you spend all day being told what to do, where to stand or sit.

Lunch is whatever everyone else is having, be that pizza, fried chicken or a highly processed pre-packaged sandwich which leaves you feeling tired and mentally drained all afternoon. 

When you get home at the end of your work shift, you feel so fatigued and worn out, all you can do is crash on the sofa and binge-watch whatever you can find that may be interesting on TV or mindlessly scroll through your social media feeds being triggered by whatever opposing political view you happen to read—which then puts you in a foul mood for when you finally fall asleep. 

You repeat that every weekday. I know which kind of life I want to live. 

Living a disciplined life is about making decisions that are in your best long-term interests. Discipline is like a muscle, the more you exercise it the stronger it becomes. 

It’s that discipline that makes each day feel constructive and meaningful. It prevents you from feeling you are wasting your life and it leads to better relationships because you are dependable, solid and inspiring to other people. 

One of the interesting things about following a disciplined life is that after a few months, living that life becomes easy. It becomes something you just do. I write my journal every morning. It feels effortless, to make a cup of coffee, sit down with my iPad and write for ten minutes. I write about how I feel, what’s going well and what’s not going well. I write about my dreams, how I would like to live my life and where I feel I can improve. It’s just who I am. I write a journal. 

To begin living a more disciplined life needs to start small. It could be something as simple as doing the washing up before you go to bed, or it could be you make your bed before leaving to start work. Once that becomes something you “just” do, you can then expand that something else. For instance, going out for a thirty minute walk after dinner—a fantastic way to help control your blood sugars by the way—or perhaps sitting down after your walk and spending ten minutes planning what your objectives for the next day will be. 

I should say, planning my objectives for the next day is one of my favourite times of the day. It gives me a sense of control over my life. Instead of waiting for things to happen to me, I feel I am making things happen for me. It gives me a focus for the day and when I complete those objectives I get a wonderful sense of achievement. 

The key to living a more disciplined life is deciding what you want out of life and finding a few little things you can do each day that will move you a little closer towards achieving those things. 

I’ve seen so many people destroy their lives because they lived an undisciplined life. People who can no longer say yes to doing new exciting things because of health issues, or relationships breaking down because of a lack of attention and unreliability. 

Don’t be one of those people. You can take control of your life and build amazing things with a little discipline. It’s how we humans thrive, flourish and grow. 

It can be hard to become disciplined; I understand that. This is why you want to be thinking long-term. Start small. Develop your self-discipline strength and think of it as building a life you want to live small step by small step. I can promise you once you get started, and you begin to see results you will continue to grow.

Thank you, Cindy for you question and thank you to you too for listening. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Why set goals? After all, most people fail to achieve them and for those lucky few that do, what then? What do you do after you’ve achieved your goal? Find out in this week’s episode.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 238 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 238 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

It always surprises me that many topics come round in cycles, and suddenly I am inundated with questions and queries about that topic. And that’s what happened with this week’s question. I got a podcast question and then a few emails about the subject, and then it came up in two of my coaching sessions.

Now I suspect the goals question has come up because of the realisation we’ve just gone past the halfway point of the year, and when we look at the list of things we wanted to do this year—our goals and projects—we discover we are way off achieving the things we wanted to do, and our goals appear on our radar again.

So, why do we set goals? What’s the point? With a statistic that claims only 8% of you will achieve your goals, it suggests even attempting to go after a goal is going to result in disappointment for 92% of you. 

Well, this statistic hides the real purpose of a goal—it’s not about achieving the goal; it’s about what you have to change about yourself to achieve that goal. And that is what we are going to look at in a little more detail today.

So, I guess that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Liam. Liam asks, hi Carl, I recently went through my goals for 2022 after your recommendation in your weekly newsletter, and I realised I am miles away from achieving them. If I am being honest, I haven’t really done much about them at all. What can I do to stay focused on my goals? I do this every year, and it’s really frustrating.

Hi Liam, thank you for your question and please don’t worry. You are certainly not alone. Most people will find themselves in the same position as you are right now. 

Okay, first, let’s look at what a goal is for. Setting goals gives you a roadmap—a direction, if you like—to help you grow and flourish as a human being. Without a goal or a set of goals, we drift. We will be pulled and pushed towards what everyone else wants for us, and that’s never usually what we desire or want. Without that direction, you are setting yourself up for a very disappointing life. 

I remember reading Bronnie Ware’s book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying several years ago, and it scared me. I realised I was heading in the same direction as many of the people in that book. Who knows when we will leave this world? All we do know is there will come a time for us to depart. So the only question we need to ask is what would I like to do with my short life? 

And that’s the key here. What do you want? If you don’t have an answer to that question, you will drift through life and become another dead being, having achieved nothing and done nothing. Sorry to be so dramatic. I hope that scares you, it should do. It scares me. 

So now we’ve dealt with the morbid part; let’s look at the bright side. 

Having a few long-term goals gives you a sense of purpose and a pathway to follow. You can change that pathway at any time if you feel you no longer want to pursue the direction you were going, but at least you have a direction, and you are growing and developing while you are on that path. 

If I look back at my early life, I wanted to be a police officer, a Royal Marine, a vet and a physiotherapist—these were all goals I had while I was at school. However, like all teenagers, I changed my mind and went in a different direction. But each one of those occupations were goals at one time or another that I abandoned. But the abandonment was not in vain. I learned what it takes to become a police officer and a marine. I also learned a little about animals and human physiology. 

Now, as I am older, my goals are more refined and more long-term, but I still have them. My goals don’t change much. Indeed, they haven’t changed much at all over the last ten years. I wanted to build a business—which I’ve now done, and now I want to grow that business. One change I have had to make about myself in the last ten years is to change my mindset from an employee one to a business owner. That was a lot more difficult than I expected, but it has been a wonderful journey. 

And that is where having goals brings its the biggest benefit. You have to change. If you don’t have to change, then there’s no goal. 

For instance, a lot of people set themselves the goal of losing weight. Great, with two-thirds of the western world population overweight or obese, that’s a good goal to have. However, the goal is not really to lose weight. Anyone can lose weight. Skip dinner tonight and weigh yourself tomorrow morning. You will have lost weight. But skipping meals long-term is not sustainable. Instead, what a weight loss goal needs to do is change your eating habits and lifestyle.

A weight loss goal is a lifestyle change. Most of us eat too much of the wrong types of food and develop painful, debilitating diseases as a result. So, the goal is to change our eating habits, move more and keep the weight off so we can live a healthy, active long life.

If your only purpose is to lose a few pounds, you’ll likely lose it, but if you are not changing your habits at the same time, you will quickly put that weight back on. 

One of my biggest current goals is to buy a piece of land and build our family home to our specifications. Right now, I do not have the money to buy the land, but the habit I needed to change to achieve this goal is to become less of a spender and more of a saver. I have cut out a lot of my expenditure, and I save a lot more money now than I did before. I became aware of just how much I was spending and was able to reign that spending in. 

If we choose to abandon that goal in a few years' time, it won’t matter. What matters is I now longer spend frivolously. I have become a saver, not a spender. My whole identity has changed. 

So, what about you, Liam? What do you want? 

For you to achieve what you want, what do you need to change about yourself? 

We humans can achieve almost anything we want to achieve. Millions of people before us have achieved incredible things. How did they do that? They did it by first learning what they need to change and then dedicating themselves to changing.

How do you write a book? You have to dedicate an amount of time each day to doing focused writing. To do that, you need to learn how to focus and do deep work without distractions. You need to change your habits. Rather than sitting down and consuming, you need to change to be a creator. 

If you desire to be the CEO of a leading company, you need to change from being a follower to being a leader. Again, it’s not easy, and you will need to learn about leadership by reading about leadership and learning from the greatest leaders. 

There’s a concept that Tony Robbins teaches. It’s called CANI (C-A-N-I), which stands for Continuous And Neverending Improvement. As humans, we thrive and grow when we are continuously improving ourselves. We can do that by learning—reading, and studying. We can do that through exercise if we want to improve our health or by learning more about the food we eat. 

There has never been a better time to apply CANI. We have an abundance of resources through YouTube and blog posts to be in a state of continuous improvement. 

And finally, a word about failing. You never really fail unless you quit. Altering your goals, refining them or changing them completely is fine. Quitting is not. However, if you start down a path and struggle, you are not failing; all you are doing is gaining data points. 

Failing is a part of achieving goals. The failure gives you data you can use to adjust your approach so you can try it a different way. This is part of the fun of having goals. 

My first attempted marathon was a complete failure. I remember the day well. It was a hot, humid day, and the marathon I was attempting was ten times up and down a large hill. Stupid of me to try this as my first marathon, but there you go. I managed to do half the course before pulling out. 

However, while I was disappointed, I learned I needed to change my training. I needed to add a few long runs of around eighteen to twenty miles, and I needed to get off the flat ground and start adding a few hills to my training runs. 

I changed my approach, and three months later, I ran my first full-course marathon. 

Did I fail at the first one? of course not. It turned out it was a training run (although, at the time, I treated it as a proper race). I learned a lot from that first attempt and was able to make adjustments so I could complete a full course marathon three months later. 

So, I urge you, Liam and anyone else listening who has struggled with their goals to focus on what you need to change about yourself to achieve your goal. What is it that has prevented you from achieving them before that you could change and start to achieve your goals? 

Remember, if you write 500 words a day for 120 days, you will have written a 60,000-word book. That’s just four months. Develop the habit of writing. 

If you cut out soft drinks full of sugar, refined carbohydrates and fast food, in three months, your blood sugars and LDL cholesterol will have returned to normal (or close to normal). Make some minor changes to your diet, and you’ll be a lot healthier. 

A goal is less about accomplishing the goal. It’s much more about who you become in the process of achieving the goal. 

Thank you, Liam, 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. 

One of the most productive things you could do is to start writing a daily journal. In this week’s episode, I answer a question about how to get started journaling.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Ultimate Productivity Workshop 

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Take The NEW COD Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script | 335

Hello, and welcome to episode 335 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

Possibly the most productive thing I have done over the last ten years is to write a journal. This habit has taught me many things. For one, it has taught me the value of consistency. The act of spending ten to fifteen minutes every morning before I start the day has given me something deliberate—I sit down and write—which has led to me building out a solid set of morning routines that start my day in a way that’s healthy (mentally) and productive. 

It is productive because it gives me a few minutes to think about the day ahead and review my objective tasks—the things I want to or must complete that day. This is far better than rolling out of bed at the last minute, rushing around to get dressed and out the door only to realise I left something important at home. 

Writing a journal every day has also given me a space to analyse where I am doing well and where there is room for improvement. It allows me to write how I am feeling and what I am worrying about and consider future directions. 

It’s almost as if I have a close friend I can confess all to. 

Now, if you search YouTube for journaling, you will find thousands of videos advising how to start. Yet, it can be difficult. What do you write about? Do you use a digital tool like Day One or Apple’s Journaling app, or an old-fashioned paper notebook? 

There’s a lot of questions. 

This week, I received a question about starting and what I suggest you use. So, I decided to share all the tips I’ve learned over the years so you, too, can begin this fantastic habit. 

Before I get to the question, there are just under two weeks until the start of September’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop. 

This workshop will teach you how to build your own productivity and time management system from the ground up. 

We begin with your calendar and task manager, and I show you how to connect the two so that they work in harmony. This removes the overwhelm we face when tasks swamp our days. 

In the second week, I show you how to do an effective weekly planning session and how to get, and more importantly, stay on top of your communications—those hundreds of emails and messages that must be dealt with daily. 

By the end of this workshop, you will have a perfectly balanced system that works for you and your work style. What you will learn will eliminate backlogs, help you identify what is important (and what is not), and establish your core work and areas of focus. 

You will learn a lot in this workshop. Plus, your package includes four courses, which gives you lifetime access to the four key elements of maintaining your system. 

There are only a limited number of places, so if you haven’t registered yet, you can do so with the link in the show notes. 

I hope to see you there on the 6th of September. 

Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Naomi. Naomi asks, Hi Carl, I saw your recent video on how to get started with journaling. Could you talk a little more about what to write and your recommendations about the best way to write it?

Hi Naomi, thank you for your question. 

Let me first deal with digital Vs paper journals. 

There are many advantages to writing your journal digitally. For one, you can add a photo each day and set the journal to collect data such as your exercise, the weather, and, if you wish, what you posted on social media automatically. 

I spent three years writing my journal in Day One. It was easy. I could write on my phone, my computer or my iPad. I preferred my iPad, but occasionally I would write on my phone. 

What stopped me was the realisation that technology was gradually taking over my life. I was no longer doing anything manually and was always on the lookout for more convenience. 

Sure, convenience is nice. In theory, anyway, it frees up time for other pursuits. Yet, I found those other pursuits were not productive or healthy. It invariably meant more time on social media and TV watching. 

So, back in January, I switched back to handwriting my journals. 

I’ve discovered that handwriting my journal has slowed me down. It’s helped me to be more thoughtful and to express myself better in my journal. 

It’s also rekindled my love of fountain pens and good-quality paper, which can be a very dangerous hobby—fountain pens and notebooks can get very expensive. 

Yet the key here was slowing me down. 

Why would you want to rush to get the day started? There will likely be plenty of drama—you don’t want to rush into all that. 

The other reason I stopped journaling digitally was that I realised I was spending far too much time in front of a screen. Giving myself ten to twenty minutes every morning with a good old-fashioned pen and paper felt far better than sitting in front of another screen. 

If you decide to go down the pen-and-paper route, my advice is to get yourself a good-quality notebook, preferably hardbound. 

A hardbound notebook can travel with you, and if you don’t have a table to write on, its binding will give you enough support. 

I’d also recommend investing in a nice pen. A fountain pen may not suit you, but that nice pen investment will give you extra pleasure when writing in your journal. 

Okay, those are the tools dealt with. Now, what do you write about?

If you’ve never written a journal before, when you start, you may be afraid to share your deeper thoughts and feelings. 

I always think of this like when you meet a stranger for the first time. You don’t open up and tell them what you feel or what your opinions are about other people. You are reserved and generally stick to topics such as the weather or the traffic conditions. 

So start there. Write down what the weather was like and what you did that day (or the day before). 

When I started, I wrote down all the important, meaningful tasks I had completed the day before. And, of course, the weather. 

You can even write what you ate and how much activity/exercise you did. 

You will soon begin opening up and writing about how you feel. Again, this is very much like when you meet a stranger. As you get to know them, you open up. 

Now as you progress and develop the habit of writing your journal every day, you may want to create a few recurring areas. 

For example, I have five items in my morning routine. After writing the date at the top of the page, I list these five items (make coffee, drink my lemon water, do my stretches, write my journal and clean my email inbox) in the margin and check them off. This tells me how consistent I am with my morning routines. 

I also write in the margin what exercise I did that day. 

This year, I have a 366-day challenge to do at least ten push-ups each day, so I write down the number of push-ups I’ve done that day. (So far the year, I’ve done just over 8,000 push-ups)

That gives me a start and some structure to my journal. 

After that, I write whatever’s on my mind. This morning, for example, I wrote how much better I feel. This week, I’ve been suffering from a heavy cold, and I felt a lot better this morning. So, that was my opening paragraph. 

I also wrote about the weather. It’s been hot and sticky over the last two weeks. Last night, we had quite a lot of rain, and that cleared the humidity a little. 

So you don’t have to write anything too deep. 

When starting, your goal should be to get into the habit and let nature take its course. After a few weeks, you will naturally open up and write about more deeply meaningful things. 

You’ll likely begin writing negatively about your colleagues—we all do that occasionally—don’t worry. No one else is going to read your journal. And writing about your feelings about anything is how journaling can be very therapeutic. 

And that’s the whole point of writing a journal. It’s therapy and it helps you to focus on what’s important. 

I find the act of writing what’s on my mind helps me to organise my thoughts, put things into perspective and then focus on the essential things. That could be my relationships, finances, spirituality or how my business is growing. 

It also helps me see where I can improve my life. I track my weight each week, and it becomes very clear when my weight is rising, which tells me what needs to be done to get back to where I should be. 

And finally, journaling gives you a record of your life. After all, you are documenting your life. And that’s a beautiful thing to do. If nothing else, you leave something for your kids and grandchildren. 

One of my family’s most prized possessions is my great-grandmother’s recipe book. It was started in the 1890s and has been handed down from daughter to daughter. It’s incredible to look at. It is tatty and torn, and the pages are stained. Yet, the handwriting is still legible; there are pen and pencil marks. 

Your journal could potentially become the same thing. A treasured family possession. Who knows how technology will progress in the future? Perhaps the text files you create today won’t be accessible in ten or twenty years. But a handwritten journal will always be accessible. 

We still have 7,000 pages of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks—written 500 years ago. Wouldn’t it be nice for your own life to be celebrated in 500 years?

So there you go, Naomi. I hope that has helped and motivated you to start writing your life. You’ll never regret it. 

Thank you for your question and for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very productive week. 

Is your time management and productivity system optimised so you are always focused on doing the right things? That’s what we’ll be looking at today.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 237 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 237 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

If you are like me, you will be reading, watching and listening to anything on time management and productivity. And there’s a lot of content out there. 

Now, I must confess, I’ve been consuming this content since I was in middle school and I’ve tried a lot of ideas, systems and structures over the years. In the end you realise there are a few fundamentals that work and many that don’t.

Most of the ones that do not work are the things that look great in a blog post or YouTube video, but when put into daily practice involve so much maintenance, doing the work becomes secondary to keeping the work organised—a sure bet that the new idea is not going to work. 

And so, this week, we’ll be looking at how to optimise our systems so that we are pointed towards the right things every day. It’s also a good time to be doing this because we’ve recently crossed the year’s half-way point and this a great time to be a half-year review. 

So, let me now 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 want to make my system better but I don’t know where to start. I took your Beginners Guide To Productivity years ago and I love how everything comes together, but sometimes I feel my system has become boated and slow. What do you do to keep things fresh and fast?

Thank you, Scott for your question. Good question and it got me thinking.

I know it’s very easy to keep adding to our systems once we feel it is working. What we do is add something new, and while that might be a small change when you add, the problems start when those small changes add up. 

This often begins in adding more and more project folders to our task managers. This is often where things start to go wrong because the more project folders you have in your task manager, the more folders you need to review when you do your weekly planning. 

This can also happen in our notes app where we add more and more categories and sub-categories. Eventually, it becomes a mess and we do not enjoy going in there to find what we need. 

Generally, I look at my system as a whole every three months or so. However, there is a key question I use here: what can I eliminate? 

It’s easy to accumulate plugins, extensions and apps. I do it all the time. I become curious about a new app everyone is talking about and install it on my computer and ‘take it for a test drive’. In 99% of cases I don’t see how it would improve my overall system, but the app sits there on my phone or computer. This three monthly clean out keeps these out of my system and out of temptation’s way. 

If you are relatively new to this world of productivity and time management, it’s going to be hard to stop looking at these tools. The best advise I can give is by all means go looking and playing, but after three months do a clean out. Remove apps, plugins and extensions you’ve accumulated and no longer use. 

But let’s start at the beginning. How are you collecting your tasks, ideas and notes? How fast is it? Do you find yourself sometimes resisting to add something because of the effort it takes to get something into your system? 

How you collect your stuff needs to be easy. Keyboard shortcuts on your computer, and widgets and long presses on your mobile devices. There needs to be as little resistance as possible. I like to think of it as like a Formula 1 racing team always searching for that extra hundredth of a second in speed. This is my approach to my collecting. Speed is key. 

The problem is we don’t have ideas when we want to have ideas. Ideas come at us at the most inopportune times. I could be in the middle of a run and an idea comes to me, I need to be able to get that idea into my notes app while breathing heavy, sweating and not wearing my glasses. 

Next up is how you organise everything. Now in the last five years or so, Microsoft, Google and Apple have been helping us here. You may have noticed that we are getting more and more stuff coming at us each day. Newsletters, books and articles we want to read, reports to review and of course messages and emails. It’s a lot of stuff. Where do we put all this? 

Well, Microsoft, Apple and Google’s engineers have obviously experienced this problem too and so they’ve done a lot of background work into their search features. Now, I don’t use Microsoft tools, but I know you can do a system search and find pretty much anything on your computer. Apple has Spotlight which in the last year or so has become brilliant, and Google, is the king of search. 

This is one area where I have significantly changed my system over the last few years. I remember six or seven years ago I was advocating a hierarchical tagging structure in Evernote. Today, I rarely use tags and my notebooks are a simple structure called GAPRA - Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive. 

To be honest, because search is so powerful today, you really don’t need many folders or notebooks. A simple structure called personal and work would work. It would also be fast because you don’t have to think too much about where to put something.

The only thing you need to make sure is the titles of your notes and files are recognisable to you. For example, I use a simple meeting note title. I put the date first in the year, month, day format and then the word “meeting” and finally the person’s name I am meeting with. This way, I can search my notes via date, type of note (meeting) and/or person. 

Next would be to look at your calendar. How are you doing against your “perfect week” calendar? I did a video on this a few months ago where you create a blank cleaner and call it “Perfect Week”. Then you add everything you want time for each week. This would include your social time, your exercise, family time and any else you want time for. 

Ideally you would also break down your work. For example, if you would like to have two or three hours each day for doing focused work, then you would add that to the calendar. Likewise adding an hour each day for communications. 

Every three months or so, turn that calendar on and compare it with your current week. How are you doing? Are you merging the two calendars? That’s the goal. 

When I last did this, at the end of last year, I realised I needed more time for sleep. I wasn’t getting enough and I had just finished reading Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep book. So, I made sure there was a gap of at least eight hours from when I finished my day and when I began the next. 

I’m not doing great here, but I am getting closer towards my sleep time goal. 

Now, a quick word on your task manager. All those project folders are holding pens. They don’t drive your day. Your day comes from your Today list. That’s the list of tasks that you have decided needs to be done today. Now the question here, is are you trying to do too much. How frequently do you complete you list for the day. 

Here, is where you need to optimise things. When you know what you can reasonable do each day, that becomes your daily number—or rather the maximum number you will allow on your list each day. 

When I include my daily routines, that number for me is twenty. I will not allow more than twenty tasks on my daily list. I know if I ever have more than twenty I am not going to complete them all, so I can optimise my day by only allowing a maximum of twenty tasks. It helps me to eliminate the less important tasks. 

And the final piece is how consistent are you with your daily and weekly planning sessions? I recently heard that those people who follow GTD (that’s Getting Things Done system) less than 5% do the weekly review consistently (and that means every week). That astonished me. The GTD book, the bible of modern day productivity systems, repeatedly tells us to do our weekly review. The weekly review is glue that brings everything together. 

I’m guessing those of you who follow the Time Sector System very few of you are consistent with the weekly and daily planning sessions. Yet, like GTD, it’s the glue that brings everything together. You need to know what’s on your plate for the following week. You want to be eliminating the things that do not need doing next week and making sure you are attending to the things you have identified as being a part of your areas of focus. 

Similarly with the daily planning, you need to know what your objectives are for the day. They are the tasks that will pull you towards successfully accomplishing your goals and projects. Without that clarity, other people’s dramas will get in the way and you’ll quickly become overwhelmed and that’s what you are trying to avoid by becoming more productive and better with your time management. 

Your weekly and daily planning sessions do not require a lot of time if you are consistent with them. Twenty to thirty minutes for a weekly session and ten minutes for a daily session. It’s less than 1% of your total weekly time. 

Now, I do know it’s easy to skip it and it’s unlikely there will be any immediate issues. But if you are not consistent and you skip these sessions a lot, something will eventually slip through the cracks and then the whole system falls like a house of cards. That’s when those thirty minutes you didn’t do turns into several hours of fixing a problem that should never have occurred in the first place. 

The final part to optimising your system is to look at how much time you are spending on doing the work versus planning and organising the work. The goal should be 95% doing and 5% planning and organising. 

I spend around five minutes a day cleaning up my desktop of files, screenshots and other digital stuff I have collected through the day. I do my ten minutes planning—although as I am consistent with this it often takes less time—and I clear my task manager’s inbox—around another five minutes. So, in an average twelve to fifteen hour working day, I spend around twenty minutes planning and organising my work each day. That’s around 2% of my working time spent organising and planning. 

So there you go, Scott. I hope that has helped and given you some ideas on how you too can optimise your system. Remember, the goal is elimination, not accumulation and that includes minimising the amount of time you require for planning and organising. If that is an area where you are spending too much time, I would suggest you start there. 

Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, the question is all about how to simplify your system so there’s less maintenance and more doing.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 236 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 236 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Over the last ten to fifteen years, we’ve been blessed with a lot of fantastic digital applications that have made managing our tasks, goals and notes easy. We can start a note on our mobile phone and finish it off on our computers when we get to our desks. We can add tasks to a task manager while out hiking when we remember we need to do something and it will be there waiting for us on any device we choose to use. 

However, what started out as a simple idea—use a device we carry with us everywhere to collect tasks, notes and ideas—has now become an ocean of complexity. 

How do we organise all this stuff? 

Where do I put this quote I want to keep for a presentation I may have to do in six months' time? 

What do I do with all my bank statements? 

And true to form, we humans have come up with increasingly complex ways to manage all this stuff. We now have elaborate digital filing systems—The alphanumeric system we’ve successfully used for hundreds of years isn’t good enough anymore, of course. And the humble task manager that started out simply telling us what we needed to do today, now has thousands of tasks hidden away in project folders often three or four levels deep. 

What all this complexity does is slow us down. We end up spending more time organising than doing. We waste hours looking for answers to our problems on YouTube or in blogs (or podcasts) and yet, the answer to these problems is staring at us in our face. Reduce the complexity and get back to basics. 

And that is what I will be looking at in this episode. 

So, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Eric. Eric asks, hi Carl, last year I decided to get myself organised and to start using my computer and mobile phone to organise my life better. Unfortunately, I really struggle to keep on top of everything. I often can’t find something I’ve saved (I know it’s somewhere) and my task manager has hundreds of projects which take a long time to clean up each week. Is there a better way to manage documents, files and projects? 

Hi Eric, Thank you for your question.

You are certainly not alone with this one. With a lot of my coaching clients, this is one of the first areas we need to sort out. Cleaning up their basic system so that managing it is simplified and the focus can return to accomplishing the work. 

Let’s start with the task manager. 

All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you must do today. Everything else is a distraction. This means the only list that matters each day is your today list. The list of tasks you have decided needs to be done today. 

On a daily basis, everything else is a distraction. If you find yourself having to go into your project folders each day to look for something to do, your system is failing you. 

Now, this might not be because of the apps you are using, it could be you are not doing a weekly or daily planning session and I have talked a lot about the importance of these in previous episodes. Basically, the weekly planning session is where you look at all your active projects to see what needs doing next week and add a date to when you anticipate doing those tasks. 

Once you have that done, you can ignore all those project folders. They are just holding pens for tasks you think you need to do at some point in the future, but have not yet decided when they need doing. 

On a side note, one of the reasons I don’t like having individual project folders in my task manager is because they often fill up with tasks that don’t need doing. You just add these tasks because you don’t want to have an empty project folder. 

Creating a new online course, for example, could have hundreds of tasks in a project folder in a task manager. But ultimately there are only a few things that need to happen. 

Write the outline,

Record the course

Edit the videos

Publish the course

Tell people about the course. 

Five tasks. If you look carefully at these tasks, the outline needs around two to four hours, recording the course needs a full day, as does editing the course. 

Uploading and publishing the course will require around four hours and telling people about the course will need another three or four hours. 

My task manager will not help me much here. All these tasks will need to be on my calendar because I need sufficient time to work on them. My notes will be where my ideas and comments will go. 

All I need my task manager is to tell me to “continue working on the course”. There may be a few little tasks such as write course description, but until the course is outlined and recorded, I am not going to be able to do that. 

I certainly don’t need a project folder for something like this. I do need a note somewhere for my ideas and the outline will be in a spreadsheet. 

Your focus needs to be on doing the work, not organising your work. And that leads me to the next problem. 

For apps to be attractive they have to lure you in with more and more features. And rather than simplifying your workflow, all these features add complexity. And it’s this complexity that slows you down. 

It might sound great that your new task manager can connect to your Google Calendar. But then every few months you’ll waste thirty minutes or so having to reconnect the calendar to your task manager. All that does is cause you to lose trust in your system—which again means you will be checking that events and tasks are moving as they are supposed to between your apps—another waste of time.

Now, what about all those files and documents? Well, there is some good news here. Apple, Google and Microsoft have, in recent years, been working very hard on their system search. What this means is as long as you know a keyword, a date range or a title, you will be able to find a document whether it is on your computer, or cloud service (if you are using iCloud, OneDrive or Google Drive).

You no longer need to develop complex folder structures for your files and documents. For example, If you create a Word, Google Doc or Pages file, you are encouraged to leave the file within the app’s file saving system. 

What this means is if you write a Word document, the document will be automatically saved in Microsoft’s Word documents folder. This applies to Apple’s Pages folder. All your documents are contained within the apps folder. 

You can then manipulate how your documents are listed. By date created, modified, title, size etc. You no longer need to create folders within folders for all your different projects. 

And as all these documents are essentially saved in the cloud, you can use your system search on any of your devices to find any document. Plus, this means you have a URL link which you can copy to your project notes so any relevant document can be found quickly via a single click or tap. 

When you focus on keeping your whole system as simple as possible, you will spend a lot less time having to go through folders looking for something to do. 

But again, it comes back to planning. Knowing what you want to get done the next day. 

If you maintain a simple system—a system based on when you will do your work rather than project tasks—the only thing you need to decide when planning the day is what needs to be done today? 

A daily planning session is not about going through your projects to see what needs doing next—that’s what the weekly planning session is for—a daily planning session is about deciding what you will do tomorrow based on your appointments in your calendar, and what your priorities are for the day and week. 

Of course, if you are not doing a weekly planning session, then your daily planning will become a weekly planning session and that will take up a lot more time. 

Seriously, all you need is thirty minutes on a weekend for weekly planning and ten minutes at the end of each day to plan the next. A total of around 90 minutes a week planning. —around 1% of your week. 

If you struggle to find that amount of time each week, you have a serious time management problem— or, as is more likely, a big self-discipline problem. 

The problem is the consequences of not doing these planning sessions. Not doing these sessions will result in you wasting so much time each day just trying to figure out what to do next—often what you end up doing is other people’s work. It’s much easier to say yes to someone’s request when you have no plan for the day. 

When you have a plan for the day, you’ll find you’ll say no to frivolous requests from your colleagues. You will also gain a lot more respect for your time from other people because they will see the results you are getting. 

The bottom line is if you want to be more productive and get more out of your time each day, you need to keep things simple. Stop wasting time trying out new apps in the hope they will make you productive. They won’t. 

Reduce your folders, you really don’t need them. Things to read can go into things to read folder, your documents can be kept in their documents folders. All you need to make sure is they have a recognisable title so you can use keywords to find what you are looking for by using your computer system’s search features. 

Make sure before you end the day you give yourself a few minutes to decide what needs doing tomorrow and never skip the weekly planning session. That is the foundation on which all productive weeks are built. 

I hope that has helped, Eric. Thank you for your questions. 

Thank you also to you too for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

What do I do with this email? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s episode.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Email Mastery Course

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 235 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 235 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Email. Possibly the most revolutionary new form of communication in the business world over the last thirty years. It’s transformed the way businesses communicate with each other and speeded up aspects of our work that in the past took days if not weeks to do before its advent. 

However, as with all great new things, it can be abused and email has likely been one of the most abused innovations. Now, things that could have waited until the next meeting, are often quickly written down in an email and sent to the other side of the world, with an expectation of an almost instant reply. And that is where many of the issues with email rest.

But, another problem for us today is where do you put important emails that do not need a reply, but do need to be kept for informational purposes or just in case? That is what we will be exploring this week. 

And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks, hi Carl, I get hundreds of emails each day, many of which do not need a reply, I just need to keep them, and I struggle to know where to put them. I don’t trust sending them to the archive, so I have a huge list of folders that are now overwhelming me. Do you have any tips or tricks to better manage email?

Great question, Anna, thank you for sending it in.

