Your Time, Your Way

Have you ever wondered how those in highly demanding jobs that require almost 24/7 attention to the job manage to do it? Well, I’ve been researching and found a few common habits that may help you get more out of your day. Let’s begin… Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 2026 Spring 50 Sale Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 410 Hello, and welcome to episode 410 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It seems everyone feels under pressure with increasing workloads and demands on their time. And research is backing this up. Instead of reducing the workloads of the typical knowledge worker, AI is increasing it. In one study published last month in the Harvard Business Review, 83% of knowledge workers reported an increase in their workloads after adopting AI tools. Yet even in the age before AI, smartphones, and desktop computers, there were jobs that required an intensity few people could or would endure for very long. For example, if you were to look at the daily schedules of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, you would see an official workday beginning around 6:30 am and ending well after 7:00 pm, 7 days a week. Just look at pictures of President Carter on his inauguration day and compare them to pictures of him on President Reagan’s inauguration day; you can see the toll the presidency had on Carter. It seemed to have aged him 20 years, and yet it was only four. If we were to look at President Obama’s schedule. While he did not typically start work until around 9:00 am, he would work well into the night, catching up on briefing documents and other background reading. In total, he was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Yet each of these leaders used techniques that helped maintain some calm amid otherwise chaotic days. They were well-tested, proven techniques that so many people seem afraid to use today. This week’s question is about these techniques and how you might adopt some of them to manage your workload while still having time for rest and family. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Aaron. Aaron asks. Hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who cannot get on top of their work, no matter how many “time blocks” they put on their calendar? Hi Aaron, thank you for your question. Now, you didn’t specify what kind of work you do, but I can answer based on what I’ve learned from former world leaders and CEOs and how they managed their days when facing global challenges. I know not all of us are running a major country, but lessons from people like Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Ford may help you see that there are ways to take control of your time, do the things you want to do, and get a lot done. The first approach almost all highly effective people do is to protect time for quiet work. This might not necessarily be deep focused work; it could be reading reports or, in the case of presidents and prime ministers, briefing documents prepared for them by their staff. Of the people I have read about and studied, all of them protected some time during the day. Mostly, this was early in the morning or late at night. John F Kennedy, for instance, would read the newspapers at 6:30 am, before he met anyone in his office. This gave him a heads-up on emerging world events and often meant he knew more about a subject than any of his aides did. One interesting note about Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, was that they both took a speed-reading course when they were younger, and it is reported that John Kennedy could read 1,200 words in one minute. Imagine that. That’s going to save you a lot of time. That’s being able to read one of my longer blog posts in a single minute! As a side note, it is reported that Theodore Roosevelt would read a book a day, sometimes two, as well as all his briefing documents. Now, I suspect that in the early to mid 20th century, with no computers, people read far more than we do today. If you are reading thousands of words a day, you’re naturally going to become a faster reader. Presidents Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson would read briefing documents late into the night. In the case of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, this was often until 2:00 am in the morning. President Obama also read late into the evening, from around 8:30 pm, after spending some time with his family, he would go to a quiet room and read until midnight or 1 am. The advantage of doing their reading late at night was that they were unlikely to be disturbed, and it was quiet. One t

Email, Teams, Slack and other instant messaging systems are great, until they clog up our day and we find we spend more time responding to messages than we do doing any meaningful work. What can we do? Well, that’s what I’m answering in this week’s episode. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the Email Mastery Course Here The Hybrid Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 409 Hello, and welcome to episode 409 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. Last week was a workshop week for me. I finished off the Ultimate Productivity Workshop and held an in-company session. During both sessions, a similar question was raised. How to manage your time when you are compelled to respond to your messages instantly or at the very least within a few minutes. The problem with this situation is that it’s an uncontrollable one. You have no idea when or how many messages will come in on any given day. This makes it practically impossible to do any work. You will not be able to focus on anything if you have to be checking your messages inbox all the time. Now, I should caveat this: if you are employed to respond to client messages, then being responsive is part of your core work, and therefore it is something you would prioritise. However, in these situations, you’ll likely be working as part of a team, and most of your client queries will be handled in real time. Those that cannot be dealt with would be escalated to another person or department. The issue of response times arises when you are expected to do work that requires quiet, focused time to complete. In this situation, you will need to find time during the day to do that work. If not, all you will be doing is building unsustainable backlogs. To get to a place where you can complete your work and respond to messages in a timely manner, something will have to change. The first thing I would address here is response times. What is the expected response time for the work that you do? Is it realistic? Now, you have the data. You know how much time you need to do your work. Perhaps you need two hours a day to complete it. This means you have a degree of flexibility each day. In this situation, I would recommend you look at the times when most of your messages come in. For me, most of my messages come in through the night. I may go to bed around midnight with an empty inbox, but when I wake up, come through to the office and open my email, there will be between 100 and 150 emails sitting there waiting for me. The first step is to clear those emails and sort the ones I need to act on from the ones that can be deleted or archived. That gives me a heads-up for my day and calms my anxious mind, knowing there are no fires to deal with. Later in the day, I will set aside 40 to 60 minutes to clear the actionable emails. Now, I am fortunate in that when I wake up, Europe is asleep, the east coast of the US is going to bed, and the west coast is finishing the working day. In the morning, there is no rush for me to respond. If I were living in the UK, I would adjust my response time to better align with the time zones I work with. This is working with the data I have. But let me illustrate a different type of work and how to deal with it. Imagine you were responsible for writing proposals for your sales team. On a typical day, you would receive six to eight new proposals and four or five adjustments to make to proposals you have already done. If it takes you an average of twenty minutes to write a new proposal and ten minutes to make an adjustment, that will take up around four hours of your day just focused on writing proposals. That does not take into account having to request any further information you may need to complete a proposal. Now here’s where things get interesting. Not all proposals are equal. If you were asked to write proposals for a $10 million project and a $1,000 one, the $10 million project would likely take priority. I’m also pretty sure the person asking for the $10 million project proposal will be chasing you to get it done faster. If you already have a two-day turnaround on proposals, moving that project up would delay one of the other proposals. What do you do? The problem here is that while you are fielding messages from the people wanting their proposal done today, you are not writing proposals. Everything is getting delayed. Now, I’ve worked at companies with strict processes for these situations. Salespeople had to follow the process and inform their customers when to expect proposals or invoices. They were not all

"The key is not to prioritise what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities." Ah, Stephen Covey got it right. If you don’t know what your priorities are, whatever’s on your calendar will be prioritised, which often means low-value meetings and other people’s urgencies. Not a great way to work if you want to be more productive and better at managing your time. This week, we’re looking at identifying your core work and eliminating the non-essential. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 408 Hello, and welcome to episode 408 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. Something that came up in last weekend’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop was around identifying your core work. The work you are employed to do or what you do to put food on your table. In the past, this was easy to do. Job descriptions were simple, and job titles included things like salesperson, accountant, lawyer, administrator, receptionist, lifeguard, and office manager. It was very clear what your responsibilities were, and defining your core work was simple. Today, hmmm, something’s gone disastrously wrong. Now we have job titles such as Empathy Engineer (a software designer), Scrum Master (a project manager of sorts from the twenty-teens Agile trend) or Digital Overlord (a website or systems manager). These are unclear and ill-defined, and figuring out what these jobs entail is challenging, to say the least, but not impossible with some thought. Then there are jobs such as the “C” roles: CEO, CFO, COO, etc. These are notoriously difficult to define because they are intentionally vague and depend on the company’s size, its goals and often the state of the company when a person starts the role. When Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, he took over a company on the up. When Satya Nadalla took over Microsoft, Microsoft was struggling in the rapidly growing mobile market. Same job titles, but entirely different roles given the state each company was in when they took over. In today’s episode, we’re looking at core work and, more importantly, how to define your role so you can pull out the tasks you need to do consistently to perform well and make it easier to prioritise the things important to you. 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 Chris. Chris asks, hi Carl, I am really struggling to define my core work. I am a sales manager in a medium-sized car dealership. I manage a team of 12 salespeople, and I report directly to the General Manager. The part I am struggling with is what my tasks should be each week. Could you help? Hi Chris, thank you for your question. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of core work, your core work is the work you are employed to do. It’s how you are evaluated and the reason you were employed. The issue with core work is that over time, the scope of your work can expand to a point where you have so many competing priorities that it becomes practically impossible to decide what needs your attention. And that’s when backlogs of important work start to grow uncontrollably. This can be caused by our innate human need to please people, so we say “yes” to too many things without considering whether we have the time to do the work we ‘volunteered’ to do. The problem here is that once you have said yes to the work outside your core work, you own it. It is now your responsibility to get the job done. Do this too often, and the line between what you are responsible for and what you volunteered to do becomes blurred. A few years ago, I worked with a client who was a product manager in a pharmaceutical company. Her core work was to ensure that her product’s labelling, literature, and local branding were accurate and up to date. She was also responsible for three sales campaigns each year. Unfortunately, Sam was a people pleaser. She couldn’t say no to anyone. She volunteered to be on the Annual kick-off event committee (each year the company had an off-site retreat to motivate the team for the new year), she volunteered to be the lead of a breast cancer awareness campaign her company wanted to run, and if a sales manager asked her to do a presentation to their sales people, she’d always say yes. But her people pleasing was not confined to her professional life. She volunteered to help organise events at her church, committed to watching her husband play football every weekend and would help her friends out at the drop of a ha

“By far, the greatest danger of AI is that people conclude too early that they understand it” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI researcher AI is everywhere today, and there are many exciting claims about what it can do to help us be more productive. But, is this just hype, or are there aspects of AI that can improve our productivity? That’s the question I am answering today. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 407 Hello, and welcome to episode 407 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. You may have noticed AI is everywhere. Our favourite apps seem to be adding more and more AI capability with each new update. And then there’s almost every video and article on productivity warning us that if we don’t get on board with this, we’ll be left behind on the scrap heap. It’s also an exciting time, and there’s no doubt that things are changing, and people are finding new ways to use AI to help us do our work. But beyond the hype, how are current AI models really helping with productivity, and what will this mean for us as we try to manage our time in the future? That’s what I am looking at this week, and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI in your videos or articles. How do you see AI helping us with our time management and productivity in the future? Hi Chris, thank you for your question. The reason I have not written or spoken much about AI is that I am waiting to see where it settles down. Currently, it’s hard to work out what is true and what is pure hype. I saw a lot of noise about OpenClaw—an AI-type personal assistant that, if you give it access to your computer, can do a lot of things, such as make appointments for you, book flights, sort and reply to your emails and much more. That was certainly interesting, but once I discovered that I would need to hand over all my passwords and credit card numbers to OpenClaw, I lost interest. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not comfortable giving up my passwords, credit card and banking details to a third party. Certainly not one that could be hacked very easily. Last year, I read Dominic Sandbrook’s series of books on British history from 1956 to 1982. That period covered some very interesting developments in technology, from the dawn of the nuclear power age to the introduction of the personal computer. In the late 1950s, it was predicted that we would all be driving around in nuclear-powered cars and that our homes would have their own nuclear power generators that would only need recharging every 10 to 20 years by the end of the century. Hmm how did that work out? To better answer your question, Chris, I stepped back and looked at how I am using AI today. My main use of AI is searching for specific information. In a way, AI has replaced how I search the internet. I use Google’s Gemini, and it is fantastic at collecting the information I want. No longer do I have to open multiple websites to try to find the information. This has significantly reduced the time I spend going down rabbit holes looking for something specific and being pulled down holes I never intended to go. I also use AI to generate subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. Without AI, these jobs would take hours. AI can do it in minutes. I use Grammarly to spell-check my writing, and I believe it uses AI in the background to suggest how sentences are written. I rarely accept Grammarly’s sentence suggestions. It seems to destroy my voice and turn sentences into bland perfections that lack resonance or feeling. Beyond that, I am not knowingly using AI for anything else. I asked my wife how she is using it. My wife’s a full-time student, studying physical therapy, so she’s learning a lot about human anatomy and medical terms. She’s using AI to simplify complex concepts. She also occasionally uses Google’s Nano Banana to generate graphics for her presentations. So, if I look at how AI might help us with time management and productivity in the future, it does look like there will be some aspects of our work that AI can significantly speed up. In my case, generating subtitles and time stamps for videos is a great example. However, when it comes to managing our calendars and task lists, I’m not sure you would want AI getting involved. One thing I’ve always been acutely aware of is that much of what makes us feel overwhelmed is the sense that we have no control over how w

Steve Jobs once said, “Deciding what NOT to do is as important as deciding what TO do”, and that quote has been, and still is, a cornerstone of my whole time management and productivity philosophy. Today, I answer a question about dealing with all the little things that pop up each day while staying focused on what is important. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop The Hybrid Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 406 Hello, and welcome to the real episode 406 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. What happens when your productivity system collapses? Do you go looking for new apps, or do you give up and just think you’re not the organised type or lack self-discipline? People react in many different ways when their systems become backlogged and overwhelmed, yet this is a state that will happen to all of us from time to time. Life has a bad habit of getting in the way. It throws up all sorts of problems to test us. No one week or even a day will ever be the same. Only five minutes ago, my plan to take Louis out for our walk at 2:00 pm was changed by my wife asking if we could go at 12:30. That way, I could pick her up from her dance class and then go to the reservoir for his walk. And that was a small change. These little things are hitting us every day and disrupting our systems, yet that doesn’t mean our systems are broken. It just means we need to ensure that we have sufficient buffer and flexibility built in. This week’s question is all about what to do when, for whatever reason, your system begins to collapse, and you have backlogs of work, emails, messages and commitments, and you have no idea how to regain control. Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, just a heads up to say if you are considering joining next week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop, there are only seven days left before the first session. The workbook will be going out next week, and I would love for you to join me. This is your opportunity to get to grips with the COD and Time Sector Systems, where you can ask questions and come away with not only the knowledge, but with a rock solid system that is flexible, automatic and leaves you with enough time for the things you want to do. PLUS, you also get, for free, four of my courses to help you go deeper in your own time. I will put the details in the show notes, and I hope to see you next Sunday. Now, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Nick. Nick asks, “ Hi Carl, all my professional life I have tried to be organised and focused, but every time I feel I have found the solution, something happens either at work or at home that destroys my plans. How do you suggest someone go about dealing with disruptions all the time? Great question, Nick, and thank you for sending it in. Much of what causes us these issues has little to do with our systems. It’s just life getting in the way. Yet, what we are aiming to do is turn managing our time into a routine. Something we just do. For instance, I would feel uncomfortable going to bed not knowing what my appointments and important tasks are for the next day. It doesn’t take long—five minutes tops —but most days it’s likely less than two minutes. This is why I cannot get my head around it when people tell me they are too exhausted to plan the next day. It’s no more than five minutes! You only need to know when and where your appointments are and what your one or two most important tasks are. It takes a minuscule amount of energy to do it. Those two minutes have a profound effect on my day. Last night, I went to bed knowing that I had six hours of meetings today and one critical task to do. I knew if I was diligent, I would be able to complete my meetings and that one task. The fact that my wife has already changed my plan has not caused me to drop the task. My original plan to do it after my morning calls finished has changed. I will now do it when I get back from taking Louis for his walk. What matters is that when I finish today, I can look back knowing I have what matters done. This all begins with respecting the basics. Those basics are contained in COD. Collect, Organise and Do. You need a way to collect everything that comes your way throughout the day. This needs to be something you trust. That could be a task manager or a daybook (a notebook you use to manage your day). Then, at some point in the day, you process and organise what yo

“If everything’s important, then nothing is important”. You’ve probably heard that many times. Yet, are you guilty of ignoring it? In today’s episode, I share with you a few ideas on how to best prioritise your days. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop The Hybrid Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 405 Hello, and welcome to the real episode 405 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. How many overdue flagged tasks do you have in your task manager? If you’re like most people, you will have quite a few. The question is: why are they overdue? You made a conscious decision that these tasks were important, but then did not do them when you wanted to do them. This is something I struggled with for years. I would add flags to anything I felt was important, then completely ignore them throughout my day. It wasn’t until I realised I was making a mistake and diminishing the power that flags give me, that I changed my approach. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen this coming up in a lot of my coaching sessions, where I notice overdue flagged tasks cluttering things up and becoming a distraction to the user. The other issue here is that overdue flagged tasks cause an increase in anxiety. You flagged them because they were important or urgent, and now you have a long list of such tasks. Where do you start to get them under control? Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, if you’ve been waiting for the 2026 Ultimate Productivity Workshop, then the wait’s over. Coming on the 8th and 15th of March, join me live for a festival of productivity. Featuring the COD foundation, the Time Sector System, and how to get on top of your backlogs and so much more, including the DPS (daily Planning Sequence and the WPM (weekly Planning Matrix). Places are limited, so get yourself registered today. Full details are in the show notes. And now it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve recently cleaned up my Todoist, and as I was doing so, I found a lot of flagged tasks that I had ignored. These are important tasks, and I don’t want to remove the flag. But it’s become so overwhelming. What’s the best way to use flags, in your opinion? Hi Caroline, thank you for your question. As a Todoist user, you have many options for your flags. There are technically four flags. P1 (red), P2 (orange), P3 (blue) and P4 (white). The P4 flag isn’t really a flag, since all tasks default to it. With these flags, there are many ways you can organise them. However, you do need one of them to be your priority flag. When I say “priority flag,” this is the one you use when a task absolutely must be done on the day it was assigned. Logically, you would use the P1 red flag for that. Now, this is where many people go wrong. It’s very tempting to add a flag to a task long before it is due. The feeling is that if the task is important, it will still be important on the day you plan to do it. Not true. Priorities change. You plan to finish a proposal for your most important client on Thursday, but that morning, your daughter has a serious asthma attack, and you are now in the emergency room of your local hospital. Where’s your priority now? Okay, I know that example is a little extreme, but those things happen. Priorities also change throughout the week. That important client may tell you the proposal is on hold for a few months, so there is no urgency. But new priorities will come along, don’t you worry. This is why adding your flags should be done at a daily planning level. Now I will caveat that. There are times when I know something will be the priority for the day. The script for this podcast, for instance, is today’s priority. I knew that when I planned the week, and I flagged it. It doesn’t matter what other things pop up through the week; when it comes to writing this script, it’s the priority for the day. Your core work will always be a priority. This is why I have people spend time working out what their core work is. After all, your core work is the reason you are employed. If you didn’t do your core work consistently, you would not have a job for very long. Even retired people need to consider what their core activities will be each day. I’m reminded of this following a conversation I had with my father-in-law over the weekend. We’ve just had the lunar New Year here in Korea, and my parents-in-law stayed

Podcast 405 "Pen and paper will solve almost anything. Or at least start the process." - Nicholas Bate This week, I have a special episode for you about what I have discovered over the last two years from bringing pens and paper back into my productivity system. It’s certainly been an eye-opener for me. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 405 Hello, and welcome to episode 405 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. A week ago, I launched a brand new course called the Hybrid Productivity Course. The purpose of this course was to help those who have found that a digital-only approach has led to a loss of focus on what’s important and a sense of extreme overwhelm and distraction. As in most areas of life, a one-size-fits-all methodology rarely works. All humans are unique. We think differently, have different life experiences, grow up differently and experience life through many different cultures. It stands to reason that none of us will have exactly the same needs as everyone else. We saw this during the pandemic. Around 50% of people loved working from home. They thrived and became much more productive. The other 50% struggled, found it hard to do their work, and lost their enthusiasm and energy for it. This highlighted the difference between extroverts and introverts. Extroverts bounce off the energy of other people. They need the bustling office environment to operate. Take that away, and they slump. Introverts, on the other hand, thrive in the opposite conditions. Quiet spaces and solo environments are where they thrive. I always struggled in an office environment. I found it difficult to concentrate and focus. When I began working from home in 2015, my productivity went through the roof. I suddenly had the freedom to work when I liked, where I liked and in the quiet solitude of my front living room. One advantage of an all-digital system is that you can easily add many features to your digital tools without much thought. I noticed this while testing Todoist’s new feature, Ramble. Ramble lets you have a conversation with Todoist, and it pulls out all the things you indicate need to be done. Sounds great in theory, until you test it out. Just a two-minute “conversation” with Ramble led to 15 tasks! When I went back into my inbox to sort them out, I realised that the majority of those tasks were low-value, would-be-nice-to-do tasks, but realistically, there was no way I would have the time to do them. I edited down that list of 15 to 6 tasks. The problem is that most people will not edit these lists. It’s time-consuming, and you have to think it through. Two things that are out of fashion these days, it seems. This is where I found bringing a pen and notebook back into my system really helped. It forced me to edit down my list of tasks for the day. It also made me smarter when writing my lists. If I had five people to call today, in the digital system, I would write out all five calls independently. It didn’t take long, and most of those would already be in the digital system. All I had to do was add a date. In a paper system, it would mean writing out all those calls individually. You soon find that rather than doing that, you would write “do my calls”. Writing those three words strangely reinforced the action. All you then needed to do was to ensure that any communication tasks were correctly labelled in your digital system. This is where the seeds of a hybrid system began to take shape. If it were easier to collect using digital tools, then why stop doing it that way? If you were more focused when writing out a daily to-do list than using a digital to-do list, why stop doing that? My idea was to marry the two. This led to the development of what I call my Day Book. However, before I got there, I went back to my roots and used the Franklin Planner for eighteen months. The strength of the Franklin Planner is in the way the daily pages are laid out. You have your daily prioritised task list on the left, your calendar for the day next to it, and, on the right page, a place to keep notes and ideas. This means that once you have written your appointments, you can see how much time you have available to do tasks. It forces you to be realistic. If you had seven hours of meetings and began writing out a long list of tasks, you would instantly see that you were creating an impossible day. If you were to consider meeting overruns, the “urgent” messages and “quick questions” that will inevitably come your way that day, it’s li

Peter Drucker once said “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else” How is your management of time? Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 403 Hello, and welcome to episode 403 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. Are you in danger of boxing yourself in with too many processes and too much structure? Now, it’s important to stress that having some structure to your day is important. But too much can lead to boxing yourself in and losing flexibility. Let me give you an example I often come across. Protecting time for doing your focused work. Having this protected on your calendar so the time cannot be stolen by others is important. If you protected 2 hours and finished in 90 minutes, that doesn’t mean you have to continue for another 30 minutes. Take a break. You’re done. But this works the other way, too. If you have two hours protected for a project task but cannot finish it in that time. It’s okay. You turned up. You did the work, but you miscalculated how long it would take. This happens to all of us. Some days we’re on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, a lot less so. The problem is that when you begin your day, you really don’t know what kind of day you’re going to have. There are too many variables. How you slept, whether you’re catching a cold or simply something else is on your mind. Your life is not measured by what you do in one day; everyone has bad days. 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 Alex. Alex asks, hi Carl, this year I’m trying to be better at time blocking, but I am really struggling to stay consistent with my blocks. What advice do you have to help stay true to your calendar? Hi Alex, thank you for your question. Something I have always taught is that of all your productivity tools, one of them needs to be sacred. One of your tools must be the “truth” about what you are going to do that day. Task managers are generally not good at this because we throw a lot of things into them. That’s a good thing. Yet, the issue is that most people never curate what they throw in. This creates overwhelming lists of low-value, ill-thought-out items that will never get done. They just cripple your task manager’s effectiveness. The best tool for acting as your sacred base is your calendar. It’s never going to lie to you. It shows you the 24 hours you have each day and where you need to be, with whom, and when. You cannot overload yourself without it being plainly obvious that you are trying to do too much. And let’s be perfectly clear, an agreed appointment with someone will always take priority over an email or proposal you need to write. If not, you cancel the appointment. I hope, at a basic, civilised human being level, you get that. I’ve called off face-to-face meetings in the past if the person I am meeting cannot put their phones down and actually talk to me. It is rude, disrespectful, and no person with an ounce of integrity would ever do that. One of the striking things I’ve noticed about the highly successful people I work with is that they never have a phone. Tablet or laptop near them when they are in meetings. A notebook and a pen are all they have. That’s focus, professionalism, and demonstrates to the person you are meeting that you are focused on them in that moment. When you make your calendar your primary productivity tool, you gain clarity about how much time you have available for the things you want to do. It’s visual, it’s staring at you, and there’s no escape from reality. If you work 9 hours a day and today you have 7 hours of meetings, you only have 2 hours to do solo work. That’s it. If you need three hours to get your critical, must-do work done, then you have two choices. You either cancel a meeting or you accept that you will need to work an extra hour. It’s strange how so many people waste so much time trying find other solutions. That’s time they could have spent on getting started on the work. The solution is to time-block slots for doing the work that matters. The best salespeople block time every day to prospect and follow up with their customers. That’s why they are the top salespeople. The best CEOs block time every day for working on their top priority task. That’s why they are the best at what they do. Best-selling authors block time for writing every day. That’s why they sell a lot of books. Now, as I eluded to at the beginning, there will be some days w

You’ve probably heard of something called AI. It seems everyone is talking about it. The question is: how will this affect our productivity, and what can we do to ensure we are ready for the likely changes this year? That’s what I’m answering this week. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Take the Time Sector System Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 402 Hello, and welcome to episode 402 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. Unless you’ve had the fortune to avoid seeing the news over the last few years, you may have come across something called AI. It seems to be everywhere today. Just yesterday, I got a big update to Evernote, and it was all about AI. Todoist, my task manager of choice, is also on board with AI with their dictation tool called “Ramble”. All great tools, all giving us the potential to collect and organise more. I use AI a lot myself. It helps me brainstorm ideas, create subtitles for my YouTube videos, and write the video descriptions, which I hated doing myself. And it is a phenomenal research tool. I can import my analytics from my blog, this podcast or my YouTube videos and ask it to tell me what is resonating with my community. Then that helps me to decide what the next best content will be. Yet, with all this, there are some downsides. One of which is that I noticed last year that many of my coaching clients were seeing an increase in the number of tasks they had in their task managers. It wasn’t until recently that I realised where many of these tasks were coming from. Many companies are rolling out AI-supported meeting summaries. AI is particularly good at this. It listens in to the meeting and, at the end, produces a summary of what was discussed and a list of action steps to be taken following the meeting. Some of the more sophisticated versions of this will break down by who is responsible for which task. Superb! Or is it? What I’ve discovered is that AI is like that annoying new recruit who wants to impress by doing far more work than is necessary. It will turn a 10-bullet-pointed summary into a 20-page report, only for the recipient to return it to a bullet-pointed summary. It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Winston Churchill: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.” Yet, from a productivity perspective, what AI is doing is creating a lot of tasks. So much so that it has now been given its own term: “AI-generated work bloat”, or a less friendly version: “AI-generated Work slop”. So, what can we do to “defend” ourselves from this AI-generated work bloat? Well, there are a few things we can do that will allow us to take advantage of AI’s incredible abilities, yet still keep our workloads within limits without it slowly becoming overwhelmed with a lot of “work slop”. That nicely brings me on to this week’s question, 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 Robert. Robert asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the most out of the new AI tools without them becoming overwhelming? Hi Robert, thank you for your question. AI is certainly causing some issues in the time management and productivity space. Yet, it is also helping many people to get better organised. It is like all new technology. There is an initial period in which we try everything to determine where the new technology can help us most. I remember when email became a thing. There was a lot of nervousness about it initially. I was working in a law firm at the time, and the legal profession in the UK was reluctant to adopt email, even though its benefits over snail mail were obvious. There were fears over privacy and client confidentiality. Eventually, we adopted it, and when we did, it rapidly became an instant messaging portal. Clients who sent an email began expecting an instant reply and quickly called us if they did not receive one within a few minutes. Fortunately, we had not at that stage entered the smartphone era and were able to explain to clients that when we were out of the office, we were unable to check our emails. However, email became the new way of communicating, and it soon created a cascade of stuff for us to process and organise, eating up more valuable time—time we didn’t have then, let alone today. I see the same thing happening with AI today. We are trying to adopt AI in so many ways. Some will stick, others will fall by the wayside in time. It doesn’t mean we should reject these n

Albert Einstein once said, “Organised people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” And I think he makes a very good point. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Digital Notes Organisation Course The File Management Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 401 Hello, and welcome to episode 401 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. Last week’s episode on what to keep in your notes sparked a lot of follow-up questions around the concept of how to organise notes and digital files. In many ways, this has been one of the disadvantages of the digital explosion. Back in the day, important documents were kept inside filing cabinets and were organised alphabetically. Photos were mostly kept in photo books, which were then thrown into boxes and hidden under beds or in the attic. The best ones were put in frames and displayed on tables and mantelpieces—something we rarely do today. And notebooks, if kept, were put at the bottom of bookshelves or in boxes. The limiting factor was physical space. This meant we regularly curated our files and threw out expired documents. The trouble today is that digital documents don’t take up visible physical space, so as long as you have enough digital storage either on your computer’s hard drive or in the cloud, you can keep thousands of documents there without the need to curate and keep them updated. Eventually, it becomes practically impossible to know what we have, where it is, or even how to start finding it if we do know what we want to find. So, before I continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia asks, “ Hi Carl, I listened to your recent podcast episode on what to keep in your notes, and it got me thinking. How would someone go about organising years of digital stuff that has accumulated all over the place? Hi Julia, thank you for your question. A couple of years ago, I became fascinated with how the National Archives in Kew, London, handles archiving millions of government documents each year. Compared to us individuals, this would be extreme, but they have hundreds of years of experience in this matter, and my thinking was that if anyone knew how to manage documents, they would know. What surprised me was that they maintained a relatively simple system. That system was based on years and the department from which the documents originated. So, for example, anything that came from the Prime Minister’s office last year would be bundled together under 2025. It would then be given the prefix PREM. (They do use a code for the years to help with cataloguing, as the National Archives will be keeping documents from different centuries) Upon further investigation, the reason they do it this way is that older documents are most likely searched for by year. Let’s say I was writing a book on British disasters in the 20th century, and I wanted to learn more about the Aberfan Disaster, where a coal slag heap collapsed, crushing the village of Aberfan in Wales. All I would need to know would be the year, and a simple Google search would give me that. From there, I could search the National Archives for HOME 1966. That search would indicate the Home Office files for 1966. (The year the disaster happened) I would also know that the disaster happened in October, so I could refine my search to October dates. If we were to use a system similar to the one the National Archives uses to organise its documents, we would create parent folders by year. You can then go through your documents wherever they are and, using your computer’s ability to detect when a document was created, have it show your list of files by when they were created. That way, all you need to do is select all files from a given year and move them into their appropriate year folder. Now, when I do this, I notice that I have files going back to 2015. The next step would be to allocate time each week to review your year folders and organise the documents into topic folders. For example, anything related to insurance can be placed in an insurance folder. How deep you go after that will depend on you. I don’t go any further than that. I have three insurance documents. Car, health and home insurance. And given that these are now organised by year, if, in the unlikely event, I need to retrieve my 2019 health insurance documents, it would be very easy to find them. I would suggest starting at the current year and working backwards. The chances of you needing to find a document from ten years ago are sl