The key to getting on top of email is to understand the basics of what you need. Let me explain:

The inbox is for collecting email. It is where all the messages that are sent to your address will come in. It’s the collection point. The archive is for emails that you’ve either dealt with or want to keep for future reference and then there’s the trash for emails you no longer need to keep. 

Now, on their own, those folders could work in a system. But I feel there’s one folder that bridges the gap between the inbox and the archive and that is a folder for emails you need to take action on. 

I call this folder the “Action This Day” folder. Any email that requires action from me, will go into that folder. That could be emails I need to reply to, emails I want to read such as newsletters or reference emails with information I want to transfer to a project note. 

Over the years, I’ve seen some pretty elaborate structures in email with long lists of project folders or folders for bosses and colleagues emails. These are still the most common ways for people to organise their email. It can work—up to a point. It stops working once the folder list becomes so long it takes forever to find a folder to save a mail message. 

And there lies the “secret” to better managing email—speed. 

As with most things related to productivity, the less time you spend organising your tools and stuff, the more time you can spend doing the work. All these folders you created, Anna, work if the volume of email you receive is low—less than twenty to thirty mails per day—when you receive over 100 emails a day, this system is going to break. It will slow you down so you spend far too much time organising it instead of dealing with it. 

A question I would ask you, is why do you not trust archive? The archive is a great place to store your non-actionable, reference mail because it is searchable via sender’s name, keyword, topic or date range. As long as you know at least one of those search terms, you will find anything in seconds. 

Now if there is a fear you will lose it in archive, always remember, if you receive an email there will be a copy of it somewhere. If you replied with an acknowledgement mail (a thank you for sending that mail) then you also have a copy of it in your sent folder. There’s nothing wrong in asking someone to resend an email they sent you. I am sure people would prefer that to someone simply ignoring their mail. 

Search within email has come a long way in the last five years. All top email services have excellent search. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail are fast and have multiple ways to find a mail. 

There are thousands of articles and videos online explaining how to get the most out of search on these services. This is where we can develop our skills and learn how to search our email effectively. Just type a search query in Google for “How to search Gmail, or Outlook, Apple Mail” etc. Then set aside an hour or two to study. 

It will take a little while to become competent at search, but once you learn the basics and apply what you learn, your confidence in your archive will grow and pretty soon you will be able to let go of all those folders. 

Now, what about managing your mail. What do you do with it? Well, there are a number of different types of email. The easiest to deal with are all those newsletters you receive that you don’t read. 

Often these are newsletters from industry bodies you feel compelled to read because they are about your industry. Now if you read them, great. When they arrive, put them in your action this day folder for reading later in the day. 

If you don’t read them, unsubscribe from them. 

Here’s an interesting thing, there will always be someone who does read them and if there is anything interesting they will tell you. You can always ask them to forward them the email. Alternatively, you can resubscribe at any time. 

The problem I’ve seen is people who subscribe to these newsletters and never read them. They place them in a dedicated folder and pretty soon they have thousands of unread newsletters. Seriously, you are never going to read them. Let them go. 

All those mails are taking up digital space and slowing down your mail. You want mail to be fast and efficient. With thousands of unread newsletters clogging up your system, you will be slow. 

Get real, and be honest with yourself. If you are not reading these mails, let them go. Unsubscribe. 

Actionable mails get dropped into your Action This Day folder for acting on later in the day. These are easy to deal with when you are processing mail. If you need to reply, drop it in your Action This Day folder. 

Now those emails that contain a paragraph or two that are relevant to a project but do not need a reply—the CC’d emails. What I do is rather than send the whole email to my project notes, I copy and paste the relevant parts of the email directly into the project note and link back to the original email. If your email app doesn’t allow linking directly to a mail, then copy and paste the title of the email together with the date the mail was sent into your project notes. That way, if you do need to reference the original email again, you have your search terms. 

There is a class of mail that doesn’t need a reply immediately but does require a lot of work. This to me is a project and therefore I would treat the email as an instruction to begin a project. That means I open up a project note in my projects folder in my notes app, paste the email and add the link back, then I will add a task in my task manager’s inbox. I can decide later when I will begin work on the project.

The original email is then archived. I have a link back to the original email, and the relevant instructions are now in a project note. 

For linking back, Gmail, of course, is the best at this as each email you receive will have its own unique URL. Apple Mail allows you to drag and drop emails into notes that generate an in-system link back, and With Outlook as long as you are using OneNote as your notes app, any email sent to OneNote will also have a track backlink. 

And that’s a good point, I know there are a lot of great notes apps around, but you are only making things harder for yourself if you are using Outlook mail and a third-party notes app that doesn’t allow you to link back to an email. Apple Mail and Apple Notes work fantastically together. My advice is don’t make life harder for yourself than is strictly necessary. 

Now, what about emails you are waiting for a reply on. This one is interesting because in many ways if you don’t trust the person you sent the email to reply to you, then there’s an issue with trust, not an issue with email. It’s easier to blame mail, a lot harder to blame your own lack of trust. 

However, there are some emails you may need to keep as you wait for a response. One of which would online orders. I keep the order confirmation email in a waiting for folder, just in case there is a problem with the order. However, emails I sent to a colleague or client, I would add a note in the relevant project to tell me when I sent an email. 

The problem with waiting for folders is they don’t automatically clean themselves out. What I mean is when you get what you asked for, we forget to remove the sent email from our waiting for folder. Pretty soon, that folder fills up with things you are still waiting for and stuff that you received a reply to weeks ago. 

This is about minimising what you are keeping. It’s more effective to add a note to the project note with a date you sent the email than it is to add another mail to a waiting for folder. 

Another issue I have with waiting for folders is if you have a task that says “get presentation materials from Jane”, and you send the email to Jane asking for the materials, you have not completed the task. You do not have the materials from Jane, therefore the task is not complete. The task was not “send email to Jane” it was to get the presentation materials. Don’t complete the task, reschedule it a day or two in the future. That will be the reminder to you that you still have not received the materials. 

Managing email can be simple or complex. Which one you choose will have a big impact on how effective you are at dealing with mail. The truth is we’ve always received a lot of mail. Even before email. The trick is to develop a system that filters out the necessary learning only the necessary to deal with. 

One final point. There are two parts to managing email. Processing and doing. Don’t mix up the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as possible. It does not involve doing email—even if it would take two minutes or less. Just clear that inbox as fast as you can. Then set aside an hour at the end of the day for dealing with your actionable mail. Doing it later in the day avoids email ping pong because it’s unlikely you will get a reply on the same day. Reply in the morning and you’ll be doubling up your email. 

I have a course on managing email called Email Mastery. I have put a link to that in the show notes for you. 

SO, there you go, Anna. I hope that has covered most of the types of emails you receive. 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. 

Why does doing your work feel overwhelming and so hard? That’s what we are looking at this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Where We Get The Eisenhower Matrix Wrong

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 234 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 234 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

A lot has changed over the last two hundred years or so when it comes to how and why we work. For most people living two-hundred years ago, there was a purpose to work—to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. Life wasn’t fair, crops were destroyed by drought, floods and wars, but we had a purpose every morning when we woke up. To ensure our family were fed. 

Today, there are multiple reasons why people work. The truth is, despite everything going on in the world, we are living like emperors and empresses. The vast majority no longer need to worry about where the next meal will come from. For most, their biggest worry now is their mobile running low on battery power.

With all this luxury, it can be very hard to find our purpose. We have everything we need. Food, clean, running water and, for most of us, a safe, stable environment in which to go about our lives. Why do we even need to work? Great questions and ones that all come from this week’s question. 

Speaking of which, I think it’s time now for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Jesper. Jesper asks, hi Carl, I recently lost my job and I’ve found myself struggling to find the motivation to construct a system to find another job. Instead I am waking up later each day and instead of working on my CV, I read news and look for new productivity apps. Is there a way to help me be more productive now I don’t have a boss telling me what to do?

Hi Jesper, firstly I am sorry to hear of your lost job. I hope you find a new job quickly.

Now, let’s deal with how you structure your day when hunting for a job. A myth I need to remove is the myth that you need to spend all day hunting for a new job. 

One of the benefits of not having to go to an office or place of work is you no longer need to commute and sit in meetings all day. Instead you can concentrate your time. This means you no longer need to be “working” on your job seeking activities eight to ten hours a day. Instead you can do the required work on less than four.

This is great when it comes to structuring your day. 

Now, I don’t know how long you have been working for, but if you have held down a job for the last five or more years, now is a good time to do some deep personal thinking. Many people get a job based on advice given to them by teachers and professors who may know about a student’s academic credentials, but have no knowledge of their individual motivations. 

It could be that you were good at chemistry while at school and so you were pushed towards a career in science. But that might not be where your motivation is. Your motivation could be entrepreneurial or legal and studying law or business is really what you wanted to do. 

A loss of a job, while devastating, it’s also a great time to reflect. What was it about your work you enjoyed? What was it you did not enjoy? That’s going to help you to find your own motivation. It’s unlikely it will be the money. Money is a poor motivator in the long-term. People are not motivated by money. People are motivated by what they think money can do for them. What is much more likely when you reflect on your previous job is there will have been parts of that work that excited you, motivated you and gave you a buzz. And there will have been parts of your work that did the opposite. 

Look at these first. This will give you a starting point for what to look for in a new job. 

Now, if money is tight, it’s often worth swallowing your pride and going to work in a coffee shop or other job below your skill level, temporarily. You do not want to let money get in the way of choosing the right career or job for you. 

I remember, I lost my job when I was in my late twenties and was struggling to pay the rent. I wanted to get into law at that time and so I worked in a bar five nights a week so I could pay my rent and have food to eat. It was an unpleasant five months, but it was worth it. Had I let me pride dictate the course of action, I would never have worked in a law firm and instead gone back into selling cars. Who knows, I might still be doing that today, had I not taken that part-time bar work for a few months. 

Once you know what you liked about you previous job, you now have a list of things you want to do. You also have list of things you don’t want to do. 

Next up is your skills. What skills do you possess? We all have skills, often we are unaware of them, but we all have them. Take some time to think about what you are good at. Don’t worry at this stage is some of the things you are good at are things you do not enjoy doing, just list out the things you believe you are good at. A good way to determine this is to think of things you do with ease that other people find difficult. 

Are you good at talking to strangers? Organising events? Delegating? Leading teams? Where are your skills? Write them down.

Next comes the fun part: matching your skills with a job. Find a job vacancy site and read through the listings. See which jobs match your skills. This is going to lead you down avenues you may not have ever considered. Once you’ve done this, what are the jobs that match your skills?

Okay, now the hard bit. It could be that the jobs that jumped out at you were jobs that required professional qualifications. Qualifications that currently you do not have. Here’s where you need to decide whether it’s worth going back to school, even part-time, to get those qualifications. 

Now, when you look at the process to get to where you want to be, do you really need to be spending eight to ten hours a day searching? Not likely. 

So, while you were in full-time employment, what did you miss out on? What were the things you wanted to do, but could not do because you were stuck in an office or wherever your workplace was? 

Do those things now. 

You will be back in full-time employment again soon and these opportunities will disappear. Take these opportunities now. Get plenty of rest, do a lot of reflection, exercise and give yourself four hours a day for job searching. 

That means, if you prefer to wake up later in the day do so. Do your job search work in the evenings or the afternoons. You have complete freedom now. 

And here’s the thing. While there is a lot of debate around how we should be working. Working from home, working in an office or a combination of both, learning to structure your time during the day is going to be a new skill we all require. And structuring your day is part planning and part self-discipline. 

Planning because we need to set up our work sessions and self-discipline because we need to stick to our planned sessions whether we like it or not. 

The final piece, is to begin the day with an objective. What do you want to accomplish today? What one meaningful task could you do today that will leave you feeling satisfied and fulfilled. 

Now, this does not need to be related to job seeking. It could be you decide that today’s the day you clean up you home from top to bottom—it’s surprising how good it feels when you’ve spent all day cleaning and you sit down at the end of the day and look at your work. 

Related to your job search, you may decide you will apply for seven positions today, or you will complete a summary of your skills. Pick something. That something is going to give the day a purpose. It’s the purpose that will pull you through the day. 

Remember, Jesper, losing a job can be awful, it can be stressful, but it also gives you a chance to reflect, reset and rediscover your passions. Don’t let that opportunity go. 

When I look back through my career, losing a job has always turned into something very special. It gave me a chance to look at what I was doing, to do some self-reflection and to accept my weaknesses. On the flip side it gave me the chance to reconnect with what I enjoy doing, to learn new skills and to find a job or vocation that ignited my energy. 

It was losing my job back in 2002 that caused me to fly to Korea to teach English for a year. Within three months I discovered my passion for teaching and knew, deep down, I would spend the rest of my life teaching. And today, twenty years later, I am more passionate about teaching than I have ever been. 

A job loss can be soul destroying, but it can also be a catalyst to something much greater, something more special and a change within ourselves that starts us on a journey that we never tire of. 

Good luck, Jesper, I hope you find what you are looking for. Remember to structure your day, make sure you know where your skills are and maybe, you will discover something so much better than what you were doing before. 

Thank you for your question and thank you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week. 

This week’s question is on defeating the habit of procrastination (and I have some rather brutal truths to reveal).

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 233 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 233 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

Procrastination ah the bane of all productive wannabes. No matter how motivated you are when you retire for the night to have a productive day the next day, that pernicious procrastinator steals the day, and you find you’ve achieved very little, but you know how everyone of your friends on Instagram are doing, and you can talk about all the funny videos you saw on Tick Tock as if you were a professor of the subject. 

But what is procrastination, and why do we do it? Those are two questions we need to answer before we can start helping move anyone away from those dark depths to a more brighter, focused and productive light. 

Now, to kick start things off and before the Mystery Podcast Voice reveals the question, let’s look at the definition of procrastination:

“Procrastination is the action of unnecessarily and voluntarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so. “

Now I want to give you another definition. That of self-discipline:

“the ability to make yourself do things you know you should do even when you do not want to”

Now the way I see procrastination is that it is the near opposite of self-discipline. Yet, no one wants to admit that—particularly procrastinators. The truth is is a little more complex than that, but it is a good starting point because these definitions can give us some clues on how to defeat procrastination. 

Okay, with that part done, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Len. Let asks, hi Carl, I’ve been in full-time employment for over twenty years now, and I’ve always wanted to be more productive, but I’ve always failed. I’m never doing things that are important, instead I do the unimportant stuff. I think I am what some people call a “serial procrastinator”. Have you any ideas you could share that will help an old procrastinator like me stop? 

Hi Len, thank you for your question and for being so honest. 

Firstly, let’s deal with the “I’ve always failed” part of your question. Failure is not a finish line in itself unless you make it so by quitting. Failure is an education. 

Whenever you fail at anything, you learn something—if nothing else, you learn what doesn’t work so you can start again with a different strategy. Failure has nothing to do with you as a person; failure at anything informs you what skills are missing, so you next time you try to can build those skills and strengths, so you don’t fail again. 

I remember the first full marathon I attempted. I failed. I dropped out at mile 18. I just couldn’t go another step further. I was devastated. I thought there must be something wrong with me. But a little voice inside me said, this was only my first attempt, and I learned that I needed to set off slower and pace myself better, and I also needed to improve my strength and stamina on hills—you don’t run marathons around an athletics track. You run on streets, and they are rarely flat. 

With that information, I spent the next six months learning to pace myself properly and did a hill session every week. The next time I entered a marathon, I finished it—with energy to spare! Did I fail? Of course not; I got knocked over, but I learned why and picked myself up and developed my skills and succeeded. 

Remember, you never fail until you quit. You may get a few setbacks because the strategy you were trying didn’t work, but that is not failure. It’s a setback. 

Okay, now on to your procrastinating. 

I’ve seen a lot of clinical reasons why we might procrastinate, and I see many people in the media who will jump on these clinical definitions and tell every who procrastinates that it’s an illness and if you take this new super-drug, you will be cured. Well, I’m sceptical. I’m sure you can alter the chemical make-up of your brain to stop procrastinating and be more focused, but artificially altering your brain’s chemicals isn’t a long-term solution if you ask me. 

But let’s go back to the definition of procrastination—delaying or postponing something you should be doing despite being aware of the negative consequences. 

Why are you postponing what you should do? What are you doing instead? That’s where I would start. Let’s say that reading the news or going through Tick Tock or Instagram, is what you do, now here is the dilemma, Facebook (or Meta as they are now called) and ByteDance are big corporations that employ smart people to create a user experience that is designed to keep your eyes on their content. Much like soap operas and TV dramas—they want to keep you watching their content. 

You are battling again with professional people who understand human psychology, and unless you remember this, you will always be sucked in. 

It’s the same with the news today. The news media companies are in competition for your eyes and attention. They employ people to come up with click-bait headlines so you click their articles. For years journalism schools have been teaching students how to grab and keep your attention, and it’s very effective. 

Now we mortal humans have not had any opposing training. There are no classes on how to resist click-bait headlines and the social media algorithms designed to keep us on their site. So, this battle is very much a one-sided one.

However, we do have one thing in our arsenal that is highly effective. And that is self-discipline. And the great thing about self-discipline is that it works very much like a muscle: The more you train it, the stronger it becomes. 

By the way, if you want to see how developing self-discipline can transform your life, I highly recommend David Goggins’ book: Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds and Jocko Willink’s Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual. Both books lay it on the line what can be achieved by developing your self-discipline and destroying procrastination. 

However, for the last forty years or so, our lives have become more and more easy. When I think back to my childhood and visiting my grandparent's house, whenever they wanted to watch something on TV, they had to be there at the time the show was on. There was no streaming or recording. You either watched it when it was on, or you missed it. And then, if you didn’t like the next TV show, you had to get up out of your chair, go to the TV and turn over the channel. No remotes back then. 

There were no robotic vacuum cleaners, and if you wanted to learn something, you had to go to a place called a library. No picking up your phone and Googling something for the answer. If you wanted to read the news you had to go to a newsagent to buy a newspaper—unless you were lucky and you lived in an area where the newspaper was delivered to you. 

And if you were hungry, you had to get up and cook something. No home food deliveries in those days.

Back then, every day we had to exercise our self-discipline one way or another. Today, we can run businesses from our sofa with a phone. We don’t have to move anywhere. 

All these conveniences have been eroding our self-discipline silently and ruthlessly and it’s no surprise that the word procrastinate has become such a popular word in recent years. I’m betting if I asked my grandmother twenty years ago if she knew what procrastination was she’d have looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language. 

So what can we do to strengthen our self-discipline? Well, one of the best ways is to develop a simple, healthy morning routine. There are three things a good, solid, healthy morning routine does. It first wakens you up. You can start off by doing a few stretches. Begin with your neck, then shoulders, arms, stomach and then legs and feet. Spend around two minutes stretching every morning as soon as you get out of bed. Then drink a glass of water with half a lemon squeezed into it. 

You can make yourself a cup of coffee or tea as well. Then sit down somewhere relaxing and do ten minutes of meditation or journal writing. And finally, look at your plan for the day. 

Three things. Stretching (and or exercise), reflection—meditation or journal writing and reviewing—look at your plan for the day. Make this not only a routine but something stronger. A ritual. Something you will not miss—ever.

My morning ritual lasts around 40 minutes, although I give myself 45 minutes. Yours might be thirty minutes or even an hour. The time it takes is not important. What is important is that every day, whether you are working or not, you begin each day the same way. 

Then, before you start the day, make your bed and clean up the kitchen. 

Make no excuses (there are none) for not doing this. Not only will you feel great having a consistent way to begin your day, you are also exercising your self-discipline. 

Another way I strengthen my discipline is to always take the stairs and avoid escalators and lifts (“elevators” if you live on the other side of the Atlantic) I do have an exception here. If the floor is above the 10th, I will take the lift. But fortunately, it’s rare I need to go beyond the 10th floor. 

Quite often taking the stairs is faster than waiting for a lift anyway and I gamify escalators by taking the stairs and racing the escalator to prove it’s faster to use the stairs. 

It takes time to strengthen your self-discipline, but the time and effort is worth it because as you gain strength here, your procrastinating habit will be receding. 

The next thing you need to do to stop procrastinating is be aware of what you do when you procrastinate and when you find yourself doing that activity stop immediately. Ask yourself: What am I doing?! In an aggressive voice out loud. 

What this does is interrupt the pattern you have wired into your brain that causes you to procrastinate. Interrupting patterns of behaviour is a great way to overcome any bad habit. You could also slap yourself aggressively across your chest as well when you say “what am I doing?!” 

This pattern interrupt will begin the rewiring of your brain to remove the bad habit of procrastinating and start reinforcing a new, positive habit. 

Finally, always have a plan. Sometimes we slip into procrastination because we do not know what we need to do next. Or, our to-do list is so long, it’s overwhelming and trying to decide what to do next causes so much anxiety we slip into procrastination. 

Your plan does not need to be a micromanaged plan. All you need are a few real, meaningful objective tasks to be completed that day. Knowing what you need to get accomplished each day prevents procrastination because you feel the pull of your plan. It’s when you don’t have a plan you feel you are having to “push through” the day and that’s exhausting. Instead, have a plan. The plan will pull you through the day and that is far easier than pushing all the time. 

I hope that has helped, Len. Thank you for your question. Remember, you are not failing, you are learning what doesn’t work. I hope knowing that all you need to do is to strengthen your self-discipline muscle and have a plan for the day and you will soon find yourself procrastinating less.

Thank you also to you too, for listening and it just remains for me know to wish you all a very very productive week. 

What is your philosophy for life and work? That’s the question we are exploring this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 232 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 232 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One of the most influential people in my life has been Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn was active in the 1980s through to the early 2000s and taught personal development through changing people’s philosophy on life and emphasising the importance of taking responsibility for your own life. 

One of Jim Rohn’s main teaching points was to develop your own philosophy for the way you live your life and do your work. This means having a set of rules for how you will execute your work and be present with your friends and family. For instance, a simple example would be when having a family dinner, you put away your phone and be interested in how your family spent their day. 

This week’s question is linked to this as it’s a question based on how I manage to stay consistent with my output. I’m nothing special, I just took on board what I learned from Jim Rohn’s books and videos—which most are available on YouTube now—and built a few simple philosophies into my life. 

It’s not easy to do this and it takes time. But if you do not have a set of philosophies (or rules) that you set for yourself, you will find yourself living your life by other people’s philosophies and rules— which are rarely going to do much for your life. There is always something driving our lives. Either we take control or we allow other people or society in general to control us. 

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 Sean. Sean asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following you for some time now and I’m impressed with how you have consistently uploaded content over many years. How do you do that? Do you have a team of people helping you or is there something else? 

Hi Sean, thank you for your question. 

Firstly, I should say that I do not have a team of people working with me. It’s all me. I have toyed with the idea of hiring a team to help me with video editing and social media publishing, but so far, I have not seen the need as I can manage to do my work each week without much stress and certainly without overwhelm.

However, I do have a set of ‘rules’, if you like, that I follow that enables me to stay focused on what is important each day. 

And this is linked to my 2+8 Prioritisation Method (or what I used to call my Golden 10) this is a process by which I determine what needs to be done each day. 

Several years ago, now, I realised I could not do everything in one day. I’m sure you also have discovered that, and having an open-ended to-do list, left me feeling stressed and overwhelmed. It often felt that as fast as I did my tasks, new tasks would be coming in. There was never a net gain. 

This had to stop. So, at the end of each day, I began selecting ten tasks that I would work on the next day, two of which were must do’s. Whatever else happened that day, those two “objective” tasks would get done. 

It was this methodology that transformed my output. Every morning when I began the day I know precisely what needs to be done and what I would like to get done. 

Ten tasks are my optimum number. If I try to add more, I leave myself with no flexibility to deal with anything urgent that may come up on the day. 

My rule is, that when I stop and close out the day before I turn off my computer, I will open my task manager and go through the next day’s tasks. I will use the flags to indicate which ten tasks will be my 2+8 for the next day. This is now a non-negotiable rule. And funnily enough, I have been doing this for several years now and it feels very uncomfortable to go to bed not knowing what my ten tasks are for tomorrow. 

I noticed on a recent trip, that even though I was not working, I still found myself opening my task manager before going to bed to see what needed to be done the next day. To prevent myself from doing work (I was taking a break), I made my objective task to relax and enjoy the day. 

This is probably the biggest most impactful philosophy or rule I have adopted over the last ten years that has seen a dramatic improvement in my daily and weekly output. 

Just to give you an example, before I went to bed last night, I made writing this podcast script one of my objectives for the day. When I woke up this morning, I was ready to begin writing. There was no hesitation or procrastination. Writing this script is a must-do today and the sooner I start writing the sooner I could move on to other, possibly more urgent, things for the day. 

And that brings me back to what I learned from Jim Rohn all those years ago. “Success is a few simple disciplines practised everyday”. It’s that philosophy that is tattooed onto my brain (as Robin Sharma would say). 

And this philosophy works with anything you want to do. Exercise, for instance, takes consistent effort to achieve whatever results you want. You can’t lose weight or run a half-marathon if you only do activities to achieve the result you want when you feel like it. It has to be a disciplined practice to eat less and healthier or do your exercise for the day. 

My closing down for the day activities takes around ten minutes, it’s just ten minutes out of 1,440 minutes each day. Is that really so difficult? Now based on how I feel when I don’t do it, it’s not worth missing. I’d rather have ten minutes less sleep and know precisely what needs to be done the next day than run the risk of having a stressful and overwhelming day. It’s a small discipline practised every day. 

But there is more that will help you to make sure you are doing the right work every day. I’ve talked a lot about your core work—the work you are paid to do or are responsible for. This is the work that must be done for you to do your job well—and that’s the same whether you are in full-time employment, a stay at home parent or run your own business. There are a number of tasks you must do each day and week to uphold your responsibilities. 

These tasks must be scheduled and once scheduled they get done at their scheduled time. Skip these or ignore your calendar and you are shirking your responsibilities. You are in effect doing what Jim Rohn calls practising failure, which is: “a few errors in judgment repeated every day”. And that’s what you need to tell yourself. Nobody wants to be irresponsibly so you need to make sure you are responsibly doing what you know you must do—that could be collecting your kids from school and driving them to their rugby or swimming practice. Or it could be calling ten new prospects each day. 

These are the few simple disciplines that if practised every day will ensure you are leading a successful life. You become dependable, and consistent and in a world of inconsistency, that is something refreshing. 

A question to ask yourself is what rules do I want to live my life by? Now, this does not mean boxing yourself in so you live a miserable life. What it means is you choose the rules by which you will live a fulfilled life. For instance, I know if I do a little exercise every day, my energy levels remain high, I feel great and it puts me in a positive mood. I also know, that if I do not exercise every day (an error in judgment), I feel lethargic and my mood is bordering on the negative. 

Similarly, I feel fantastic when I get to help people. Putting out my content each week, allows me to help thousands of people. Whenever I hit publish, I get a buzz knowing that this piece of content, whether it is a blog post, newsletter or YouTube video, will help someone somewhere become less stressed and more in control of their lives. 

But I cannot press publish if I don’t have anything to publish. So the work has to be done. It’s funny, as I write or record, I feel I am having a conversation with someone—someone I don’t know, have never met and possibly never will. But if I help just one person become a little more disciplined, or a little more focused, perhaps I might have helped them achieve the life they want for themselves. Nothing beats that feeling. 

So, sitting here at my computer, writing this script, is a must. This is my chance to help someone. 

That is why every week, I will sit down and write my blog posts, and record my podcasts and YouTube videos. It’s not only a discipline, it’s my philosophy. 

So, Sean, if you want to lead a fulfilled life, the secret is to create your own philosophy. What ‘rules’ do you want to live your life by? What could you do a few minutes each day that over time will build into something very special? What habits, do you need to change? 

The thing is, unless you start with what you want, you won’t know what needs to change and what habits you need to develop. 

Being a good parent, means you need to spend quality time with your kids each day. What does quality time mean to you and what could you do to make that happen? It’s surprising how little effort you would need to put into it. For instance, it could be you make it a rule you will not work after 6 pm so you can be there to help your kids with their homework or take them out to the park on a lovely summer’s evening. 

Not working after 6 pm, becomes your philosophy. 

It’s rare that we need to have to do a fundamental overhaul of our lives. Most people, and I guess you listening to this podcast have already made the decision you want to improve aspects of your life. That improvement is a philosophy—it’s what Tony Robbin calls Continuous and Never Ending Improvement (CANI). That is a great philosophy to have. How can I be a better spouse, parent, salesperson, taxi driver, or friend? What do I have to do each day to be more organised, better prepared and more fulfilled? 

All great questions and questions that when answered have the potential to become your philosophy. 

I hope that has helped, Sean. Good luck on your journey (for that is what life is—a journey) and thank you for your question. 

Thank you also to you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

This week, we’re diving deep into prioritisation and learning how to use the Eisenhower Matrix to make it easy.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Where We Get The Eisenhower Matrix Wrong

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 231 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 231 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One of the most common challenges people face is how to prioritise their work and personal tasks. With so much being thrown at us, not only do we need time to process all that stuff, we need to make sure that we are allocating sufficient time to the tasks that are important. 

However, that means we need to also make decisions about what is and is not important and that is where the biggest challenge will be. 

So, this week, I will be answering a question on how to do that effectively. 

Now, before we get to the question, I would like to give you a heads up that this week, I have launched my summer sale. For this week only you can get 15% off my individual courses, 20% off my coaching programmes and 25% off my bundles. Full details can be found in the show notes. 

Don’t miss out on this incredible offer. My sales are rare, so this is your chance to build your skills over the summer so you are ready and prepared for whatever the world throws at us next. 

Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Margarida. Margarida asks, Hi Carl, I recently cam across something called the Eisenhower Matrix. I think I get it, but how does this fit in with how you prioritise your work?

Thank you Margarida for your question. 

I first came across the Eisenhower Matrix when I read The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey a very long time ago. 

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the Eisenhower Matrix, this is a matrix of four squares that divided between urgent and important, not urgent and important, urgent and not important and not urgent and not important. 

By the way, if you want to see this matrix, you can head over to my website, carlpullein.com, and my latest blog post has an illustration for you. I’ll also put the link in the show notes for you.

The idea is you spend most of your time in the top two squares. The important and urgent and the important and not urgent. 

Now, as with all systems there are difficulties and the Eisenhower Matrix is no different. The second square (or quadrant 2) the important and not urgent tasks is where you need to be dedicating more of your time. The type of tasks in here are planning tasks, anticipating potential problems, taking care of your health and your relationships and getting some rest and relaxation. 

Now, I am sure as you listen to those words you know they are important but how often do you prioritise them? The chances are you only prioritise them once they become urgent. A visit to your doctor informs you you are pre-diabetic and urgently need to lose weight and start an exercise programme. This is where a quadrant two task moves into quadrant one (urgent and important). 

The same can happen if you neglect your relationships, because maintaining relationships is rarely an urgent task, we tell ourselves we’ll deal with a relationship issue later. The problem is “later” is not defined and when something is not defined it slips down our list of priorities. It’s only when you are served with divorce papers that a task like this gains the urgency it needs. 

One thing I learned a while ago is, if you want these important, not urgent tasks to remain non-urgent you must schedule time for them. This means you schedule planning, exercise and time spent with your nearest and dearest. Ie; blocked out on your calendar. 

But, here lays another issue, what are your quadrant two tasks? What do you define as a quadrant two task? 

Most people never sit down and decide what is important to them and what needs to happen to maintain them. Ultimately, actions speak louder than words. And that means if you are to make sure you are taking care of these important areas of your life you need to know what they are and what you need to do to maintain them. 

For instance, I know my relationship with my wife is important. This means each week, I make sure we have at least one day out together. Often we’ll drive over to my parents in law for dinner, or we’ll take day trip to the beach. One thing I do know though is that day spent together is far too important to miss. 

We are both busy people, but in the almost fifteen years we’ve been married, our weekly trips have been rarely missed. 

I find it interesting that car owners are generally very attentive when it comes to getting their cars serviced and engine oils changed. I know I am. In fact, my car begins to warn me a service is due a few thousand kilometres before the due date. 

Now if you don’t get your car serviced on time, there may not be anything that goes catastrophically wrong as soon as it’s late. You may even be able to go another year without any serious harm. But sooner or later, that neglect, will cause trouble and it will be expensive. 