WOW! We’ve reached the 400th episode of this podcast. I’d like to thank all of you for being here with me on this incredible journey. And now, let us begin. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Download the Areas of Focus Workbook for free here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 399 Hello, and welcome to episode 400 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. 15 years ago, I remember being excited to find Ian Fleming's explanation of how to write a thriller. I saved the text of that article from the Internet directly into Evernote. As I look back, I think that is probably my favourite piece of text that I've saved in my notes over the years. This morning I did a little experiment. I asked Gemini what Ian Fleming‘s advice is for writing a thriller. Within seconds, Gemini gave me not only the original text but also a summary and bullet points of the main points. Does this mean that many of the things we have traditionally saved in our digital notes today are no longer needed? I’m not so sure. It’s this and many similar uses of our digital note-taking applications that may no longer be necessary And that nicely brings me on to this week’s topic, 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 Ricardo. Ricardo asks, Could you discuss more about note-taking in your podcast, as I have difficulties regarding how to collect and store what’s important? Hi Ricardo. Thank you for your question. When digital note-taking apps began appearing on our mobile phones around 2009, they were a revelation. Prior to this innovation, we carried around notebooks and collected our thoughts, meeting notes and plans in them. Yet, given our human frailties, most of these notebooks were lost, and even if they were not, it was difficult to find the right notebook with the right notes. Some people were good at storing these. Many journalists and scientists were excellent at keeping these records organised. As were many artists. And we are very lucky that they did because many years later, those notebooks are still available to us. You can see Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s notebooks today. Many of which are kept at the Athenaeum Club in London, and others are in museums around the world. It was important in the days before the Internet to keep these notebooks safe. They contained original thoughts, scientific processes and information that, as in Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s case, would later form part of a massive scientific breakthrough. Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle was a defining moment in scientific history. It provided the raw data and observations that would eventually lead to his theory of evolution by natural selection. That was published some twenty years after his journey in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. During Darwin’s five-year journey around the world, he filled 15 field notebooks with observations and sketches—these were roughly the same size as the iconic Field Notes pocket notebooks you can buy today. Additionally, he kept several Geological Specimen Notebooks. These were slightly larger than his field notes notebooks. He used these primarily to catalogue the fossils and rocks he collected Darwin also kept a large journal during his travels, which he used to record data and incidents. These were all original thoughts and observations. Today, all that information is freely available on the internet and, of course, in books. What’s more, with AI tools such as Gemini and ChatGPT, finding this information today is easy. I, like many people today, rarely use internet searches for information. I simply ask Gemini. This means there’s no point in saving this information in my digital notes. All my searches are saved within the Gemini app, as they are in ChatGPT and Claude. But your original thoughts, ideas and project notes are unique. It’s these you want to keep in your digital notes. Much like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton wrote down their thoughts and observations, your thoughts, observations and ideas should be collected and stored. When Darwin travelled on the Beagle, he was 22 years old. When he published The Origin of Species, he was 45. And perhaps, like Darwin, not all your ideas today will have an immediate practical purpose. But if you don’t keep them, they never will. This is why it’s important to keep them where you can find them later. And that’s where our digital too

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in twelve months and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.” I first heard that quote from Tony Robbins, and it completely changed my approach to yearly goals. I stopped setting ‘New Year’s resolutions’ and began looking further ahead to see what I could do over the next twelve months that would move me closer to my longer-term dreams and goals. In this week’s special episode, I will share with you why smaller steps over the next twelve months will do so much more for you than trying to do something big and scary that you ultimately fail at. Let’s go. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Download the Areas of Focus Workbook for free here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 399 Hello, and welcome to episode 399 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. What are the mistakes most people make when it comes to goals and resolutions for the New Year? Well, the simple answer is that they overcomplicate things and try to do too much in one year. Let me explain. Like most people, I used to set New Year’s resolutions when I was growing up. At various times in my life, they included losing weight and getting fit, quitting smoking, saving money and many more. And, again, like most people, I failed miserably every time. What Tony Robbins’ quote made me realise is that I was failing because none of these resolutions were connected to my long-term goals or vision. I was in my twenties, and I believed I was immortal. It wasn’t until I reached my early thirties that three-day hangovers convinced me that I wasn’t immortal after all. It wasn’t until I’d settled down, married and begun to see a life ahead of me that I started to wonder if I could control that life and the direction it would go in. And yes, I could. And so can you. But you do need to know what kind of life you want to be living in ten or twenty years. Hope is not a good strategy. It’s no good carrying on as you are and “hoping” you will one day reach the goals and the life you’ve always wanted to live. To achieve that, you will need to take action. To give you an example of what I mean. I want to be active well into my eighties and nineties. I long admired Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh. He died in 2021, just a couple of months short of his 100th birthday. And yet he remained active throughout his eighties and nineties, being one of the hardest-working members of the Royal family. The Queen allowed him to retire at 97. How did Prince Philip maintain his strength and endurance? He did something called the 5BX every morning for eleven minutes. 5BX is a series of body-weight exercises you can do anywhere that was developed by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the 1940s to keep their servicemen fit, healthy and strong. I highly recommend you search for the original Royal Canadian Air Force instructional video on YouTube and watch it. It seems so quaint by today’s standards. He also walked miles and miles every day, ate small portions of food based on a traditional balanced diet, limited his alcohol intake, and went to bed and woke up at the same time each day. If we were to break that down into daily activities, it was simple and doable. Because he was able to do it every day—even when he was travelling—it meant there were few excuses he could use not to do it. You wake up, and after a few minutes, do your 5BX session, shower, have a small, healthy breakfast, and get on with your day, taking every opportunity to walk. And you do it every day. Tie that to going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, and you would be setting yourself up for a long, healthy, active life. And in that, there is nothing complicated or time-consuming. There are also no goals involved. It’s just a shift in your daily routine, so these activities become part of your daily routine. Although I would suggest you use January as a “test”. Often, we read or listen to something, think it’s a good idea and then find that because of our circumstances, we struggle to make it work. That doesn’t mean it cannot work. It means we need to rethink the routine and make a few changes so it works for us. I remember reading Robin Sharma’s The 5 AM Club and thought it was a good idea. And it was a good idea in 2016. I could get to bed at a reasonable time. Then I started my productivity work and coaching programme, and it became challenging to get to bed before midnight. Something had to change. I realised that the power

"The first ritual you do during the day is the highest leveraged ritual, by far, because it has the effect of setting the mind and setting the context for the rest of your day." — Naval Ravikant or was it Eben Pagan? I don’t know, but it’s a great quote to begin today’s episode. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 398 Hello, and welcome to episode 398 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. Your morning routine is one of the best ways to create a productive day. If you were to wake up at the very last moment, rush around your home getting ready while trying to sip your hot coffee, and rush out the door to catch the train to work, you’ve started the day in a stressed state, and you’re likely to stay stressed all day. It’s not a great way to begin the day. If you were to start the day with a set of routines that you follow every day, two things would happen. The first is that you have no decisions to make, which preserves your decision-making powers—powers that diminish throughout the day. And the second is that the routine itself allows you to slow down. However, as with all things good for us, we can take it to extremes, which can create stress in itself. I remember in 2017, I began doing Robin Sharma’s 5 AM Club. This is where you wake up at 5:00 AM, do twenty minutes of sweaty exercise, twenty minutes of planning, and twenty minutes of learning. It’s a great routine, but unfortunately for me, in 2018, I began coaching, which meant I was doing calls late at night, significantly reducing the sleep I was getting. I found myself walking around all day like a zombie. I decided to stop doing the 5 AM Club routine and develop my own, which I’ve stuck with for seven years now, and I still love my mornings. And with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Teagan. Teagan asks, In my morning routine, I take care of my pets, check my home budgeting app, then have breakfast and coffee while doing my email sort. My daily planning is done the night before. The problem is that I don't want to transition to getting dressed and starting work after doing this routine. It takes me 3 hours or more to get going. I'd like to do some physical activity, but this would make the morning even longer. Do you have any tips on moving more efficiently through the morning? Hi Teagan, thank you for your question. I think the simple answer would be to include getting dressed as part of your morning routine. However, before you get there, I think there may be an issue in your routine. Three hours is too long for a morning routine. Let me explain. Imagine you had a flight to catch at 7:00 AM. It takes you 90 minutes to get to the airport, and you need to allow 2 hours for check-in and getting to your gate. That would mean you need to leave your house at 3:30 AM. If your morning routine takes three hours, you would need to start your day at 12:30 AM. Therefore, dangerously reducing your sleep time. Most people think of doing their morning routines when everything is normal. Unfortunately, “normal” is not a consistent state of affairs for most of us. It may happen 90% of the time, but when we develop our morning routines, we need to consider the 10% of days when it doesn’t and how we will start the day on those days. The “perfect” morning routine is a routine you do 100% of the time. This would be your starting point. I’ve found that a morning routine of around 45 minutes is realistic. This means that even on days when you need to start your day earlier than usual, there are few excuses you can use not to do your routine. Although hopefully you won’t need “excuses” for not doing it. Your morning routine should be something you look forward to doing. It gives you a reason to jump out of bed, not crawl out. It should be built around things you enjoy doing. To give you an example, my morning routine is: Wake up and put the kettle on. Drink a glass of lemon juice water while the kettle is boiling. Make a pot of Yorkshire Tea. Wash my face and brush my teeth. Then, sit down at my desk, with my mug of tea, open my journal and begin writing. Finally, open my email and clear my inbox. In total, that takes me about 40 to 50 minutes. It depends on how much I write in my journal. As I know my routine won’t take any longer than 50 minutes, I can confidently decide when to set my wake-

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." That was President John Kennedy in 1961, speaking at the Joint Session of Congress. It is possibly the best example of a project statement ever made. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 397 Hello, and welcome to episode 397 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. Starting projects. It can be tough. Where do you start? Where will you find the time? And what do you need to do? These are just some of the questions you will find yourself asking. Yet the biggest obstacle to completing a project on time is overthinking and over-planning. Thinking about and planning a project are not the same as working on one. Working on a project is doing something that moves it forward. Decorating your bedroom will require paint and brushes. The only pre-project decision you need to make is what colour. The first two steps, therefore, are: Decide what colour to paint the bedroom Buy paint and brushes I would add a third decision: when. When will you do it? Once you’ve done those three things, you’re ready to go—no more planning, no more thinking. Just get on and start. Yet, that’s not how most projects go, is it? There’s thinking, planning, then creating tasks in your task manager, and if it’s a work project, a meeting, then perhaps another meeting. Often, by the time a project is conceived, 80% of the time required to complete it gets spent on thinking, planning, and meetings. And that brings us nicely to this week’s question—a question about finding ways to reduce the thinking and planning time. 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, “Hi Carl, how do you work on complex projects?” I find I spend a lot of time planning a project, end up with a long list of things to do, and when it comes to starting, I freeze. It’s as if I don’t know where to start. Do you have any tips on handling this type of problem? Hi Phil, thank you for your question. “Project freeze” is a common problem for many people. I suspect this stems from the belief that every aspect of a project needs to be planned before starting. Yet, for many projects, this would be impossible. Imagine you were part of NASA in May 1961, and you’d just heard President Kennedy’s speech at the joint session of Congress about why the US should put a man on the moon and bring him back safely to earth before the end of the decade. At that time, NASA was struggling to get even the smallest of rockets into space—the idea of sending astronauts to the moon and back was a pipe dream. Yet a group of incredible people at NASA in 1961 took on the challenge. Instead of planning every single step they thought would be needed to complete the project, they looked at what they already knew, the obstacles they would need to overcome, and the first steps. That gave birth to the Mercury space mission. The Mercury programme was not to put a man on the moon; its objectives were to orbit a crewed spacecraft around Earth, study the human ability to function in space, and ensure the safe recovery of both the astronaut and the spacecraft. Before they could reach the moon, they needed to understand how humans cope in space. So the project’s objective was to send a man into Earth’s orbit. The key was to get started, and they did this by listing out the obstacles they needed to overcome first. They then worked out how to remove those obstacles. Now, I know our projects are unlikely to be as big as sending someone to the moon and back, but we can adopt the same approach that NASA used to work on our projects. Even small projects can adopt this approach. Let’s say you were asked to do a presentation on the likely effects of AI on your company’s business over the next five years. Where would you start? For something like this, there would be several phases. The first would be to research and gather information. For this, the task would likely be to find out who to ask or what to read. Okay, when will you do this? Here’s the key point. It’s no good just deciding what needs to be done first. You need to make it intentional, and to do that, you will need to set aside time to do it. Perhaps you decide to give yourself an afternoon to research this. Research is a

"In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention." — Pico Iyer How do you feel when you have nothing to do but enjoy your surroundings? Where nothing is urgent, and you can enjoy the moment you are in? Never felt it? Maybe that’s a problem you need to fix. Today’s world makes us feel that everything must be done now, yet it doesn’t. If you were to slow down, step back from time to time to think, you’d get a lot more important things done and eliminate much of what is unnecessary. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 396 Hello, and welcome to episode 396 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. Slow down. There, I’ve said it. If there were one distinguishing characteristic of those who control how they spend their time and when, it would be that they are slow. Not in a negative way, more in an intentional way. They meet their deadlines, are never late for appointments and have clearly had time to read through the meeting preparation notes. Even in one of the most stressful occupations, that of being a special forces soldier, they are trained to slow down. The US Navy SEALs have the expression “slow is smooth. Smooth is fast”, and I know from talking with former members of the UK Special Forces that a large part of their training is focused on slowing down and being deliberate with their actions. Of course, the problem here is that when you’re faced with twelve urgent Teams messages, you have five missed calls from an important customer, and your next appointment is about to start, the last thing your instincts will tell you to do is to slow down. Yet it is precisely in those situations that slowing down and being intentional about what you do next is what you do. Slowing down calms your over-anxious mind, and when your mind is calm, you make better, more rational decisions. And slowing down is what this week’s question is all about. So, to kick us off, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Hanna. Hanna asks, Hi Carl, I work in a very busy Pharmaceutical company, and from the moment I step through the door at work, it feels like chaos. My phone never seems to stop ringing, and my Teams feed looks like it’s alive. It’s always moving! The day’s a blur. What can I do to slow things down and regain some control? Hi Hanna. Thank you for your question. One of the things I’ve learned is that we do have control over the speed of the day. I know often it feels like we don’t, but we do. The reason is that we always have choices, even when it often feels like we don’t. You can choose to answer your phone or let it run to voicemail. You can choose to answer those urgent Teams messages immediately or not, and you can choose to go to the staff rest area and make yourself a nice cup of tea. Unfortunately, it’s natural for us to head straight into the storm of those phone calls and messages. And when we do that, we start conditioning ourselves to do it consistently. Yet maybe the best thing you can do is pause, make that cup of tea, and strategically plan your approach. This is often what I call the tactical retreat. Step back, pause, and look at what’s currently on your plate and your most important tasks for the day. However, you will only be able to do that if you can move from being a firefighter to becoming a fire prevention officer. Firefighters charge straight into every issue with only one intention: putting the fire out. Fire prevention officers: pause, look at the bigger picture, and seek ways to prevent the fires from starting in the first place. In all companies, you need both types of people. You’re not going to prevent every crisis or urgent issue. Yet many can be prevented. I gave one example in last week’s episode. If you have ten equally urgent messages to reply to, you’re going to have to choose which one to respond to first. If you don’t have a process or a strategy for handling that situation, you will panic. Panicking slows you down because the act of panicking creates a lot of activity, yet nothing happens to deal with the messages. The strategy I suggested was to use the first-in-first-out approach. Deal with the oldest first. This way, even if the last message you received is from your angry boss, at least you won’t have

"The mind is like water. When it's turbulent, it's hard to see. When it's calm, everything becomes clear." — Kobe Bryant Kobe Bryant was definitely onto something when he spoke those words. If you’re not in control of your commitments and have no idea what needs to be done next, you’re going to be stressed. And stress, like turbulent water, makes it hard to see where you should be spending your time. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 395 Hello, and welcome to episode 395 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. What’s the point of learning how to be more productive and to be better at managing our time? Are we not just shuffling work around—work that will need to be done at some point anyway? Well, yes and no. Historically, people went to work, often in factories, where they performed repetitive manual labour. When their workday finished, they “downed tools”, clocked out and went home. As there were no TVs or smartphones, people often played cards or board games with their families, read books or went to the pub. It was easy to leave work at work. It was easy to manage our time. There was personal time and work time, and the two did not mix. Today, it’s very different. Most of you listening to this podcast will likely be working in what is commonly called “knowledge work’ jobs. You’re not hired for your muscles. You’re hired for your brain. And this causes us a problem. Manual labour meant you did a hard day’s work, and when you went home, you could forget about work. In knowledge work, it’s not so easy to stop your brain from thinking about a work problem. I remember when I worked in a law firm, I caught the bus home and often spent most of the journey thinking about an issue with a client and trying to figure out the simplest way to solve the problem. In the past, people would have looked forward to getting home to their families. When you’re mentally distracted in that way, it’s hard for you to switch off and enjoy that time with your family and friends. Today, it also means there’s no barrier—except our own willpower—to sending an email or a Teams message at any time of the day or night. In the past, the factory gates were locked, or someone else was doing your job on the night shift. It wasn’t possible to work beyond your regular working hours. Time management was much easier. Not so today. And that nicely leads us to this week’s question. And that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, I’ve spent years struggling with time management, and it’s got to the point where I think there’s no point. As hard as I try, there’s always something that needs to be done, and I never get a chance to finish anything and end up with everything being urgent. Is there any point to all this time management and productivity stuff? Hi Michael, thank you for your question. In many respects, you might be right that managing time, or at least trying to, is a waste of time. (I think there might be a pun there) As I alluded to, with knowledge work and the explosion of communication tools over the last few years, things that could have waited a day or two now seem to have to be dealt with immediately. It’s not that the task is suddenly urgent; it’s a combination of people’s expectations and the delivery system. The problem here is that no matter how fast the delivery system becomes—or other people’s expectations— we are human. We can still only do one thing at a time. That is not going to change in our lifetime. And that’s where to start—understanding that you, as an individual, can only work on one thing at a time. In other words, if you have ten equally urgent messages to reply to, you’re going to have to choose which one to respond to first. Now, you could come up with a complex, convoluted system for deciding which message to respond to first, or you could adopt a more straightforward first-in-first-out approach. Start with the oldest and work your way through your list of messages. What are we talking about here—perhaps a ten-minute delay for you to get to a particular message? Does ten minutes really matter? You’re not trying to save someone’s life in an emergency room, are you? Messages are often more time-sensitive than emails, and I find that responding to them between work sessions works best. For instance, if you were to protect 9:30 to 1