The same applies to your quadrant two tasks. Miss doing what needs doing for a week or two, perhaps even a month or two, and nothing will seem wrong. But neglect of any of these areas and you will soon face problems. Now a quadrant two task has become a quadrant one task and that is never good. 

This is why not only do you need to know what your quadrant two areas are, you need to know what tasks need to be completed each day or week and get them scheduled on your calendar. 

What about quadrant one tasks—the urgent and important? These are tasks related to your core work. The work you are paid to do. If you’ve taken the Time Sector Course, you will know all about these important tasks. These are the essential tasks that need to be done as part of your employed work. Neglect these are you will soon find yourself out of a job. 

On a day to day basis, it’s these tasks that take priority, after all, they are urgent and they are important. But here again there are problems. As with quadrant two tasks, most people never define what they are. If you never define what your quadrant one tasks are, your quadrant three tasks (the urgent, not important tasks) will sneak into quadrant one and overwhelm you. 

For instance, some emails are quadrant one, most are quadrant three. Yet, if you never define which emails are quadrant one, all emails will become quadrant one. When that happens, you waste a tremendous amount of time on low-importance emails. 

Once again, here you need to take a little time out to define what is what. Let’s say you spend three or four hours working out what is important to you and what your core work is. That time investment will be repaid multiple times because once you know what is important, your decision making becomes so much faster. 

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I can process 100 emails in around twenty minutes. That’s not because I have any special abilities. It’s simply because I know what emails are important and what are not. Customer and client emails are the highest priority. Emails from companies asking me to advertise their products are my lowest priority and are instantly deleted. 

Each day, I know what my core work is and I know I have time allocated to making sure that work gets done. Again, that does not take any special talent or ability. All it takes is a few hours establishing what my core work is and what is not and therefore low-value work. 

And that’s what you need to do, Margarida, take a little time out and establish what is important to you and what your core work is. Once you know these, you will be able to make the Eisenhower matrix work for you. The secret power of the matrix is to customise it for your life and not try and fit your life into other people’s examples of hoe they use the matrix. 

Now the final parts to the Eisenhower Matrix is to establish what your quadrant three and four tasks are. These are generally easy to work out. These are the things that often cause us to procrastinate. 

Now there is a warning here. You may find playing video games in the quadrant four list of many people’s examples. This may not always be the case for other people. I know many people who use playing video games as a way to relax. If you do find activities like playing video games are a good way to relax, then they can be a quadrant two task. However, mindlessly going through YouTube videos and aimlessly watching TV, is most certainly a quadrant four task and should be avoided at all cost. 

I use YouTube as a way to learn new things. That, for me, comes under self development, and therefore is a quadrant two task. However, if I ever find myself aimlessly watching something, I will quickly recognise it for what it is and stop. 

Quadrant three is the difficult one to define. The truth is most emails and meetings you attend are quadrant three, but they are clever as they can disguise themselves as quadrant one. This is another reason why clearly defining what a quadrant one task is is so important. Allowing quadrant three tasks to sneak through into quadrant one will lead you to stressed out and overwhelm. 

Here, I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to define what your quadrant one tasks are. Once you are clear about these, your ability to quickly decide what you need to do about something and how much time to spend on it improves. Most advice for quadrant three tasks is to delegate as many of these as possible, and if you can do this, do it. However, for most of us, that is not really possible. 

The best advice I can give you is the advice former Israel Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir who said… And I quote:

“Take my advice: take everything you’ve received today and put it away, don’t touch it for a week. Urgent, not urgent—leave it, don’t touch it. Come back to it after seven days, ten days. This is what you’ll see—ninety percent will take care of itself, and the ten percent that didn’t—that’s probably what you need to deal with.”

I’ve always loved that quote and it’s what I have used for dealing with quadrant three tasks. Leave them for a week. I’ve found that it’s true, 90% of them take care of themselves and the remaining 10% I can elevate to quadrant one. 

I hope that has helped, Margarida and thank you for your question. 

Thank you also to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Podcast 230

This week, we’re looking at how to collect more efficiently and, more importantly, more consistently

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 230 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 230 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

When we first start out building a productivity system for ourselves, one of the first things we need to master is collecting. This is how we get ‘stuff’ into our system that gets processed and organised and ultimately done. If you’re not collecting stuff to put into your system, then you don’t have a system at all. 

Collecting needs to be fast, with as few steps as possible, and we need to learn to be consistent with it. 

It’s not the sexy part of building a system; this is the messy bit in the middle that Robin Sharma often talks about. It’s fine-tuning, stepping back and rethinking and more often than not, we have to repeat this process of testing and fine-tuning before we finally have something that works intuitively and consistently. 

And it’s this bit I shall be explaining in this episode. 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 Baz. Bad asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently undertaken a project to update my twenty-year-old system to a more modern-day one. Over the last twenty years or so, I’ve always written things down on a notepad I kept on my desk, but now I want to make this digital. Do you have any tips for making this an easy transition? 

Hi Baz, thank you for your question.

One of the first things you are going to need to get used to is typing out your tasks, ideas and anything else you want to collect instead of writing things down, and this can be more difficult than you might imagine. You see, it feels very natural when you are in a meeting or with someone else to pull out a pen and notepad and write something down. People understand you are writing something important down. 

Unfortunately, because of the bad press our mobile phones, tablets and laptops have today, typing something into one of these devices makes us feel self-conscious. We fear the other person or people think we’re responding to email, checking our Facebook feed or searching for big tractors. (People in the UK will understand that one) 

The thing is we need to get over that self-consciousness as quickly as possible. I know when I first went digital I needed to explain to people what I was doing with a “hang on while I write that down”. Typing into your phone and writing on a piece of paper is the same thing in this instance. I know it takes some getting used to, but it’s part of the process of going completely digital. 

To lessen this self-consciousness, we need to make digital collecting as fast as we can. How do you do that? 

This is where the digital tools we use have a big impact. And this starts with the applications we choose. A mistake people make is to look through YouTube and watch what popular YouTubers are using. Thomas Frank uses Notion, Steve Dotto is a big Evernote user and Matt D’Avella uses Apple Notes. 

Now the thing to remember, these people are not you. They are content creators who likely rarely have meetings with customers and clients. Their productivity needs will be very different from you. Thomas Frank, Steve Dotto and Matt D’Avella will make extensive use of notes apps to plan out videos and collect future topic ideas. If you are in sales, for example, your digital notes needs will be very different. 

Perhaps you need to keep details of when you last spoke to a customer, have a list of potential customers and information on the products you sell. Information that is very different to a YouTube content creator. 

So, before you go out and find a tool based on the recommendations of others, stop and ask yourself what your needs are. 

The next thing to consider is where you will do most of your collecting. Prior to the pandemic, most of my collecting was done on my phone as I was travelling to see students and clients. Today that has changed. The vast majority of what I collect is collected on my laptop. It’s here where you need to do some thinking. 

Collecting needs to be fast and intuitive. For me, I have a keyboard shortcut to collect a task. It does not matter where I am on my computer: whether I am in full screen or not, whenever I activate the keyboard shortcut, I get an input box in the middle of my screen where I can type whatever task I need to be reminded of. Likewise, if I have an idea, I can initiate a keyboard shortcut which will bring up a quick entry box for getting the idea directly into Evernote. Apple Notes has become even easier if you are on an iPad or laptop, all you need do is swipe up from the bottom right of your screen, and you get a new note ready to collect the idea. 

So, whatever digital tools you decide to use, make sure that collecting stuff into those tools is fast and easy. See if you can create a keyboard shortcut on your computer, and whatever mobile device you are using, make sure at the very least the apps you use for collecting are in your dock or home screen. You don’t want to be swiping from left to right trying to find your notes app when you have the next big idea, or you need to simply write down a person’s email address. 

The next step is to turn collecting into a habit. Now, the way to do this is to consciously collect everything that comes to your mind. Anything and everything needs to be collected. A lot of this stuff you collect will be deleted when you process, but you don’t need to worry about that at this stage. Hitting the delete key is far better than missing something important. 

What you are doing here is developing a habit. You can do your filtering when you process. Just get into the habit of using the keyboard shortcuts or pulling out your phone to collect. It’s this you need to turn into a habit and learn the necessary muscle memory. 

Now a quick tip here is if you do find yourself not collecting using your tool of choice, make a point to stop and do so when you remember what you should be doing. This helps to interrupt a pattern in your brain, so next time you will be more aware. It’s developing these habits that can be difficult. We’ve got used to collecting (or not as the case may be), and we have to change that habit. That’s difficult. To do that, you have to break the old habit—interrupt it—and replace it with the new habit. That’s why even if you do write down the task or idea, make sure you consciously take what you wrote down and add it to your digital system. 

Once you have set up your system. You’ve got the apps you’ve chosen on your phone—most likely to be your primary collection tool—and you’ve set up your keyboard shortcuts, which you now want to be fine-tuning. To do that you should frequently ask yourself “how can I do this better?”. It’s an incredibly powerful question, but it also helps to make sure your system is at its most effective and efficient. 

One thing I’ve learned is the fewer barriers there are to collecting something, I am more likely to collect it. This is why I’m always checking to see what has been updated in my collecting apps when they update their apps. Have they found a faster way to collect? 

I do remember when Apple released their Shortcut apps; I spent many an evening experimenting to see if I could activate my collecting using Siri. I never really found anything satisfactory or better than what I currently use, but I have found that the fastest way to get something into my system now is through the use of my Apple Watch. That’s always on my wrist, and so, even if I am out running and think of something, I can still add it to my system quickly using just my voice. 

What you will find is as technology improves. There will be better and faster ways to get things into your system. If you have Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s HomePod, that gives you additional ways to collect stuff. 

I recently bought an Amazon Echo and was impressed with how I could interact with Alexa so that my tasks could be added directly to Todoist. This means as I am walking around my office, all I need to do is tell Alexa to add something to my to-do list. It’s fast and surprisingly intuitive to talk to a device. Perhaps this is where the future of collecting will grow. 

The key to collecting is not to overthink it. Choose a digital tool, set it up so that you have quick access to the inbox and make sure you use it consistently. That part can be hard; you will slip up from time to time; that’s part of the process of learning. Make a mistake, recognise it, and try again. As long as you are persistent, you will soon break through and collecting digitally will become second nature. 

Thank you, Brad, 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. 

Podcast 229

This week’s question is: what does “Love what you do” really mean?

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 229 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 229 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I received an interesting question the other week about how to love the work that you do. Now, this was sparked from an article I wrote where I pointed out if you really hate the work that you are doing and dread Mondays, then perhaps you need to reconsider your career options. 

For those of us past the age of 45, you will have likely come to the conclusion that life is not just short, but brutally short. By 45 you’re about halfway through your life and all those goals, ambitions and experiences you said you would do one day suddenly seem to fade into long lost opportunities. 

And life being so short, why would you want to subject yourself to 35 years of misery spending the majority of your prime years doing something that does not bring you any pleasure or satisfaction. it just does not make any sense. 

So that brings us back to the question, how do you love what you do? That is what I will try and answer today and hopefully give you some ideas about how to change a career that no longer brings you joy or any satisfaction. 

So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, recently I read an article on your blog that said that if you hate what you do you should change your career. I know that sounds like the obvious answer, but what if you can’t change your job for whatever reason, how can you change the way you think about your job? 

Hi Phil, thank you for your question (and for reading my blog) 

Now before we get into the heart of this question, I should point out the two versions of this quote or expression: “love what you do” and “do what you love”.

One is possible for all of us, the other is often unrealistic. The unrealistic one is “do what you love”. Now that does not mean it is impossible. I was recently sat next to a pilot on my flight back to Korea and he was telling me he chose to become a pilot because since he was a little boy, he’d been fascinated with all things to do with flying. He was well into his fifties and still loved flying. 

So, while doing what you love is often unrealistic, it is certainly not impossible. But if what you love doing is sitting on the sofa watching movies every night while eating ice cream, it’s likely you will struggle to find a career that will support you. (Although perhaps becoming a movie critic for a news media company might be a good path to follow.)

These days, however, doing what you love does have more doors that can be opened. For instance, when I was teaching English, I did have a number of students whose dream job was to become a travel writer. With sites like Medium and SubStack, there are now opportunities to turn your passion for a particular activity into a side project, that over time could become your full-time work. And of course, YouTube has opened up possibilities for people to record and publish their take on any number of topics. 

But what about the second one. “Love what you do”?

Now this one is an interesting one. I love writing, I also love recording and producing videos. But, I do not like the admin that comes from running my own business. If I were to spend all my working time writing and recording, it would be ‘perfect’. Sadly, life gets in the way. We still have to do admin. I still need to do my expenses and my taxes. I hate doing that kind of work. But it has to be done. 

Now a question that has helped me in the past with doing the things I do not like doing is “what would happen if I stopped doing the work I did not enjoy?” Well, if I don’t do my expenses and my taxes, it would not be long before the tax authorities would be knocking at my door. There is also the other side to this, in that neglecting an important part of life (admin) would leave me feeling unfulfilled. Part of my personal identity is that I am organised and know what’s going on in my life. So, not doing an essential part of my work would leave me feeling guilty and unhappy with myself. 

So, I do my expenses, taxes and admin. 

However, there is something you can do here. Turn doing the work you don’t like into a competition with yourself. For instance, if you hate clearing your email’s inbox, time yourself. See how fast you can process 100 emails. (To help you here, I recently cleared 120 emails from my inbox while sitting at Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport in 33 minutes. (Beat that!) I was a little disappointed, though, I wanted to do it in less than 30 mins. 

Now it’s rare I would have 100+ emails in my inbox, I average around 80 emails in a morning when I start the day. But next time I get 100+, I will beat that 30 minutes. 

What’s happening here is you are taking the emphasis off the boring part of the process—deciding what an email is and what, if anything, you need to do with it—to something completely different—how fast can you clear your inbox?

Now the work I don’t like doing, I’ve turned it into a project to find the most efficient way to complete my expenses. I’ve created my own spreadsheet and I look for ways to automate it as much as I possibly can. My expenses are not the typical lunch or dinner receipts. Most of my expenses are monthly subscriptions for services I use such as iCloud, website hosting and such like. these are recurring, so I’ve managed to set up a system where I can duplicate these payments automatically in my spreadsheet and then the spreadsheet will do the currency conversion automatically. I loved coming up with that idea. 

What about a whole job you don’t like doing. Well, first of all, do you hate all aspects of your work? If so, you really do need to stop and ask yourself what you would like to do. If you hate everything about the work you do, then really the best option is to leave that career altogether and find a different one. 

But, in my experience, hating everything about your work is very rare. I remember my first job was cleaning the changing rooms in a health club. Not the most pleasant of jobs, but I did find it fascinating seeing the members working out and being able to judge what was needed if you were to be fit and healthy all your life. 

I remember one member, who must have been in his seventies, with a body of a Greek god. Not an ounce of visible fat and not overly muscular. I think people would describe him as looking very athletic. I watched his workout routines every day. I noticed he didn’t lift particularly heavy weights at all. His routine was to start on the running machine for twenty minutes or so, then he spent twenty minutes lifting free weights (not machines) followed by around ten minutes stretching and finally he would do lengths in the pool for around twenty minutes. 

I remember asking him one day how he stayed in such good shape and he told me he’s been working out every day in some way or another since he was at school. Almost thirty years later I am still inspired by that gentleman. 

Another job I did in my early working life was as bar staff in a local pub in England. Being on your feet for six to eight hours a day and coming home stinking of cigarettes and alcohol was not pleasant. But the job itself taught me how to communicate with people. I am not by nature a people person. But working in the bar, taught me to communicate and I met some incredibly interesting people. 

Sure, there were days when I got soaked in beer when changing a barrel, I also cut my fingers many times when cutting lemons and many broken glasses. But it was an experience I will never forget and I know how to pull the perfect pint of bitter and Guinness. What a skill to learn. 

There are always parts of a job you will not like. You need to identify these areas and ask yourself how you could learn to make them less unpleasant. When I worked in a law firm, I hated dealing with angry clients. But I realised that learning to handle upset customers (clients) was always going to be a key skill in life. So, I offered to help my colleagues if they ever had an upset client. I made it an objective to master the art of handling upset clients. Not sure if I ever did master it, but I no longer fear it. 

But if you really are at a loss with your career choice and feel it impossible to change direction now. Stop. There’s absolutely no reason why you cannot go back to school and learn a new vocation. There are so many opportunities now to take online courses reasonably cheaply. You can even do a Masters degree online today. 

The first step, though, is to give yourself some time to think about what you would like to do. Perhaps do some reading and research. Discover where your passions are now. That’s your starting point. Then do the research. From there, you will soon find what the next step will be. 

There you go, Phil. I hope that has gone some way to explaining what you can do to turn around an unhappy career choice. You have some amazing opportunities today, the only thing you need to do is to take the first step and decide what you want to do. 

Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listing. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Podcast 228

This week, I have a very special episode for you. It’s all about managing email with Francis Wade. 

The guilty article:

Clear Your Email First Thing

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

[Follow Francis here >]

You have an overflowing inbox, you’re behind on projects and your calendar for the next ten days is full of meetings and other commitments. What can you do to get things under control and meeting your commitments? That’s what we’re looking at this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Ultimate Productivity Workshop 

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Take The NEW COD Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script | 334

Hello, and welcome to episode 334 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

I know it can be easy for productive people to say all you need to do is this or that, and you, too, will be productive. The reality is it’s not that simple. 

It’s not just about getting organised, reestablishing control of your calendar, and learning to use a to-do list properly; there’s also a mindset shift involved. 

Many people I work with individually have been told and come to believe that they are disorganised and sloppy with their time management. If you’re told this too often and your actions support it, you begin to believe it. Being poor at time management and productivity becomes an identity. 

Once you believe you are bad at these things, it becomes a self-fulfilling habit. Every attempt to become better organised and more productive will fail because you will sabotage your successes. 

Your brain has an incredible capacity to reorganise and adapt. Just look at how people adapted to the lockdowns in 2020. There was resistance at first, then the adoption of new ways of doing things. Those who enjoyed exercise found ways to adapt their exercise programmes and work from home—something many people believed was impossible for them- but they soon discovered it was possible.

Your brain can adapt and remodel itself using “neuroplasticity”. All you need is a stimulus—such as a determination to get organised and be better at managing your time—like muscles in response to exercise. 

Sadly, most people don’t try. They accept these negative patterns as just who they are. Yet it’s not true. Your mindset and habits are not set at birth. You learn them. And that means you can unlearn them and develop better beliefs and habits. 

So, with all that said, it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Wim. Wim asks, hi Carl, for years, I have tried to get myself organised and failed every time. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve read all the books, watched thousands of YouTube videos, and learned all the tricks. But for some reason, I can never do anything I learn. How would you help someone like me?

Hi Wim, Thank you for your question.

Part of the problem for people who struggle to get themselves organised is trying to do too much at once. 

While we are good at changing things, we are not very good at changing everything. This is why it’s often said that moving house is one of the most stressful things a person can do. Moving house is exciting, yet it also involves a lot of change. 

That makes it uncomfortable. There’s a new home, a new way to get to the supermarket, a different drive to work and new people to get to know in the neighbourhood. 

Yet, after a few weeks, our new home becomes normal. We feel comfortable and safe, and the stress of the move disappears. 

All change requires an initial period of discomfort. We make mistakes and forget to do something we should have done, and going through the actions feels like a huge effort for a small gain. 

But we discovered during the pandemic that we can do it. We can adapt to change and do it quite quickly. 

So, where do you begin? 

As always, the best place to begin is with the basics. To get organised means learning and implementing the principles of COD—Collect, Organise and do. 

When it comes to collecting, how will you gather together all the stuff you either have to do, would like to do or have a passing interest in? 

For some, that may mean setting up their phones as their universal collection tool (UCT) or perhaps a pocket notebook. 

If you choose to use your phone—possibly the best UCT as we carry these things with us everywhere we go (including the bathroom!) what application will you use? 

The application you use for collecting is important because it needs to fulfil two requirements. First, it must be quick and easy to use. Too many buttons to press, and you won’t collect everything. Second, you need to trust that what you collect will be saved and not lost. 

A lack of either of those functions and it will fail. 

Once you have your collection tool set up, the next area to work on is the habit of processing and organising what you collect. Done frequently, and this won’t take a lot of time. Done infrequently, and it will take too long, which then means you won’t do it. 

I generally advise people to clear their inboxes every twenty-four to forty-eight hours. This depends on how much you are collecting. I find people just starting out with a system collect a lot more than seasoned people do. 

That’s actually a good thing because for the first few weeks, it’s about building the habit. The old habit of trying to remember things in your head doesn’t work, but it’s an ingrained habit—“oh, I won’t forget that”. 

You will. Write it down. 

If you are collecting a lot of stuff, clear your inbox daily. If you’re collecting less than ten things a day, you can clear your inbox less frequently. (Although I do advise you to scan your inbox daily to ensure you haven’t missed anything important).

Now, when it comes to organising what you collected is a little more difficult. This requires some thought. 

The goal is to find what you need as quickly as possible when you need it. 

One thing that will hinder you here is if you have stuff all over the place. I have a policy of using tools for the purpose they were designed. This means I use one task manager, Todoist, for all my tasks. 

This stops me from having to find stuff in multiple different places. When I start the day, I know all my tasks will be in one place. 

This also helps with trust. I can trust that what needs to be done today will be on my Todoist Today list.

Yet, this didn’t happen overnight. It took many months of learning Todoist and building trust. 

When I see people announcing on YouTube or social media that they have switched to another app, my eyes roll. I’ve seen it time and time again. If you constantly switch apps, you never build trust in your system. You’re always learning a new tool, and things slip through the cracks. 

Let me say this: you will never become better at managing time or more productive if you cannot settle on a set of tools and stick with them. 

You are not missing out if a new app appears and promises to fix your productivity woes. That’s just marketing. Stop falling for it. 

The question is, how will you organise your stuff?

I use the Time Sector System to organise my tasks, and my notes are organised using a methodology called GAPRA (Goals, Areas, Projects, Resources and Archive). 

I have a lot of resources on these organisation methods on my website, so if you want to learn more about them, head over to Carl Pullein.com. 

The final part is to do the work. 

This involves getting control of your calendar. 

Now, here’s the thing. If you do not control your calendar or are ignoring it, you will always have difficulty managing your time. While your calendar is the simplest tool in your productivity toolbox, it’s also the most powerful. 

We all begin each day with the same amount of time. Yet we have different priorities and things we want time for. However, time is fixed. And that’s a good thing. It means you have one constant you can work with. 

The number of tasks coming at you is not something you can control. You have no idea what will happen today. You don’t know how many emails and messages you will get; you don’t know what your customers or boss will ask you to do. That side of the equation is not within your control. 

Yet, I see so many people trying to control the uncontrollable. That’s often where problems begin. 

Instead, take some time and look at the different categories of things you need time for. Communications and admin will be two things. It’s also likely you will need time for chores and planning. On top of that will be the work you are employed to do. 

A lawyer will need time to read and write contracts, prepare cases for court and talk to clients. All this requires time. The question becomes how much time do you want to allocate to these activities each day? 

For example, I know that if I dedicate two hours a day to content creation, an hour to communications, and thirty minutes to admin, I will never have any backlogs or be very far behind on my commitments. That’s just three and a half hours a day to get important work done. 

That means I have just over twenty hours for everything else each day. Take Louis, my dog, for his walk, eat, do chores, sleep and exercise, and, of course, spend time with my family and friends. 

We are all different, and we will all have different priorities. Yet, if you control your calendar and are strict with how you allocate your time, you will find you do have time to get everything done. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but you will have time over the next few weeks. 

Doing what I call the backend work matters. That’s deciding your priorities and using those to guide your days. If spending time with your family is important, you need to protect time to spend with your family. Hoping you will find time in the future is not a good strategy. 

If you’re sick and tired of seeing hundreds if not thousands of unread emails in your inbox, they won’t disappear because you hope they will. You have to deliberately set aside time to deal with them and then protect time each day to ensure the backlogs don’t reappear. 

Similarly, if you have projects that are behind schedule, they will not miraculously get back on schedule if all you are applying is hope. You have to set aside time to do the work intentionally. 

It’s worth pointing out that no new, brilliant AI-inspired calendar or productivity tool will ever do the work for you either. You do the work. It’s your time, and only you know what is critical and what is not. 

This all comes back to the basic principles. Know what is important to you—develop your areas of focus. You can download my free Areas of Focus workbook from my website. 

Make sure you collect and organise your stuff, set aside time to do the work, and then do the work. 

It will take time to develop these habits. But it’s not impossible if you really want to do it. Allow yourself that time, and within a few weeks you will begin to see notable improvements in your time management and productivity. 

Thank you, Win, for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, we’re focusing on doing the work instead of organising the work. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 227 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 227 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Most productivity advice, tips and tricks focus on how to organise your work. And while this is important to some degree, it is the least important part of the three areas—collecting, organising and doing. 

You see, you can have the best organisation structure and still be unproductive. That’s because in order to keep everything organised you spend far too much time organising and adjusting. You might feel good while you are collecting all your files and notes and moving them into an organisational structure, but you won’t be getting anything done. 

Obsessively organising your stuff is another form of procrastination because it means you are not getting your work done.

And that’s what this week’s episode 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 Jade. Jade asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently finished your From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course, and now I feel organised (I now know where everything is), but I don’t feel productive. How do you keep everything organised and get your work done? 

Hi Jade, thank you for your question.

Congratulations on completing the Disorganised To Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course. I know with that course you now have everything you need to build a great system.

And you are now ready to move to the automation part of productivity. You see, when we start doing something new—such as having all our files, documents, notes and everything else organised and in a place where we can find them, it will mean that you will need to consciously think before you do anything. 

You will need to think about where you will put something and that takes time. 

However, this is just a part of the learning process. You’re changing old habits for new ones. The key here is to consistently do some organising each day. This will likely involve processing the files and documents on your desktop into their rightful place. It will also entail clearing your inboxes and making sure everything is in its rightful place. 

When you first start doing this, it will take quite a lot of time. However, if you are consistent with this, you will get faster. 

Now a lesson I learned years ago when I was in sales. During my induction training with one company, they sent me out with one of their salespeople for a day. That day coincided with the expense reporting day and I vividly remember the salesperson training me pulling up in a car park after lunch and suggested I go for a walk for a couple of hours. 

She then opened the glove box and out poured what seemed to be hundreds of receipts. She had to transfer those receipts from that glove box onto an expense reporting form. 

That taught me a valuable lesson. Don’t pile work up. Do a little every day and instead of it taking you two to three hours up close to a deadline, it will take you less than ten minutes to add that day’s receipts to the expense report. 

To give you another example, many years ago, when I first began using a digital task manager, it could take as much as forty minutes to clear its inbox each day. When you tagged on all the notes I had written, I was spending more than an hour just organising my stuff. 

However, I stuck to it. Over time, my clearing time dropped. I learned what to collect, what could be added directly to a project note during meetings and what didn’t need looking at every day. Now, I can clear ten to fifteen tasks in my inbox in around five minutes. 

When it comes to clearing my notes’ inbox, I generally do this once a week. Notes are less urgent, so do not need processing as frequently as tasks do. And if I did collect a note that related to an active project, I could easily add that to the project notebook when I next work on the project.

And that’s really what it’s about. Find effective and efficient ways to manage the work that is coming in. Over time, you will also learn what to say “no” to, which will reduce the number of inputs coming into your system. 

The biggest benefit to getting everything organised is the time saved trying to find stuff. However, your new organisation system is going to take time to become second nature. It’s only then that you will feel the “system” itself is in the background so you can now focus your attention on what’s in front of you. 

However, with all that said, something you could ask yourself now is where do you feel your system is slow? Where do you find you spend most of your time when you are organising? Here we will all be different. For some, how they manage and organise their email is a bump in the road. Getting quick at clearing your inbox and making decisions such as what is it? And what do I need to do with it? Takes a little time to become automatic. 

Again, with consistency, you soon learn the patterns and can make decisions about whether you need to take action on an email or not. Likewise with those bigger requests from bosses or clients. The requests that will need an afternoon of deep focus. What do you do with those? 

When we first begin, we will hesitate and likely think too much about these kinds of requests. As you apply your system, though, they become much easier to make and, more importantly, you become faster at making those decisions. 

Now there is one area I haven’t spoken about and that is learning how to search your devices and your apps. Search has come a long way over the last five years or so. Long gone are the days when a downloaded file would disappear somewhere on your hard drive and would take hours to locate. Now, as long as you know roughly the date you downloaded it, a title or keyword: within a second or two, you’ve found the file. This is again moving you towards automating your system. 

It’s always difficult to change old habits, and one of the worst habits to have is to go through all your file folders looking for files and documents. A far quicker way is to trust your computer. It knows where everything is. On a Mac, all you need do is hit the COMMAND key and Space bar, and you get a little search box. Type in what you are looking for, and boom! You have what you are looking for. 

I’m not entirely sure how this works on Windows, but I know Windows does something very similar. Learning how to do this will dramatically speed up your work. 

Another part of feeling productive is in what you are completing each day. If the majority of what you are completing are low-value tasks, you are not going to feel very productive at the end of the day. This is where daily planning comes in. When you do the daily planning, make sure that you have one or two meaningful tasks on there that will move a project or goal forward. 

You do not want to be overloading your task manager with high-value meaningful tasks—that’s likely to leave you feeling stressed out and overwhelmed, and you will not be able to do everything in one day. But, choose a project that needs working on and create a task that says something like “work on Project X”. That gives you a lot of wriggle room. Often you will find all you have done is planned out the next steps. 

For instance, if I find a project has stalled for whatever reason, just going into the project note and reviewing my notes, I will soon see what needs to be done next, and I can add that ‘next action’, if you like, to my task manager. It’s a quick, satisfying way to get projects moving forward. 

But what are meaningful tasks, and where do they come from? Generally, these tasks will one from one of three places. Your goals, your Areas of Focus or projects. As long as you have a good mix of tasks that comes from these three places, you will find that you get to the end of the day and feel fulfilled and satisfied with the day. 

If you fill your days with low-value admin type tasks, you are going to feel unfulfilled and unhappy with what you have done that day. 

Now, I’m not saying you fill your days with high-value project or goal tasks, that would leave you with a lot of admin being neglected, and that will always come back and bite you. It’s about the mix. Let me give you an example.

If you made sure you had two to three hours each day for high-value important project work, an hour for dealing with your communications and perhaps thirty minutes for admin, you would soon find yourself being very productive at work. 

If you then added forty-five minutes for daily exercise (a good walk is enough), some time for your family and friends and a little time for your own personal development, you would still have time for a good night’s sleep. 

You don’t need to fill every hour of every day with activities. You just need to identify what’s important to you and make sure you have sufficient time each day for those activities. 

I hope that has helped, Jade. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

This week’s question is on the subject of optimisation and process. Two parts of the productivity mix that rarely get talked about.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 226 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 226 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

There’s a lot of information on creating a system or method for better managing your time and being more productive, but how do you improve those systems and methods once you have them in place? 

More importantly, how do you repair broken systems when they fail? (And they always fail in the early days) Because there’s less information about these situations, a lot of people quit trying or wander off looking for another new system. 

That’s the wrong way of looking at it. As long as the system you adopt covers the three basics: collecting, organising and doing, then the system can be made to work for you. Your system is a little like when you buy a new mobile phone. 

When you first get the phone, there are a number of preinstalled apps. If you tried to live your life with these limited apps you wouldn’t get the most out your mobile phone. You need to customise the phone for the kind of lifestyle you have. It’s no good having the English Premier League app installed when your sporting love is rugby and cricket. So we add and remove apps according to taste and that’s the same with your productivity system. You will at some point need to customise it to maximise the effectiveness of your system. 

That’s what I’ll be talking about in this episode. 

And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Andrew. Andrew asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried a lot of time management programmes and methods over the years, but I can never find one that works for me. There’s always something missing and a lot of features I’m never likely to use. I am curious how you have made things work for you. 

Hi Andrew, thank you for your question.

The reality is no system, programme, or method will ever work perfectly straight out of the box. You see the difficulty is all these methods are developed for humans and humans are not machines. We all think differently, prioritise different things and work different jobs. 