Back in October, I gave you the five questions to ask yourself before 2026. In this special follow-up episode, I share with you what you can do with the list you have been building over the last two months. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 394 Hello, and welcome to episode 394 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. Hopefully, you’ve started creating a list of things you want to change and or do in 2026. If not, it’s not too late. If you missed that episode, the five questions are: What would you like to change about yourself? This question is focused on you, your habits—good and bad. What would you like to change about your lifestyle? This is about how you live, the material things, if you like, such as your home, car and other possessions that improve your lifestyle. What would you like to change about the way you work? The professional question. Perhaps you want to learn more about AI, or change jobs and work from home, or maybe go back to working in an office. What can you do to challenge yourself? What could you do that frightens you slightly? This question is designed to help you move out of your comfort zone. What goals could you set for next year? Realistically, what could you accomplish next year that has alluded you? The idea behind this exercise is to give you time to think a little deeper and discover where you are happy and where you feel things need to change. Now, one thing you will find helpful is to go back to your Areas of Focus. There, you have your definitions of what family and relationships, health and fitness, career, lifestyle, self-development and others mean to you. Often, you will find that by reviewing these eight areas, you will find something you have neglected over the previous twelve months. As I’ve been helping my coaching clients with this exercise, it’s surprising how many of them have discovered neglected areas. This is quite natural, given that once the year begins, we can easily get caught up in the day-to-day crises. Then we drift away from our good intentions. In a perfect world, you would give yourself two months to reflect on these questions. To explore options and talk with your family. But don’t worry if you have not started yet. There’s still time to develop your thoughts and ideas. Now, some people have asked me where best to capture these ideas. Over the last two years, I’ve written these questions out in the back of my planning book. This book is always on or near my desk, and I have captured a lot more ideas this way than I ever did digitally. So, my advice to you is: if you have not started this exercise, grab yourself a notebook, write the five questions as headings, and over the next few weeks, allow yourself to think about them and write down your ideas. Right now, it’s less about what you write out and more about just getting everything written. And there’s a very good reason for this. If you do this exercise over a few weeks, what you will discover is that a theme will develop. Let me explain. Last year, I failed at getting back to fitness. During 2023, I reduced my exercise time to focus on writing Your Time Your Way. I also wasn’t very careful about what I ate, and as a consequence, my weight ballooned. Last year was supposed to be the year I got back into shape, and I failed miserably. So, last year, as I went through these questions and captured ideas, I soon found that health and fitness were common themes. This meant when I began 2025, my focus was to get back into shape and not repeat the mistakes I made in 2024. And it worked. I went from touching 88 kilograms (around 195 pounds) in January to where I wanted it to be—80 kilograms (around 176 pounds) by the middle of July. To do that, I needed to change a few habits. Moving more and locking in a consistent exercise time were the obvious ones, but I also looked at my diet and removed all processed foods, replacing them with natural foods—real vegetables, fruit, and fresh meat. Given that around Christmas and the end of the year are quiet times for me, I reviewed my calendar and moved a few things around to accommodate my new routine. Another example, I remember two years ago, a client of mine was struggling to grow her side business. It was causing her a lot of frustration. One idea she wrote down was to work harder on her business in the evenings, but every time she looked at that, she felt that was

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going." That’s a quote from one of my favourite people, and a friend of this podcast, Jim Rohn. Listening to one of his lectures—for that is what they were—in 2017 changed my life, and I hope this episode will change yours. Let’s get started. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 393 Hello, and welcome to episode 393 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. Discipline is unsustainable. You probably have discovered that. Yet there are many people we look at and see someone living what many would describe as a disciplined life. So how do they do it? Well, I can promise you it’s not discipline. Discipline is like a rocket used when launching a spacecraft—it’s required initially to get the spacecraft off the ground, but once in orbit, the rocket can be discarded. Then the balance between forward velocity and the Earth’s gravitational pull maintains the spacecraft in orbit. And that’s how these outwardly “disciplined” people do it. They decide what it is they want to accomplish—healthy eating, regular exercise, journal writing, daily and weekly planning, etc. And then they “launch”. A lot of effort and focus is required initially, but after a few weeks, their forward velocity—or the habit—takes over and it becomes something they just do. And you can do the same. And this week’s question is about how to go from an idea to turning that idea into something you will “just do”. 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 Anna. Anna asks, Hi Carl, for the last three or four years, I have done your Annual Planning exercise. And each year, I fail to accomplish the things I set out to do. I feel I don’t have the discipline to keep my commitments. There’s always something else that gets in the way. How do you help people start to live a more disciplined life? Hi Anna, thank you for your question. As I alluded to a moment ago, it’s not really about discipline. That’s a fuel that will run out eventually. Sure, it can get you started, but if you don’t develop the habit or routine over a few weeks, the consistency you want will slip away, and you’re back at square one. The problem with discipline—and, for that matter, motivation—is that they rely on the human condition. For discipline, you need willpower. Willpower diminishes throughout the day. You start with strong willpower, and as the day goes on, that power slowly wears down. But it is also dependent on how much sleep you got, whether you are in a good or bad mood, whether you are stressed or anxious, and the people around you. You may have heard the advice to ditch your “toxic friends”. They are the ones who keep pulling you down to their level. If someone were attempting to give up smoking, the advice given is to stay away from their smoking friends. If you surround yourself with people who hate exercise and you decide, for example, you want to take up the “from couch to 5K” programme, you’re not going to find a lot of support from the people you surround yourself with. They have become what is known as “toxic friends”. Instead of thinking you need discipline to achieve the things you want to achieve, look at what you can do to make achieving your goals easier. Imagine you decided you wanted to read more books. Many people will set the goal to read a certain number of pages or chapters each day. This method requires immense discipline to maintain consistency. You see, people often set these goals when they are rested, unstressed, and motivated. What you need to think about is what a realistic target would be if you were tired, unmotivated, and just wanted to curl up and scroll through your phone. A better approach would be to set a time target. For example, one of my clients wanted to finish reading the pile of books in his home office this year. He had around thirty-five books he’d bought, and they were real books, not ebooks. I suggested to him that he set a target of reading for 20 minutes every evening before going to bed. This, he felt, was realistic on days he was tired out. Speaking to him last week, he said he had discovered that on most days he read for well over 45 minutes, and on some days he read for over an hour. Over the course of 2025, he’s only missed two days—and those days were when he was at home, but was away on a b

“When I was Leader of the Opposition in the UK and some time out from an election which we were expected to win, I visited President Clinton at the White House. As we began our set of meetings, he said: “Remind me to tell you something really important before you leave.” I was greatly taken with this and assumed I was about to have some huge secret of state imparted to me. As I was leaving, I reminded him. He looked at me very solemnly and said, “Whoever runs your schedule is the most important person in your world as a Leader. You need time to think, time to study and time to get the things done you came to leadership to do. Lose control of the schedule and you will fail.” I confess I was a little underwhelmed at the time. But he was right.” That’s an extract from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s book. On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century. And it’s perfect for the theme of this week’s episode—finding time to do the important things. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 392 Hello, and welcome to episode 392 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It’s nice when our systems work. We follow our plans for the day and the week, and when we arrive at the end of the week and look back, 80% or more of what we set out to accomplish is crossed off. Unfortunately, those weeks are rare—even for the most productive of people. There are far too many unknowns that will pop up each day and week for us to consistently get what we plan to do, when we plan to do it, done. But that doesn’t mean that productivity systems are a waste of time. They are not. A solid productivity system keeps you focused on what’s important to you and gives you a way to prioritise what matters most. And it doesn’t matter where you are in life. You might be nearing retirement and in the early stages of preparing your business for sale, or you could be starting out on a university graduate programme. There will always be things to do, some important, some less so. The key is to remain consistent with your system so you know each week, you are nudging the right things forward, even if you’re not getting everything done. And that leads me to this week’s question, AND… The Mystery Podcast Voice is back! So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Serena. Serena asks, Hi Carl, I have implemented productivity systems to keep me on track with my academics as a graduate student, and they have worked well when I consistently followed the steps. The problem is that when I get stressed out, I fall behind on deadlines. When the weekends come, I just want to decompress and do nothing. What can I do to get back on track with the system and continue to practice good personal productivity practices? Hi Serena, thank you for your question. When I was at university, we had four core subjects each semester. It was on these that we would be expected to write essays and be examined on at the end of the academic year. This is nice because from an organisational standpoint, class times will be predefined for you. They would go onto your calendar. These become your weekly commitments. And while you may not know the deadlines for the essays at the start of the semester, you will know roughly when they will be due. That would be the same with your exams; you may not know the precise date of the exams at the start of the academic year, but you will know roughly when they will be held. This is often the same for many of you in the workplace. You may know which quarter a project deadline falls in, but you may not know exactly which date the deadline will be. One thing you do know, though, is that there is a deadline. Now, whatever we are working on we all have four limitations to deal with. Time itself, there’s only 168 hours each week. The fact that you can only work on one thing at a time, our emotions—sometimes we’re just not “in the mood” —and, as humans, we get tired and need to take a break. There’s nothing we can do about these four limitations. You can “optimise” the human things though, ensuring you get sufficient sleep being the obvious one, and becoming as stoical as you can be in any given emotional situation (a lot easier said than done) Given that one of the “fixed” limitations is time itself, the first place to lock down is your calendar. As you will likely know when your lectures will

"Prioritise what matters. You can't be everywhere, do everything, and have everything!" That’s a quote from Oprah Winfrey, and it captures the essence of this week’s question. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 391 Hello, and welcome to episode 391 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. You arrive at your desk, open up your Teams messages or email, and your screen fills with line after line of unread (and read) messages. One message grabs your attention, it’s from your boss and you feel compelled to open it. And from that one action, your whole day is destroyed. And while I am sure that message from your boss was important and potentially urgent, but did it really warrant destroying your day? That scenario is happening every day to millions of people, and it makes deciding what your priorities are for the day practically impossible. So, what can you do to ensure you are acting on your priorities and not being distracted by what appears to be both urgent and important? Giving some reflection, putting aside that so-called urgent message might actually be the best thing you can do. So, with that said, let me read out this week’s question (The Mystery Podcast Voice is on holiday this week). This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, hi Carl, I really struggle to decide what I should be working on each day. My work is very dynamic; a lot can be thrown at me each day, and whenever I plan my week or day, none of it ever gets done. What’s the best way to prioritise? Hi Michael, thank you for your question. In many ways, what you describe is what I see as the curse of the modern world. The incredible advances in technology have enabled us to do seemingly impossible things, yet they have also sped everything up. I remember just twenty-three years ago when I worked in a Law office in the UK, and if we received a letter (remember them?) from another lawyer, we effectively had around twenty-four hours to compose our response—even if what was being asked was urgent. We relied on the postal service, and no matter how fast we responded to that letter, it would not leave our office until 4:00 pm at the earliest on that day. And if we missed the 4:00 pm deadline, tough. It would have to wait until 4:00 pm the next day—which incidentally gave us a wonderful excuse for anything arriving late. The expectations from the “other side”, as we called them, were that they would receive the reply two days later. Today, just twenty-three years later, those two days seem to have fallen to just two minutes. What went wrong? The problem is that no matter how well planned our days and weeks may be, owing to others’ expectations, we are “expected” to respond within hours, sometimes minutes, not days. This has blurred the line between what we know is important and what is simply urgent noise. This is why it’s more critical today to be absolutely clear about what is important to you. And I emphasise the words “to you”. What’s important to you is not necessarily important to another person. When someone requires you to do something for them urgently, it’s urgent to them, not necessarily to you. You may have twenty similar urgent requests waiting for you. You are expected to decide what is the most urgent. That’s an almost impossible decision to make—if you don’t know what’s important to you. So, the important place to start, Michael, is to establish your areas of focus. These are the things that are important to you, and they are based on eight areas: Family and relationships Health and fitness Finances Career and business Lifestyle and life experiences Self development Spirituality And your life’s purpose. The first step is to define what each one means to you and then pull out what action steps you need to take to keep everything in balance. These are the higher-level priorities in your life. There’s a little more to it than that, and if you want to learn more about developing your areas of focus, you can download my free Areas of Focus Workbook from my website; the link is in the show notes. Next, what is your core work? This is the work you are employed to do. Now, most people can describe their jobs. For example, I’m an architect, a doctor, a nurse, a bricklayer, a teacher, or a TV presenter. Yet, there’s another step here. What does doing

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others." That’s a famous quote from Groucho Marx and encapsulates perfectly what this episode is about You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 390 Hello, and welcome to episode 390 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’ve been coaching people one-on-one for seven years, and in that time, I picked up some ideas that, when adopted by clients, almost always guarantee they will transform their time management and productivity. None of these ideas is revolutionary, which isn’t surprising since people have long struggled with time management and productivity issues. Our attitude to time and the expectations of others has changed, but the amount of time we have hasn’t. Technology, rather than helping us to do more in less time, has elevated the amount we are expected to do. Fifty years ago, we might have received thirty letters; today, technology has elevated the number of digital letters and messages we receive into the hundreds. And while we may be quicker at responding, we’re not realistically able to respond to hundreds of emails and messages each day and still produce work. (Even though I know a number of you are trying) It goes back to what I wrote and spoke about two or three years ago, fashions may change, but the principles don’t. AI and ChatGPT are all the rage today. If you’ve gone down that rabbit hole, you will have been blown away by what it can do. It’s incredible. Yet what is it doing? It is making some parts of our work faster. Yet, most people still don’t have enough time to do all their work. What’s happening? Well, telling everyone that you can now produce a sales review presentation in less than twenty minutes with the help of ChatGPT means you are now expected to create more presentations. That sales review presentation may have taken you two days before, but now, if you can do it in twenty minutes, boom! Your boss can give you more work to do! So what are the traits, best practices and ideas that do work that the people who have seen a massive increase in their time management and productivity follow? Well, that’s the subject of this week’s question. 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 Lauren. Lauren asks, “Hi Carl, I know you have been coaching people for a long time, and I am curious to know what the most productive people you meet do that is different from those less successful at it.” Hi Lauren, thank you for your question. As I eluded to, the most productive people I’ve coached follow principles, not fashions, and are ruthless with their time allocation. Those principles are to collect everything, process what you gathered, eliminate unnecessary things, and allocate time for doing what’s left. But it goes a little deeper than that. First, you need to know what is important to you. That relates to your Areas of Focus. Those are the eight areas of life we all share but will define and prioritise differently. Things like, your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness and self-development. Knowing what these mean to you and what priority they are in your life goes a long way to helping you to build productive days. Almost every client of mine that has significantly improved their time management have gone through the Areas of Focus exercise and defined each one. The second part to this is to be clear about what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do. What I found interesting is that my YouTube Short video with the fewest views is the one asking the question: What are you employed to do?” That doesn’t surprise me. Going through and defining your Areas of Focus and core work is not sexy. Quick fixes, new tools and apps are the sexy things, yet none of those will ever help you regain control of your time. Sure, they are fun, exciting and interesting to explore. But they are distractions that will never help you be better at managing your time. (I learned that one the hard way. I used to waste so much time each week playing with new apps, programmes and tools) Speaking of tools, I have noticed that the most productive people use simple tools. Often it’s Microsoft ToDo or Apple’s Reminders. Quite a few u

Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin planner, once said: "When your daily activities are in concert with your highest priorities, you have a credible claim to inner peace." And that nicely begins this week’s episode: what I’ve learned from my time with the Franklin Planner over the last twelve months. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 389 Hello, and welcome to episode 389 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. Between October and the end of December, I like to experiment with different time management and productivity tools to see what I can learn and discover about managing my work. Last year, I chose the Franklin Planner. That has been a revelation. It allowed me to revisit how I managed my time and work while working in a high-pressure work environment with rapidly changing priorities and a constant supply of crises each day. In this week’s episode, I want to share what I learned from the experiment with the Franklin Planner and how it has changed how I manage my work and time. I was first introduced to the Franklin Planner back in 1992. My former boss, Andrew, inspired me to start using it. At that time, I also read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, which was a book written to introduce the planner.A From 1992 to 2009, I religiously used the Franklin Planner to manage not just my work, but my life. I remember writing in my planner the first time I had the idea of coming to Korea, and then turning it into a project in the back of the planner. All my fears, concerns and excitements were written in there. Twenty-three years later, I still look back on that decision to come to Korea as being the best decision I’ve ever made. For those unfamiliar with the Franklin Planner, let’s start with the idea behind it. When you first receive your Franklin Planner, you are encouraged to write out your “governing values”. These are the things that are important to you—values such as honesty, integrity, how you treat others and your family. From these, you can determine your performance against what is important to you and set goals based on that. This is where I got the inspiration for my areas of focus. We all share eight areas of life, which we define and prioritise differently. These eight are: family and relationships, Career or business, health and fitness, self-development, finances, lifestyle and life experiences, spirituality and life’s purpose. It’s these governing values that become the foundations of your system with the Franklin Planner. Once you have established your governing values, you can begin using the daily pages. On the left, you have a prioritised task list. Next to that, you have your schedule for the day, and on the right-hand page, you have a space to collect notes. What became immediately obvious to me when I been using the Franklin Planner, was the way it forced me to stop and think. The act of handwriting what I decided were my most important tasks for the day slowed me down and got me thinking about what was genuinely important. With digital systems, it’s all too easy to add random dates to a task, hoping that by some miracle you will find the time to do it. And I know some of you add random dates because you’re afraid of forgetting about the task, even though the task does not need to be done on the date you assigned it. With the Franklin Planner, you stop doing that. You become more intentional about what you will do each day, which ensures that you are focused on the important tasks. What I noticed was that I became much better at prioritising. It becomes annoying to rewrite a task day after day because you didn’t do it. So you either delete it or you do it. With digital systems, it’s easy to give up and move the task to another random day. And when that day comes, you don’t do it again, so push it off again and again. The other related lesson from the Franklin Planner was that you become hyper-aware of what you can realistically do each day. Because you write out your appointments for the day first, you can see, in plain sight, just how much time you have for doing tasks. If you’ve got seven hours of meetings, a concert to go to, and you want to fit in a thirty-minute exercise session, you will instantly see that you won’t have much time to do tasks. With digital systems

“I used to say, ‘I sure hope things will change, ' then I learned that the only way things are going to change for me is when I change." That’s a quote from the wonderful Jim Rohn. A strong proponent of developing a plan for your life, and a part of that is creating a strong plan for the new year. In this special episode, I’ll walk you through the steps for the Annual Planning Season, which began on October 1st. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here. Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 388 Hello, and welcome to episode 388 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. A mistake I used to make was to come up with some ideas about what I would like to change in the new year in that gap between Christmas and the New Year. The only reason I ever did that was because my friends were asking, “What are your New Year’s resolutions?” I never really had any, so I used to quickly think up some cool-sounding ideas and say that was what I was going to do. And yet, it wasn’t always like that. When I was a competitive athlete in my teens, each year in December, I would sit down with my coach and plan what we would achieve the following year. What times we were going for and which races were to be the “big ones”. I still remember the year I broke 2 minutes for the 800 metres and 4 minutes for the 1,500 metres. We knew I was close, having ended the previous year at 2 minutes 3 seconds for the 800 and 4 minutes 6 seconds for the 1,500. All that was needed was a good, strong winter and pre-season training. I remember going into 1986 in one of the most positive frames of mind ever. Then, when I stopped running competitively—one of my biggest regrets—I stopped planning the year. And that coincided with my not achieving very much. I drifted from one job to another. Had no idea what I wanted to do, and I remember feeling unfulfilled and lost. Fortunately, I rediscovered annual planning. The sitting down and thinking about what I wanted to accomplish. It was that restart that resulted in me coming to Korea, and discovering my passion—teaching. Everything I have achieved over the last 23 years can be traced back to following my annual planning method. From finding a career I loved, to getting married and moving to the East Coast of Korea—one of the most beautiful places in the world—and starting the company I run today, now employing four people. All of these ideas began with the annual planning method. So, what is the annual planning method? Well, it’s five simple questions you ask yourself and give some thought to over two months—October and November. Those five questions are: What would you like to change about yourself? What would you like to change about your lifestyle? What would you like to change about the way you work? What could you do to challenge yourself? What goals would you like to achieve? Let me explain the kind of things you can think about. What would you like to change about yourself? This is about you. Your current habits and routines. Are these delivering the results you want? When I sat down to write Your Time, Your Way, I knew I had to sacrifice some exercise time in order to write. I was okay with that, and I also knew a consequence of reducing my exercise time would be a gain in weight. Two years later, I had gained eight kilograms (about 17 ½ pounds)! Not good. If my weight exceeds 83 kilograms, I feel sluggish and quickly become tired. So, in my planning last year, I made it a non-negotiable to get my weight back to my regular weight of 80 kilograms (about 176 pounds or 12 ½ stone) Today, as I write this, my weight is 80.5 kgs. Well within my weight window. That all started with asking myself, “What do I want to change about myself?” The answer was to get back into my regular exercise routine. So, what would you like to change about yourself? Are you doing things that are not contributing to the results you want? Are you not consistently planning your days or weeks? Are you not moving enough? Are you spending too much time sitting down in front of a screen and not enough time in nature? Another one is how you dress. The pandemic saw a collapse in the way people dressed. This may not interest you, but perhaps you’d like to dress better when you go out. What could you do to improve your dress sense? Maybe you’d like to begin journaling or meditation. Write anything

“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” That is possibly one of Stephen Covey’s most famous quotes. It’s at the heart of almost all time management and productivity advice today. It addresses one of the biggest challenges today—the cycle of focusing on the urgent at the expense of working on the important. If you focus on the urgent, all you get is more urgent stuff. If you focus on the important, you reduce the urgent stuff. It’s all about priorities, and that’s what we’re looking at today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 387 Hello, and welcome to episode 387 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. There are two natural laws of time management and productivity that, for one reason or another, are frequently forgotten, and yet they are immutable and permanent, and you or I cannot change them. They are: You can only do one thing at a time, and anything you do requires time. When you understand this and internalise it, you can create a solid time management and productivity system based on your needs and what you consider important. This doesn’t change at any time in your life. When we are young and dependent on our parents, these natural laws still hold true. These laws are still then when we retire from the workforce and perhaps gain a little more agency over our time. You can take the time to landscape your garden and travel the world, yet you cannot do both simultaneously. Even if you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to hire a landscape gardener to do the bulk of the heavy lifting for you, you will still need time to plan what you want done and find the right landscaper. What this means is every day you have a puzzle to solve. What to do with the time you have available that day. And the secret to getting good at solving this daily puzzle is to know what your priorities are. And that is where a little foresight and thought can help you quickly make the right decisions. And that neatly brings us to this week’s question, which means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Mel. Mel asks, Hi Carl, I’ve followed you for some time now and would love to know your thoughts on prioritising your day. I have family commitments and work full-time, and I often struggle to fit everything in. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Hi Mel, Thank you for your question. I must confess it took me many years to understand these natural laws. Like most people, I felt I could get anything done on time, that I had plenty of time to fit in more meetings, accept more demands on my time, and still have time to spend with my family and friends. Yet, I never managed to accept more meetings and requests, meet my commitments, and spend quality time with the people I cared about. I found myself working until 2:00 am most days and starting earlier and earlier each day to keep my promises. And, like most people, I thought all I needed to do was to find another productivity tool. A new app would surely solve my time problems. This was at the height of the “hustle culture” trend ten to fifteen years ago. It was all about working more and more hours. I fell into the trap of believing that to be successful, all I had to do was throw more hours at the problem. Well, that didn’t work out. All that happened was I felt tired all day, and my productivity fell like a brick. It felt good to work until one or two in the morning. I felt I was doing what I needed to do to be successful. Yet, I conveniently forgot I was having to take naps throughout the day, and when I was awake, I procrastinated like I was in the Olympic procrastination final. And all those new tools I was constantly downloading, looking for the Holy Grail of productivity apps, meant I had tasks, events and information all over the place, which required a lot of wasted time trying to find where I had put the latest world-changing idea. What I was doing was violating the laws of time. You can only do one thing at a time, and everything you do requires time. The lightbulb moment was realising that I had a limited amount of time each day, which meant that if I was to get the most important things done each day, I needed to know the most important things. Here’s what’s important to you. The promises you make to other people, particularly

I want to begin today’s episode by thanking you for listening to this podcast. Earlier this week, this podcast surpassed one million downloads. For context, that puts this podcast in the top 3 to 5 percent of the productivity and time management niche. So, thank you. I do this for you, and for all of you who have sent in questions for answering. You keep me on my toes and challenge me every week. For that, I am eternally grateful. Thank you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 386 Hello, and welcome to episode 386 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. This week’s question is about a subject I’ve always been a little afraid of covering. I’m afraid because there is no simple answer, yet it’s certainly one that has a solution. Unfortunately, that solution isn’t an easy one to implement. How do you manage your time and productivity in a dynamic, fast changing work environment? The problem is that standard advice often doesn’t work. For instance, if you are in IT support and systems and company wide software are continually breaking down, how do you find the time to do focused work, when you are being interrupted by emergencies from the moment you arrive at work to the time you leave? It does have a solution, but it involves the word “no” and the use of experience and knowledge to determine how “urgent” something really is. I’m currently reading Dominic Sandbrook’s book, Seasons in the Sun. It’s about Britain between 1974 and 1979. Five years when the British government was in perpetual turmoil. Not just dealing with one or two crises. There were hundreds and they were happening every day. From economic breakdown to Northern Ireland being on the verge of civil war. Every day brought a new emergency that needed instant solutions. Reading it today makes the political turmoils we face now look like a walk on the beach by comparison. Yet the government managed, just. It wasn’t easy, but they muddled through, and economic collapse and Northern Ireland civil war did not happen. It was close, but these catastrophes were fortunately averted. Reading about it now, it seems the UK between 1975 and 1980 was collapsing, yet as Dominic Sandbrook points out, it didn’t and most people were able to get on with their lives and improve their living standards. If you’re working in an environment where you feel you are only one crisis away from a total shutdown, don’t despair. It can be handled, and it’s possible to implement some processes and techniques to maintain some sanity when you may feel things are about to fall apart. 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 Jan. Jan asks, Hi Carl, I work in a company with no boundaries. Anyone can send a Teams message to me anytime, and I am expected to deal with it immediately. This means I never have time to do my important work. What advice would you give to someone in my position? Thank you, Jan for your question. One of the most dangerous things one can do is to believe there is no way through when the work piles up and there seems to be no respite. The first place I would begin in your situation, Jan, is to look at the type of requests you are getting. Not all of them will be urgent must be done immediately. It’s also likely when you look at them, you will find that very few are of that nature. Back in the day, when I worked in hotel management, it could be said that no one day was ever the same. And there were a lot of unknowns happening practically every minute. Yet, our training was build on understanding what was urgent and what was not. A business party turning up at 8:30 am asking where their pre-booked meeting room was, when no such room had been prepared was a drop everything and get the room set up urgently. Similarly, a guest asking for a hairdryer, was also a drop everything urgency—it was likely they discovered their hairdryer was not working after they had just washed their hair. Yet most other requests were handled in the normal fashion. A change of towels, a noisy air conditioner that won’t turn off or missing bottles of water from a room’s mini-bar. All of these “urgencies” would have been unknown when the day began, but given that they happened every day, the hotel had processes in place to deal with them. One thing we did have, which I notice many com

"The real magic lies at the intersection between eating, moving, and sleeping. If you can do all three well, it will improve your daily energy and your odds of living a long, healthy life," That’s a quote from Tom Rath, author of Eat Move Sleep. The three most important factors in you becoming more productive, focused and motivated each day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 385 Hello, and welcome to episode 385 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. Don’t skip the basics. For me, this was a hard lesson to learn. I used to stay up late to finish work or watch TV. I’d skip my exercise or allow myself to get involved in meetings I didn’t really need to attend—just to feel a part of something. And I would eat rubbish—cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and rice or fries for lunch and pizza for dinner. And I felt it. I was tired, unproductive, and did not know where I was going. My weight kept going up and up, and every day felt like a drudge. I would wake up, feel horrible, go to work, come home, collapse onto the sofa, turn on the TV, and escape the real world. It was easy to blame everyone else. My boss, my colleagues, my customers, the weather, where I lived, the company, etc. Yet, it wasn’t anyone else’s fault. It was mine. I had allowed myself to wallow in self-pity. That was a choice. I cannot say there was a particular moment that changed me. It was more a gradual change. What I learned, though, was that creating an enjoyable, exciting, and fulfilling life started with getting the basics right. And that is what this week’ question is all about. What are the basics, and why do they matter? 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 Ali. Ali asks, hi Carl, my life’s a mess. I stay up all night watching TV or YouTube videos, and then wake up late and have to rush to get to work. Then at work I feel tired and unmotivated all day. What can I do to have some better habits? Hi Ali, thank you for your question. The first step would be to read James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It’s a brilliant book, that explains how habits work, how to create your own and does all that in a simple step by step approach. The next step is to understand some time tested basics. One of the many reasons why anyone would feel demotivated about the day is they are not clear on what is important to them. Not everyone wants to be supremely fit and sporty and that’s fine. You don’t have to be. But it’s equally true no one wants to die prematurely. As Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement address in 2006 "No one wants to die... even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there" To find your purpose, or simply the motivation to jump out of bed each morning go through the Areas of Focus workbook. It’s free and you can download it from my website. This will give you the eight areas of life that should be in balance. Those eight are: Family and relationships Career or business Health and fitness Finance Lifestyle and life experiences Self development Spirituality Life’s purpose Now, when I say in balance, it means defining what each one means to you. For example, for your finances area of focus could be something as simple as “I live within my means and not over spend on trivial things” or your lifestyle and life experiences could be “I live in a clean and tidy home”. Getting these eight basics of life in balance will give you some purpose each day. Living in a clean and tidy home may mean that before you leave to go to work, you make your bed and wash the dishes. To keep your finances in check, you may decide to do a weekly or monthly budget to track how you are spending your money. That becomes a habit. It’s a must-do. None of these takes a lot of time, but they help to keep your areas of focus in balance. Now onto another important factor. One of the things I’ve noticed about highly motivated and successful people is they have some structure in their lives. They wake up at the same time each day, they follow a morning routine and have some structure for the rest of the day. That could be exercising at the same time each day or just going for a walk at the end of the day to decompress. Apple’s Tim Cook, for example, starts his day with an extremely early wake-up, around 3:45 AM, to read emails from customers and e