And even in our own lives, our priorities will change. In our teenage years is all about getting an education. In our twenties, it’s about learning to handle the responsibilities of being an adult and intimate relationships. And as we get older, there’s likely parenthood, career and eventually retirement to manage. 

The reality is, a system you developed to manage your education is not going to be as effective when you want it to manage your career and family life. It will have to change and evolve as you change and evolve. 

Now the mistake I see most people making is thinking that as their priorities change they need to change their whole system and that’s not true. Rather than changing a whole system what really needs to happen is the existing system you use needs to be adjusted. 

So what does that mean?

Well, let’s look at the three parts to a good productivity and time management system. There’s a task manager, a calendar and a notes app. Now the only thing that’s changed here over the last ten to twenty years is we’ve gone from a paper-based system (diaries and notebooks) to a largely digital system. 

The biggest change there was the separation of our task list and notes. Twenty years ago, we wrote our to-dos in our notebooks (or on PostIts!). Now, for most people, they are two different apps. 

But, the basics still apply. To ensure we are working on the things that matter we need to be clear about what needs to be done. Whether those tasks are written out on paper or in a digital system doesn’t matter. 

The same applies for writing out our goals and plans. Whether you write these out on paper or digitally doesn’t change things. You still write them out (externalise them) and review them (hopefully).

This means if you are struggling with “systems” it is not likely to be the system itself, it’s more likely something is not working within the three areas (collecting, organising and doing) 

With collecting, the emphasis is on writing down all your commitments and ideas and not trusting your brain to remember them. That’s simple enough. But, the question here is: are you collecting all your commitments and ideas? Do you sometimes skip this part? 

Problems here are usually in three areas. 

The first is there’s no habit to collect, so we ‘forget’ to write things down or we believe we will remember—which often we don’t. Plus, if you don’t collect everything you don’t get a sense of how much you have to do, so you end up with a false picture of what commitments you have. 

The second is there’s a lack of trust in the tools you are using. If you don’t trust that your task manager or notes app will safely store what you put in there, you will continue to try and remember everything in your head. 

Trusting your tools is a big step for many people, and it becomes a lot harder for those who are always switching their tools. Whenever you start using a new tool (or app), there will always be an element of doubt that what you collected went where it was meant to go. It takes time to build that trust. 

And thirdly, the tools you are using make it very difficult to add new tasks or ideas. If there are too many ‘clicks’ or taps to get something new into your task manager or notes app, you will not consistently add stuff. 

It’s important when choosing tools, you test out how easy it will be to get stuff into the app. If there are too many clicks or taps, then stay well away from the app. 

What I’ve noticed here is a lot of people are attracted to the latest, shiniest tool, so they are looking at the aesthetics of an app or what popular YouTubers are telling them. Just remember, a lot of these YouTubers are paid to review these apps and they are not necessarily reviewing things objectively. 

Now when it comes to organising, I find a lot of people’s organisation system is either their downloads folder or their inbox. There’s no structure and so it’s almost impossible to find anything. 

These days you don’t need a complex hierarchical organisation system. The computers we use have fantastic search capabilities, but you do still need some form of basic organisational structure or you will become overwhelmed when you go searching for something you cannot remember the name of. 

How you organise your stuff really depends on you. No one person will be the same here. My notes, for instance, are structured around GAPRA—Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and an archive. This gives me a place for all the things I collect. 

When I shared this organisational structure on YouTube, I got so many questions about where I think something some be stored. I couldn’t answer a lot of those questions because I didn’t have the kind of notes I was being asked about. In this area, we will all have different types of collected notes. This is where you have to trust yourself and think about how you would naturally look for something. 

My file folder structure, for instance, is divided into two parts Personal and Professional. That’s because I use a single computer for both my work and my personal life. I have a lot of clients who have a computer for work and a computer for their personal lives. In this situation, my structure wouldn’t work. 

For my professional work, I run my own company. This means I need folders for tax, company regulations, expenses, employees and admin. If you are an employee, things like HR, admin and taxation are likely things you don’t need. 

Doctors and lawyers are required to do continuous professional education which means they need a way to keep all of these educational materials somewhere. Project managers may be managing several projects all at once and so need a way to manage these materials. 

Hopefully, you get the point. No one person is going to have the same file and note organisational structure. It’s very important to spend some time developing your own so you can find what you need when you need it. 

When it comes to how you manage your task manager, here, all you need to see is what needs doing now. Something that needs doing in six months’ time is not relevant today. 

I find the problem with the way people manage their task managers is overthinking things. The only thing that’s important today are the things you need to do today. Tomorrow’s tasks are not relevant today.

This means, that the most crucial part of a day is when you ask yourself “what needs to be done today?” Now, ideally, you will do this the night before, not the morning of. You want to be very clear when you start the day what needs to be done. If you leave the daily planning to the morning of the day, you waste so much valuable focus time trying to decide what to do. 

When you do the daily planning the night before, you can step back and look at the big picture and anticipate what’s coming at you. You will also find you are more engaged with your family and friends because the next day is planned and you are not worrying about things you may have missed. 

I don’t buy into the excuse that there’s no time to do the daily planning the night before. It’s a ten to twenty minute daily commitment. If you cannot find ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day, then you have serious problems. Nobody is genuinely that busy. 

No, if you are not doing a ten to twenty-minute daily planning session, you are just being lazy. Pure and simple. 

How difficult is it to look at your calendar and your task list for tomorrow? Seriously? You don’t have time for that?

And if you don’t want to look at it because you don’t want to be thinking of work when you are not working, you need to question your career choice. If you hate your work that much, you cannot bear to look at your calendar and task list for a few minutes before you end the day, you’re in the wrong career. 

And finally, when it comes to doing, how are you managing your time? Are you maximising your “doing” time or are you spending too much time organising? 

Now here it’s about learning when you are at your most focused. Again, we will be different. Some people are more focused first thing in the morning, while others find their focus is better later in the day. 

Now, I understand that a lot of people don’t have a great deal of control over their calendars when at work, but you can still look at ways to make sure you are blocking time out for the more difficult work at a time you are likely to be most focused. Okay, you may have a meeting at 10:30am, but what are you doing at 9:00am? That’s still a good hour and fifteen minutes where you have a block of focused time. If you know before you start the day what the big task is for the day, you can get started on that first thing. 

So, Andrew, rather than looking at different methods, programmes and systems, look at the three foundations of collecting, organising and doing. How are you in each of these three areas? 

Whether you are using David Allens, Getting Things Done, the Franklin Planner or my Time Sector System, if you are not consistently collecting, don’t have a clean, workable organisation system and have no plan for doing your work each day, nothing will work. 

You will be constantly looking at different methods and tools and never finding what you are looking for because you are looking in the wrong place. Look at yourself first. Decide what you want to see each day and how you prefer to get things done. 

Then build on that. 

I hope that has helped, Andrew, and thank you for sending in your question. And, thank you to you too for listening.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

This week, we’re looking at how to identify your most important thing.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 225 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 225 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s a lot of stuff flying around in our lives that demand attention right here. Right now. Messages from WhatsApp, email and social media that need responses. Colleagues, family and friends as well as clients and bosses ask us to ‘help’ them. Homes and cars that need cleaning, bills to pay, accounts to sort out and consolidate and, of course, summer holidays to plan. The list is endless. 

And because this ’stuff’ is non-stop and endless, the truly important things in our lives get pushed aside in favour of what’s urgent that masquerades as important. 

So what can we do about this? Fortunately, there are a number of things we can do that will give us some perspective on things and guide us through the days so that the things that do matter to us, can still take centre stage. 

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 Frank. Frank asks, Hi Carl, thank you for all the valuable content you publish. You’ve really helped me to get a grip on my life. 

I’ve completed your Areas of Focus Workbook and followed the guidelines. The problem I have is I have so many other things to do for my work and general chores, that I don’t have any time to do the things I want to do for my areas of focus. Is this normal or am I missing something important? 

Hi Frank, thank you for sending in your question. 

Now, it sounds like you are in transition. This is quite common when we have spent a lifetime working for other people’s agendas. It’s hard to take back control because we’ve become conditioned to give up all our time for other people. So, when we take some of that available time away and dedicate it to ourselves, we feel guilty and selfish. The truth is, you are not being selfish at all. 

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard the analogy from the airline safety announcements at the beginning of a flight—put your oxygen mask on first before helping small children—and there’s a good reason for this. You are not going to be able to help anyone if you are unconscious. The rule is you make sure you are fine first so you can then help other people. 

This is the same with life. If you are breaking down if your health gives out and you have to spend a prolonged period in hospital. Or if you are stressed out, burnt out and depressed, how helpful are you going to be to those around you? 

If you want to be there for the people that matter in your life, you must take care of your own wellbeing first. 

What does that mean? 

Well, in terms of time it doesn’t actually involve a great deal. Let’s begin with the basics.

In order for you to keep in touch with your wants and needs, you need some time each day to reflect and think. The best time for this is first thing in the morning. Rather than staying in bed until the very last moment, wake yourself up thirty minutes earlier and make those thirty minutes time dedicated to you. 

Make yourself a cup or glass of your favourite morning drink, then find a quiet spot for some time alone. Now, what you do in this time is entirely up to you. For me, I like to spend a little time in my journal and write my thoughts and feelings and review my objectives for the day. The key with these thirty minutes is to spend some time with yourself. Treat it as a time to stop, reflect and think about your needs. 

The act of writing a journal gives you a way to empty your head of things that might be worrying you. Or it might highlight some area of your life you feel is out of balance. 

Now, in your case, Frank, you have already completed your Areas of Focus workbook so you know what each of the eight areas means to you. This gives you a reference point to refer to that will help you to see where things are going well and where things might not be going quite so well. 

By completing the workbook, what you have done is to externalise the things that are important to you. This makes it so much easier to see if everything is going well. 

For instance, health and fitness is quite high up on my list and while my diet and exercise have been very good for a number of years, one area I have neglected is sleep. I haven’t been getting enough and I realised I need to make some changes to my day so I give myself every opportunity to get the required seven and half hours of sleep I need each day. 

This meant reviewing my calendar, adjusting my available coaching times and moving my daily admin time to earlier in the day. 

The funny thing was when I first realised my sleep was not good, I could not see where I would be able to find the time. But writing about it, reflecting and thinking about solutions over a couple of weeks, I soon found a way to accommodate more sleep time into my schedule. 

While it was running around in my mind, it became a huge problem. When I sat down to think about it objectively and look at the resources I had available, I soon found the solution was in my own hands and a few small adjustments to my calendar solved the problem. 

One of the great things about giving yourself some time for yourself is you have an opportunity to look at what is on your mind and to come up with solutions so they are removed from your mind. 

Our brains are incredible things that have evolved to keep us alive over hundreds of thousands of years. And that is where our brains fall down. They are designed to keep us alive and not necessarily evolve and develop us as individuals. This means even the smallest of problems will become amplified until we become stressed out and worse, stuck in a cycle of worry and anxiety. 

By giving yourself thirty (or more) minutes each day for yourself, you can occasionally ask yourself a series of simple questions. Questions like:

• What work issue/project is most on my mind?
• What health issues are bothering me?
• What area of focus feels out of balance? 

Now, most days, there will likely be nothing, but from time to time, there will be something, and this allows you time to externalise the problem (write it down) and to let your intelligent brain consider solutions. 

Now, there are two parts to your brain. There’s the conscious brain—this is where your survival instincts lay. This is the brain responsible for making your stressed, anxious and on edge. Now, this is a good thing because it allows you to stay away from imminent danger. It’s what has kept us human beings alive. It’s the flight to fight part of our brains.

So, running away from your angry boss or upset customer. Or avoiding calling the bank to talk about your unauthorised overdraft is all controlled by your conscious brain. So, is ignoring your expanding waistline, your constant fatigue and the pain in your back that won’t go away. All of these ‘decisions’ are controlled by your conscious brain. 

If you never stop to reflect and think about you, you never engage your more intelligent part of the brain—your subconscious brain. 

Now, I like to think the subconscious brain is where your knowledge and life experience mingle and develop unique solutions to all your problems. The problem is, that you need to give your subconscious brain time to do its stuff. 

Your conscious brain is designed to make quick decisions such as running away from an angry mother bear and avoiding calling that upset client. 

Your subconscious brain is where you will find all the resources you need to solve all your problems. It might not be very helpful if you come face to face with a charging, angry mother bear protecting her cubs, but for most of our everyday problems, it is by far the best part of your brain to engage when you want to bring a sense of calm and control in your life. 

The reality is, that there’s always something on our minds. Something that doesn’t feel right. The question is: what are you going to do about it? 

You can choose to ignore the problem, or you can externalise it and reach into your subconscious mind for the resources that will give you the solution.

Just some of those resources would be:

• Ask someone who has the knowledge to help you. That could be a doctor, a dietician or a fitness instructor. It could be a friend, a boss or a colleague. 
• You could read some books or articles or listen to podcasts etc.
• And of course, you have your own experience. What have you learnt in the past about this particular problem that could help you solve it?

All these resources are in your subconscious mind, but if you do not give yourself some time alone to stop and think, you will never gain access to this amazing resource. 

Over the years, I’ve leant not to be afraid to ask myself what’s bothering me right now and what can I do to get it off my mind? It’s when I go through that process I find that the things that are bothering me are not as bad as I imagine them to be and that a simple fix is often just a small amount of time away. 

On my recent flight back to Korea, I knew I was not going to get any sleep on the overnight bus ride to Dublin Airport, but I reasoned that as I was going to be on an eleven-hour flight from Paris to Seoul, I would have time to get some sleep on the plane. And as I was going to be very tired, I would not have much of a problem getting to sleep. 

What I didn’t bank on was to be sat next to two lovable small boys who once the flight attendant dimmed the lights after our meal, would start fighting and screaming. So much for being able to settle down to a few hours' sleep. 

Initially, my conscious brain reacted. I began to feel anxious and annoyed. But then I stopped. Externalised the problem—I was extremely sleep-deprived and these two boys were making it impossible to sleep. 

Once I pushed the problem to my subconscious brain I calmed down and realised there was still eight hours left of the flight and these boys were not going to be able to carry on fighting and screaming for all those hours. 

And sure enough, after about ninety minutes, they got tired and fell asleep. Cue seat back and sleep. 

Okay, I didn’t get as much sleep as I had hoped for, but by calmly waiting for the boys to get tired, I wasn’t stressed—one way to not be able to sleep—and I got around five hours. Enough to get me through the long flight. 

So there you go Frank. If you’re missing something it’s giving yourself time each day for yourself. To look at the big picture of what’s going on in your life and to externalise (ie write down) any issues or problems you feel you may have. 

Your subconscious brain may not give you the solutions immediately, but if you give it enough time it will. 

Life was never designed to be smooth sailing. It’s a journey, and they will be plenty of rough seas and storms. The ‘secret’, if you can call it that, is to give yourself time to reflect and use your natural resources to calm those seas and break those storms. This is where you will find the important things, and then you can prioritise them and make sure that is where you spend most of your time each day. 

Good luck Frank with your journey and thank you for your question. And thank you to you for listening.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, why must we do the so-called backend work if we want to be more productive.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 224 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 224 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Last week, I wrote about the importance of the backend work and why you need to take a few days off to isolate yourself and really go through the process. That was inspired by a question I was asked a few weeks ago about what the backend work involves and why it’s important. 

This week, that question is the one I will be answering. 

Now before we get into the question and answer, just a heads up that I’ve just released my latest online course. It’s the first of a new series of mini-courses I will be doing this year which takes a single part of time management and productivity and show you, step by step, how you can implement it into your daily life. 

The first one is on time blocking. Possible the most effective way to get control of your time and to make sure you have time for doing the things you want to do. Ultimately, everything we want to do will involve some time, which means we need to have complete control over our time. That’s what this course will teach you to do. 

Full details of this fantastic course are in the show notes and you can sign up for it right there. 

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Liz. Liz asks: Hi Carl, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about things like areas of focus and north stars, but I’m not sure what they really mean. All I want is a way to get control of the crazy amount of work I have to do. Is there any reason why I should be worrying about these things?

Hi Liz, thank you for your question.

It sounds like what you are asking is why are things like establishing your goals and the important things in your life a necessity. Now the important things in your life come from areas (or roles) that can often be neglected if all we are focused on is finishing our work or hitting deadlines. It’s not healthy to be stressed out and anxious about the work we have to do and to let other, more important, areas of our life go neglected. 

Now, I admit, with my coaching programme, the first thing I need to do with a new client is to get on top of any backlog or outstanding work that is hanging over a client. But if I am to help a person become better organised and more productive in the long-term so they have time for things like their family, relationships, health and fitness and enjoying life, I need to move to establishing what their long-term goals are and what is important to them. 

You see, when you build your life on a foundation of long-term goals and areas of focus, you feel less stressed, more in touch with yourself and fulfilled. It means that these areas and goals become the priority in your life as a whole and work, and the associated workload, is just dealt with. 

It’s when work becomes the central part of our lives that things will ultimately break down. You’ll burn out and you will feel exhausted.

But, more importantly, when you know what your long-term goals and areas of focus are, you give yourself a “why”. Why are you doing what you are doing? 

Most people go into a job and see it as a way to get some money to pay for groceries, mortgages and going out. That’s a very depressing way to see your work. Your work needs to have some meaning, some other reason why you are doing it. 

It could be part of your long-term goal—to become a leader within your organisation, or it could be you want to help people improve their lives. 

In my case, the reason I turn up every day is because I see it as a vehicle to help people. Helping people gives me a huge buzz. It excites me and leaves me feeling energised and fulfilled. That’s my why and I see my work as part of my life’s purpose area of focus. 

Life would be horrible if I was reacting to my to-do list every day. That way my to-do list would fill up with everyone else’s long-term goals and areas of focus and I would find myself being pulled in all sorts of different directions and those directions would not necessarily leave me feeling happy or fulfilled. 

So the backend work is what puts you in control. 

So, what’s involved in the backend work?

Well, the first place to start is to ask yourself what you would like to be doing in ten or twenty years' time? That can be hard to do if you have never thought about it before, but where would you like to be living? What would you like to be doing every day? 

You may feel you are happy where you are today, and that’s fine except that life doesn’t stand still. We get older, societies and cultures change and if we are not changing with them we are falling behind. 

Do nothing to stay fit and healthy today and in ten or twenty years' time you will be struggling to move, you will be wracked with pain and your health will be causing you to spend a large proportion of your time in hospitals. Is that what you want to be doing in ten or twenty years? 

Do nothing to improve your skills, and very soon, the work you are skilled at today will be obsolete or have been replaced by a computer. In the last twenty years, I’ve seen receptionists, specialised camera operators, secretaries and sales admin disappear. All of which have been replaced by new technology. Receptionists have been replaced by automated telephone systems, sales admin by Salesforce, secretaries by email, Teams and Slack and specialised film camera operators replaced by drones

So the area of focus related to your personal development is important if you want to stay relevant in your industry. 

The best way to build a set of long-term goals that inspire you and to learn what is important to you is to step away from your day to day life for a few days and go somewhere outside of your normal environment. 

Book yourself into a country-house hotel or a mountain retreat for a few days and get away from your day to day life. Use these days to really think about what you want and what is important to you. 

Use this time to expand your areas of focus—what would you like to regularly do with your family and your friends. What skills would you like to learn? Perhaps you’ve always wanted to learn a musical instrument or to play tennis? 

I have a free areas of focus workbook you can download from my website that will guide you through the process of turning these areas of focus into actionable steps you can take every day or week. 

The problem is most people will never go through this process. It’s as if they are scared to discover what they want or afraid of making a mistake. The thing is you will never make a mistake. You can change your plans at any time. That’s the fantastic thing about being alive. We can change our minds. 

Up until I was thirty-five my whole life plan (if you could call it that) was predicated that I lived and worked in the United Kingdom. It never crossed my mind I would end up living and working in South Korea. Well, that’s where I am and that’s where my future plans are focused on. Life is wonderful in the way it throws up opportunities at almost every junction. 

But, it is important to have goals because they give you a direction and a purpose. Without goals, you’ll end up helping everyone else achieve their goals (and not in a positive way). 

That said, the biggest benefit to know what you want and what is important to you is your whole time management and productivity system will be focused on you and your wants. When you are focused and making progress where it matters, you become a leader and an inspiration to everyone around you. And when that happens, you begin to give back to the people that matter to you. It’s a win-win. You take care of yourself and your needs and at the same time, you contribute to everyone around you. 

You will be more positive, more intentional and less stressed. Everything you do will be more meaningful and you will know exactly why you are doing something, even if you don’t find the particular task pleasant. 

And when all that happens, you will be energised and that is a great way to improve your overall productivity. 

So, there you go, Liz. I hope that has answered your question. Now go and book those three or four days off, get yourself checked into a nice quiet hotel and enjoy the process of designing the life you want to live. 

And… Before I finish, this podcast will be taking a break next week. We will be back in two weeks. 

In the meantime, thank you Liz for the question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

How do you plan out your projects? Not just your professional ones, but your personal ones too. That’s what we will be exploring in this week’s episode. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Time Blocking Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 223 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 223 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

In the world of productivity and time management, we often talk about tasks and projects and how best to organise these. 

There is also the added complication for those of you who are self-employed and have a greater degree of freedom in what you work on. How do you choose your next project? Sure, sometimes that may be obvious, but often it’s not. 

So this week, we’re going to look at how to impose self-assigned deadlines and stick with them and also how to manage projects within the Time Sector System.

Now, before we start, I just want to give you a heads up that I launched a brand new course over the weekend called The Time Blocking Course. This is the first of a series of mini-courses I will be doing over the year that takes a single concept—such as time blocking—and teach you how you can build these valuable productivity skills into your own life. 

Full details of this fantastic course are in the show notes. 

Okay, time to have you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks: Hi Carl, I am a music producer and I have several projects on the go although non have deadlines but I’d like to start using some. Do you have any tips on sicking to self-made deadlines and working on multiple projects whilst using the Time Sector system? All of my projects (music or life) don’t really have deadlines but was wondering if you can help?

Hi Tom, thank you for your question. 

One additional question you asked about was project objectives or outcomes. Now, this is one of the most important starting points. As Robbin Sharma says: Projects (or goals) are exciting at the beginning, messy in the middle and beautiful at the end. The biggest problem with most projects is never the start or the end, it’s the middle bit. Yes, it’s messy, but it’s also where the hard work is. And it’s boring, difficult and often hell. 

When you have a clear objective or outcome for the project, it gives you the motivation to keep going when things get very difficult. 

The outcome is the vision of what things will look like when you finish the project and it’s that vision that keeps you going when things become boring, hell and difficult. As Winston Churchill said, “When you’re going through hell, keep going”. And to do that you need motivation. 

And of course, a clear objective will tell you when you have finished the project. 

But… There is another part here. Why are you doing the project? Without your why you will lose motivation. It’s the real motivation behind success at any project or goal. Your why could be anything, the important thing is that your why means something to you. For instance, in music, you could have the ultimate goal of winning a Grammy the reason why you are working on this particular project is it will add to your body of music that will get you noticed. 

Now, what about self-imposed deadlines. These can be very difficult to observe because there’s a lack of accountability. There’s no one chasing you or waiting for you to finish the project. This means you can very easily let deadlines slip which does nothing for your focus. 

I am in a similar position to you, Tom I have a number of projects I want to complete this year, but as there are no clients directly involved in these projects the onus is on me to stick to a planned completion schedule.

Now, the way I have found to make this work is to divide the year up in quarters on a chart or in a spreadsheet and set them as columns. If you include a “to be assigned” column that gives you five columns to create. 

Then, to add all your projects to one of the quarter columns. 

Now, that’s the easy bit. The difficult part is creating the right balance. You will not get very far if you put all your projects in the first two quarters. You will have far too many projects. The trick is to understand how many projects you can realistically do each quarter. 

When I began this year, I knew that a realistic goal for me was to complete two big projects each quarter. This was based on experience and although it would stretch me, it would mean I will have to work a project every week, but as long as I was working on one of those two projects each week, I knew I would complete those two projects in the quarter. It would stretch, but not overwhelm me. 

Now, the next part is to decide which projects you will do in each quarter. 

At the time of recording this, we are approaching the end of the first quarter of 2022. And I have just finished my second big project of the quarter. 

If you are dividing up your year by project, and you feel you can manage three projects per quarter, then you have twelve projects you can work on this year. Now, I would round that number down. So instead of twelve, I would make it ten projects for the year. That’s still a large number of projects, but by rounding down the number of projects you give yourself some breathing room in case one or two projects don’t go according to plan. 

And let’s be honest here, life is never a straight line. Things go wrong, sometimes events beyond our control will interfere with our plans. So, build in some breathing room. 

Okay, so now we know how many projects we can work on this year, the next question is what projects will you work on? You may find that projects for the first two quarters will be easy to assign. It becomes more difficult to assign the third and fourth quarters. This is why we have the fifth column: the “to assign” column.

This is really where you start. Write out all the projects you want to accomplish this year. If you don’t know the specifics yet, that’s okay. You can call a project something vague such as “produce album TBC” (TBC standing for To be Confirmed”) It means you have given yourself space to work on an album in say, Q3 or Q4. You can decide what album you will work on later in the year. 

I should point out, that this projects list is not exclusively for your work. You want to put your personal projects on there too. Part of the reason we don’t complete our personal projects is that we do not give them the same weight as our professional projects. The reality is, our personal and professional lives are equal. I would argue that your personal life is more important than your professional life, but we’ll save that argument for another day. 

To complete any project you need time. This means if you want to complete a personal project, you will have to give it some time. Now, most people do not treat personal projects with the same focus as professional projects. It’s as if personal projects are luxuries and we feel guilty about doing them. This, of course, is ridiculous. You should never feel guilty about working on personal projects. 

Let’s imagine you have a personal project to clear out your garage ready for the summer. Okay, you now have the basics required for a project. You know the result—clear out the garage. You also have a time frame—the start of summer. Now all you need to do is work out how long you will need and how you are going to do it. 

Now, apparently, the first official day of summer in the northern hemisphere is the 21st of June. So that’s the day you set for the project deadline. That date comes towards the end of the second quarter, so if I were doing this, that would be a Q2 project. 

That gives approximately ten weeks to work on this project. If I divide that up I could spend two hours each weekend cleaning out the garage and by the end of the ten weeks, I would have spent twenty hours on that project. That should be plenty of time to complete that project. 

Now, in the Time Sector System, all I would need to do now is create a recurring task in my task manager that starts on Saturday 2nd April that says “work on garage clean out” and add that task to my recurring areas of focus (this kind of task relates to my lifestyle area of focus) 

I know as long as I spend two hours (out of a 48 hour weekend) on as many weekends as possible during Q2, I will complete that project. 

Now, there will be some variables here. There will be weekends when you will be away and cannot work on the garage. That’s fine skip that weekend. There could be weekends where instead of working on the garage on a Saturday, you could reschedule it for Sunday, or a day in the week if you have a free day somewhere. 

You can use the same principles for your work-related projects. If producing music is part of your core work—which I guess is from your question, Tom, then this is going to be a little easier. With the Time Sector System, you will already have most of the tasks you need to perform set up in your recurring areas of focus. This is your core work, so having time set aside for doing your core work is vital. If it’s got to be done, you need to have a time assigned for doing it. 

You will also have time blocked out on your calendar for this core work too. 

Each week, for example, I have five hours blocked for writing and three hours for recording videos and this podcast. This is my core work, so it must be done each week. So, it has time assigned for it. 

If the projects you are talking about, Tom, are projects on top of your core work, you will need to decide how much time you want to (or need to) spend on these each week and block the time out on your calendar. I do this with my online courses. I have an afternoon blocked out each week for online coursework. Most of the time it’s just updating websites, or adding the occasional supplemental video. But I do have time set aside for working on these. 

Now, here’s a little secret tip for you. If you have set a deadline to complete a project by 30 May, I would block out the 24th and 25th May for solely working on that project. This would be blocked out now. 

The reason for doing this is two-fold. First, it gives you a 48-hour window to dedicate yourself exclusively to this one project. And secondly, knowing you have these 48 hours, you can make sure you have no meetings or other commitments on those days. It’s much easier to decline a meeting a few weeks in advance than it is a few days before. You can tell everyone in yours here of influence you will not be available on those days well in advance. 

The best way to manage your projects is to first know what you want to accomplish in a given time frame—quarters are usually best, but you can apply this to months if you prefer—then set realistic deadline dates for those projects. 

However, the secret sauce, if you like, is to allocate time each week for working on those projects. It’s knowing you have sufficient time each week for project work, that removes the overwhelm, stress and worry that you will not be able to complete the project. Just doing a little bit each week, will keep the momentum going and ensure that you successfully complete the project on time. 

The truth is it all comes down to time. And that means whatever you want to accomplish, personally and professionally, you need to set aside time for working on it. That is inescapable. No time, no completed project. 

Thank you, Tom, for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s question is about time blocking effectively. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 222 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 222 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Have you ever tried time blocking? I suspect many of you have tried; probably with mixed results. 

Now for those of you who don’t know about time blocking, time blocking is where you block out increments of time on your calendar for doing work without being interrupted. It prevents other people from scheduling you in meetings and it gives you a sense that you have enough time to do your work each day. 

Does time blocking work?

Yes. It does work, but it only works if you build flexibility into it. There’s a lot of conflicting advice around time blocking. Possibly the worst piece of advice is to block out every minute of the day for your activities. I’ve never met anyone who has been able to successfully do that. 

There are just far too many things that could go wrong when you micromanage your time in that way. Firstly, meetings rarely start and finish on time, traffic jams can cause you delays and then there are all the potential tech issues. 

Time blocking only works if you first know what you need to do and secondly you build in flexibility. Then you only need to add in a little discipline and your productivity AND time management skyrockets. 

Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, If you don’t know already, I have a YouTube channel that is full of advice, tips and tricks on time management, goal setting and productivity. So, if you are looking for a place to help you improve your time management and so much more, then head over and take a look. I am sure there will be something that will help you. 

Plus, you can get all my YouTube videos, PLUS blog post and this podcast in one convenient place by joining my weekly newsletter. You can join with the link in the show notes.

Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Ally. Ally asks; Hi Carl, I’ve heard you occasionally talk about time blocking and I think I know what it means. Do you have any tips or tricks for time blocking effectively? 

Hi Ally, thank you for your question. 

You’re right I have spoken about time blocking and for me it is a big part of why I can consistently write blog posts, do this podcast and produce YouTube videos every week while at the same time running a full time coaching and teaching business. 

However, to get the most out of time blocking is does involve a bit more than simply blocking time out each day on your calendar. You need to know that what you are doing during your blocked time is important and moving the right things forward. 

Let me explain. 

I’ve seen advice such as block out time for doing focused work each day. Now on the surface that makes sense. After all, if you dedicate two or three hours a day for doing important work without interruptions, you will get a lot done right? 

Well, yes and no. You see, if you don’t know what you are going to do in those two or three hours before you start, you are going to waste a lot of time trying to decide what to do. If you want your time blocked sessions to be productive, you need to know precisely what you will do before you start. 

And that means doing some forward planning—something most people are terrible at.—I struggle to persuade people to give themselves ten minutes at the end of a day to plan the next. If they also need to plan what to do in a three-hour focused time block as well it’s not going to be likely. 

I should point out that daily and weekly planning is the secret weapon of all highly productive people. These are the people who know what needs to be done and when. They are rarely if ever stressed and you will never find them overwhelmed. It’s impossible to be overwhelmed when you know what you have to do and you know when you will do it. And if a crisis happens, you absorb it like water does with a rock and quickly get back on track. 

Anyway, I digress. 

The first thing you need to know is what is important to you. And that really does mean what is important to you—not your company or your clients. What’s important in your life? 

How important is spending time with your family? Exercise? Taking a walk in nature? Meditation? These all need time. Time is not something you can magically pull out of a hat on demand. If you want to do something you must allocate time for it. If that’s not a law of physics it should be. 

Now, most people operate on an “if I have time” principle. If I have time I will call my parents. If I have time I’ll go for a run this weekend. If I have time I will clear out the garage. 

The problem is the “if I have time” principle does not work. This is why so many garages don’t have any space for the cars they were built for. It’s why almost 60% of the western world are overweight and why so many parents complain they rarely hear from their children these days. 

We never have ‘spare’ time. If you want to do something you have to schedule it. You have to make a commitment to yourself to do it. 

Your garage would get cleared if for the next three Saturdays you scheduled 10 am to 1 pm for garage cleaning and it was blocked in your calendar. You would get control of your health if you scheduled 30 minutes every day for exercise and your parents would be a lot happier if you made 7 pm on a Saturday night the time you call your parents. 

So the first step to time blocking effectively is to schedule time for doing the things you want to do. Start with yourself. That way your work is not going to dominate your life. 

Next, your work. Here we need to ask the question: What is my core work? This is the work you are employed to do. 

Now a salesperson is not employed to spend 80% of their time filling out CRMs and documents for the benefit of lazy sales managers. A Salesperson is employed to sell. So, at least 80% of their time needs to be spent selling or doing work that is likely to result in a sale—follow-ups, calling customers and meeting prospects. 

A salesperson’s core work is to sell. So any activity that leads to a sale, needs to be blocked out on their calendar. 

This applies equally to teachers, designers, architects, real estate agents and doctors. Time spent doing the work you are trained and employed to do needs to be blocked out on your calendar. 

Now, of course, teachers and doctors are likely to have some kind of rota system (a kind of time blocking if you think about it) where they are either teaching or on duty. When I taught at the university, the university gave me my teaching schedule and I entered that into my calendar. 

When it came to marking exam papers, that was time I needed to block out, but the university told me the date they wanted the papers returned, so it was easy for me to find the two or three days I needed to mark and evaluate the papers. 

Whatever work you do, you will have some core duties that are your responsibility, It is these core duties you need to find time blocking for each week. 

Now, a little tip here. If you can fix these time blocks for set times per week you will find your life is a lot easier. For instance, I write one blog post and two newsletters each week. In total, I need around five hours each week to do this, so I block three hours out on a Monday morning called “writing time” and two hours on a Tuesday morning. This ensures that I always have time each week to do my writing. 

Likewise, I need three hours for doing my YouTube videos each week, so I have three hours blocked out on a Friday morning for that. 

These times are fixed and it makes life so much easier. When I begin the week, I know I have time for my writing and video recording. 

Now, I know it might not be possible to fix time like this, but see if you can. It makes planning the week so much easier.

Here’s a tip for you. 

Design your “perfect” week. To do this create a new calendar in your calendar app and call it “Perfect week”. Then from a blank calendar sketch out how you would lie your week to be with all your personal work time blocks. 

You want to include how much sleep you want by putting in you're going to bed and waking up times. Then how long do you want for yourself in the morning for morning routines etc? Make sure you have plenty of blank spaces for the unexpected. 

This gives you a good idea of how your week would look if you had everything you want to do on there and will help you decide if it is possible. Often you might find what you want to do and the time you have available is not realistic and you can make some modifications. 

Time blocking is a very effective way to get control of your time and ensure you get the things you want to do done. But, you need to commit to it and treat your calendar as sacred territory. It’s no good spending time building your “perfect” week and then ignoring your calendar. If you do decide that time blocking, or some form of it, is for you then commit to doing it. This is not something you dabble at. It’s something you commit to. 

I hope that has helped, Ally. Thank you for your question. And before we finish, I have just finished recording a new course on time blocking. Details of this will be on my website in the coming days if it’s not already there. 

Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s podcast is about identifying your purpose—possibly the most difficult area of focus to define.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 221 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 221 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One of the parts of life I talk about is areas of focus and there are eight areas we all share. These are:

Family and relationships.

Lifestyle and life experiences

Career/business

Finances

Self-development

Health and fitness

Spirituality

And life’s purpose

Many of these areas are easy to define and establish what they mean to us. However, most people struggle with their life’s purpose. 

Now, I suspect this is because we think our life’s purpose needs to be something grandiose and world-changing when in reality life’s purpose is nothing more than helping other people and contributing in some way to our society and that can take form in multiple different ways. 

So, this week, I am exploring how you can establish and develop your life purpose so you can work on bringing balance to all eight of these areas. 

Now, before we get to this week’s question, have you joined my free weekly newsletter yet? This is a weekly newsletter that comes out every Friday and brings you all the content I produced that week including my YouTube videos, podcasts and blog post as well what I have been reading and watching from others. 

Additionally, you get a weekly productivity or goal setting tip. It's tremendous value and will give you something more constructive to read and watch over the weekend. 

All you need to do is use the link in the show notes to join. 

Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Jamie. Jamie asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently been working through your Areas Of Focus Workbook and have most of the areas worked out. The one I am struggling with, though, is life’s purpose. I really don’t know what my life purpose is. Could you give me some ideas about what I should be writing here? 

Hi Jamie, thank you for the question and for downloading and working through the workbook. 

Before I begin, I should mention, if you want to get a copy of the Areas of Focus Workbook. You can download it for free from my downloads centre on my website. 

Okay, as I mentioned in the opening, we all have eight areas of focus. We all have them, the only thing is what these areas mean to us will be different and how important they will be. For me, health and fitness is higher up than finances. For others, their self-development could be high up and spirituality low down.

For the most part, these will be easy to define. Family and relationships, for instance, is likely to be the easiest to define and, as Jamie mentions, life’s purpose is very difficult. 

So, what does life’s purpose mean?

Now, this may be different for many of you, but the way I see life’s purpose is in contributing back to society. It’s in giving and helping. 

Now, let me ask you a question; how do you feel when you have helped someone out of a difficult situation? I know I feel great. I get a buzz from helping people. 

When I was in my early twenties, I did not really think about how I felt about it, but now, as I look back through my life I realise the most fulfilling moments in my personal and professional life are those moments when I have helped someone or contributed to a worthwhile cause. 

There is something special about using your skills and knowledge to help someone in need. This is why I don’t really believe anyone should retire. Sure, by all means, leave your job, take some time out for yourself, but if you really want to be happy, you should use the knowledge and skills you developed over your professional life to help your community. You could write about your experiences, help out at a community centre or go to a local college and teach. 

If you have taken care of your financial area of focus, your life will no longer be about earning a living, now your life should be about giving back to society. 

Let me explain using my own life experience. When I was in my twenties I did not really know what I wanted to do. I tried all sorts of jobs, from hotel management to car sales. And while I liked all those jobs, they really were just ways to earn a bit of money so I could go out clubbing with my friends on a weekend. 

I hated Monday mornings and I remember sitting in my living room on a Sunday night dreading going back to work. I lived for the weekends and it was a miserable existence. If you are living your life for the weekends then 70% of your life is going to waste. 

The funny thing is, as I look back now, any additional work given to me was always a pain. I always felt overwhelmed and client problems caused me stress and worry. While I loved law and enjoyed working with the people I worked with, I was not really happy inside. I was still going to work to pay the bills. 

Things changed for me when I took a year out to teach English in Korea. I knew I need to think about my future, I couldn’t bear to feel I was going to spend the rest of my working life living for a salary. 

It was when I began teaching I discovered that helping people was incredible. Life no longer became about me, it became about my students. I was consumed with finding betters ways to build their confidence when speaking English. I stopped hating Sunday evenings—in fact I was often so excited to get back into the classroom I struggled to sleep. 

Now, I found myself still going out with my colleagues and friends on a weekend, but my life during the week was no longer about living for the weekend. I got to live life every day. 

What changed? The biggest change was my professional life was no longer about me. It became about my students. And this is really what your life’s purpose is all about. It’s about using your skills and knowledge to help other people. When you have that shift in mindset, your whole life changes.

The first change you will notice is you no longer worry about the clock. When I worked in an office, I arrived a few minutes before my start time and I left as soon as I could at the end of the day. Now, I have no problem spending a few extra minutes helping a student or client with a problem. 

My relationships have improved too. Now, when I am with my friends and family I am no longer worrying about work and having to go into the office the next day. I am more positive, a better person to be around and when I am with my family and friends and really am with them—instead of my mind still worrying about work. 

When you think about it, working 9 till 5 (or what every time you work) is just a concept from industrialisation. Before we industrialised, we didn’t worry about the clock. We woke up at sunrise, we went out into the fields and did our work, returning when the sun went down. Because our only goal was to provide food for our families through the unproductive winters, life was much harder, but it was also a lot simpler. Spring, summer and autumn were about growing, nurturing and harvesting our crops. Winter was about doing the repairs and preparing for the coming spring. 

We got more rest in the winter because the days were shorter. We worked long hours in the summer when the days were longer. 

We essentially worked with nature. Now we work against nature, and that causes us to feel anxious, stressed and leads to all sorts of dangerous lifestyle diseases. 

So to really understand what our life purpose is, we want to ask ourselves: how can I help and contribute to society? 

From that question, you can look at your profession—how does your work help other people. If you are in sales, you are solving people’s problems by providing them with a tool or service that will solve their problems. If you are in customer service, you provide answers to customers’ problems and, of course, teachers and doctors help people develop themselves and stay healthy. 

When you think about it, your life’s purpose will always be about giving back. Writers bring joy and entertainment into people’s lives. Actors and comedians also. Scientists develop new ways of improving people’s lives and find better and cleaner ways to heat our homes and fuel our cars. 

So, Jamie, think about how you help others. What is it about your work that solves other people’s problems? Change your perspective about your work from one that provides you with an income to one that gives you the opportunity to help people who need your skills and knowledge to solve difficult and stressful problems in their lives. 

Last week, I wrote in my Learning Centre’s Learning Note, that your work needs to change from being just a job to become your mission to help. When you wake up in the morning knowing that what you will do today will help someone, you are going to start the day with a lot more energy and purpose than if you wake up focused on writing reports, responding to emails and attending meetings. 

As I wrote in my learning note:

“Your job is a vehicle that allows you to help people. There is nothing more satisfying than being able to help someone in some way. To solve their problems, help them overcome a difficulty, or give them support when they need it. 

Whether you are an author, a financial advisor, a doctor, or a real estate agent, your job is to help people. When you see your work from that perspective, you will never worry about how much time you spend doing your work. You will be present when with your family, you’ll be happier, less stressed and will be a pleasure to be around. 

Surely, that is better than worrying about how much time you spend doing work? “

I hope that has helped, Jamie, and thank you for your question. 

Thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, we’re entering into the realm of personal identity and how successful and productive people think and I explain why this is important. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script

Hello and welcome to episode 220 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

When you think about it, being better organised and more productive is quite straightforward. Knowing what needs to be done, by when and how doesn’t require a lot of effort or special skills. It just requires application and a little self-discipline. 

But if it is that simple, why do so few people do it? Well, that’s what we will be answering this week and I hope I will be able to give you some tips that will help you not only improve your overall productivity but improve other areas of your life. 

Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, just a reminder if you want to get all the content I produce each week in one place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. 

It’s full of useful tips, plus you get a weekly essay with tricks and ideas you can use to improve and optimise your own system. It’s free and it comes out every Friday—perfect for your weekend reading. All you need do is sign up using the link in the show notes.

Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Caleb. Caleb asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the videos you have put out. I have watched most of them. I want to be more organised, but I’ve never been that kind of person. Ever since I was at school I’ve always been messy and I’m always late for appointments and I can never stick to a productivity system (and I’ve tried them all). Am I a hopeless case or is there something I am missing? 

Hi Caleb, thank you for your question. 

I certainly don’t think you are a “hopeless case”. Nobody is. I believe that if one person can be organised and productive, so can anyone else. To me, the interesting thing is why can one person keep everything organised and another person can’t?

One thing, it is not mechanics. There’s nothing difficult about looking at a to-do list and a calendar at the end of a day and deciding what you will do the next day—you don’t need special skills to do that. All you need is ten minutes and everyone can find a spare ten minutes. 

Similarly, there’s nothing difficult about moving files to their rightful folders, processing email or clearing a to-do list’s inbox. You don’t need a special talent or a PhD for any of that. Just a mixture of time and a little discipline. 

The problem most people experience is often in their own identity. Let me explain: 

I see from the way you wrote your question, Caleb, that you use the phrase “I’ve never been that kind of person” and “I’ve always been messy and late for appointments and I can never stick to a productivity system”.

If that is what you believe, Caleb, then that is what will be true… In your mind. This means that if you ever arrived early to an appointment you would feel uncomfortable. You would sense something is wrong. And when that happens, you will self-sabotage yourself and ensure you are late for your next appointment. 

Another thing that will happen is you will not tidy something up or keep your folders organised because you believe that you are not that kind of person. You in effect give yourself permission to not be organised and so you are not. 

Let’s be honest here; we are all born untidy and disorganised. When I was little I never put my toys away, I didn’t make my bed and I never understood why I had to be ready to go to playschool at 8:30 in the morning. No matter how much my mother shouted at me, it just never occurred to me to put my toys away or get ready for playschool. 

Over time, I learned how to put my toys away. I learned that if I did not want to lose things—my favourite toys for instance—it was a good idea to put them in a safe place after I finished playing with them (the amount of times I took my toy tractors Starsky and Hutch car to bed with me is laughable now). 

Putting things away so you can find them again the next day is a learned skill. You learn, if things are where they are supposed to be, it makes your life that little bit easier. 

So, if a child can learn to be tidy, so can an adult. 

It’s also about saying the right things to yourself. In your case, Caleb, it’s going to be about changing your identity. Instead of saying things like “I’m always late for appointments” you need to change that to: “I’m always on time for appointments” and backing that up by taking concrete steps to make sure you will be on time. 

Start with something simple. If you are always late for a specific type of appointment, then make it a commitment to always be on time for that appointment from now on. 

Changing our thinking—our identity—begins by changing our approach to something and deciding that from now on you will take the necessary action. 

We all know exercise is good for us. Yet, very few people consistently exercise. It’s probably the one thing we all know we should be doing, yet it’s the one we are pretty good at coming up with excuses for. Not today, I have too much work to do. It’s raining, I’m not in the mood, I’m tired etc etc.

But what if you told yourself: “I’m the kind of person that exercises every day” and you back that up by having a set of exercises you could do in fifteen to twenty minutes every day? Could you find fifteen to twenty minutes each day? I’m sure you can. 

Just to give you a sample. My go-to exercise when I am tired, busy, not in the mood etc is fifty push-ups, 3 sets of 90-second planks and 3 sets of lower back strengthening exercises. I give myself three or four minutes of basic stretching before I begin, and then I begin. On average these exercises take me around twelve minutes to complete and I finish it off with some squats. 

Doing these exercises every day is so ingrained now, I do them every day even if I have been out for a run or I do additional weights on top of these. 

To me, it would inconceivable not to do them because I am the kind of person who exercises every day. It’s now a part of my identity. 

You can adopt the same approach to your daily planning. If you do want to be better organised, more productive and better with your time management, it all starts the day before. You must plan your day. 

Now, here, the important part of planning is knowing what you will complete the next day. I knew when I woke up this morning that today I was going to prepare this podcast, write my learning note and get my coaching feedback written. Three things. It meant when my morning calls were completed, I opened up my writing app and I began writing. I did not need to look at my task manager or my calendar. 

When I went to bed last night, I knew my morning was clear from 9:00 AM. I also knew I needed to start at 6 AM because my calls began at 7 AM. There was no time wasting when I woke up trying to decide what I needed to do. It was wake up. Make my coffee, drink my lemon water, write my journal, clear my email inbox and prepare for my first call. 

And that’s all it takes to be better organised, productive and good with your time management. Ten to fifteen minutes before you end the day make a decision about what you will do the next day. If you tell yourself that this is what you do. It is who you are, and you never forget that, it soon becomes a habit. 

Now you also say, that “I can never stick to a productivity system”. If you believe that, you’ve failed before you start. Instead of looking to make any productivity system work for you, you will be looking for reasons why this new system won’t work for you.

The interesting thing about productivity systems is they need customising for your needs. I don’t get many phone calls distracting me throughout the day, and I don’t get a lot of messages through my messaging system. I do get a lot of emails, but I have a system in place for managing that. However, someone else may have Slack or Teams open all day and a boss that demands you respond to her email before she hits send. 

You need to develop strategies for dealing with that. But you can develop a strategy within an existing system. Let’s take my approach to email. I process my email in the morning and reply later in the day either between five and six or after dinner between 7 and 8. 

Someone else who works in an environment where quick responses to email is expected may need to spend thirty minutes or so at 11:30 am responding to mail and messages and again at 4:30 pm. You develop a process that works for you. 

Some people can block out two or three hours every day for focused work, others who have meetings every day, may not be able to do that, but instead, perhaps they can find two days a week where they can squeeze a two-hour block for doing focused work. It’s about taking a system, implementing its foundations and philosophy and then modifying it to work for your special set of circumstances. 

My Time Sector System is perfectly modifiable. You can set that system up in pretty much any task manager. You can use tags if you wish, you can create customised folders for projects if you wish (although I don’t recommend you do so), but the key point is all productivity systems will work for you. But they only work if you are committed to making them work. 

Before I finish, I should point out that the one trait you need to make any of this work is self-discipline. You need to take full responsibility for all this. Without a commitment from yourself to make things work, they will not work. Changing you identity from believing you are a disorganised mess to being a highly productive, organised individual begins by believing you are that person already and making a commitment to following through. 

These days this analogy might seem a bit old fashioned, but if a smoker quits smoking and tells everyone how many days they have gone since their last cigarette, you know they are going to fail. In their mind, they are still a smoker. You know they will begin smoking again. But if that same person tells everyone that they are now a non-smoker, they have begun the journey of changing their identity and they are likely to successfully kick that habit. 

I hope that has helped, Caleb. 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. 

Podcast 219

This week’s question is about the tyranny of the to-do list. Something I’m confident we’ve all felt at times.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 219 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 219 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Have you ever felt your to-do list is controlling your life and not allowing you the freedom to get on and do the things you want to do? I think we’ve all felt this before and it can be demoralising. The feeling our to-do list is running our lives and we cannot escape. This week, my goal is to change that and to show you that rather than your to-do list controlling your life, it is you who ultimately is in control. 

But first, if you want a convenient place to receive all the content I produce each week, sign up for my weekly newsletter. It’s full of useful tips, plus you get a weekly essay with tricks and ideas you can use to improve and optimise your own system. 

It’s free and it comes out every Friday—perfect for your weekend reading. All you need do is sign up using the link in the show notes.

Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Adam. Adam asks: Hi Carl, I started using Todoist about a year ago when I saw one of your YouTube videos and I loved it. But recently, I feel my life is trapped by all the tasks I have to do each day. It’s becoming difficult to motivate myself to look at my list and I am always rescheduling tasks. How do you keep your list from becoming demotivating?

Hi Adam, thank you for your question. 

I know how you feel. I’ve been through that forest many times and it can be disheartening to feel trapped by becoming better organised. I’ve recently felt it since we moved house and I got a new office and studio. I want to keep my workplace clean and tidy and everything in its place. The trouble is, to maintain that, it feels I am always cleaning and tidying up. 

However, I’ve learned strategies to overcome that. The first is to treat cleaning and tidying as a way to step away from my desk. What I do, is between sessions of sit down work—like preparing this podcast script—I will get up and wipe down the kitchen surfaces, or I might pull out the vacuum cleaner and vacuum the studio. These tasks don’t take very long to do on their own, so they are a great way to keep me moving through the day and consistently done, they keep my office and studio clean and tidy. 

When it comes to your task manager this can be a bit more difficult. Part of the problem most people face is in the enthusiasm for building a productivity system. When we start we enthusiastically put all tasks into our task managers. It does not matter whether they are important or not, we just throw everything in there and we then process these into the system.

Now, when you first start, this is an important part. We need to develop the habit of automatically putting our commitments, event and ideas into our system. If we never develop that habit, we fall at the first hurdle. Not getting stuff into our systems, means we never learn to trust the system we create and if you don’t trust your system, it will never work. 

However, once you are in the habit of dropping all your tasks, commitments and events into your system, you need to become very protective of what actually gets processed into your system. 

I treat my inbox for both notes and tasks as a filter. Nothing moves from there until I have made a considered decision about whether I need to do something or not. I would say, around 60 per cent of what I add to my inbox gets deleted later in the day when I process my inbox because either I have completed the task or I decide I don’t have the time or resources to do the task. 

One thing I can assure you, is if you delete something that later becomes important, you will find out and you can add it back in. It’s better to add less and delete more. You can always add something later if it becomes important, but if an unimportant task gets into your system, it can be very hard to find it and remove it later. Who has time to go through all your tasks cleaning them out? Better to spend a few extra minutes making decisions about tasks before they get into your system. 

However, I should stress, if you are new to using a to-do list, focus on developing the habit of adding everything to your to-do list or notes first. Once it’s automatic to pull out your phone or open your to-do list when something comes up, you are then ready to move towards filtering tasks before they get into your system. 

Although I am pretty good at filtering my tasks and notes, I do still go through both every three months or so and clean them up still. Unimportant things do still get through and into the system. 

Now, on a deeper level, Adam, another reason why to-do lists become overwhelming and uninspiring is because they fill up with other people’s tasks and ideas. 

One thing I will always stress on people is to develop three areas. These are your long-term goals, areas for focus and core work. 

These three parts are where your passion, motivation and focus will come from and should always be your priority. 

To give you an example of this, Dwayne The Rock Johnson will always prioritise his gym and family time over everything else. We might not be aware of it, but part of an actors contract is a period of time where they must promote the film or TV show they have been working on. 

The promotion tours are not just turning up in London or Los Angeles for the premiere—they involve hours spent in interviews with the press, travelling between countries attending premiere parties in those countries and photoshoots. It’s very time consuming and tiring. Yet, Dwayne Johnson will still be in the gym first thing in the morning (even if that means waking up at 3 AM) to do his gym work and spending time with his family via FaceTime if he is not in the same country. 

These activities come from his areas of focus Health and fitness and family and relationships. Your areas of focus will always be a priority. 

It’s interesting to see people who are not achieving success in what they do. They don’t have any core areas of focus—instead, they wait for their boss or customers to tell them what to do and then complain about how little time they have for other things. 

To have time for “other things” you have to make time for them. Dwayne Johnson does. So do all happy, fulfilled, successful people. There is no other way. 

But before you can make time for these, you need to know what they are. I know it’s hard to think about what you want. How and where you want to spend your time. It also takes a long time. It took me over a year to develop a set of long-term goals and areas of focus that motivate and inspire me every day. 

But… If you want to be inspired and motivated every day, then it’s non-negotiable. You must do it. 

If you haven’t already done so, you can download my free areas of focus workbook to help you develop these. 

Now, your long-term goals and core work can be easier to develop. Your core work is simply the work you are employed to do. If you're a salesperson, your core work is selling. This means your daily work tasks need to be promoting sales and avoiding and reducing, the amount of time you spend doing admin. Doing admin is not selling. Same for teaching. A teacher’s core work is teaching. Making sure the majority of your work activities each day are focused on teaching and preparing teaching materials is your core work. Again, student admin is not core work. You want to be minimising the admin. 

Long-term goals do not have to be absolutely clear yet. After all, they are long-term. But you do need to know where you want to go. 

My long-term goal is to help millions of people to become better organised and more productive. I know that by helping people do this, they will live a life with a lot less stress and anxiety and will free up time to spend it doing what they want to do. Every day, I wake up thinking about how I can achieve that. Growing my business, doing these podcasts, writing my blog posts and recording my YouTube videos does this. This means my core work and long-term goals converge. 

Once you know what your long-term goals are what your areas of focus mean to you, the actions and activities you do that develop them become the core of your day. One of your areas of focus is going to be your career and business. Each day you work, it’s likely eight hours of those days will be spent focused on that area of focus. Doing your work better, learning and developing your skills. Making sure that the work you are paid to do is done to your best abilities will form part of your core work and areas of focus related to your career and business. 

I saw a meme the other day where the employee says because they are paid below average wage they do a below-average performance. It’s funny on the surface. But it does miss a point. As Jim Rohn pointed out, you are paid the amount of value you bring to the job. That’s the nature of the market. If you want to be paid more, you need to develop your skills and abilities so that your value increases. 

We can argue about the pros and cons of the employment market, but the point is, you may not have much control over your salary, but you do have absolute control over the development of your skills. When your skills grow, so does the value you bring to your job. 

One of the most motivating sentences I read in a Seth Godin blog was: “If you need a resume you’ve lost”. Meaning, when your skills and abilities rise you get noticed. When you get noticed, you no longer need a resume because people want to hire you. 

If 75 to 80% of your tasks are related to your long-term goals and areas of focus you will never have a problem with motivation. You’ll be waking up excited for the day ahead. Sadly, most people will not reach that. Instead, 75-80% of their tasks will be tasks given to them by other people. If I were waking up each day to spend the majority of my day working on other people’s goals and areas of focus, I’d be pretty unmotivated. 

So, my advice to you, Adam, is to begin by asking yourself what you want. What do you want to be doing in ten and twenty years time? Once you know that, you have a direction for your life. You can then direct your work activities to develop the skills and abilities to get you to where you want to be. When you are given a task, you can look at it through the lens of your long-term goals. By working on a project for your boss, what skills can you learn? How will it improve your abilities? 

I remember when I worked in a law office, I loved dealing with angry clients. I was always afraid of dealing with upset people. I realised I would not go very far in my career if I always ran away from dealing with difficult and upset clients and customers. So I read books on communication, I watched my bosses deal with clients and volunteered to call clients who were not happy. 

I soon developed skills that have been so valuable to me and to the companies I’ve worked for. I know how to calm down angry people now. 

It’s very similar to the answer Warren Buffett gives to the question what was the best investment you ever made? He says; a Dale Carnegie communication course he took at university. Before that course, Warren Buffett was so afraid of speaking in public he was physically sick. So he enrolled in the course and learn the skill (and art) of communication. 

Once you know what you want and where you want to be in the future. Be very clear about what you are employed to do and get very good at doing that work. And make sure your areas of focus are in balance. 

When you make these the core of your daily to-do list, you will no longer fear looking at your list. It will be a place to go and get motivated. 

I hope that helps, Adam, and thank you for the question. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s question is about how to balance your work life with your professional life.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 218 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 218 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I’m sure you heard of Work/Life Balance and how this is the goal for living a balanced life. Well, is it? Does trying to balance your personal and work life really give you a balanced life? 

You see, if you place hard barriers between your personal and professional life you create an unnatural barrier to living life on your terms. If you are up against a tight deadline and you have a very important meeting the next day, what will you be thinking about as you sit on the sofa with your family in the evening? You won’t be thinking about your family. Your mind is going to be on that important meeting that begins in ten hours time. 

But because you have a hard rule that states after 6 PM you do not do work, you are now causing yourself a lot of unnecessary stress. The better thing for you to do is to excuse yourself for the evening, go to a quiet room and prepare for your meeting. You’ll feel a lot better, be much more in tune with your needs and you can make it up to your family the next day by taking them out for dinner somewhere nice. 

A lot of our time management and productivity problems come from trying to box ourselves in when if you give yourself greater freedom, you’d be a lot happier, less stressed and considerably less overwhelmed. 

Now before we get to this week’s question, if you would like to receive all my weekly content, including this podcast as well as my blog posts and YouTube videos in one place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It’s completely free and each week you get a productivity tip plus get to see what I am reading and watching. 

This newsletter is a great productivity and time management resource for your weekend reading. The link to join the newsletter is in the show notes.

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks: hi Carl, what do you think of work/life balance? I’m really struggling with this. I have two teenage boys and a full-time job. I worry that I am not able to spend enough time with my boys. Do you have any tips on having a better work/life balance? 

Hi Anna, thank you for your question. 

There is a lot written about work/life balance and it certainly used to be possible. Back in the day when we worked shifts in a factory where the only action we needed to take was to put widgets on devices, it was easy to leave work behind when we clocked out for the day. We were not coming up with solutions to problems that came up throughout the day. 

But for most of us, we do not work that way anymore. That kind of work has been farmed out to machines and robots. We’ve moved into an age where our physical labours are less in demand and our mental abilities have become the in-demand skill. 

The great thing about using our physical skills and labour is we can turn off at the end of the day. The only thing we need to worry about is where do we need to be tomorrow.

Being employed for our mental skills makes it a lot harder to turn off at the end of the day. You can still be working on a client’s problems while driving home from the office. It’s much harder to turn off at the end of the day. 

We also live in a very connected world. I have clients who live in California and manage teams in Asia and Europe. There’s a seventeen hour time difference between Seoul and San Francisco. How do you do one on one team meetings with that time difference and maintain a work/life balance? 

The solution is in something called work/life integration. Rather than seeing our work and personal life are two entirely different things, we combine the two. 

Now, anyone who runs their own business will likely already be living a work/life integrated life. It’s a necessary part of building a business. As a business owner, you can’t simply turn off at the end of the workday. You will be constantly coming up with ideas, dealing with customers at all times of the day and having to do admin and other such tasks late into the evening. 

So how does work/life integration work? 

Well, the first step is to see your day as a whole rather split into work and home. This means if one of your boys is playing in a school rugby match on a Wednesday afternoon and he wants you to come and watch him, you schedule the match in your calendar like you would schedule a business meeting. 

Now, because you spent three hours watching your son play rugby, you can catch up with your work later that evening say between seven and ten. To your son, it was far more important to him that you were there at his rugby match, rather than skipping the rugby match and sitting down in the evening watching TV with him. 

It’s being there in the moment when it matters that counts, not going through the motions believing that you are doing the right thing every evening. 

Now, I accept not everyone can take a Wednesday afternoon off to watch their kid play sport, but the way we work is shifting towards this more flexible way of working. Knowledge work doesn’t naturally conform to strict timelines anyway. 

If we take the team leader in California, she is going to have to do meetings in the early morning or late at night if she wants to communicate with her whole team anyway. 

So, let’s say our team leader wants a weekly team get together to review current and future projects. She might schedule a meeting at 11 pm for her. That would be 4 pm for her team in Asia and 8 am for her European team. This is one hour per week, where she gets the chance to communicate with her team as a whole. 

She could schedule a later start to her day the next day or another day to compensate for the late time for the meeting. There are endless possibilities to reclaim the time back.

An alternative approach is to split your days. Now, this has worked for me, but it is not for the faint-hearted. I live in the Far East. My clients are either in Europe or North America. My clients are active late at night and early mornings in my time zone. So, all my coaching calls are scheduled for either morning or evening. 

My afternoons are quiet. I rarely get emails and I have no coaching calls. So, I do my errands and exercise in the afternoons. I can take our dog for a walk with my wife and do any shopping that needs doing. 

Now, for most of my working life, I have worked split shifts. I began in the hotel industry and I regularly did the morning and evening shift getting the afternoons off as a break. Then when I came to Korea I taught English for fifteen years where my classes were both early morning and evening classes. So, taking a break in the afternoon somehow feels natural to me. 

The key to work/life integration is to do what needs doing in the moment. If you have a young child that needs your help with his homework in the afternoon, then you stop working and help them with their homework. 

When your children are on half-term break, with a work/life integration approach, you will free up your calendar as much as possible to spend time with them. When they return to school you can make up time on your work projects or do any time-sensitive work in the evenings when your kids are in bed (or playing video games) 

I follow a lot of successful entrepreneurs and read many biographies on tremendously successful people. People like Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Dell will always be at home for their family dinner in the evenings so they can spend quality time with their families. After dinner and when their kids are in bed, they will do some more work. 

I remember seeing a video on how Casey Neistat manages his day. Now, Casey Neistat is a very successful YouTuber and creator. He’s an incredible storyteller. He’s also a bit of a workaholic. He’s a runner too and running every day is a non-negotiable part of his life. So, he wakes up early, does his run, returns home for breakfast with his family, then goes to the office and spends most of his day there. He will return in the evening to spend time with his wife and child and then at 11 pm he will work on editing his videos until 1 am. 

Now while Casey works a lot, he still gets five to six hours a day of quality time with his family. He is totally present when he is with them. Knowing he has another two-hour block later in the evening allows him the freedom to forget work for the five hours or so he’s with his family. 

People trying a work/life balance approach might be there in person, but they are mentally worrying about all the work that’s piling up because they will not allow themselves a couple of hours to get on top of it. 