Let me take some pressure off. Your problem is not discipline. Your problem is not organization. Your problem is not that you have yet to stumble upon the perfect schedule. And your problem is not that the folks at home demand too much of your time. The problem is this: there’s not enough time to get everything done that you’re convinced—or others have convinced you—needs to get done. That’s a quote by Andy Stanley, an author and church leader and perfectly captures the topic of this week’s episode. Enjoy. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 384 Hello, and welcome to episode 384 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It’s easy to create a productivity system on paper, working with theories and concepts. The challenging part comes when that system is confronted with real-life events. The upset customer who demands immediate action, a colleague off work sick and a boss who thinks you can drop everything and work on their latest wheeze. It’s not that these productivity systems don’t work, they do, it’s that a system is only as good as the person adopting it is willing to slow down and consider how important the demand in front of them really is. It’s also understanding what you have control of and what you don’t. You don’t have control over whether your daughter’s after-school class is cancelled at short notice or not. You do have control over putting in place a contingency in case it happens. In the real world, things change fast. An urgent email you received at 9:15 a.m. Is resolved on its own by 9:28 a.m. A meeting you spent all weekend preparing for get’s cancelled two hours before it’s due to begin. The list is endless. Yet, having some kind of system still helps you. And that’s what this week’s question is about. How to use a productivity system in a fast moving, chaotic world. And so, 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, how would you advise someone that is struggling to set up a system because their work is always changing. My customers expect me to be available all the time and my boss keeps calling meetings without any notice. I never have any time to do my work. Hi Alan. Thank you for your question. I think it was Jim Rohn that taught me to understand that there are a lot of things in life that we cannot control. Obvious ones would be the weather, or a train breaking down that prevents you from getting into work on time. Yet, there are also things like phone calls and urgent messages that can significantly change your plans for the day. This is what I suppose we call life. Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of our plans. However, it’s always been like that. Life has always been unpredictable and yet many people have managed to deal with it. There are a number of things you can do that will help you to stay on track, yet have the space and time to deal with the unexpected when they occur. The first one is when planning the week, don’t focus on tasks, focus on objectives. What I mean by this is when you focus on scheduling tasks for the week, it’s likely 60% or more will not get done. Either you don’t have the time or things change and they no longer need to be done. Too much can change over seven days. I’ve seen people carefully schedule out an exercise plan for the week, only to pick up a calf strain on Tuesday that prevents them from doing any more running for the rest of the week. Yet, had they set the objective to exercise four times that week, the calf strain would be a minor inconvenience and perhaps to fulfil their exercise objective they could go swimming or to the gym and do non-leg exercises instead. Similarly in the work environment, if you were to plan out a project’s tasks for the week, and you keep getting pulled into a last minute “urgent” meetings, the chances are by the end of the week you will have done practically none of the tasks you scheduled for yourself. If you had instead set the objective of doing some work on the project, you would give yourself more flexibility to choose what to do given the changing circumstances of your week. This way, although you may have only done three things on the project you still completed your objective. That’s a win. Had you set yourself up to complete ten tasks on the project and only done three, you would consi

“I'm not gifted. I'm not smarter than everybody else. I'm not stronger. I just have the ability to stick to a plan and not quit.” That’s a quote from Jonny Kim. A Navy SEAL, Harvard educated medical doctor and NASA Astronaut. All of which was achieved before he was thirty five. Now the key part to that quote is “the ability to stick to a plan and not quit” And that’s the topic of this week’s podcast. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 383 Hello, and welcome to episode 383 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It took me many years to learn that the best things in life never happen by accident. They are the products of slow steady work. Becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not about making a decision in middle school and then miraculously ten years later you’re performing in the Supreme Court or surgery in a top hospital. It takes years of slow steady study, experiencing ups and downs and frequently wanting to quit because it’s hard. Yet that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s hard because as human beings we thrive when we have a goal that requires us to work hard consistently. Jonny Kim is remarkable because he did three incredibly hard things. Yet, to achieve all of them required him to follow a simple process of study and preparation. It wasn’t impossible. All it took was a steely determination to achieve these things, being consistent and, to take control of his calendar. And that’s what this week’ question is all about. How to do the the hard things consistently so you start to see progress. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Joe. Joe asks, hi Carl, the one thing I find incredibly hard to be is consistent. I’m great at setting up task managers and notes apps, but after a few days, I stop following the system. How do you stay consistent? Hi Joe, thank you for your question. There could be two parts to this. The first is what I call the “Shiny Object Syndrome”. This is where you see every new tool on YouTube or in a newsletter as something that promises to solve all your productivity and time management problems. We all go through this phase. In many ways, I think it’s important to do so. This way you learn the limitations of tools and find out, the hard way, that no tool will ever do the work for you. You also discover that the more addictive the tool (I believe they call it “sticky”), the less work you will do. For me, Notion was a classic example of that. When Notion first came onto my radar around 2018, I was fascinated. I downloaded the app and began setting it up. It was exciting. Far more editable than Evernote or Apple Notes. There were all these cool things you could do with it. Change the font, the colours, the background, create increasingly more complex dashboards and so on. On that first day, I spent eight hours “setting it up”. It was later that evening I realised that if I were to use Notion I would never get any work done. I’d always want to play with it and try and get it to show me what I wanted to see, when I wanted to see it. A goal I was never likely to achieve. So, I deleted the app. It came down to one very simple thing. Do I want tools that will help me do my work or not? Well, the answer was I wanted tools that got me to work fast. And that was not going to be Notion. The tools that best promote solid work are boring. They have no flamboyant features. They just do what they are meant to do. In other words they are so featureless the only thing you can do is get on and do the work. I rather envy those people who have the time to be constantly changing their apps. I know from experience that transferring everything to a new app takes time. And then there’s the learning curve, although I suspect that’s where the dopamine hits come from. I certainly don’t have the time to do that. I’d prefer to spend my free time with my family, walking or playing with Louis or reading books. The other area where a lack of consistency comes in is when you have no processes for doing your regular work. Humans work best when they follow a pattern. If you’ve ever learned to ride a bicycle, you will remember it was difficult at first. You were wobbly, probably fell off. Yet, if you persisted, today riding a bicycle doesn’t require a thought. You jump on and off you go. There’s an illustration that To

"There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences." That’s a quote by former GE CEO, Jack Welch. This week’s episode is about finding balance in our lives. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 382 Hello, and welcome to episode 382 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It’s always fascinated me how so many people see the attainment of a “work-life balance” as their goal in life. Yet, that balance is easily achieved if you know what is important to you, are clear about your core work activities, and take control of your calendar. I’m reading Dominic Sandbrook’s brilliant book State of Emergency: The Way We Were, Britain 1970 to 1974. In Britain in the early 1970s, the economy was in dire straits. The labour unions were fighting the employers and the government, inflation was rising uncontrollably and unemployment was becoming a serious problem. Nothing the government tried worked and often made things worse. Yet, despite all these travails, people got on with their lives. They went to work, came home had dinner with their families or dropped into the pub to meet up with friends. At weekends kids went out to the cinema, or hung out on the high street with their friends. Parents would potter around their gardens or attempt DIY projects at home. Balance was a given. Work happened at work. Home life happened at home. There were clear boundaries. Today, it’s easy to find people being nostalgic for those halcyon days, yet they weren’t all great. There were frequent power cuts (power outages), droughts, and the incessant strikes meant often people couldn’t get to work, or their workplace was closed because of the strikes. Having a work life balance shouldn’t be a goal. It should be the way you life your life. There’s a time for work, and a time for your hobbies and family. Not in a strict sense, but in a flexible way. This week’s question is about ho to achieve that with the minimal amount of effort and fuss. So, to get into the how, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Isabelle. Isabelle asks, Hi Carl, I’m having a lot of trouble trying to balance my professional and personal life. I never seem to have time to meet my friends, and often skip going to the gym because I have to finish my work late in the evenings. What do you recommend someone do to regain some work/life balance? Hi Isabelle. Thank you for your question. One of the most effective ways to start this is to create what I call a “perfect” week calendar. This is where you create a new blank calendar and sketch out what you would like time for each week. Begin with your personal life. How many times do you want to go to the gym, how much sleep do you want each night, and how much time you want to spend with family and friends? Add these to your calendar. Then sketch out how you would like to divide up your work time. How many meetings per week, how much time can you spend on admin and communications each day and time for doing deeper, focused work. Once you have done this, you will get to see if what you want time for each week is realistic. I’ve found most people who do this exercise discover that they are trying to do the impossible. You only have 168 hours a week. And you do not have to do everything you want to do in those 168 hours. Before coming to Korea, I used to go to watch Leeds Rhinos Rugby League team every home game. In those days, those games were usually held on a Friday night. This meant, every other Friday, I’d make sure I left work on time, got home, changed, had a quick dinner, then went to pick up my friends and off we went. After the game we’d call into the local pub for a few beers before going home. During the season, we made it a non-negotiable event. It would have been unheard of for any of us to miss a Friday night game. If I had urgent work to finish, I would rather go back into the office on Saturday morning to finish it off than miss a game. That was the mindset. Those games and meeting up with friends were non-negotiable. And that is the first lesson here. If there is something you want to do, then make it non-negotiable. Of all the productivity and time management tools available, the only one that will tell you if you have time to do something is your calendar

"Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall, and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings." There, Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello reminds us to focus on the magic in front of us. What are you doing to switch off, and if you cannot do so, how can you do it? That’s why 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 Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 381 Hello, and welcome to episode 381 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. How often do you completely switch yourself off from tasks, projects, emails and messages? And not just professional emails and messages and tasks, it includes all the WhatsApp messages from friends, strangers and the home projects you promised yourself that you would do this weekend, but never did? It seems we’ve found ourselves caught in the to-do trap. Where the only thing on your mind is all the things you’ve listed somewhere that you think you must do. It’s a horrible existence. As soon as we sit down to relax, our phone reminds us there’s more to do. More emails and messages come in, task manager reminders pop up on the screen with a bing telling us we’re supposed to call this person or that one. And given that we now carry our phones around with us everywhere we go, it’s as if the phone no longer serves us, but we serve it: jumping to its every whim and beep. The problem here is that it’s not something you suddenly start doing. It’s a gradual creep. It begins with waiting for your daughter to text you the time her train arrives at the railway station, to suddenly worrying about whether a customer or your boss sent you last minute Teams message before the end of your work day. You’e got to check right? And before long, you feel intensely uncomfortable if your phone isn’t in your hand or near you. It’s then when you have gone beyond experiencing a healthy relationship with your digital devices. It’s time to unravel all those now ingrained impulses. And that’s where this week’s question comes in. 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 Maggie. Maggie asks, hi Carl I see all these productivity YouTube videos, and listen to a lot of podcasts, but very few of them ever talk about how to switch off at the end of the day and relax. This is something I am really struggling at the moment with. Hi Maggie, thank you for your question. You’re right, I rarely see videos or hear podcasts talking about switching off and relaxing. I do sometimes hear people saying to stop and relax, but not how to do it. As I mentioned a moment a go, this is not something we just stop doing. It creeps up on you. One moment you’re a child without any digital devices, being curious, running around, trying new hobbies then falling asleep to suddenly being held hostage by task lists, projects and long lists of thing you think you should do. Not to mention the anxiety of responding quickly enough to a friend’s text message or your boss’s email. If you think about it, while we seem to have adapted well to this new phenomenon, and appear to just accept this as the way of life, it’s really a horrible existence. Last week, I mentioned that I had embarked on a 13 hour autobiographical TV series on Lord Louis Mountbatten. The series was recorded in and around 1969, so was shot before the dawn of home computers. What I noticed was how people in those pre-home computer days relaxed. There were family board games, book reading and going out for walks and having picnics by the river. Because the only way you could be contacted was via a letter, telegram or land line phone, once you left the house you were free. And “free” in a real sense. If you were to take a walk by the river or pond or lake, you could fully engage with your surroundings and the people you were with. And family meals were important. The aristocracy in the UK would dress for dinner, and even as we went into the post-war years, there would be a ritual of adults and children washing their hands before sitting down to dinner. I rarely see that with people today. I should point out that it’s still a good practice to do—you know, washing your

"Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why." Eddie Cantor This week, I’m answering a question about why it’s important to slow down and allow your brain to do what it does best and why you do not want to be competing with computers. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 380 Hello, and welcome to episode 380 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It’s very easy to get caught up in the hype about AI and what it promises to do or can do for you. And it is an exciting time. AI promises a lot, and our devices are becoming faster. Does this mean it’s all good news? Well, maybe not. You see, while all this technology is becoming faster, our brains are not. Evolution takes time. We can still only process information at the same speed people did hundreds of years ago. And it’s causing us to take shortcuts. Shortcuts that may not necessarily be in our best interests. Thirty years ago, people would buy a newspaper in the morning and that single newspaper would furnish us with analysis and news throughout the day. I remember buying my newspaper from the newsagent outside the office I worked at in the morning. I would read that newspaper during my coffee breaks and lunch. I’d begin with the front page, then the sport on the back page and usually in the afternoon, I’d read the opinion pieces. It was a daily ritual, and felt natural. I’d pay my fifty pence (around 75 cents) each morning and by the end of the day, I would feel I had got my money’s worth. I remember reading full articles, getting to know both sides of the argument and the nuances within each story. Today, people are in such a rush, they rarely read a full article, and only get a snapshot of what’s really going on. There are apps that will summarise documents, articles and important reports for you. But is this really good for you? This is why over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally slowing down. It began with bringing pens and paper back into my system, then going on to wearing an analogue watch instead of an Apple Watch. It’s moved on to buying real books, and this year, reacquainting myself with the joys of ironing, cooking and polishing shoes. And that brings me on to this week’s question. So, 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 Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, you’ve talked a lot about your pen and paper experiment and I was wondering why you are going against technology, when clearly that is the future. Hi Michael, thank you for your question. I should begin by saying I am not against technology. I love technology. I still use Todoist and Evernote, and I use Anthropic’s Claude most days. Technology is still a big part of my life. However, I began my “analogue experiment”—if you can call it that—because I began to realise that trying to keep up with all the advances in technology meant I was missing out on life. I had stopped thinking for myself and was looking for confirmation of the opinions I had formed about a subject. And technology does that extremely well. I remember during the last US Presidential election I was curious about what the arguments were about. I watched a few videos on YouTube from Fox News and MSNBC trying to maintain some kind of balance. That didn’t turn out so well. I must have accidentally watched a video or two more from Fox News and suddenly my YouTube feed was full of Greg Gutfeld and Meghan Kelly. So much for trying to hear both sides of the argument. It took over a month to get those videos out of my YouTube feed. From a time management and productivity perspective I’ve always felt it’s important that you decide what is important and what is not. For most of you, you will have gained a few years experience in the work that you do. That experience is valuable. It gives you an advantage. You have learned what works and what does not work. Not in a theoretical way, but in a practical way. Sales courses can teach the theory, but to become a great salesperson requires real, hands on experience. Talking with real people, dealing with objections and allowing your personality and charm to come through. You can’t learn that from an online course or four hours chatting with an AI bot. Henry Kissinger was a div

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential” That quote from Winston Churchill perfectly captures the dilemma we face when it comes to planning. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 379 Hello, and welcome to episode 379 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. Planning and organising have their place. Yet, there is a danger of taking them too far and using them as an excuse or as a way to procrastinate. Ultimately, whatever you are planning to do will eventually need to be done. The goal, therefore, is to get to the doing part as quickly as possible. One of the dangers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, is the emphasis on organising and doing the weekly review. It’s a procrastinators heaven. An authority in the the productivity space giving you “permission” to spend two to four hours a week planning and reviewing and another large proportion of your time organising and reorganising your lists. Don’t get me wrong. Both planning and organising have their place and as Winston Churchill says, “planning is essential”, but it’s a thin line between helpful and unhelpful planning and organising. In today’s episode, I will share with you some ideas that you can use to ensure that you are following some sound principles with your planning and reviewing. So, 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 Sally. Sally asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling to get myself organised. I have so many things on my desk and on my computer’s desktop I don’t know where to start. I feel like all I do all day is plan what to do and tidy up my lists. How do you avoid over planning and organising? Hi Sally, thank you for your question. Firstly, I must admit I have been down this road of over-planning and organising. I read Getting Things Done in 2009 and loved it. I ditched my Franklin Planner, the “tool” I had been using consistently for over fifteen years, bought myself a nice Quo Vadis notebook (the paper quality was better than Moleskine) and spent a whole weekend setting up the notebook as a GTD tool. I also printed out the GTD weekly review checklist from David Allen’s website and stuck that into the back go my planner and became a GTDer. It took me seven years to realise that I wasn’t getting anything significant done. I had a lot of ideas, plans and goals, yet all I seemed to be doing was reviewing, planning and doing the easy things from my context lists. Replying to emails was much easier than sitting down to write the first chapter of the book I wanted to write. Spending more time mind mapping the presentation I had to give on Friday seemed more important than opening up Keynote and designing the presentation. Yet, ironically, it was an end of year review that forced me to face up to reality and see that while I was excellent at planning and reviewing, I had become terrible at doing the work. And this is one of the most common problem areas I see with many of my coaching clients. The fixation on having everything perfectly organised and planned. You see, the problem here is not that everything is neatly organised and you have the plans to do whatever it is you want to do. The problem is nothing is being done to do those plans. While I was working on my recent Time-Based Productivity course, the project note I had for it was a mess. I had a lot of notes, ideas and thoughts. Yet, I maintained a strict next actions list at the top of the project note as well as links to the documents I was working on. It didn’t matter that below those items was a horror show of ill-thought out ideas and random thoughts. They were there in case I got stuck somewhere. What mattered was the important information was clear and at the top of the note. The note was designed so that the work got done. It was not designed to look pretty. I’ve seen clients with thirty page Word documents detailing their department’s plans for the year. It’s written in some vague management language that leaves a lot to interpretation. It’s as Winston Churchill once said of a similar document from the government’s treasury department: “This paper, by its very length, defends itself from ever being read.” You can spend hours going through a document like that, and nothing will ever get done. What matters is knowing what the department’s objectives are an

“Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool. Obviously, you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.” That’s a quote from Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. And is the start of my attempt to explain why you don’t want to be abandoning the humble pen and paper just yet. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 378 Hello, and welcome to episode 378 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 recently came across a short video from Shawn Blanc of the Sweet Setup website who argued that paper-based planners enable better focus and less distractions that their digital counterparts. And in my now ten-month experiment with the Franklin Planner I also have discovered that planning on paper gives me greater insights about what is important and what is not, it has allowed me to reduce my to-do list dramatically and improved my ability to think at the next level—the level that really matters if you want to go beyond just the rudimentary basics and create something special. This week’s question is about my “experiment” and what I did it and what I learned. 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 Phil. Phil asks, hi Carl, I’m curious about your Franklin Planner experiment. Why did you do it and what have you learned from the experience? Hi Phil, thank you for your question. Before I begin, I should give you some background. My planner journey began on my 18th birthday when my uncle and auntie bought me a black leather Filofax. These were all the rage in the mid to late 1980s. They were a symbol of what we called in the UK the “YUPPIE generation” A YUPPIE was a young urban professional or young upwardly mobile professional. It was a term used to describe a young, well-educated, and affluent person who worked in a city. It was often associated with a particular lifestyle and consumption patterns. Filofaxes had a diary—usually a week to view—, an addresses area, and other planning pages such as a goals and notes area and an expenses tracker. I loved that Filofax. And I remember carrying it around with me everywhere. I was living the YUPPIE lifestyle without having the job, type of car or luxury apartment associated with them. I was pretending hahaha. A few years later, while working in car sales, I was introduced to the Franklin Planner. I think it was around 1992 or 1993, by my general manager, Andrew. That changed everything for me. No longer was I just carrying around information—really what a Filofax did in those days—and I had a tool that enabled me to establish what was important to me (my “governing values”) and a way to plan the day, and week. I used that Franklin Planner for fourteen years. It went everywhere with me. I’d take it on holiday with me and often find myself sat on the hotel’s balcony late at night writing out how I felt my life was going and what I wanted to change. It was a tool that kept me accountable to my goals and values and really did change my life for the better. Then came what I call the digital explosion in 2009. That’s when I got my first iPhone and that coincided with my first reading of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I stopped using the Franklin Planner and began a transition to digital tools. It was an exciting time and my whole time management system began to change. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Yet, on the whole I enjoyed the evolution. That’s the background. So, why did I decide to go back to using a Franklin Planner. Well, I had begun to notice that I felt I was rushing everything. Sure, some things needed to be done quickly, but the majority of my work didn’t need to be done right now. Those tasks in my task list could wait until another day, yet, I had this feeling I had to complete them today. It created a sense of anxiety. A sort of low level buzz in my head telling me I should be doing work, checking off my tasks and not taking time to step back and th

“If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.” That’s a quote from Alex Pang’s book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. How many of you are taking a holiday (“vacation” for my American friends) this year? I know that for many—myself included—taking a holiday is not something they find comfortable. They know they need it, yet there’s just so much to do and so little time to do it. Anyway, having just returned from a ten-day holiday, I thought I would share with you some ways you can get some significant rest and still use your holiday time for some useful work. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 377 Hello, and welcome to episode 377 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. For many people, going on holiday is something they look forward to. It’s an opportunity to get away from the daily grind of meetings, deadlines, emails, and messages. Yet for others, it can be more stressful than when at work. There’s a worry that something important will be missed or that an emergency of their making will occur while they’re away. However, there’s is something else a holiday offers you, that few people ever take advantage of. In this week’s episode I will share with you the things I do while away. Now, some of what I do may not be for you—I run my own business which means I need to be watching, at the very least, what is happening within the business each day. Yet, many of the things I will suggest may be just the thing for you to help you get on top of your work. Now, before I get into the ideas, just a quick heads-up. Before I went away, I launched a brand new, ground-shattering course. The Time-Based Productivity course. It’s an evolution of everything I’ve taught over the last several years. You have no control over what’s coming in each day, yet feel you must finish everything. Trying to decide what’s important, what can wait, and what must be done right now causes you to freeze, become anxious, and then spend time reorganising all your tasks. It’s unsustainable and leaves you feeling lost, out of control, and overwhelmed. Enter time-based productivity, where what matters is how much time you allocate to the different types of work you need to do. It’s a method that works, and will transform your relationship with time once and for all. There’s currently an early-bird discount of 20% on the course. So, if you want to become less stressed, more in control of your time, and have the time to do the things you want to do, this course is for you. Oh, and I should point out that this course also gives you free access to my Areas of Focus and my all-new Time Sector System course. Okay, now on with the podcast. First up, we have to accept that even though we are on holiday, email and messages are not going to stop coming in. They just don’t. If you’re employed, I would strongly advise that you set up an auto-respond email that informs the sender that you are away and will not be checking your email while away or responding to anything when you get back. Instead, inform them to resend the email on the day AFTER you get back. This does two things. The first is it allows you, if you wish, to delete anything that came in while you were away. For those of you who are more squeamish, you can archive them instead. The second is it sorts out the important from the not important automatically for you. If something’s important, you will get the email again the day after you return to work. Why the day after you return? Well, I can promise you on your return to work, there’s going to be a lot of catching up to do. You don’t want a lot of emails coming in on that day causing you to instantly feel overwhelmed on your first day back. For those of you, like me, who cannot, or are not willing to, stay away from their email, then setting up a routine can help. I travelled to Ireland. That’s eight hours behind Korea, so my sleep schedule changes. Normally, I am a night owl. I prefer to work late into the evening and start the day around 8:30 am. When I am in Europe, that changes and I become an early bird. I normally wake up around 4:00 am and go to bed around 8:30 pm. I use the two hours between 4:30 and 6:30 am to deal with communications and admin tasks that, as a busin

“Every morning in SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they'd do is inspect my bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers would be pulled tight, the pillow centred just under the headboard, and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack. It was a simple task, mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors. Tough, battle hardened SEALs. But the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another, and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.” That is an excerpt from Admiral McRaven’s Commencement Address at Texas University in 2014. And it’s the heart of this week’s episode. Simple, mundane tasks that carry far more weight than you may think. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems. Take the Areas of Focus Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 376 Hello, and welcome to episode 376 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you were to read the comments on any productivity or time management YouTube video, you’ll find many well-meaning commentators talking about this app, or that new method or hack to play with. The truth is few of them will work and most involve adding more and more layers of complexity which only stops you from doing the work that matters. Real improvements in your time management and productivity comes from the boring and mundane. It’s the sitting down to respond to your emails and messages every day. It’s taking the laundry to the washing machine and hanging it up after it’s been washed. And yes, it’s making your bed each morning before you leave to take your kids to school. Doing the simple, basic tasks each day whether you’re in the mood or not, is the secret to massively improved outcomes. It means when you get home after a particularly stressful day, everything is calm, peaceful and ready for you to relax get some rest. It’s how you avoid getting home, stressed out and exhausted only to find your breakfast things are still on your dining table, your bed’s unmade and your laundry basket is overflowing with clothes that are beginning to give off a rather unpleasant odour. And, yes, it means giving yourself five to ten minutes each day to map out your day. To see where your appointments are and what tasks you must get done. None of this is complicated. It’s basic, it’s almost laughably unimportant, yet it isn’t. These are the critical things each day that ensure you remain on top of everything and know what needs to be done, where you should be and when and leaves you feeling calm, serene even, and ready for the next day. And with all 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 Charlie. Charlie asks, hi Carl, over the last twelve months, I feel everything has spiralled out of control. I get home exhausted and just never seem able to catch up. My Task list is out of control and my calendar seems to fill up with random meetings each day. What can I do to get some control back into my life? Hi Charlie, thank you for your question. This is something that can happen from time to time. Things spiralling out of control. It’s often because we say “yes” a little too freely, or we stop following some basic principles. The basic principles of better time management and productivity are planning your days and week. Not in a micro-management way, but more in a what’s happening tomorrow or this week way. It’s also understanding that in most cases you can cancel or reschedule a meeting. I’ve often looked at my diary for tomorr

”But the fact remains, with all the changes that have happened in our lifetime—whether we’re “boomers,” “Gen Xers,” “Millennials,” “Gen Zers” or whatever comes next—one thing has never changed nor will it ever change, and that is the amount of time we all have.” That’s a quote from Hyrum Smith’s book, The 3 Gaps: Are You Making A Difference You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems. Take the Areas of Focus Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 375 Hello, and welcome to episode 375 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 thing you may have noticed is that there are many things we have to or want to do, yet there never seems to be enough time to do them. You are not alone. Everyone feels this either all the time or at least some of the time. The reason is that it’s true. There will always be more to do than time available to do it. This means we should approach the problem from a different angle. Traditionally, people have spent extra hours trying to catch up. Working late or even working the weekend. Yet, is throwing more time at the issue the best solution? I don’t think so. We live one life. Our work is just one part of that life. If you work an average forty-hour week, your work only accounts for around 25% of your time. Yet, for many people, their work causes 80% or more of their stress. This week, I want to share some ideas and a paradigm shift in how you think about the tasks you have to do and the time you have available. It’s a simple shift, but one that will reframe your relationship with time and ultimately give you more time for the things you want time for. 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 Marcos. Marcos asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to keep up with all the tasks in my task manager. Most days feel like I am adding more tasks than I complete, and my inbox is now full. Todoist won’t allow me to add any more. How do you cope with an ever-growing list of things to do? Hi Marcos, thank you for your question. There could be a number of reasons for this. One of the most common ones is moving any email you need to respond to into your task manager’s inbox. You don’t need to do that. Instead, you can create a folder in your email system and call it “Action This Day”. Then, any email you need to act on—reply, read, forward, etc. You place it there. Then, add a recurring task in your task manager that tells you to “clear my Action This Day folder”. That will remove many tasks from your task manager. It will also begin the process of changing the way you think about things to do and the time you have available to do them. It’s no longer about how many emails you must reply to; it’s about when you will work on your emails. Other things that can clog up a task manager are articles and newsletters to read, YouTube videos to watch and books to buy. All good stuff, but since so many of these are non-urgent, you would be better putting them in a dedicated note in your notes app. That way, when you do have time to read or watch these, you can open up your notes app and choose something. I covered this recently in one of my YouTube videos. There is information we like to collect—articles, YouTube videos, etc., often the easiest thing to do is to add this information to your task manager’s inbox. After all, reading or watching them is something to do. Yet, the worst place to collect these items is your task manager. There’s no urgency to read or watch these. We can do it anytime. Perhaps we’re waiting at the doctor’s office, or, in my case, for my wife somewhere. In these situations, I can open my notes app and, depending on my mood, choose between reading or watching something—my notes are always on my phone. So, Marcos, one of the first things you can do is to remove all these non-urgent informational items from your task manager and move them to your notes app. I would add that a great place to read articles is something like Instapaper or Read. Both of these apps are designed to collect newsletters and articles. Using tools like these gives you a central place to read your saved articles. It’s like having your personalised curated news feed. The only addition is finding a regular time to read what you collect. The problem with keeping these in your task manager is that you’re not reading them. Mo

“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don't much care where. The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go. Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere. The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.” That is the famous dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carrol. And it’s a great illustration of what happens when you don’t know what is important to you and where you want to go. You’re going to go get somewhere and that somewhere is probably going to be a place you never wanted to go to. This week, I’ll share with you why developing your Areas of Focus is so important. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems. Take the Areas of Focus Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 374 Hello, and welcome to episode 374 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. So, why are your Areas of Focus important? Well, in a nutshell, they give you direction. They help you to prioritise your days and weeks and give you purpose. Without them, you’ll end up helping someone else achieve their goals, more often than not, in exchange for money, only to discover you’re health is shot to pieces and you’ve spent your forty years of working life miserably giving away five days a week to something you hated doing. A bit harsh, I know, but if you’ve read the book The Top five Regrets of The Dying by Bronnie Ware, you’ll know that the number one reason given was “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” It’s your areas of focus that will allow you to live a life true to yourself because by developing your areas of focus, you’ll learn what is important to you and what is not. And the second reason? I wish I hadn't worked so hard. When you don’t know what is important and what is not, you will work too hard. Everything becomes important, and that means you work long hours and at weekends, missing out on your children growing up and enjoying the best years of your life doing the things you want to do. I’m pretty sure that’s not how you want your life to work out. So with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I hear you mention knowing what’s important to you a lot, yet I really don’t know what’s important. I’m under pressure at work and I have two teenagers at home. I feel my life is being pushed and pulled by everyone but myself. What can I do to create some boundaries in my life? Hi Julie, thank you for your question. It’s when we feel lost and out of sorts that our Areas of Focus can help to bring back some peace to our lives. Our areas of focus are focused on our needs and wants. And because of that, people feel it’s an indulgence to even consider spending time on developing them. That’s particularly the case when we have a young family and we’ve allowed our work to dominate our lives. The first book I ever read on time management and productivity was Hyrum Smith’s Ten natural Laws and time and Life Management, and around the first quarter of that book is spent on developing what Hyrum Smith calls your governing values. Your governing values are the values by which you live your life by. With these, we will all be different. For some, being a good mother or father will be their most important value, for others, it might be building a successful business. Now, when I read that book I was around eighteen or nineteen and that part of the book washed over me. I was young, I believed I was immortal and I could do anything I wanted to do. I didn’t have time to think about my “governing values”. Yet, with age, came wisdom and around my late twenties I began to see the importance of having a set of values to guide me. That’s when I gave myself a couple of weekends to write out my governing values. Funnily enough, as I look through my old Franklin Planners from that era, I can see that the values I wrote down then are not far away from how I define my Areas of Focus today. it’s these areas that give you a direction and a purpose. They help you with prioritising your days and weeks and give you a solid foundation on which to build your goals. For example, I used to be a smoker.