There will be times when your work is busy and you need to spend more time on your work life than your personal life. I work weekends and so I try and take Wednesdays off. It doesn’t always happen. If I am putting together a new course or preparing for a seminar, I will use that day for recording or preparation. But on those days I do take off, I will make sure my wife and I do something special. 

This week, we are going to Seoul—about a three-hour drive away—to have dinner with my parents in law and get our dog’s haircut. (My wife only trusts a specific dog hairdresser in Seoul) This means we have six hours of driving time for conversation and I get a few hours for doing errands in the big city. It’s pure family time. 

We will get home around 10 pm and I will go to my office and spend an hour or two doing a little admin, responding to my emails and planning the next day. I’ve still had well over ten hours of quality family time and got my most important work done for that day. 

So, Anna, don’t try and live a work/life balance. You won’t be able to do it and will cause you unnecessary stress. Instead, live a work/life integrated life. This way you will always be there for your boys when they need you and when they don’t, you can return and do some work. The sense of freedom you have when you do this will bring you a lot more happiness. 

Thank you, Anna, for the question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

What’s the difference between a project and a goal? That’s what we’re exploring this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Ultimate Productivity Workshop 

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Take The NEW COD Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Script | 333

Hello, and welcome to episode 333 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One of the benefits of becoming more organised is that you begin to analyse what you do and why you do it in a little more detail. You start seeing what is important and what is not, what you need to do, what you can pass off to others, and what you can ignore. 

And, most importantly, you understand what your areas of focus mean to you. 

However, one area I’ve seen people struggle with is how to define a project and a goal and what the differences are. This week. I hope to clarify that so you know how to use each one. 

Before we get to the question, I just wanted to give you a heads-up that September’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming up. Registration is open now, and places, as usual, are going fast. 

I know there are no quick fixes or that the road from disorganised to organised is easy and problem-free. But if you follow a few core principles, you can build a system that works for the way you work. That is what you will learn in this workshop. 

I’d love to see you there. The dates are September 6th and 13th. Both days start at 8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (that’s 5:30 pm if you are on the West Coast of the US). 

Full details can be found on my website or in the show notes below. 

Okay, on with the show. Which means handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks, Hi Carl, would you explain the difference between a goal and a project? I find the distinction very confusing. 

Hi Janine, thank you for your question. You are not alone in this question. I get asked it a lot. 

Let’s start with the basics. A project is a desired outcome that requires time and a series of connected tasks to be completed by a given deadline. A simple example of this would be clearing out your garage. This would be a project in that there will be a number of things that need organising, such as a skip (a British word for a large container that you throw large items away in). 

You may need to go to the hardware store to buy cleaning materials and storage containers etc. 

For this project, you’d set a date for when you would like to do it—say a weekend—and block your calendar so that’s what gets all your attention on the given day. 

The project is complete once you have achieved the desired result.

Now, a goal also has a desired outcome, and it may also have a timeline in that you want to achieve the desired result by a given date. 

However, a goal differs in that once the goal is achieved, you will want to maintain it. 

A simple example would be if you set a goal to lose twenty pounds by the end of the year. As I am recording this in August, that would give you four months to lose twenty pounds or five pounds a month. 

Once you have achieved your goal, though, you are unlikely to want to put those twenty pounds back on. So, a goal’s objective is to take you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future. 

I like to think of a goal like acting as a course correction engine burn. If you’ve seen the film Apollo 13 (a brilliant film if you’re interested in project management and dealing with crises). 

When a spacecraft goes to the moon, it is dealing with a moving object. The moon travels around the earth. Therefore, you need to anticipate where the moon will be when you arrive at its atmosphere. Get that wrong, and you are in trouble. Too shallow, and you would bounce off into outer space. Too steep, and you would burn up in the moon’s atmosphere. 

This means, from time to time, you need to adjust your course, and that’s where the engine burn comes in. You turn on the engines for a few seconds to push you back on course. 

That’s how goals work in your life. 

If you have established what your areas of focus are—these are the eight areas of life we all share that are important to us. For example, family and relationships, your career, health and fitness and finances. If any of these falls out of balance, you can set a goal to push you back on track. 

A simple example would be if, as part of your financial area of focus, you save a minimum of $5,000 per year, and currently, you have only saved $1,000 for the year, you would set a goal to get that back in balance. You could increase the amount you save per month by reducing your spending, or you may decide that this year is proving difficult financially, so you choose to increase the amount you save next year—that would become the goal.

In many ways, goals are a series of repetitive tasks you perform in order to achieve a specific outcome that improves your life. 

A project is rarely repetitive. For instance, I have a project at the moment to record the audiobook version of Your Time Your Way. Sitting down to record the chapters is repetitive, but the content I record is different each time, and I need to share the recorded files with my publisher each week. 

The deadline for the project is the end of September. Once done, that’s it. My publisher will fine-tune things and add the audiobook to the list of formats available. I no longer have anything to do. The project is complete. 

If we return to the weight loss goal, imagine I achieve my goal of losing those twenty pounds; it’s not finished. Now, the goal becomes to maintain my weight and avoid anything that would risk putting those twenty pounds back on. That means changing eating and exercise habits. 

Similarly, with the financial goal, once everything is back to where it should be, I need to change or add habits to ensure I don’t fall behind again. 

That’s the real purpose of setting goals. To initiate a change that endures. 

A project doesn’t do that. Once done, it’s finished. Often forgotten about. 

A project could be your next vacation. Before you arrive at your vacation destination, you have a series of tasks to complete. Research hotels, flights, and car hire, for example. Then, book your hotel, flights and car rental. Pack your clothes and get to the airport on time. 

When you return home. The project is complete. Yes, you will hopefully have some nice memories and pictures, but for all intents and purposes, the project is complete. 

Now here’s the interesting part of goals and projects. Sometimes, a goal can become a project. 

Let me explain. 

One of my goals is to spend a week at the Goldeneye Resort in Jamaica. It’’s not just a goal for me, it’s been a dream since I was a teenager. Goldeneye is where Ian Fleming wrote all the James Bond books. And, if you don’t know, Ian Fleming is my writing hero. 

Today, though, it’s just a goal. 

To achieve this goal, I will need to save a lot of money. Goldeneye is not a cheap place to stay, and I’m sure the flights will not be cheap either. 

So, if I decide I want to go to Goldeneye in twelve months’ time—let’s say September 2025, I have twelve months to save the money. I would set a goal to save X amount of dollars per month. That goal may involve reducing my expenditure—no more expensive pens, inks and paper (oh no!) and instead putting that money away. 

However, the habit I form here is to become more of a saver than a spender, getting into the habit of saving money each month.

Now, once we get to April next year, I would need to book a villa at the resort—that would require a little research. This goal has now become a project. There are a series of tasks involved to ensure my wife and I are on the plane flying to Jamaica in September next year. 

In other words, the goal is to save money so I can achieve a dream. Once the money is saved, it becomes a project so we arrive at Goldeneye on the right date. 

I can see why understanding the difference between a goal and a project is difficult. Although they have many similarities, their functions are quite different. 

Think of a goal as something you use to change a habit. A way to move you towards living to the standards you set for yourself in your Areas of Focus. A project is a tool you use to organise a group of tasks that achieve a specific outcome by a given deadline. 

As Tony Robbins says: “The reason we set goals is to give our lives focus and to move us in the direction we would like to go.” 

And that is the essence of a goal. 

One more distinction here is the number of projects and goals you may have. Often, you won’t have any control over the number of projects you have. They could be given to you by your work or family. 

Goals are personal. You get to decide what they are. It’s also important not to try and accomplish too many goals at once. That dilutes your focus and attention. 

By their very nature, goals are hard. You are changing habits and moving outside of your comfort zone. If you have too many goals at once, making that change becomes almost impossible. Be patient. Change one thing at a time. 

We are all works In progress. 

In 2009, I was an overweight, smoking binge drinker. I chose to change that lifestyle and become a healthy, non-smoking runner by the end of the decade. 

That involved numerous changes, but the goal was to end the decade healthier, fitter, and stronger than I began it. 

I achieved it. Yet, I didn’t quit everything on January 1 2010. I took my time. I began by reducing drinking to almost zero. I also started running again. 

By 2014, I had completed two marathons and numerous half-marathons and chose to tackle smoking. By 2016, I had quit smoking, and the final part of the goal was to quit sugar—I managed to do that in 2019. 

It took ten years to turn my health and lifestyle around. But it was fun. There were challenges—quitting smoking was the hardest, but as I went through the decade, I developed resilience, a stronger mindset and as I saw the results, I maintained my enthusiasm throughout. 

So, there you go, Janine. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week. 

This week’s episode is a question that came about because of my recently updated Time Sector System course.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time Sector System Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 217 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 217 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

So, many of you already know that my productivity system is called The Time Sector System. This system is based on managing my work by when I want to do it rather than by project. 

Around three or four years ago, I discovered that when I managed my tasks by project, I was spending too much time organising and reviewing and not enough time doing the work. It was leaving me with a lot of work that needed rescheduling at the end of the day. Not a good place to be when you want to feel you are becoming better at managing your time. Too much rescheduling and you lose confidence in your system. 

That’s when it dawned on me that, really, the most important part of any system is having the time to do the work, not how you organise your files and projects. That was my light-bulb moment. 

Now, I do get a lot of questions about this system. It goes against the grain of many of the more popular systems out there and naturally I get a lot of questions about it. So, I have selected one of those questions to answer this week. 

So. Without further ado. Let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Eric. Eric asks, Carl, You used to write and talk a lot about GTD but I notice you no longer use it. Why is that and what do you use instead? 

Thank you Eric for your question. 

Let’s start by dealing with the elephant in the room. Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen. This is the standard text by which all productivity and time management systems are judged today. There’s nothing wrong with GTD, as it is called. It’s a solid workable system. 

However, there are two issues with GTD that caused me problems. The first is this is a book that was first published in 2001 and its concepts are based on what David Allen taught in companies as a productivity and time management trainer in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Now, I remember working in the early 1990s and in those distant days it did matter where you were and what tools you had with you. If you wanted to respond to your mail, you needed to be in a place where your mail was because, for most people, there was no such thing as email. And even in the late 1990s, when email became more prevalent, you needed to be at a computer set up for your email. 

If you were lucky enough to have a personal email account, you needed to be at home with your “personal computer” in order to reply. For your work email, you needed to be at your office and sitting in front of your work desktop computer. 

So, for a simple task such as responding to your mail, you had to be in a specific physical location (home or office) and be in front of your computer (the tool).

The second issue I was struggling with was how the digital task managers were created. For some reason, task managers were set up by project, not context as it should be in a GTD system. 

For those not familiar with GTD, in GTD your task lists are organised by context. This means you create lists based on a tool, such as a computer, a phone or car. Place, such as your office or home or person, such as your boss, spouse or colleague. 

The idea is you choose what to do based on where you are, with which tool or person. 

Now, when I went digital, I fell into the trap of believing the most effective way to manage my tasks was to organise everything by project and to use tags or labels for my contexts. Big mistake. 

In GTD, a project is defined as anything requiring two or more steps. This meant, theoretically, arranging for my car to go in for a service was a project or even arranging to have my haircut (I did once have hair that needed cutting). So you can imagine how many projects you end up having on your list. 

David Allen mentions that an average person is going to have between seventy and a hundred and fifty open projects. 

That’s a lot of projects for an individual like you and me to manage. 

Now the glue that makes GTD work is the weekly review. This is where you sit down at the end of the week to go through all your projects to make sure everything is up-to-date and current. 

Well, for me, by the time I switched to using the Time Sector System my weekly review was taking almost two hours to complete each week. Yes! Two hours. 

No, I don’t know about you, but giving up two hours of my weekend to review all my projects and get current is not really the best use of my time on a weekend. 

However, let’s not be too hard on GTD. It’s a great system and it does help you get very organised. All your projects are kept in project folders—originally, paper-based project folders you kept in or near your desk, now digital folders you keep on your computer. It is easy to find what you need when you need it—if you are willing to maintain your system and keep it up to date. 

And that’s really the problem with GTD today. Maintaining the system takes a lot of time. Time that could better be served to do the work you are creating lists for. 

If you look at the very basics a productivity system needs; it’s a way to collect all your inputs such as calendar events, tasks and notes. You then need to organise those inputs in a way you can find them when you need them and you need to be maximising time to do the work. 

GTD crosses the first two boxes. It teaches you to build a collection system. When the GTD book was first launched that meant purchasing a physical inbox that you had on or around your desk. And it organises your documents and relevant materials into projects or reference materials that are easy to find.

However, because of the time, it takes to manage those first two parts, you are taking away a lot of time for doing. And if you want to be more productive, you need to maximise your doing time and minimise your organising time. 

That’s why I eventually got to the point where I realised GTD was not working for me. I wanted to free up my organising time so I could focus on doing. 

That led me to analyse what was really important about getting my work done. That was when I realised that the only thing that really mattered about a task was when I was going to do it. After all, it does not matter how important or urgent something is, if there are no hours left in the day it is not going to get done that day. Period.

And, I’m sure you are aware now, contexts have become a lot less important. You can design presentations, do work on a spreadsheet, email and make phone calls from a handheld device you carry with you everywhere you go. You no longer need specific tools to do a lot of the work you need to do. 

I have been told that contexts are a personal choice. You can create contexts around energy levels. For example, if you feel energetic, you can do some of the more difficult work. If you feel tired you can do some of the less strenuous tasks. That true. But I cannot predict when I will feel energetic or when I feel lethargic. I cannot control how I will sleep tonight. For energy level contexts, there are far too many variables outside my control for those to be effective. 

In the end, I realised that all I wanted to know was what tasks were important this week. Which ones did I want to do and which tasks could I do that would move a project or goal forward. 

So, I created a folder structure in my task manager that focused on when I would do something. That means I have: this week, next week, this month and next month folders for tasks I am reasonably certain I want to get done in the next eight weeks or so. And I have a long-term and on hold folder for tasks that I’d like to do sometime, but I am not sure yet when I will do them. 

What this means is when I do my weekly planning, all I need to focus on is when I will do something and more importantly what will I do that week. 

Using this method means instead of spending two hours or so doing a weekly review, my weekly planning sessions last around twenty to thirty minutes. They are a little longer at the end of the month because I am looking at more folders. 

It also makes processing what I collected in my inbox much simpler. I have far fewer decisions to make. Really all I am doing is deciding what something is and when will I do it. I don’t have to worry about what context to add and which project to put it in. 

Now, all my projects notes and resources are kept in my notes app. Tasks that relate to these projects are hyperlinked to the relevant task so all it takes is one click and I am in my project notes. This makes it so much quicker to get down to work. I can quickly see what’s been done and what needs to be done. I also have access to relevant emails, meeting notes and files all in one place—which is not something you can do if you are managing your projects from a task list manager.

The most important thing for me though, is how I spend very little time managing my projects and reference materials and I am spending far more time doing the work that matters. And this has given me much more free time to do things outside of work. The more time I have available for doing the work the more free time I get at the end of the day. 

And, I no longer skip my weekly reviews as it did when I was doing GTD. I’d probably do a proper weekly review once a month. Now, as I know a planning session won’t take longer than thirty minutes, I love doing them. It’s got me a lot more focused on what’s important and I no longer lose anything.

But the most important thing for you to remember is, the best productivity system is the one you design for yourself. I strongly believe that you need to take parts of the many different systems out there and build them into your system. I have elements of Tony Robbins’ RPM (Rapid Planning Method) system, Ivy Lee’s method and the Eisenhower matrix in my system. 

Tony Robbin’ RPM is how I plan out my projects and goals. The Ivy Lee Method is how I prioritise my day when I do my daily planning and the Eisenhower Matrix ensures I am working on the things that reduce the urgent work. 

It’s taken me a long time to develop a system that works seamlessly. It began with the Franklin Planner in the early 90s, through GTD in the naughties and eventually to my own system I call the Time Sector System. 

Always remember, you are a unique individual and what works for one person will not necessarily work for you. Take elements from one and merge them with something else. You will find a system that works best for you and that one will be the one for you. 

Thank you, Eric, for the question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s question is about deciding what to work on and prioritising

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 216 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 216 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

We’ve covered prioritising before in this podcast and it is an important part of being more productive and ensuring that what you are working on is meaningful and moves the right things forward. 

However, for those of you who have created a good solid system, you are likely struggling with deciding what to work on. If you are collecting a lot of inputs—tasks, events and ideas—at some point you will have to make a decision about what to do about those collected inputs and, more importantly, when you will do something about them. 

And those decisions can be very difficult. So, that is what we will be exploring in this week’s podcast.

Don’t forget, if you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Not only do you get a summary and link to my weekly blog post, YouTube videos and this podcast, you also get a free productivity or goal-setting lesson each week. 

And best of all… This newsletter is completely free. All you need do is click the link in the show notes enter your details and you’re in. Doesn’t get any simpler than that. 

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:

This week’s question comes from Shelly. Shelly asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the work you produce each week, I have a question about choosing which tasks to work on. I usually begin the day with around thirty tasks in my to-do list and I never complete them all. I feel guilty about rescheduling a lot of tasks. How do you choose which tasks to work on each day?

Hi Shelly, thank you for your question. 

This is a great question because it touches on a hidden aspect of productivity and time management. 

All productivity and time management systems focus on collecting and organising stuff. Writing everything down and then organising it in a way that means something to us. What often gets forgotten is finding the time to complete these tasks we collect. And, more importantly, deciding which is important and which is not. How do you do that? 

Well, time sensitivity is one way. Due dates and deadlines are great motivators for getting things done. If you have a deadline for something, you are going to be more likely to complete it. This becomes even more important if the deadline was given to your by your boss or someone in authority over you. 

Your life would be easier if you spent a little time each week doing your taxes—organising your receipts and income and expenditure—rather than leaving a year's worth until a few weeks (or days) before the tax assessment deadline. But, hey, when I don’t have to submit my tax information for ten months, why would I spend an hour every weekend pulling together everything I spent and earned this week? There’s no imminent deadline, so there’s no urgency and therefore it’s not a priority. 

So we leave it until a week or two before it’s due and now it’s not an hour, we are talking days if not a whole week doing work on submitting taxes. 

If you want to stop the tyranny of tax assessment time, then do a little each week (or month) to keep it organised. It’s not about making it a priority, it’s about making it something you do regularly. 

A bigger problem you will be facing each day Shelly, is a phenomenon called “over-choice”. Basically, what this means is when we are faced with a lot of options to choose from, we find it very difficult to decide. We become overwhelmed and anxious about whether we are making the right decision or not. 

If you were to wake up tomorrow morning and have one item to do. You would do it. No matter how big or difficult the task was. You would do it. First of all you would be focused and secondly, there’s no decision to make. You are doing that one thing. So you get on and do it. 

But we don’t do that do we? We see how easy it is to add things to our task managers and then, so we don’t forget something, we add a random date to a task that roughly equates to when we think it needs doing. 

Unfortunately, this strategy leads to tasks coming up on our daily lists that don’t actually need to be done that day but clutter up your today’s task list. When you look at that list in the morning, you have far too many decisions to make. 

We try and rationalise that by looking for the urgent tasks—but you often find even that filtering approach leads to too many tasks to complete in one day. We think everything is urgent and the problem there is if everything is urgent which one do you work on first? 

What we end up with is a list that gives us too much choice and then we face the paradox of choice—as Barry Schwartz wrote about in his book by the same name. 

You make have heard of the studies into choice. When we have a limited number of choices of a particular product we are much more likely to buy one than if we are faced with too many choices. I believe the statistics were when faced with a limited choice 80% bought. When faced with a lot of choices, only 3% chose something. 

This is the same for your daily task list. Too many items on that list and you will waste so much time trying to pick something. More often than not you won’t and will stop looking at your to-do list and instead do whatever someone else tells you to do. It’s easier and you delegate choosing to someone else. 

It’s why we procrastinate. We have far too much choice. 

So, if you want your to-do list to become more effective; you must reduce your list of tasks for the day. 

How do you do that?

Well, first look at how you are writing your tasks. Make sure it is very clear what you need to do. I see people writing things like “Paul 353 2458 3579” and expect to know instantly what that task means. It looks like the name Paul and a telephone number. So you may deduce you need to call Paul. But why do you need to call him?

You’d be far better-writing something like: “Call Paul about expected shipment date for Yorkshire Tea”. As soon as you read that you instantly know what you need to do. 

The key to writing your tasks is to make sure there is an action verb in the sentence. If you make it very clear what needs to be done with a task you reduce the number of decisions you need to make. And that is really the secret here. 

Reduce the decisions you need to make. 

And this can be done in another way. Let’s take email. We all get it, some more than others. If you are not staying on top of your email daily, it builds up to a point where you become swamped and overwhelmed. 

There are two parts to managing email. Processing; where you decide what, if anything, needs to be done with an email. And doing email—where you respond or act on the email you have decided needs action from you. 

Now if you are randomly looking at your email throughout the day, you lose focus on what you were working on. You get dragged away from what you decided to do that day and can quite easily spend a lot of time just responding to email. If you set aside some time each day for processing—say thirty minutes before lunch or first thing in the morning and then a set amount of time each for responding to your actionable email, you reduce the decisions you need to make. 

If, for example, you set 4pm to 4;45pm for responding to your actionable email each day, you now no longer have to decide when you will respond. You know you have time for that later in the afternoon. All you need to decide, when an email comes in, is whether or not you need to action it. You’ve simplified your decision making. 

With this method, you no longer need to be sending emails to your task manager. All you need now is a single time block in your calendar that tells you when it’s time to clear your actionable email. 

What about all those follow-ups and calls you need to make? I find these are often the cause of a lot of clutter in a task manager and are likely to be the tasks that get put off again and again. 

Rather than randomly adding these to a task manager, you could group them together as subtasks in a recurring task that tells you to do your calls. Or, if you are in sales and need to follow up with clients regularly to see if they need something, you could put them on a spreadsheet. That way you can record information like when you last called them and any information that would be useful when you do call them. 

All you need do then is have a single task telling you to review your calls list. 

This is the reason why I stress the importance of knowing what your core work is. This is the work you are paid to do, not the voluntary work you have committed yourself to by using the word “yes” too often. 

Once you know what your core work is, you can make sure you block time out on your calendar for doing that core work. Again, once you have done this there’s no decision to make. You look at your calendar and you see what you must do. The decision is already made. 

I write a blog post each week. It’s part of my core work. I have set aside Monday morning, once my early morning calls are complete for writing. It’s non-negotiable. It’s what I do. So now, I don’t have to try and decide when I will write the blog post. I know I will be writing the blog post on Monday morning. The only decision I need to make now is what will I write about? I’ve reduced my decisions by 50%.

The key to building more manageable to-do lists, Shelly, is in reducing your choices. The less you have to choose from, the easier that choice will be to make. 

This can be achieved by making sure you are very clear about what you want to get accomplished each day and the best time to do this is the evening before. 

When you give yourself ten to fifteen minutes before you end the day to make decisions about what you will work on the next day, you no longer have to waste time picking a task. You wake up with a clear set of objectives for the day and you can get started. 

The strange thing is once you start to see that most of our productivity problems are caused by the decisions we have to make each day you start to find ways of reducing those decisions. I am a bit extreme here. A couple of years ago I decided I hated having to think about what to wear on my videos each time. So I decided I would wear a navy blue t-shirt. Since I made that decision I have accumulated about twelve navy blue T-shirts. I have six long-sleeve for the winter and six short-sleeved ones for when the temperature gets warmer. 

I’ve also been eating the same thing for breakfast and dinner each day for around eight years. This means I don’t have to worry about calories because I eat roughly the same amount of calories each day and I don’t have to decide what to eat. I already know that when I have breakfast today I will have Greek yoghurt with blueberries and mixed nuts. For dinner, I will have chicken salad and a bowl of fruit to finish. 

Now, I don’t expect people to follow my lead here. I am not a foodie. So eating the same thing eat day doesn’t worry me. I don’t get bored. And I do have a free day every Saturday where I can eat anything I want. And as for my clothes, I rarely meet people in person these days—certainly not since the pandemic began—so wearing the same kind of clothes each day isn’t an issue for me. 

Finally, I would recommend you build as much structure into your day as possible. Doing the same kind of things at set times each day and week isn’t boring. It prevents procrastination. It reduced the number of decisions you need to make and it keeps your task manager clean and tight. You will find you no longer have to reschedule as many tasks are you are doing now and with consistency, life will become so much easier and less overwhelming. 

I hope that has helped, Shelly. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s question is about finding new goals when you have achieved many of your life’s gals already.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 215 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 215 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Now, we often hear about how to achieve goals, what habits to develop and change our lives. But what do you do when you have achieved many of your long-term goals and what remains no longer inspire you? 

Not much is written or spoken about that. It’s as if the assumption is people struggle to achieve goals. Well, that’s not entirely true. It is hard to achieve goals, that as it should be. But it doesn’t mean we don’t achieve them. We do. 

So. I’m going to tackle that question this week.

Now before we get to the question, if you would like to receive all my weekly published content in one single place, then subscribe to my newsletter. Not only will you get links to my content, you also get a FREE productivity tip plus notice of any special offers before anyone else. 

It’s free and if you want to grow your skills in productivity, time management and goal setting (and achievement) then go ahead and subscribe today. The link to sign up is in the show notes. 

Okay. It’s time to hand you over to the Mystery podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question is from Tim. Tim asks: Hi Carl, I have been fortunate in that I have achieved many of my life's goals. Those that I haven't achieved . . . well, they're just not attractive to me anymore. The problem is I now feel lost without having some goals. How do I find new goals?

Hi Tim, thank you for the question. 

One thing humans need is to be continually growing. That does not necessarily mean physically grow, but grow mentally. When we stop growing, we can feel depressed and down and lost. What keeps us moving forward is something to achieve. That could be a certain lifestyle, a new knowledge or even a business. 

No matter what it is, our minds (and bodies) need exercising and that exercise is how we grow. 

When we are young, fresh from school, it’s likely we will have a lot of ideas and ambitions. We are a little naive then, and we think we are immortal and can achieve anything. Then life punches us in the face and we realise that all the things we’ve dreamed about accomplishing is not as easy to achieve as we first thought. 

Apparently, statically, 97% of people will stop at this point and just accept life as it is and give up their dreams and ambitions. It’s easier to blame life and our circumstances than to stand out and be different and go after our dreams—the things that other people around us say are crazy or impossible to do. 

The three percent who do go after their dreams and goals and accepts that their life is 100% their responsibility, are the ones who are goal driven, focused and never stop growing their skills and abilities.

But there comes a natural point where most of those goals and dreams have been achieved. Then what? What do you do then? 

I remember, the first time I completed a marathon. It was amazing. The sense of accomplishment was incredible. There was this smile on my face. I felt I could achieve anything. Those feelings lasted all of about an hour. After that I began thinking now what? 

You see, achieving your goals will not give you a lifetime of fulfilment. That sense of pride and fulfilment doesn’t last. 

A goal, as Damon Cart talked about in this podcast a few weeks ago, is just a stepping stone to something much bigger. And I mean much much bigger. 

The real question to ask yourself is what do I want out of life? Who, or what do I need to become to accomplish that? 

Now, one place you are likely to find the answers to these questions is in your areas of focus. These are the eight areas of life that are important to us. Some are obvious such as health, family and friends and finances. But the other five are just as important. Your career or business, your spirituality, your self development, lifestyle and life’s purpose will all come into the mix at some point. 

I’ve recently finished reading a new biography of Ian Fleming, my writing hero. For those who don’t know, Ian Fleming was the creator and writer of the James Bond novels. 

Throughout the 1950s, Ian Fleming achieved everything he desired. He attained all his goals. At the start of the decade he built his dream home in Jamaica, he married the woman he loved and he published “a spy novel to end all spy novels” when he published Casino Royale in 1953. 

Throughout the 1950s, Ian Fleming achieved all the goals he set out to achieve. The success of the James Bond novels made him a multi-millionaire, it allowed him to become an independent writer and live the lifestyle he had always dreamed of. 

At the end of the decade, was he happy? No. His marriage was breaking down, his health was failing him and he became embroiled in a legal battle involving his book, Thunderball. 

Towards the end of his life, Ian Fleming had one remaining goal. That was to become the club captain at the Royal St George’s Golf Club in Kent, England. He finally achieved that goal when he was announced as the club captain on the 12 August 1964—the day he died of a heart attack. 

Despite all the success the James Bond novels brought Ian Fleming. The fame, the fortune and lifestyle, the one thing he valued most was his golfing friends. Golf was a big part of his life, but it wasn’t until towards the end of his life he came to realise that the friendships he developed on the golf course and in the club house and writing—whether that was books or articles for The Sunday Times newspaper—were the most important things in his life. 

If you look at the eight areas of focus, friendships and career / business were important parts of Ian Fleming’s life. Career or business because his career was spent largely in journalism and writing. 

Two years before his death, Ian Fleming, wrote a book called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was a children’s book about a flying car. It was going to be the start of a new career—writing children books. He decided he wanted to become famous not just for writing spy fiction, but also to be a children’s book author. 

Often even though you may have retired from your professional life, the skills and abilities you learned during your career, hold a part of you that you love doing. 

My father is a great example of this. My father’s a farmer. He has been all his life. He retired in 1999, sold the family farm in the UK and promptly bought a small farm in Ireland. There’s little pressure for him to make money, now it’s a labour of love. 

He still wakes up reasonably early to go out and feed the animals. He’s an avid poultry shower—he raises hens to show in events around the country each year and that is where most of his goals come from each year. Winning the all Ireland Championship. 

So, Tim, Where are you interests now? That’s where I would start. What interests you? 

If you have most of your areas of focus covered, are there any areas you feel need attention? Often you will find new goals and ways to grow in there. 

But that’s not all you can do. I would suggest trying new things. Go to a mountain retreat in a far off country, learn to surfboard, take a rally driving course, learn to horse ride or do archery (or both!) 

You could set a goal to try ten new things over the next ten years. Commit to learning something new for twelve months. I have a friend who did this in her mid-thirties. She decided she would learn ten new skills over the decade. The first one was to learn English fluently—she did that, the second was to learn to swim. One of the goals was also to write a book. 

When she embarked on this ten year journey, the energy and excitement in her eyes was there for everyone to see. To her, failure was not an option. 

And yes, she did learn ten new things between 2005 and 2015. The funny thing was by the end of 2015, she’d already written a list of ten new things to go after in the next ten years. Can you imagine the life she’s living? 

But the most important thing about my friend’s ten year goal, was the amazing positive change in her. Once she’s achieved her first goal, her confidence was sky high. I remember the celebration we all had when she finished learning English. Not only was she pretty much fluent, but she was now surrounded by people from all over the world. Twelve months previously the only friends she had were from Korea. Now she had international friends as well . 

Goals do not have to be high and lofty. They can be small little things you could do on a weekend. I have a former client who after retiring decided to restore an old car. The car he bought was around $700. I cannot remember the name of the car, but I do remember the excitement in his voice when he told me he’d picked up the car and put it in his garage. 

The car didn’t run, it was over forty years old—I remember it was a car he’d always wanted when he was in his early twenties. He had to learn how to rebuild an engine, repair rust damage and so much more. 

That’s like me finding an old Ford Escort RS Cosworth and restoring it. WOW! Just thinking about that excites me. The fact that the Escort Cosworth was never sold in Korea, doesn’t deter me. I’d find a way to get one. 

So there you go Tim. I hope these examples have given you some ideas. There’s a lot you could do. A lot you could try. Perhaps start with a country retreat somewhere special. Take a notebook with you and write out all the things you could do over the next ten years that would excite you. 

Thank you for your question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, it’s all about how to stop overthinking and just get on with the work.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 214 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 214 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Do you occasionally find yourself paralysed by decisions? Having too many choices and not knowing where to begin? I think a lot of us find ourselves in this situation and it can have negative effects on our overall productivity. 

One of the things I have conditioned myself to be able to do is to quickly decide what needs to be done and where something should go. This takes quite a lot of practice but can be speeded up with a few simple questions. 

Now before we get to the question, I want to give you a heads up about my weekly newsletter. If you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. This newsletter goes out every Friday and contains my YouTube videos, blog posts and podcast all in one convenient email. 

In addition to my content, I share with you a couple of articles of interest from other people as well as some of the videos I have been watching that week. AND, I also share with you a short essay on a productivity or time management tip that I am sure will help you to develop your out systems.

The link to my weekly newsletter is in the show notes.

Okay let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks: Hi Carl, I follow the Time Sector System and it has really helped me to process my inbox much faster. However, I do still find myself not being able to decide where to put a task. How do you process your inbox so fast? 

Thank you Alan for the question. 

One of the reasons I developed the Time Sector System was because I found myself wasting so much time trying to decide where a task went. When I managed my tasks by project I would have twenty to thirty open projects in my projects list and while tasks related to specific projects were quite easy to process, there were a lot of tasks that didn’t neatly fit into a project. 

Then I had to decide whether a new task was a project or not—based on the principle that anything requiring two or more steps was a project—if it did require two or more steps, I created another project to add to my already overwhelming project list. 

It was crazy! I found myself spending so much time deciding what something was and precious little time doing whatever that something was. And don’t get me started on the time it took to review so many projects each week. 

That’s how the Time Sector System was born. It came about because of frustration and when I analysed what was important about a task, I realised the only important factor was when I was going to do it, not what project it was associated with. 

Basically, I removed a step—a step that was taking up a lot of time each day and week. Now the only decision I need make when I get a new task is when am I going to do it. There are no more grey areas because I’m not thinking about how many steps are required. All I am deciding is when I am going to do it. 

My thoughts and ideas about a project are kept in my notes app. If I want to add information, ideas or a checklist of things to do on a project, I can jot them down in the project note and not worry about dates, labels or anything else you need to think about when you manage projects from a to-do list. 

Many of the old style task management systems require you to make a lot of decisions, and as we now know, our ability to make decisions each day is limited. As the day goes on, our capacity to make good quality decisions diminishes. And, as most people are processing inboxes at the end of the day, it’s at that time when our ability to make decisions is at its lowest. This is why we struggle in this area. We get caught up in overthinking a simple decision: What to do next.

So what about those decisions I alluded to earlier? Well when you are processing your inbox—whether that is your task manager’s or email inbox, the first question to ask yourself is: 

What is it? 

If you are processing your email, there are many different types of email. There’s spam that got through your spam filter—of course you delete these immediately. Then there are those emails you were CC’d on, but you have no action to take personally and there are emails that do require you to take some action. 

I’ve found this one question can eliminate as much as 50% of the email in my inbox because knowing what something is, tells me what to do with it. If it’s spam or has no interest to me, delete it. If it’s something I need to know, but not take action, I archive it and if it’s something I need to reply to, it goes to my action this day folder for replying to later in the day. 

I apply the same question to my task manager’s inbox. Here is a little different because anything going into this inbox has been put there by me. There’s a reason it’s there. However, again, I am looking to eliminate and as I process my inbox, I am thinking: do I really need to act on this?

Often, as time has passed my enthusiasm for doing something has gone and I can delete it. That a positive result for me. 

However, after deciding what something is, and that I will do something about it, the only question I need ask then is when will I do it? And with that a lot of the time the decision is already made. If I’ve been asked to send an invoice or receipt to a customer, I’ll do that within the next twenty-four hours. If I’ve added an idea for a future project, I will transfer that idea to my ideas list in my notes app or, if it relates to a current project, to the existing project note.

 Deciding which projects to work on and what to do with those projects will likely form a major part of your daily decision making and certainly when it comes to managing projects, you will be making those decisions when you do your weekly planning. 

The best criteria for deciding which projects to work on is time sensitivity. When is the project due? When’s the deadline? If the deadline is imminent, then that project needs to be worked on this week. If the project is a few months away, I can add it to my Next month folder. No need to be thinking about that project just yet. 

However, the secret sauce in being able to process inboxes quickly is practice. The more you do it, the faster you become. When I am processing any of my inboxes it’s automatic. The questions about what it is and what needs to happen, can be answered very quickly. 

But it wasn’t always like that. It was slow at first and it will be slow for you when you begin doing something new. Don’t expect to be fast immediately. You will be asking yourself what something is and when will you do it consciously at first. But over time, those decisions about a task or email will be almost automatic. You begin to see patterns in the different types of tasks and then you will be making decisions very fast indeed. 

Now that should take care of basic decision making process for you. The next decisions you will need to make are what do I want to accomplish this week and what will I do today? 

Now a quick tip here. Deciding what you want to accomplish next week, is best done Saturday morning before you do anything else. Remember our capacity to make good decisions diminishes throughout the day, so if you leave doing your weekly planning session to late Friday or Sunday, you will certainly not be in the right mood to plan next week and you won’t be making good decisions.

The best time to do a weekly planning session is Saturday morning. Get, make yourself a cup of coffee or tea (or whatever you favourite morning beverage is) turn on some of your favourite music and sit down for thirty minutes or so with your calendar and task manager open. 

Then go through and decide what you want to accomplish based on how busy your week is going to be. You may need to refer to your project notes to see where projects are, but all in all you only need to move tasks from your Next Week folder to This Week, give them a date based on when you are going to do them and make sure you inboxes are clear. 

Do that Saturday morning and you are going to get a lot more enjoyment from the weekend. Your week is planned, you do not need to think about your work and you can really settle in and enjoy the weekend. 

But the most important thing about doing the weekly planning session is it makes the daily planning sessions so much easier. Because you did the hard work on Saturday morning, when you do the daily planning sessions, all you are doing is confirming what you planned is still the right things to be working on and adding in anything new that you picked up during the day.

Now how do you stop overthinking tasks? 

Here, you need to ask yourself what is the result you want to accomplish from this task. Focus less on how you are going to do it, first ask what result you want. 

More often than not, once you are clear on the outcome, the ‘how will I do it?’ Will take care of itself. 

For instance, if you want to employ a new staff member, what’s the outcome you want? To get a fantastic new team member for the department. Okay, how will you do that? Now in this case if you work for a large organisation you may be lucky and have an HR department who can do a lot of the leg work for you. So the first step is to request assistance from your HR department. 

If you are not so fortunate, and you have to do all the work yourself, then the next step would be to draft out a job description and what the ideal candidate will be. 

From there, the next steps will take care of themselves. 

You see the idea here is to only focus on the very next step. You don’t climb mountains in one step. You climb one step at a time. That’s also the way to complete your projects and goals; one step at a time. 

I think of it this way, never leave a project without first deciding what the very next step is. You can then move that task to your task manager or leave it in your project note. 

So there you go, Alan. I hope that has helped. Try to make your processing and planning as automatic as possible: what is it and when do I need to do it? 

When it comes to individual projects, don’t focus too much on the process. Decide what the result is you want and then make sure you know what the very next step is. 

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. 

Podcast 213

This week’s question is about habits and more specifically the best habits to have for greater productivity and time management.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

The Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 213 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 213 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Over the years I have been obsessed with time management and productivity, I have tried and tested multiple ways of better managing my time and my productivity. And from all that testing, I have learned that there are some hard and fast rules that, if followed, guarantees improvements in these areas. 

I’ve spoken before about things like developing workflows, about making sure you plan the day the day before and keeping your task manager and calendar clean and tight. But of all the best methods, there is is one that stands out more than the others and that is the development of the right habits. 

And that is what this week’s question is all about. What set of habits should you adopt so that better time management and productivity becomes a habit, rather than something you need to think about.

Now, before we get to this week’s question, if you would like to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Every Friday, I send out a newsletter that gives you all the links to things like my Youtube videos, my blog post and of course this podcast. Plus, I include one or two articles written by others that I have enjoyed reading as well as a couple of videos I have watched that have helped me develop my systems.

PLUS… I also write a short essay each week that is exclusive to my newsletter that will give you tips and tricks to optimise your own productivity set up. And of course, it’s all FREE. All you need do is sign up, which you can do from the link in the show notes.

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question

This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia ask, Hi Carl, I read Atomic Habits by James Clear over the Christmas break and that got be thinking about the best habits to help me become better at managing my time and getting more of my work finished. Do you have any thoughts on this? 

Hi Julia, great question! Thank you for sending it in.

Firstly, may I just say, Atomic Habits is one of the best books you can read if you want to transform your life as a whole, not just your productivity. I remember a few years ago I was struggling to fix my morning routine and make doing it consistent. After reading Atomic Habits I discovered the piece I was missing—something called “habit stacking” which was the missing piece to making it consistent. 

Essentially habit stacking requires a trigger—in my case turning on the kettle in the morning to make my coffee, and then a sequence of little actions steps. So in the case of my morning routines, the turning on of my kettle leads to me doing my shoulder stretches while the kettle boils, which then triggers me drinking a glass of lemon water while my coffee brews, and once I have my coffee, I sit down either at my desk or on the sofa and write my journal for ten minutes. 

I’ve got to say it really does work.

Now, let’s look at some habits you can develop that will massively improve your productivity. 

Let’ start with a simple habit. The habit of consciously closing out your day. 

What do I mean by “closing out your day”? This means that at a specific time each day you stop and close down the day. It’s where to put a hard border between your work life and your personal life. 

While technology has done a lot to make our lives eminently more convenient and comfortable, it has also blurred the lines between our work life and personal life. This is not good for our mental and emotional wellbeing. There needs to be a time for work and a time for our personal activities. That could be doing some exercise or meeting up with friends. It’s often these essential parts of our lives that get sacrificed on the alter of career development and business growth. 

So, closing out your day is about drawing a line underneath your work and projects for the day so you can move to giving yourself some time. 

A good closing down habit is to stop working on whatever it is you are working on. Then clearing your task manager’s inbox. Then spending a few minutes planning out what needs to be done the next day. That involves looking at the tasks you have scheduled for the next day and your calendar for your appointments. You can prioritise your tasks and make sure you have sufficient time to accomplish everything you have planned for the day at this point. 

Now, the benefit of this habit is you avoid worrying about what you have missed and what you have to do tomorrow. Just a few minutes at the end of the day going through what you collected in your inbox and looking at what you have scheduled for tomorrow calms your mind and allows you to properly shut down the work side of your life for the day. 

What I notice about not closing out the day and planning the next, is your brain will randomly throw up thoughts about your work long into the evening and if you are particularly busy, it can have a negative affect on your sleep. You try to sleep but you are worrying about what you may or may not need to do the next day. 

It’s far better to get that sorted out before you finish the work day. 

So habit number one - get into the habit of closing down the work day. That one habit alone will massively improve your productivity AND your focus. 

The next habit I would recommend is to start the habit of journaling. A lot has been written about the benefits of journaling, but the biggest benefit for me is the focus and clarity I get from writing out what’s on my mind. 

If you include ten minutes of journaling in your morning routine you will get several benefits. The morning is when you are likely to be at your most creative—even if you are a night person—because as you begin to write you create a connection between your subconscious mind and the page. I cannot count the number of great ideas I’ve had from those ten minutes I write. 

Now, I must confess, great ideas do not come every day—perhaps once or twice a month—but when they do, I often find myself switching from my journaling app to my notes and collecting the idea there. 

But, perhaps the greatest benefit is the way journaling focuses you on the day. If you use a dedicated journaling app such as Day One, you can create a daily template. For me, my daily template includes a place where I can put my two objective tasks for the day—these are the tasks that I must complete that day, it also gives me a place to track my morning routines. For that I have a checklist to confirm I have completed my morning routines. 

The benefit of this is I have record of what I have done, AND not done, so if I ever feel out of balance, I can go through my journal and see where the imbalance may have occurred. It’s usually because I am not doing something important to me. 

My journal is also my accountability buddy. 

Last year was a torrid time for my exercise consistency. I really struggled to get back into my exercise routine after a Christmas break. Things did not start well. I strained my calf while out on my annual New Year’s Day run which stopped me from running for two weeks. And we had moved house and the new environment caused me to drop out the habit of doing exercise in the afternoons. 

I found I was berating myself almost every day and promising I would get back into my exercise routines the next day. This constant reminder eventually pushed me to solve this problem and by April I was getting back into the habit. By July I was back to where I wanted to be. 

So habit number two; start journaling. It can be a little strange at first, but if you stick to it, eventually you will find you always have something to write about. Don’t worry if in the early days you only write out the weather forecast or some news item. We all start there. Once you start doing this consistently, you will soon start writing out your thoughts. 

Habit three is to write everything down. This has saved me so many time from missing something important. How many times have you agreed to a meeting and not written it down believing you will remember and at the appointed meeting time you get a call asking where you are? It’s so easy to forget these things if we are not writing them down. 

But it’s more than that. If we don’t have a trusted method of dealing with information our brains will try and do the job for you. The problem is our brains were never designed to store factual information in this way. Our 200,000 year old brain evolved to recognise patterns—it’s what kept us alive on the open savannahs thousands of years ago. We recognised the pattern of some predatory creature stalking us for lunch. The crack of a twig or the russell of long dried grass. 

If you think about all the information coming at us every second of the day through sounds, smells, sight and touch. It’s impossible to be consciously aware of every information input. Pattern recognition is a far more effective way to alert us to danger or opportunity. Our brain automates the process and if a number of informational inputs come together at the same time that corresponds to a known danger or opportunity, you brain will make you consciously aware of it. 

One the best things our ancestors have left us are their journals and notebooks. From Leonardo D’ Vinci to Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. People who changed the world captured every little idea and hypothesis into notebooks. We can go and see these notebooks and see how amazing ideas and inventions developed over time. 

Now whether you collect everything in a paper notebook or a digital notes app doesn’t matter. Choose something that works for you. Just make sure that you develop the habit of collecting everything. You can discard things later when you close down your day and clear out your inboxes. 

I think of all the productivity tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years. Developing the habit of capturing everything has been the one that has had the biggest impact on my overall productivity. I would say I probably delete around thirty or forty percent of what I collect, but it very rare I miss something. If I do miss anything it was because I didn’t write it down. 

I’ve set up my phone and Apple Watch to be little collection tools. I use an application called Drafts which is a very powerful collecting tool available on all Apple devices (I’ve even done a series of videos on using Drafts for collecting) 

Anything from my shopping list to tasks and notes are collected using Drafts or Siri in the case of my shopping list. 

So the third habit I would suggest you develop is collect everything. Once it’s written down and in a place your brain trusts you will look at later it will relax. Once you are in this habit, I can promise you you will find your stress levels reduce and you feel a lot more relaxed. 

So there you go, Julia, three habits worth developing as we begin this New Year. Create a habit of closing down the day, begin journaling and collect everything in place you trust you will see later. 

Those three little habits will give your productivity, mental well being and overall sense of accomplishment such aa positive boost. 

Thank you, Julia for the great question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Podcast 212

This week’s question is all about getting your task manager clean and tight and ultimately more functional. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Download the Annual Planning Template

Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template

More about the Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 212 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 212 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One of the problems many people face with their task manager is the volume of tasks that appear on their today lists. And even if you are vigilant about when you add a date to a task, there often is still far too many tasks on the daily list. 

So, this week, I want to address that and share with you a few ways you can eliminate rather than accumulate tasks. 

Now before we get to the question, this will be the final episode for a couple weeks. Don’t worry, we will be returning on the 10th January.

And, if you don’t want to miss out of all the productivity and time management content I produce each week, sign up for my weekly newsletter where every Friday you will receive all the content, PLUS a short essay with a tip on improving your overall productivity, time management and goal setting. 

The link to sign up is in the show notes. 

Okay, it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Gary. Gary asks, Hi Carl, I saw your recent video on how you have Todoist set up. I noticed you have very few tasks on your today list. Is that for real or was that just for show? 

Hi Gary, thank you for your question and yes, that was for real. 

Twice a year I show how I have evolved how I use Todoist, and in this videos I share my real Todoist account. Normally, I use a demo account. 

So, how I achieve that is by focusing on elimination and being very very strict about what gets into my system. 

Now, I should be careful here because I still collect a lot of stuff into my inbox. However, I am very strict on what goes from my inbox into my time sectors. This is where I practice the art of elimination. Let me explain.

Firstly, I am obsessed with avoiding duplication. I hate it if there is a piece of work or a task in one app and I copy it over to my task manager. That act of copying it over to my task manager creates a duplicated task. 

For example. Like most people a lot of my tasks come from email and in the past I would forward these to Todoist’s inbox. That would easily generate fifteen to twenty tasks per day in my inbox. This meant I had the original email in my email system and a task for that email in my task manager which created duplication.

Then when it came to processing my Todoist inbox, I had all the other tasks plus those emails to process. This meant those email tasks had now been processed twice and I still had done nothing about acting on them—which is crazy. 

I realised, if I created a folder in my email called “Action This Day” and any email that required me to do something was put in there, I only needed a single task in Todoist that recurred every day to remind me to clear that folder. This meant I no longer needed to go from Todoist to email, back to Todoist and then email again. It was a lot of unnecessary extra steps just to reply to a single email. 

Moving email within the email app itself is a lot easier and faster and I eliminate a complete step. It also means now all I need do is allocate a block of time later in the day to clear my action this day folder and all my email commitments are dealt with for another twenty-four hours. 

Another area where accumulation and duplication appears is throwing all your project tasks into your task manager. A lot of what needs doing on a project is obvious. If you’re preparing for a big important presentation, adding tasks such as: decide theme, get figures from accounts team, find images etc are superfluous. None of these really get the presentation done. 

Opening up PowerPoint or Keynote and laying out the outline of your slides and and, once the file is complete, rehearsing it are the only really important tasks. 

So for me, I have tasks such as: Continue working on presentation file and practice for tomorrows presentation. 

My thoughts, ideas and sample slide layouts will be in a project note and that is also where the deadlines, milestones and instructions from the event organiser and anything else relevant to the project will be. You really don’t need to duplicate all that in your task manager. Again, all you have done is wasted a lot of time moving things around but done nothing to actually move the project forward. 

It’s obvious what needs doing next once you open the document or the project note. 

This is also why I am not a big fan of waiting for labels or tags. If you are waiting for something you have an incomplete task. For instance. If I create a task such as “Get last month’s sales data from Jeff” and I send Jeff a message asking him for the info, all I have done is ask Jeff for the information. I still do not have the information, so the task is not complete. 

As the task is not complete and Jeff tells me he will send it tomorrow, then I reschedule the task for tomorrow. 

If I decide to buy a new video camera for Zoom or Teams calls and I order it from Amazon, the act of ordering the camera is not completing the task. The task is I want a new video camera. So I order it on Amazon and the confirmation email is added to a waiting for folder in my email. I then have a single task in Todoist that comes up every Saturday to remind me to check that waiting for folder.

If you are buying three or four things on Amazon every week, adding three or four tasks to follow up on something seems superfluous and you can easily replace those with a single task reminding you to check you waiting for folder in email.

I should say, though, if you’re ordering things and you need a reminder about everything you’ve ordered, you’re probably ordering far too many things. 

Another area I look for is what I call natural triggers. Natural triggers are objects or events that will naturally remind you that something needs doing. Simple examples of this would be you know when to take out the trash because your trash bin is full. Likewise you know when your car needs refuelling because the fuel warning light will come on, or if you leave it long enough you run out of fuel—probably the best reminder to do something.

I’ve also set up a shopping list in Apple reminders so I can use the convenience of my Home Pod Mini and tell Siri to add something to my shopping list while I am showering or cooking. I only need look at this list on days I go to the supermarket, which is usually Tuesday and Friday. I don’t need to be reminded to go the supermarket. It is just something my wife and I do. 

Another reason why I am able to keep my today list clean and tight is because I know what my core work is. I know what needs doing each day. For instance, today, I have a task telling me to record this podcast. I also have a task that tells me to edit my YouTube videos and write my coaching clients’ feedback. These three tasks are my important tasks for the day and they are at the top of my list. 

Anything else that comes up will not take priority over my core work unless it is a genuine emergency—and genuine emergencies are rare. I’ve only had one in the last five years. 

Underneath these tasks are my routines for the day including clearing my email action this day folder and daily admin. Clearing my action this day folder takes around forty minutes and my daily admin around thirty minutes. These tasks are performed every day, and although I probably don’t need them on a list for the day, it does act as a reminder on those days when it has been chaotic or I have been away from my office. 

In total, if you include my routines, when I begin each day I will have between fifteen and twenty tasks for the day and the important tasks are at the top. If I see I have more than twenty tasks during my daily planning session, I will eliminate the less important ones. And again, I am very strict about this. 

If you do not know what your core work is—the work you are paid to do, or in you run your own business, the work you do that generates your income, then everything will be a priority and you will feel compelled to add everything to your task manager. 

I’ve seen things like iron shirts, take dog for a walk and take medicine on a task manager. Seriously? Ironing shirts should be a part of a home cleaning routine—it doesn’t need to be in a task manager. And as a dog owner myself, you should never need reminding to take your dog out for a walk. That is a part of the commitment you take on when you decide to have a dog—and dogs have a way of telling you it’s walkie time. 

For medicines, use your phone’s reminder system if you must. Setting a recurring alarm reminding to take your medication will work far most effectively than using a task manager. 

Ultimately, if you are putting everything on your task manager it means you don’t trust yourself and you need to start trusting yourself. Daily and weekly planning sessions are a key part to this because it ensures you do not miss anything. Skipping these prevents you from trusting that your system will work for you. 

When you do a daily and weekly planning session you gain the confidence that you have everything under control. You know nothing has been missed and if it has it’s unlikely to be important. Not doing these is like trying to push a wheelbarrow with a square wheel up a steep hill. 

So there you go, Gary. The trick is to have the mindset of elimination not accumulation. Remove the unnecessary and what’s left will naturally be the necessary. You can then focus all your attention on getting those done and not worry about everything else—you don’t need to because they inevitably will not be important. 

Have a wonderful week, a fantastic Christmas and I’ll talk to you all again the New Year. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, we are cleaning up our productivity systems and getting ready for the new year.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Download the Annual Planning Template

Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template

More about the Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 211 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 211 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Something I’ve been doing for a long time is cleaning up my productivity system during the end of year Christmas break. I’ve found it’s the best time of the year to do this as there are very few new inputs coming in. Most of my work comes to a screeching halt because, while not everyone celebrates Christmas, most companies and people do have an end of year holiday. 

So while it’s quiet over the final two weeks of the year, you can take advantage and clean up your system so it’s ready and waiting for you when your new year starts. 

So where do you start? 

The best place to begin is with your task manager. Over the year you will have added tasks that have disappeared into the deep dark depths and there are likely to be tasks you have completed but have not checked off. Go through all your folders or projects and make sure all the tasks in there are still relevant. If not, delete them or check them off.

Next up, is to review your routines and recurring areas of focus. By the very nature of these folders, you don’t spend much time in there because they are set up to recur. However, through the year it’s likely some of these will have become irrelevant while others may have become a little boring. Now’s a good time to remove the irrelevant ones.

Now, these irrelevant ones are the ones that you have turned into a habit. For instance, I used to have a recurring task in my areas of focus to do my exercise. This was added at a time I was being inconsistent with exercise and I needed the prompt to make sure I was at the very least reminded to do my exercise. 

Once I got the consistency back, I just added a single task as part of my weekly planning session to schedule my exercise for the week on my calendar. I no longer needed the daily prompt. 

Now for the boring ones, what I mean by these are you have seen the tasks every day for a year and you’ve become a little numb to them. Find ways to change the verb. To give you an example here, I used to have a task in my routines that said “Empty my Action this Day Folder”—this is the folder I have in email for all my actionable mail. The goal is to empty that folder each day. 

Earlier this year, I changed the verb from “empty” to “clear”. It’s a very small change, but it keeps things fresh. You can change this to things like: “reply to all actionable email” or something similar. It is a small change, but it helps to prevent things from becoming boring. 

Now before you finish with your routines folder, ask if there are any other things you really should add in here. Do you need any reminders to clean different parts of your home or car? Do you need a reminder to renew any subscriptions—or consider renewing subscriptions. Setting up tasks to remind you about upcoming renewals can help to keep you on top of your commitments. The thing with these is don’t set them up on the day of renewal. Set them for a few days before so you have time to make sure there’s sufficient money in your account.

The final action to take on your task manager is to make sure you are happy with its structure. Over the course of a year, you are likely to have experienced folder creep. You may also have tested new apps but found you don’t really use them. Clear these off your computer and mobile devices. They only take up digital space and can be a distraction. 

Hopefully, you are using the Time Sector System and with this, you should really only have six folders—your inbox, This Week, Next Week, This Month, Next Month and Long-Term and On Hold folders. If you’ve added temporary project folders or anything else, now’s the time to consider their value to your overall system. 

If you are not using the Time Sector System, and have a more traditional setup with projects, clean these up. This is one area where folder creep can become overwhelming and you are likely to find you have a lot of projects that either have been completed or are unlikely to complete for whatever reason. 

Now, before you finish with your task manager, ask yourself if it is working for you. Does it show you what you need to see when you need to see it? If not, make any necessary changes to make sure it does. For me, I want to make sure that what comes up on my today list are tasks I will do or must do. I don’t want tasks coming up that I know deep down I am going to push off to another day. 

And, if you are taking a holiday at the end of the year, go into your routines and recurring areas of focus and forward date tasks you know you will not be doing over the holidays. I will be setting a lot of my routines and recurring areas of focus to stop coming up until the 3rd of January when I return to my full working schedule. 

Now, what about your notes app?

This is likely the place where you have a lot of stuff you no longer need. After all, it’s your notes app that you open quickly to capture those little ideas that come in a flash and when you look at them later you wonder what you were thinking at that time. 

Now it does depend on how much time you are willing to spend here and how many notes you have. I have around ten to twelve thousand notes in Evernote and to go through all of those would take days if not weeks. 

So, I do a search for all notes created in the last twelve months and start there. Then I change the order of the notes collected to the oldest first and that way I can begin in January and work my way through. I usually make sure the note is held in the right place and is appropriately tagged as I go through them. 

I find doing this I will delete around 20% of what I collected and it only takes an hour or so. 

If I want to go further, I just filter notes to any note created in the last five years and repeat the process. Fortunately, I’ve been doing this every year for around six or seven years, so this deeper clean up is very quick. Anything older than a year will already be tagged correctly so all I am doing is making sure the note is still relevant. 

A final exercise with your notes is to review your structure. Is the way you are structuring your notes still serving you. These days it’s rare I would change the way I structure my notes, but in the past, I’ve played with multiple ways and found a lot of them didn’t really serve me. Now’s a good time to do any restructuring. 

Okay, so that’s taken care of your productivity apps. What about the folders in your cloud storage system and your computer. Well, hopefully, you are not using your computer to store files. Aside from the risk of losing everything if your computer died (and they do still die) flies stored on your computer’s hard drive are not available on your other devices. 

It’s really up to you. I keep files and folders for up to two years. So, anything I created this year will be stored in a parent folder called 2021. Then anything new will be created as and when required. I do have some folders that stay around for instance my company’s certificate and VAT documents which I need quite frequently. 

I also go into Pages, Keynote and Numbers and clear out anything I no longer need. If you use Google Docs or Microsoft Office online, then take a. Look and clean up anything you no longer need.

Okay, that’s a good annual clean up of your productivity tools. Now for the final step: dealing with app creep.

Let’s be honest, we are all sucked into trying new apps and forgetting they are still on our phones and computers. The end of the year is a good time to purge these and to also look at what you are using and make sure the apps you use are still doing the job you want them to do. 

It’s funny, if I am being honest, over the last two years Evernote has been on my “at-risk” list, but as I was never able to find a worthy replacement, I stuck with it. This year, Evernote is off the “at-risk” list. It’s vastly improved over the last eighteen months and while this year they have brought out a lot of features I don’t need or would use, it still does the job I want it to do reliably and with speed. 

But I did look at Obsidian this year and was underwhelmed by all the fuss. It’s gone—I’ve already deleted that one, and that was the only one I was tempted to look at this year. However, in years gone by, I have looked at a lot of apps and forgot they were taking up space. So I purge. 

One final area to clean out is your to-read list. Let’s honest here, if you have a list that’s well over a hundred articles to read, you’re not going to read them all. Purge that list, my friends. Clean it out so you start the year with a list of things to read you are going to read. 

And that’s it. If you spread this out over the end of year break, you will begin the year with a refreshed set of productivity tools ready to see you through another year. 

Have a fantastic week and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, why your system or process is more important than the apps you use.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Download the Annual Planning Template

Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template

More about the Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 210 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 210 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, we’re talking about the system versus app and why with the right system it doesn’t matter what apps or tools you use, you’ll always be productive.

I remember when I first read David Allen’s Getting Things Done book many years ago, I salivated at the chance to learn what apps would be recommended and where I could buy them from (there were no app stores in those days). I was disappointed after reading the book to learn that David Allen didn’t recommend anything other than a label printing device for all the folders I would be creating for my projects. 

Then in 2015, the revised updated version of Getting Things Done came out and I rushed to buy my copy believing this time, as we were well and truly in the new digital world of apps and app stores, David would be recommending some new apps I hadn’t tried. Again I was disappointed, The same label printing device was recommended, but no apps or tools.

And yet, David Allen was teaching me a lesson. Being productive has nothing to do with the apps or tools you use. They are just cosmetic and do nothing to make you more productive. Everything that makes you more productive comes from the system and daily process you use. And that is what this week’s question is all about.

So, with that in mind, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Philip. Philip asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently come across your content on YouTube and this podcast and hoped you could help me. I’ve been searching for the best apps for managing my daily to-dos and notes. I feel I’ve tried them all but I still feel like I am burning out trying to get everything done. Do you have any app recommendations? 

Hi Philip, thank you for your question. 

I think a lot of people struggle with this one largely because there are a lot of applications and tools now that promise to make you more productive and organise your life for you. The truth is no application or tool will ever do that. No matter what application you are using, you are still going to have to put the work in. You still need to input your information, your tasks, and collect all your files together and organise them in a way you can find them later. 

I’ve seen some apps try and do some of this hard work using machine learning or AI, but technologically we are not there yet. For that to work, a machine or app will need to know how your mind works and for most of us, we don’t even know how our minds work, so there’s little chance an app or piece of complex software is going to be able to do that. 

At best, these apps guess based on algorithms and, as we know from US congressional hearings into Facebook and Google algorithms, these are not exactly perfect by a long way. 

And that is really where you need to start. Understand that whatever tools you choose, you will still need to input your data. 

Now, When I created my system I began with the question: what do I want to see each day? 

What this question is does is elicit the information I need on hand for me to complete my work to a satisfactory level each day. It also implies that there is quite a lot of information I do not need to see. For instance, I do not need to see tasks or appointments I have next week. I might need to know I have a workshop to prepare or if I have a holiday coming up, but I only need to see that when I am planning the week. 

For instance, if I have a workshop to deliver on Monday, I will need to know that this week, because I will need to prepare for it. But that is just a single task that says “prepare for next Monday’s workshop”. Once that is is on my list for this week, I don’t need to know anything else.

From that, I can open the Keynote file or the Pages document for the workbook and get on and do the work. I may have a few notes related to the workshop in my notes app, and that note will be linked to my task. 

So, let’s say on Wednesday, I see I have a task that says “prepare for Monday’s workshop” that task will be linked to the project note in my notes app and all I need do is click the link, and I’ll be taken to the project note and I can do a quick read through to see where I am and decide what needs doing next. 

So, within five seconds I am ready to begin work. 

However, to get to that point, I first need to make a number of decisions. First, when am I going to work on the workshop—I decided Wednesday—and what work will I do that will ensure I have the workshop prepared for. 

This means I need to input the data at some point. I will need to input the task, and collect my notes and ideas and create a presentation file. 

None of these things requires expensive, complicated applications. In practice, all of this could quite easily be done using a pen and piece of paper. The Keynote file and workbook will need software, but the process of knowing what to work on and when does not need anything elaborate. 

Over the last ten years or so, I’ve played around with a lot of different tools. From Evernote to OmniFocus and in recent months Notion, ClickUp and Obsidian. And yet, while many of these apps may be pleasing to the eye very few of them actually help to get my work done any better or faster. In fact, I found Notion and ClickUp actually stopped me from maximising the work I got done each day because I wasted too much time trying to get the app to look nice. 

So a question to ask yourself is what do you need your productivity apps to do for you? 

Well, the answer to that question is you want them to tell you what needs working on and why and then to get out of the way except when you need to collect something into your system. 

This means, the best productivity apps—the ones that will help you become more effective and allow you to focus on your work—are the most boring apps. Boring because you will not be tempted to keep rearranging things: changing fonts, colours and layouts. All these are distractions. They stop you from doing your work. 

In many ways, Apple Notes is possibly the best notes app today. I know it’s only available for those who work in the Apple Ecosystem, but when you look at it, it has everything you need and nothing else. It has folders to organise your notes into categories and it allows you to collect notes very easily whether that is by using Siri or using the new Quick Notes feature. Its search is phenomenal and you can tag notes for fine-tuning your organisation. 

When it comes to customising things. Nope. Not a chance. While it is possible to change text colours and fonts on macOS, you cannot do that on an iPhone or iPad. Apple Notes does what a notes app is designed to do. Manage your notes and nothing else. 

The way to look at this is, the less time you spend inside your productivity apps and the more time you spend doing the work that needs doing, the more productive you will be. 

This means you want to be optimising your system and not looking for another app. 

To optimise your system look at how easy it is to get your tasks and appointments into your task manager and calendar. Make sure the task manager you use has some form of quick entry and for your calendar you should be able to type something like “meeting with George on Monday at 9:30 am” and your calendar will know to add that to the right place whether it is typed or spoken via Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri. 

Once you have your to-dos into your task manager, you want to be able to quickly decide what needs doing and when and then to be able to add dates (if necessary) and move the task to its appropriate folder. If you cannot drag and drop a task on a desktop from your inbox to the right folder, your task manager is not fit for purpose. 

This rule applies to your notes app too. Whatever app you choose, make sure there is some form of quick entry on all your devices. You should also be able to add relevant emails to notes and collect websites, PDFs, images and such like. I found when I tested plain text notes apps, they fell down when it came to that part of the process. While some could do it, it was fiddly and time-consuming and that defeated the purpose. Quick entry is vital. 

The final part of any good system is down to planning. If you are not planning the week and your day, you will always feel overworked and busy. Not planning your day leaves you at the mercy of other people’s demands. 

If you are not making a commitment to work on specific projects each day, you will find yourself saying yes to anything that comes your way. When you know when you start the day what you want to get accomplished, if anyone asks you to do something else, you are much more likely to say no. 

For instance, today, preparing this podcast was one of my objectives. However, this morning, I got an email asking if I could jump on a quick call to discuss a “great new proposal”, and it was easy for me to say no. I had already decided that the most important use of my time today was to prepare this podcast, do my exercise and get all my writing done. Talking about how I could help someone else with their ideas was not a priority for me today. I have times available for that, and today was not one of those times. 

Not having a plan for today, I would likely have said yes because I would then feel I was doing something. 

When you begin the day with a clear plan, any new commitment requests can be assessed based on what you have planned. When you begin the day with no plan, you have nothing to assess, so you’re likely to say yes to the new commitment request and then find yourself overwhelmed with everything you didn’t do. 

So, Philip, forget the tools and apps. Pick something you like and stick with it. Focus on making sure you collect everything quickly. Organise what you collected at the end of each day and make sure you have a plan for the day. When you do that, you will soon find yourself being more productive and a lot less stressed. 

Thank you for your question, Philip and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, as we begin the final month of the year, it’s time to lay down your plans for 2022 and to set yourself up for a very successful year.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

My 2021 Holiday Season Sale

Download the Annual Planning Template

Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template

More about the Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 209 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 209 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

If you have followed along with this podcast as well as my YouTube channel, back in October, I recommended you begin a two-month brainstorming session where you gave some thought to what you would like to accomplish next year. Well, that two-month session is almost over and it’s time to turn your attention to what you WILL do next year.

Now, before we get to the meat of this week’s podcast, just wanted to give you a heads up to let you know that my 2021 holiday sale is currently on. This year, you can save 20% on all my coaching programmes as well as up to 25% off selected courses. Full details of the savings are in the show notes or can be found on my website: carlpullein.com.

Okay, let’s get back to turning ideas into reality.

Now, a lot of what you will have written out during the brainstorming session will not be possible next year. And that’s okay. The purpose of the exercise was to open up your thoughts to possibilities. For instance, one of the questions to think about is what would you like to change about yourself? Now, most people tend to think about their weight, or their relationships, but you may have gone deeper and felt you would like to change your attitude to events outside of your control. 

I remember, back in 2016, when Donald Trump was running for the Republican nomination for president, the media seemed to turn very negative and tribal. It felt the media sucked any remaining positivity out of the news and focused only on denigrating, lambasting and doom-mongering. Reading the news every day, as I had done since I was in middle school, no longer felt like an education. Instead, it felt like media organisations were trying to trigger me into a negative mood. 

I decided that from 2017, I would no longer read the news and instead subscribe to my favourite blogs on topics I was interested in and to get a news summary email every morning from the BBC to let me know what was going on in the world. 

This was a small change, but one that left me feeling a lot more positive about the world and people. 

Another example, at the end of 2017, I decided that I could become more productive if I could reduce the number of private classes I was teaching face to face and instead focus more on digital classes. This was before the pandemic, but through 2017, I wanted to move towards a more working from home arrangement and learned how to use Skype and FaceTime. Now, of course, most of us are using Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but that change in the way I did my work, enabled me to produce more content and still continue to teach. 

So the purpose of brainstorming ideas through October and November isn’t to develop a list of things you feel you must do next year, it’s about developing ideas about how you want to live your life and then choosing a few of those ideas and looking for ways to make small changes to your daily life. 

And that’s the point I really want to share with you this week. It’s not about making big changes as the more traditional New Years resolutions would have you do, it’s about looking for those small tweaks to your habits and way of going about your day that will, over the course of a year build into significant changes in your life. 

I remember in the days when I was teaching English here in Korea I often would have a student telling me they wanted to lose weight in the new year. I would ask them how they were going to do that and the answers typically involved joining a gym and some elaborate new diet fad. 

Now, in Korea, it is common for people to each a bowl of rice for breakfast lunch and dinner every day. I suggested that instead of eating a full bowl of rice, they could reduce that to half a bowl each time and move a bit more. Take the stairs at work instead of the lift. Go for a twenty-minute walk after lunch instead of gossiping in a coffee shop etc. 

Making these small changes would bring some dramatic results after only a few months, yet they would not be asking too much of themselves. You could still do the things you like to do, you can still eat with your colleagues and all you would be asking of yourself is to commit to a twenty-minute walk every day. 

And that’s the thing. When you give yourself enough time to consider what you want to change and improve, you have the time to come up with some action steps that will not be such a drastic shift in the way you have always lived your life. It’s when you try to change things too much that you fail. 

Humans are change-averse. We like routine. This is why we generally wake up at the same time each day. It’s why we eat at the same time and why we come home and do the same things each evening. We feel safe with a familiar structure to our day. When we try and change that too dramatically, our whole psychology will fight to return to the familiar. 

Often, if you really want to make big changes, the best time to do it is when you move house or change your job. It’s then that a new environment will help you to make other big changes. 

But for most of us, we do not have the luxury of being able to move house or change our jobs every year. Instead, if you want to succeed at making changes and successfully achieving your goals, making small changes to the way you run your day are the best way to stick to your goal and to come through successfully. 

One of the best things you can do to become better organised and more productive is to give yourself thirty minutes before you close out the day and clean up your desktop. Delete old screenshots, move files to their rightful folders and then allow yourself ten minutes to look at your tasks for tomorrow and your calendar to sketch out a plan. 

It’s just thirty minutes a day, but those thirty minutes will do so many things for you. First, you will begin the day knowing exactly what you want to get accomplished and secondly when you do start the day, you begin it with a clean desktop, and a distraction-free work environment. You get all that from twenty to thirty minutes. It’s really a no-brainer. 

What about your bucket list? Are there any things on there you could do next year? Now, I know for many of us there is still the uncertainty of the pandemic, but that will end soon. What could you do next year from your bucket list? 

Now usually, the things we have on our bucket lists are things that excite us, are a little far outside our comfort zone, and yet, if we picked something, thought about how to make it happen and then took the first step, you would find it happens. Let’s take one of my bucket list items. I want to take my wife to Goldeneye, a resort in Jamaica where all the James Bond books were written. 

Now, Goldeneye is an expensive resort, and we would need to save a lot of money to make it happen. But what I can do is go to the bank in the new year, open a new bank account and call that my Goldeneye account. Then each month, send any spare money over to the account. I could set a monthly target, let’s say $1,000 a month, and that way I know if I curb my spending in the early part of the year, that would begin the momentum. If I found by June I had saved $6,000, I would start to believe that with a little push, we could very easily have sufficient money saved up to be able to go in September or October. 

The only thing I need to focus on is making sure I am sending money over to the account every month how much time does that take? Five minutes? 

You see, whatever it is you want to accomplish or change in 2022 doesn’t require a lot of time to do. You first need to identify the habits and behaviours you will need to adopt and make sure each day or week you schedule sufficient time to make sure it happens. 

Developing habits requires an extra effort to start with. For instance, I drink a glass of squeezed lemon juice in water every morning. When I first began doing that, I had to consciously think about it every morning. I even had a little alarm set on my phone to remind me every day for the first month. After about two weeks I no longer needed the alarm. 

What you will find is you make a few modifications over time too. For my lemon water, I used to squeeze a lemon into a glass of water every morning. I found that wasn’t the best approach. Now, I prepare a bottle of lemon juice every three days and keep that in the fridge. That way, when I wake up in the morning, turn on the kettle to brew my coffee, I can reach into the fridge, pull out my bottle and pour my lemon juice and drink it while. Wait for my coffee to brew. 

The same goes with changing your diet or building exercise into your life. There’s a lot of experimentation in the early days while you find the best approach. That’s fine. If you keep tweaking and modifying you will soon find the right approach for you. 

I have spoken about the time I followed Robin Sharma’s 5 AM club routine. That’s where you wake up at 5 AM and do 20 minutes of exercise, 20 minutes of planning and 20 minutes of studying. I was able to do that for eighteen months, but I began doing coaching calls between 10 PM and midnight and it became exhausting to do those calls and wake up at 5 AM. 

In the end, I realised it wasn’t so much about the time of day you woke up, it was all about what you did in the first hour that mattered. So, I adjusted my wake up time. I now wake up around 7 AM and use the first hour of the day to work on myself. I write my journal, do some light exercise and stretching and review my schedule and plan for the day. It works fantastically, and I get enough sleep. 

So, as we head into December, start thinking about what you would like to do and change for yourself in 2022. Then work out what small steps you could take each day that will gradually build up to you achieving whatever it is you want to do in 2022. 

It works, it’s a great way to feel fulfilled and successfully accomplishing these goals will generate incredible momentum to achieving things you currently think would be impossible. 

Have a wonderful week and thank you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast all you need do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I’ll be happy to answer it for you.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

What’s the difference between a project and a goal? That’s the question I am addressing this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Download the Annual Planning Template

Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template

More about the Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 208 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 208 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

With the introduction of my GAPRA notes organisation system—GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas Of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive—I’ve received a number of questions about the difference between a project and a goal and on the surface there is little difference. Both have a desired outcome, a deadline and a set of actions that need to be performed before the outcome is achieved. 

However, there are a few subtle differences that I will explain this week as well as explaining why I began organising my notes using GAPRA. 

Now, before we get to this week’s answer, just a heads up to let you know if you are enrolled in my Apple Productivity course, you now have the 2022 update ready and waiting for you. It’s a free update and this year, it has extra lessons on GAPRA and how to build that into Apple Notes. 

If you are not already enrolled in the course, you can still do so at the early bird discount price of $49.99 for just 12 more hours. The early bird discount will be ending at midnight today (22 November) 

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Johnny. Johnny asks: HI Carl, I’m struggling to understand the difference between a goal and a project. Could you explain how you distinguish between the two? 

Great question, Johnny and thank you for sending it in.

Okay, let’s start off with the similarities. Projects and goals share a lot in common. There’s a desired outcome. For instance you may have a project to redecorate your bedroom and a goal to lose 10 pounds in weight. You will also have a deadline date for both of these. So in this example, you may have a deadline to complete the redecoration of your bedroom by the 24th December and to lose ten pounds by the end of the year. 

So far, very similar. 

However, where they differ is in what happens once you have completed these. Once your bedroom is decorated, you have completed the project. It’s over. There is nothing else for you to do except to enjoy the freshly painted room. 

With your goal of losing weight, the next step is to keep those ten pounds off. That means you need to change the way you eat and move. There’s no point in losing those ten pounds only to put them back on again right? 

Goals are about changing you as a person for the better. They are about improving yourself and moving towards a higher purpose. 

How did you feel when you last successfully achieved a goal? Happy? Ecstatic? How long did you feel like that? A few days? A few hours? Minutes?

You see the problem with achieving a goal is the satisfaction that comes from achieving goals is short-lived. All goals by their very nature are just one step towards a higher purpose. For instance losing that weight, is about becoming healthier. If you lose those ten pounds and within a few weeks regain the ten pounds, then you completed a project. You did not complete a goal. A goal would be to keep those ten pounds off or go further and lose another ten pounds. 

Let me give you another example. Each year I set my company an income goal. This is a goal because the purpose here is to establish a new standard. The underlying goal is to continue to grow and improve my company. So, ultimately, the goal of the company is for constant and never-ending growth. However, each year I need to set a new goal to accomplish to achieve that. 

By pushing the goal further each year, the company grows, I get to help more people while at the same time I improve as a teacher—after all, for my company to grow I have to also improve as a teacher. For me to help more people become better organised and more productive, I also have to improve my skills. 

I remember watching a Jim Rohn seminar on YouTube a few years ago and he said you should set the goal to become a millionaire, not for the money, but for who you have to become to achieve that goal. 

To become a millionaire, you will have to change your mindset and your habits. Most people limit themselves because they believe their income is set by the company they work for. And in the past, if you chose to be an employee, that was likely to be true. The only way for anyone to become a millionaire twenty years ago was to start your own business. Today, that is not true. We have unlimited opportunities to build side-incomes. Creating online courses, or a YouTube channel. Even writing blog posts now can earn you income through sites like Medium. 

But, to do that, you will need to break free of your 9 til 5 mindset. You will need to change your thinking from consuming entertainment to consuming education. Learning, growing and being obsessed with generating income. That’s how you become a millionaire. You will learn that if you spend all evening going out with your friends or watching Netflix, you will not change anything. You will stay stuck where you are. 

If you spend your evenings on your side project—write, produce videos, sell products through Amazon or Ebay, then you put yourself in a position where becoming a millionaire becomes possible. 

I remember back when I was in my early 20s I worked in our local pub as a bar tender. One of the regulars was a gentleman called Albert. Albert had been a millionaire three times and lost it three times. I remember talking with Albert one quiet Monday evening and he told me making the first million is the hardest thing you will ever do. But once to have achieved your first million, earning a million a year is easy. 

I didn’t understand what he meant back then, but over the years, I’ve realised that once you know the mindset and develop the skills to earn your first million, if you ever lose it, you don’t need to worry. You know what it takes to become a millionaire and you can repeat the process over and over again. 

The key to understanding goals is to know that the goal is less important that the changes you have to make in order to achieve that goal. 

A project is static, it does not move. Once you complete the project it’s over. You archive the project and move on to the next project. A goal is fluid, it moves with you. As you improve your abilities, develop new skills, strengthen weak areas you, as an individual, are improving. When you complete the goal, the question becomes what next? How can you continue to grow and improve? 

And that leads me nicely onto why I developed GAPRA. All GAPRA is is a way for me to organise my notes by importance. I want my goals at the top because they are the drivers of my continuous improvement. If I am in any doubt about what I should be working on today, I know my priorities will always be with my goals. 

Then comes your areas of focus. The eight areas of life we need to keep in balance. These are your family and relationships, your health, your finances, personal development, career or business, spirituality, lifestyle and life experiences and your life’s purpose. These are all important to us but their importance changes depending on where we are in life. 

Then your projects. For most working people, our projects are likely to come from our work. But as we move through life, become home owners, parents and take on more responsibilities we will be adding more and more personal projects. 

Then we have resources, this is where we keep important information. I keep things like where I buy my clothes from and my sizes. I have a note called my “Anchor Note” where I keep important links and other useful information. 

And finally we have the archive where old project notes and other stuff I have finished with but are not ready to delete yet go.

When you organise your notes in this way, you have everything organised by importance. In the past, I’ve found I’ve ignored my goals because often my work projects take up a lot of time. But if I want to grow as a person, become better at what I do and feel fulfilled, I know I will only find that in my goals. So, when I open my notes app in a morning at the top of the folder list is my goals folder, I am reminded every day of what is really important. 

It also makes doing my weekly planning session easier. I start at the top and work my way down to projects. So, I can ask myself what I can do to move closer to my goals first, then check my areas of focus are in balance and finally make sure I have sufficient time each week for keeping my projects moving along. 

If you want to learn more about why the goal itself is the least important part of the goal planning process, I recommend you listen to my interview with Damon Cart. Damon did a fantastic job explaining that our goals are a vehicle to attaining what we really want. For instance, when someone tells you they want to earn a lot of money, earning the money might be something measurable, but really what people want is the thing that they think money will give them. A nice car? And nice home? Well, again, it’s not really the car or the home they want, it’s the feeling they think a nice car or a nice home will give them. That’s the ultimate goal. 

Now the problem with material things is they never bring you the feeling you think they will. Nice houses and cars don’t impress people as much as you may think. But if the goal is to put yourself in a position of financial security so you have the freedom to do the things you want to do, you are setting the right kind of goals. 

So there you go, Johnny. I hope that answers your question. The reality is goals and projects are very similar. The difference is that once a project is complete it’s done. Finished. A goal, on the other hand, is about changing and improving you as a person. It’s just a step towards a much higher purpose. 

Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week is a very special episode. 

Earlier, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Kourosh Dini, a clinical psychiatrist who is also very prominent in the productivity world with his Waves of Focus programme and his fantastic weekly Wind Down newsletter (which I highly recommend you subscribe to) 

I first encountered Kourosh in 2012 when he spoke at the OmniFocus event at MacWorld. I then began following his work. 

In this chat, we discuss focus, ADHD, and much more. There’s so much in this episode, so get your pens and paper ready—you’re going to need them. 

Links

Learn more about Kourosh’s work:

Kourosh’s website →

Waves of Focus →

Kourosh’s newsletter →

Get a $20.00 trial of Waves of Focus membership →

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Take The NEW COD Course

The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Podcast 207

This week, I have a question about how everything should be working together and why when you do bring everything together, your daily life will seem so much more focused and, more importantly, relaxed.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Download the Annual Planning Template

Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template

More about the Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 207 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 207 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I’ve been writing and producing videos for a few years now and over the years I have introduced a number of concepts that are designed to help you better manage your time and become more productive in what you do. 

It can be quite confusing if you picked things up a little ad hoc. This week’s question is about how to bring it all together so it is seamless and logical. 

Now before I get to the question, the 2022 edition of my Create Your own Apple productivity course is now available, If you are enrolled in the course, this is a FREE update for you and if you are not, but would like to enrol in the course you can do so this week for an early bird discount price of $49.99 (it’s normally $59.99) 

This course will show you how to build your own productivity system using only Apple’s Productivity tools: Reminders, Notes, Calendar and iCloud. It’s a great course and one, if you are in the Apple ecosystem, that will give you so much benefit. And the course includes how to set up the Time Sector System as well as my new GAPRA notes organisation system. 

All the details are in the show notes.

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Beth. Beth asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed your podcast for a while now and I know a lot of the things you teach. I was wondering if there is a particular way you apply would use each of those ideas? I get a little confused sometimes about the differences between some of them.

Hi Beth, thanks for the question. 

There is a logical sequence for many of the principles I teach and when I saw your question I thought this would be a great way to explain how they all fit together. 

So. Let’s begin with COD, that's Collect, Organise and Do. This is the foundation of all great productivity systems. If you are not collecting stuff—things like your tasks, your events and ideas, you are going to keep them in your head and that is when you will find yourself swamped and stressed out by the number of things you are trying to remember. Our brains are not very good at remembering things like that. 

You will then need some time, preferably each day, to organise what you collected. Asking some straightforward questions such as what is it? What do I need to do about it? And when will I do it? Are all parts of this process.

When I describe organising in this way it seems like it will take a long time, but you soon become very quick at processing tasks using these questions. Just to give you a benchmark, I will collect around ten to fifteen things each day, and to process those at the end of the day takes me about five minutes. If a task, for example, doesn’t need doing this week, all I need do is drag it to my Next Week or Next Month folder. 

My focus each day is then on doing the work I have assigned myself for that day. 

So where does the 2+8 Prioritisation fit? This is the daily planning process. The average person will have around twenty to twenty-five tasks per day including routines and regular work. If all of those had the same level of importance you would freeze. There’s no way you can do that many tasks each day unless they take less than fifteen to twenty minutes to do. 

So, we need to get smart and choose the ten most important tasks for the day. Now the 2 parts of this refer to your two “MUST DO” tasks for the day. These are the two tasks you will do everything you can to complete. Now What these depend on the day and what you are currently working on. For instance, when I prepared this podcast, preparing the podcast script and doing my exercise were my two must-do tasks for the day. Yesterday, I had upload the videos for my Create Your Own Apple productivity course update and clean out my office (it really needed it). 

What you’ll notice is that my objective tasks are not exclusively work-related. Sometimes they are, but I try to balance things. Now you might argue that cleaning out an office is not a priority, but we have a 12-week old puppy running around the house and I wanted to make sure there were no bits of paper or other such things hiding away on the floor. Puppies have a bad habit of chewing everything. 

The eight other tasks are the tasks I should do that day. These tasks come from my core work and my recurring areas of focus. For instance, posting my social media posts and responding to student questions are a part of my core work. Every day these tasks will come up here. There can be other areas where tasks drop into here. The most likely place would be project work. 

Again, to give you a benchmark figure, I will complete these ten tasks 90% of the time. It’s usually weekends where I occasionally don’t manage to complete them all. But, the two objective tasks have been completed every day. That is just what I do. It is who I am. I do my objectives every day. 

And that is the way you need to look at your two objectives. They are non-negotiable. You just do them. 

So when do you do your 2+8 Prioritisation planning? This is done before you end the day. Now, again when you first start this it will take longer than normal. For me, it takes around five or ten minutes. But that is likely because I never miss doing a weekly planning session. It is during the weekly planning session I set out what needs to be done that week and when I will do it. More often than not I will just be confirming that things are still relevant when I do the daily planning. 

Why the evening and not the morning? That’s because what you want to be doing when you start the day is the most important work for the day. You do not want to be trying to plan in the morning—this is when you are at your freshest so knowing what you are going to start the day with is going to set you up for a great day. It starts the momentum. 

Now for me, I’ve been doing many of these actions for over ten years and on those days when I have not been able to do them, I feel very uncomfortable. For instance, I cannot go to bed without knowing what I need to do tomorrow. I just wouldn’t sleep well. 

I know when I fly to Europe—a ten-hour flight—but with travel to the airport, and then catching my connecting flight I am travelling for around 18 hours, it throws me out. However, my flight from Korea to Amsterdam is at 1 am, so once we have taken off it’s sleep time and when I arrive in Amsterdam I have a three-hour wait for my connecting flight, so I find myself a quiet corner, get a cup of coffee and do my planning and processing. Of course, when I am travelling it’s rare I would have anything important to do. Often it’s just to process my email’s Action This Day folder and answer student questions. But, I still do it. It brings a sense of control to my day. 

I see it as who I am. It is just what I do. 

So when you look at it, a well organised day doesn’t really involve a lot of additional work. The problem for most people is getting things organised in the first place. Often when someone embarks on building a productivity and time management system they have a lot of things all over the place and the hard part is getting that organised. 

Then there is developing the habits of collecting everything and giving yourself a few minutes each day to organise that stuff. That can take a few weeks. 

But, if you want to feel in control of what you are doing each day and would like to live a more intentional life, you will have to change some things. Living an intentional life where you have time to do all the things you want to do, will not happen by accident. You have to change, your habits have to change and change is difficult. 

I remember learning to drive a car, when I first started I had to think about every step to get the car moving forward. Now, when I jump in the car, there’s no conscious thought at all. I just open the door, sit in the driver's seat and before I know it we are moving. How did that happen? It was all habit. 

And that’s where you want to be focusing your attention. Building the habits. Set a time for doing your daily planning, make sure you automatically collect everything that comes your way into your inbox and make sure at some point over the weekend you do your weekly planning session. Once you have these habits embedded, it’s easy. You just do it. 

I can promise you, Beth, that once these habits are embedded, you’ll feel so much more in control and when you begin each day you know exactly what you will be doing. 

Thank you, Beth, for the question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Podcast 206 

This week’s question is about managing overwhelm and stress.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Download the Annual Planning Template

Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template

More about the Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 206 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 206 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I’ve received quite a lot of questions over the last few weeks about feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. Not just the occasional feeling, but a general, constant feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. 

If this state lasts too long it can turn into something very bad, so it is important to recognise it and take action. Nobody wants to be depressed or experience a breakdown. Fortunately, if you do recognise the signs, you can do something about it. 

Now, before we get into this week’s question, I’d like to remind you that we are now almost at the halfway point of November. We have around three weeks left to brainstorm ideas about what you would like to do next year. 

If you haven’t already downloaded my FREE annual Planning Template, you can do so from my downloads page on my website. carlpullein.com/downloads. This is a wonderful time of year to evaluate what you did, and didn’t do and what you would like to change and do next year. 

Okay. Time to welcome back the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks: hi Carl, every day I feel stressed out and feel helpless when I look at my to-do list. There is so much on there and I know I cannot get it all done. It feels like every day the list gets longer, not shorter and I am at my wits end about what to do. Can you help? 

Hi Tom, thank you for your question and I am sorry you feel the way you do. 

The first thing I am going to do is tell you to step back. You are going to fight me and tell me you don’t have time to step back, but I can promise you this is the only way you will regain some control and get on top of that to-do list. 

You cannot go on doing what you are doing right now. If you do not step back, take a breath and spend some time going through that list, you are going to find your feelings of stress will continue to climb and that is not going to lead anywhere nice. 

So, stop for a morning at the very least. Or if you can, take the next weekend, gather up everything in your to-do list and hide yourself away for two days while you get on top of what you need to do. 

What this is going to do is to put a stop to new things coming in. You need this to breathe and to take stock of where you are with everything.

Next up, do a run through your task manager and delete any task you do not need to do. You will find there will be a lot of these. We have a habit of throwing stuff in there that we would “like” to do but don’t need to do. We need to clear these out. 

In the past, I’ve suggested people move these tasks to their notes app as a single note, but I realised this does not fix the problem. It only moves things from one place to another. Instead, I find if we delete these tasks, if they are important at some future date they will come back up on your radar and you can re-add them to your list. 

Doing this pass through on our task manager will clear around 25% of what’s in there. You’ll also find a lot of tasks that are well past their due date and completed tasks. We need to eliminate these.

Watch out for those emails you have been meaning to respond to for over a month. Sorry, but it’s too late. Delete these. Seriously, if you haven’t responded for over a month, it’s going to look very unprofessional to reply now. What does that say about your priorities? 

I should tell you I’ve had people do this and they’ve removed well over 50% of their tasks. That brings a huge sense of relief. 

Next up we are going to have to do some thinking. What are you actually employed to do? This relates to your core work. The work you are evaluated on and are paid for. 

This needs to take priority in the short term. We must reengage with what we are paid to do, and that means we need to remove the work that we have volunteered for. I know this can be difficult because we will feel we are letting others down. But you have to remember, you don’t have time to do all this stuff. Something’s got to go and unless you want to lose your job, the first place to look is at is the stuff you have volunteered for. 

Any committees you’ve allowed yourself to be on, any outside work commitments such as parent/teacher associations or community projects. If you want to get your life back, start to feel more in control of what you are doing each day, then these have to go. 

Now for the next six months, you only allow yourself to focus on your core work. Do not allow yourself to be pulled into anything else. 

This, by the way, also applied to those of you who are self-employed. You have core work too. What is that work? Make sure you strip away anything additional to that core work. You don’t have to do this forever, but we do need to do a reset to get things back on track. 

If you are self-employed, one of the things you can do is look into employing a virtual assistant to deal with the admin. Admin can very quickly build up and take a disproportionate amount of time to deal with. Your talents and time need to be spent elsewhere. 

Now, once you have taken these first two steps you will start to see some light at the end of your task manager. You will have not only slimmed down your task manager, you will also have freed up some time. 

The next step is to re-establish what is important to you. Often when we get bogged down with tasks, we lose sight of what is important to us. We often think family and friends will always be there when we need them, and while that may be true, to some extent, the last thing you need right now is problems in your relationships. 

Likewise, your health and fitness need to be taken care of. Neglect that and you’ll no longer have the energy required to do a great job, be there for your family and if your health fails, your task manager and everything else no longer matters. 

With health and fitness, you don’t have to be going out for a run or join a gym. All you need do is move. Humans are designed for movement and when we move we improve our overall mood. We feel less stressed and a lot happier. So make sure you are moving. Take walks at lunchtime and after dinner. Get up and walk around for ten minutes or so between periods of focused work. And the best thing… Always take the stairs. Never take escalators or lifts (elevators for my American friends) Escalators and lifts are the enemies of your health and fitness. 

Okay now you have taken these steps, it’s time to turn to your calendar. With all the remaining work you have to do, the question is: when are you going to do it?

Now, this is likely to be dictated to us by time sensitivity. What’s due next? Do that. 

Time blocking is a great way to make sure you have sufficient time to get your work done. However, all too often people misunderstand what time blocking is. It is not micromanaging your time each day. Elon Musk might do that, but most people do not need to do it. 

What time-blocking means is you look for gaps in your calendar you can block off to do focused work. That means working on the projects or tasks that MUST be done. For me, that usually means two to four hours per day for focused work. And, while I have meetings and calls each day, I can usually find those two to four hours no problem. 

One way to do this is to block out 9 to 11 am for your focused work. I’ve found that to be the best time. You are still mentally fresh and it’s a lot easier to focus when you are mentally fresh. This means, where possible, you avoid meetings and other commitments at that time. Turn off email and notifications on your phone and computer and focus. Don’t worry, nobody will be upset with you if you do not reply for an hour or two. If you think they will try it out. If they get upset explain what you were doing and why it is important you do it. 

Now, the only thing you need to think about is what you will get done this week. Next week does not matter today. You might need to prepare for a meeting or a presentation next week, but this week that’s all you need to find time for; preparation. 

The final piece of this fix is to commit right here and now to do a weekly planning session at the end of the week. You need time each week to stop, look at what needs doing and plan when you will do it. As long as you are doing these weekly planning sessions, the only things you need to concern yourself with are the things that need doing this week. Next week can be taken care of when you do the planning session. 

Taking these steps, Tom will go a long way to putting you back in charge of your tasks and commitments. Once you know what you need to do this week, just do one thing at a time, take a break then start the next thing. With that focus, you will soon find yourself feeling a lot less stressed. 

Now, of course, if your work is causing you stress not because of the volume but because you are unhappy at work or you have a bad boss, that’s a different thing altogether. I would still recommend stepping back and looking at that and then thinking about what you could do to change things. Perhaps you could get a transfer to another department with another boss, or maybe you need to search for another job. Only you can decide that though. 

I hope that helps, Tom and thank you for your question. 

And thank you for listening too. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Podcast 205 / Interview with Damon Cart

This week is the second part of my chat with NLP Expert Damon Cart and in this part, we dive a little deeper into setting goals and making sure that whatever goal you are achieving is growing you as a person and leading you towards a greater sense of long-term fulfilment.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin

Damon’s Website

Damon’s YouTube Channel

Download the Annual Planning Template

Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template

More about the Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Carl Pullein Learning Centre

Carl’s YouTube Channel

Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes

The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Episode 205 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 205 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This episode is part two of my chat with Damon Cart.

Damon Cart is an NLP specialist who has studied NLP or Neuro-Lingustic Programming for over ten years. Damon has a very successful YouTube channel, which I have linked to in the show notes, as well as a thriving coaching business where he helps senior executives and high achievers build fulfilling lives. 

There’s a lot of valuable information in this episode, so get your notebooks ready and let’s go.

Well, there you go. I hope you got a lot of valuable information from this episode. Thank you so much to Damon for doing this with me and …

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.