“Whoever runs your schedule is the most important person in your world as Leader. You need time to think, time to study and time to get the things done you came to leadership to do. Lose control of the schedule and you will fail.” That is a quote from former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. And it strikes at the heart of mastering time management. Today’s episode explores why your calendar is your most important productivity tool. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 2025 Summer Sale Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 373 Hello, and welcome to episode 373 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. Whoever controls your calendar controls you. They can (and often will) destroy your plans for the day, prevent you from doing your most important work and be the reason you fail in your career goals. If you are a leader, you will likely have plans for your team. In order to implement those plans and move them to completion, you will need time. It’s up to you to find that time. Top leaders understand this. They are very strict with their calendars. Nobody but themselves has control of it. And, probably the most important factor of all, they have the confidence to cancel appointments if those appointments do not align with their weekly or daily strategic plan. And yes, it’s a confidence thing. Nobody, not even your boss, really has control over your time. You always have the option to negotiate an appointment or say no. In this week’s episode, I will share some ideas you can use to get control of your calendar and have the confidence to negotiate appointments and/or say no. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Karen. Karen asks, Hi Carl, I lead a team of sixteen people and am struggling to get my work done because my boss and team are always demanding meetings with me. Do you have any tips on protecting time for important work when you don’t have control of your calendar? Hi Karen, thank you for your question. This can appear to be a difficult change to make. Particularly if your team and bosses have become conditioned to you being available whenever they need you. One of most powerful lessons I learned in my early career was from the so—called “my office door is always open” concept. For those of you not familiar with this concept, it began in the late 80s or early 90s (possibly earlier). This was where bosses used to tell their employees my office door is always open. You can come and talk to me at anytime. Nice concept. It gave the impression that your boss was approachable. Yet in reality, it was not really a practical way to operate. It meant that bosses were constantly being interrupted—well, those that we not scary, anyway, The two most productive bosses I had in my early career did follow this policy, yet with one addition. That was to tell us that when their door was closed they were not to be disturbed. One of those bosses, would close his door every day around 2 pm. He would then use that time to get his most important work done. David, had a secretary, who would hold his calls too. If you needed David between two and four, you had to go through his secretary, Michaela and Michaela protected David’s time ruthlessly. Yet, for the other times in the day, David was available. He’d walk around the office from time to time asking if we were okay. He made himself available. What happened, was if we needed David for anything, we knew we had to catch him before 2 pm or wait until after 4 pm. I don’t recall anyone complaining. The Managing Partner of the firm respected it. And so did David’s clients—he was a partner in the law firm I worked at. The key to this working was David’s consistency. His team, bosses and clients all knew that David would not be available between two and four. Since then, every productive person I have met, has operated something very similar. They have periods of time in the day where they are not accessible. In that time they are doing their most important work. That period of time is generally at the same time each day. I remember, once being on a training course and the instructor, told us she would be available at any time after 11:00 am if we had any questions. That’s it. A simple sentence. “Available at anytime after 11:00 am”. I don’t recall any one of us on that training course ever trying to contact her before 11:00 am. Now, it might not be possible fo

Do you feel you have to push yourself every day just to stay on top of your work? Well, this week I’m looking at why this happens and what you can do to prevent it. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 2025 Summer Sale Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 372 Hello, and welcome to episode 372 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you have ever watched a Formula 1 race, it can be easy to believe that from the moment the lights go out and the race starts, the cars go flat out until the end of the race. Ah, as if it were that simple. The truth is if a team tried to do this, they would be guaranteed to lose the race. Even though a race may only last ninety minutes, during the race the teams will need to conserve their tyres and fuel. Going flat out to the finish would degrade the tyres too quickly, which would mean they lose essential grip in the corners, and running out of fuel would be game over for a team. You are like that Formula 1 car. When you start your day you have a limited amount of energy and your ability to focus needs to be managed through the day. It’s not physical energy. Your body has a way to utilise your fat reserves to help keep you out of danger when necessary, physically. It’s your mental energy. That is limited. And it’s a lack of mental energy that results in you making mistakes, procrastinating and being unable to make a decision about what to work on next. It your mental energy that requires careful management each day. Getting home exhausted each day won’t do very much for your relationships. You won’t be in the mood to do very much, and having a conversation with your partner or kids won’t be a top priority. Yet, your family may have been waiting for you to get home to talk with you, play and just have some quality time. The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. There are things you can do to preserve your mental energies so you arrive home feeling relaxed, fulfilled and ready to engage with your family. However, before we get to how to do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Matt. Matt asks, Hi Carl, do you have any ideas on how to stop feeling constantly tired and using the weekends just to recover before doing it all again on a Monday? Hi Matt, thank you for your question. If you are constantly feeling tired, my first advise would be to go see your doctor. A constant feeling of fatigue or tiredness could have an underlying reason and it’s better to get that checked out first. If, your doctor reports there are no underlying illnesses, then it’s time to look at your lifestyle. As I wrote in Your Time, Your Way, there are three areas you need to keep in balance. These are the foundations of any productive life. They are: Sleep, movement and diet. Are you getting enough sleep for you? We are all different when it comes to the amount of sleep we require. Some of you may work well on six hours, while others may require eight or nine hours sleep. If you want to operate at your best each day, finding out how much sleep you need would be a first step. For years I thought I only needed six hours of sleep. Yet when I did the test that Matthew Walker, the sleep doctor, suggested, I discovered I actually needed seven hours twenty minutes. What is that test? I hear you ask. What you do is sleep with no alarm for seven days and calculate how much sleep you slept each night. Then you add the total number of hours you slept and divide that number by seven. That will give you roughly the number of hours of sleep you need. I did this experiment while I was on holiday—when I didn’t have to wake up at any particular time. That way I had no anxiety about not waking up on time. Now I make sure I get seven hours at a minimum. Movement does not mean you have to go to the gym or out running. If you look back to a time when fewer people were overweight, the 1950s for instance, there were very few gyms—and the gyms then were centred on specialised bodybuilding or competitive sports people. You didn’t see people jogging round parks either. Instead, people moved more. They walked, took the stairs, manually cleaned their houses and were more active in general. The statistics are shocking. In the 1950s, around 10% of the adult US population were classified as being overweight. That number was 6% in the UK. In 2020, those numbers had increased to over 40% in the US an

How important is it to develop your Areas of Focus? That’s the question I am answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Download the Areas of Focus Workbook Join the Areas of Focus Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 371 Hello, and welcome to episode 371 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. Why spend time working on your areas of focus when there’s already a ton of stuff to do and not enough time to do it? While very few people ever overtly ask that question, I recall asking myself that question when I was starting out on my productivity and time management journey in my twenties. It seemed such a waste of time when I had people to call, work to do and a multitude of other commitments waiting for me to deal with. The trouble was that while I was running around dealing with all the so-called urgent things, I was neglecting what was genuinely important to me. You know things like spending time with my family, reading books, and knowing what I wanted to do with my career. Those things felt like a luxury I just didn’t have time for. But what was I really doing? I was prioritising the unimportant over the important because I was addicted to being busy. And that’s not healthy. It destroys relationships, damages your health (mentally and physically) and just leaves you feeling empty and exhausted at the end of the day. So, with that said, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ben. Ben asks, Hi Carl, I hear you talk a lot about Areas of Focus. What advice would you give to someone who hasn’t got time to write out their areas of focus? To me, that doesn’t honestly seem like a good use of my time. Thank you Ben for your question. Let me briefly explain what your Areas of Focus are. We all share eight areas of life. These are: Family and relationships Career or business Health and fitness Lifestyle and life experiences Finances Personal development Spirituality Life’s purpose They all mean something to us. Yet, how we define them will be very individual. How we prioritise them will also be personal and will change as you go through life. When you are young your career and business area may be high on your priority list. Once you have a career or run a business, you may find other areas such as your life’s purpose and spirituality will rise up the list. I remember when I was in my twenties, I felt I was immortal. I smoked and enjoyed a beer or six on a Friday and Saturday night. Health and fitness was not a priority. When I reached thirty, I realised I was overweight and climbing the stairs was ridiculously hard. It left me puffing and panting embarrassingly. Something needed to change. So I reduced my drinking, eventually quit smoking and began running. Health and fitness shot up my list of priorities. The thing is, if you do not know how important these areas are to you, you will continue to ignore them. It’s surprisingly easy to develop horrible diseases such as diabetes if you have not prioritised health and fitness. And, of course, the elephant in the room. How many relationships have been destroyed because a person’s work takes over their life? Your time is limited. According to Oliver Burkeman, you have around 4,000 weeks. That’s it. And if you’re 40 years old, you’re around half way through those 4,000 weeks. Scary thought, right? So spending time defining what these areas mean to you is a critical first step to building a life that leaves you feeling fulfilled, energised and in balance with what is important to you. The way to do this is to download my free Areas of Focus workbook, which you can get from my website. That workbook will take you through the steps to dine your areas of focus and to pull out the actionable steps you can take to keep things in balance. These will range from simple tasks such as sending an amount of money to your savings each month. A task that will likely take you less than two minutes each month. To having a date night with your partner every Friday evening. Your health and fitness area is another one that does not require a lot of time. Twenty to thirty minutes a day. Think about that for a moment. Twenty to thirty minutes a day to protect your long-time health, keep you energised and help keep your weight down. That’s a no brainer. Yet to me, the most useful part of developing your areas of focus is it makes prioritising your

How can you preserve simplicity and work at a reasonable pace in an increasingly complex and rushed environment? That’s the question I’m answering today. 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 The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 370 Hello, and welcome to episode 370 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. Two of the challenges we face today are the increasing complexity in our work life. Yet, that has been around forever. New technology requires us to learn new techniques for doing things and, perhaps, the biggest challenge of all is dealing with the speed at which things come at us. Interestingly, the number of emails we get today is comparable to the number of letters people in the 1970s and 80s received. Yet the number of phone calls we get have dramatically dropped. That’s largely due to the move towards instant messages—which were not around in the 70s and 80s. The difference is the speed at which we are expected to respond. With a letter, there was some doubt about when the letter would arrive. It might arrive the next day, but there was always a chance it would take two or three days. And when it did arrive, we had at least twenty four hours to respond. Today, there are some people who expect you to respond to an email immediately—no thought that you may be working on something else or in a meeting with an important customer. So the question we should explore is how we can navigate the way we work today without letting people down, but at the same time work at a comfortable speed which minimises mistakes and leaves us feeling fulfilled at the end of the day. So, with that stated, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks, Hi Carl, over the years, my productivity system has changed with technology. I began, like you, with a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, then I moved to Getting Things Done and managed everything digitally. These days, I am struggling to keep up, and it just seems so complicated. Do you have any thoughts on how to keep things simple? Hi Tom, thank you for your question. One way to look at this is to remember that the basic principles of good time management and productivity will never change. Those principles are incorporated in COD—Collect, Organise and Do. No matter how complicated or fast things get, we still need a way to collect stuff and trust that what we collect will be where we want it to be when we process it. We need an organisation system that works for us. And that means, we can find what we need when we need it. And finally, we want to be maximising the time we spend doing the work, so we avoid backlogs building. It’s within this framework we can evolve our systems. Thirty years ago, we would have been collecting with pen and paper. Today, it’s likely we will collect using our phones or computer. Thirty years ago we would have had stacks of file folders and a filing cabinet or two to store those folders. Today, those files will likely be held in the cloud—Google Drive, iCloud or OneDrive, for instance. So while the tools have changed, the principles have not. I’m a big rugby fan. I’ve been following Leeds Rhinos since my grandfather took me to my first game when I was five years old. The teams that win the championships and cup games are the ones who get the basics right. In rugby, that is playing the majority of the game in the oppositions half. Being aggressive in defence and ensuring their players are disciplined—giving away silly penalties is one sure way to lose games. The teams that lose are the ones who don’t get these basics right. They try to be clever, get frustrated, and drop the ball (quite literally) and give away unnecessary penalties, which results in them giving away territory and playing the majority of the game in their own half. The message is always the same. Get the basics right and the results will come. This is the same for you, too, Tom. Get the basics right and that’s following the principles of COD. The problems will start when we begin trying to do multiple things at the same time. Multi-tasking is not a strategy. Sure there are some things you can do at the same time. Walking and thinking about solving a problem, listening to a podcast while doing the dishes or cleaning up the house. But you are not going to be able to write a report, prepare a presentation and reply to your ema

Podcast 369 What’s the most effective time management practice you can adopt today that will transform your productivity? 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 The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 369 Hello, and welcome to episode 369 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’ve often answered questions on this podcast about the best or most effective time management or productivity system, but I don’t think I’ve answered a question about the best practices before. A practice is something you do each day. It’s just what you do. You don’t need to think about it. It’s automatic. And there is something that the most productive people I’ve come across do each day, that I find people struggling with their management of time don’t do. In many ways, becoming more productive and better at managing time is a two-fold practice. It’s the strict control of your calendar and being intentional about what you do each day. Yet to get to those practices each day, takes a change in attitude and the squashing of some pre-conceived ideas. And that is what we’ll be looking at in today’s episode. Before we get to the question, just a quick heads up. The European time zone friendly Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming next weekend. Sunday the 18th and 25th May. If you want to finally have a time management and productivity system that works for you, and have an opportunity to work with me and a group of like-minded people, then join us next Sunday. I will put the link for further information into 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 Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, what do you consider to be the best daily habits for living a productive life? Hi Mark, thank you for your question. This is something that has always fascinated me about the way people work. What is it that the most productive people do that unproductive people don’t do. Surprisingly it’s not work longer hours. That’s usually the domain of unproductive people. What the most productive people do is to have a few daily rituals that are followed every day. Let’s start with the easiest one. Have a solid morning routine. It’s your morning routine that sets you up for the day. Cast your mind back to a day in your past when you overslept and had to rush out the door to get to work. How productive were you that day? Probably not very. You will have been in a reactive state all day, treating anything and everything as urgent. The “secret” is to use your morning routine to put you in a proactive state. That means looking at your calendar for your appointments for the day and identifying what you must get done that day. Then mentally mapping out when you will do your work. For instance, today I have seven hours of meetings. That does not leave me much time to write this podcast script. Yet, when I began my day, I looked at where my appointments were, saw I had an hour mid morning free and a further hour in the afternoon between 4 and 5 pm. Two hours is enough to get the bulk of this script written. Now all I have to do is resist all demands on my time today so I can get this script written. That’s the challenge. Resisting demands. Resisting demands on my time today is reasonably easy. Seven hours of meetings is about my limit anyway. So if someone requests an additional meeting, it’ll be quite easy to tell them I am fully booked today and I can offer them an alternative day and time. And that’s a mindset shift I would recommend to you. Know where your limits are and to be comfortable offering alternative days and times. If the person demanding your time insists and is in a more senior position to you (does that really happen today?), then you can decide which of your other meetings you could postpone. If your day is full of meetings, make sure you task list reflects that. What I see a lot of people doing is having a day full of meetings and a full task list. Yeah, right. That’s not going to happen. For most of us the confirmed, committed meetings will be the priority. Tasks will not be. So, on days when you have a lot of meetings, reduce your task list. That will immediately remove anxiety and give you more focus for your meetings. Next up, is to not use the excuse of a busy day to not do your communications. Email and messages build up very quickly. Just one day neglecting these means tomorrow you

Backlogs. We all have them. But, how do you clear them and then prevent them from happening again? That’s what we’re looking at today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 367 Hello, and welcome to episode 368 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. Organising your work, creating lists of things to do, and managing your projects in your notes are all good common-sense productivity practices. However, none of these are going to be helpful if you have huge backlogs of admin, messages, and emails creating what I call a low-level anxiety buzz. You’re going to be stressed and distracted and in no place to be at your very best. What’s more, this can become a chronic problem if those backlogs are growing. This is when critical things are going to get missed. I’m often surprised to get an email from someone asking me if they can have a discount code for an early-bird discount that expired three or four weeks previously. I mean, come on. If it’s taking you three to four weeks to get to an email—even if you consider it to be a low-value email—there’s a serious problem in your system. (Or more likely, you don’t have a system at all.) So this week, I want to share with you a few ideas that can help you regain control of these backlogs and, more importantly, prevent them from happening again. 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 Wyatt. Wyatt asks, hi Carl, how would you help someone who is backlogged beyond belief. I’ve got over 3,000 emails in my inbox, and my team are still waiting for me to finish their appraisals from last year! I feel so stuck. Please help. Hi Wyatt. Thank you for your question. Sorry to hear you feel swamped. I know it can be a horrible place to be. Before we begin, let me explain the three types of backlogs we all have to deal with. The first is the growing backlog. This one is the worst because it’s getting bigger and unless you take action immediately, it’s going to overwhelm you. These kinds of backlogs will always be your priority. The next type of backlog is the static backlog. It’s not growing, but it’s there and it’s on your mind. It needs to be dealt with, but the urgency isn’t as big as a growing backlog. And then there’s the shrinking backlog. These are the best because if they are shrinking, they’ll soon disappear altogether. Now, one of the most common areas of our work that backlogs is our email. The last statistics I saw show that on average, people are getting 90+ emails a day. If you need an average of 30 seconds to deal with each email—which I know is low—that’s around forty-five minutes to deal with them. Do you have forty-five minutes today to deal with your email? Remember, that’s a small amount of time for each email. It’s likely you’ll need more than thirty seconds for most of those mails. Now the good news. If you’re starting with a backlog of over 3,000 emails, many of those emails will no longer require a response. The moment’s passed. What I would suggest is you take any emails older than a month, and move then to a folder called “Old In-box”. While my instinct it to tell you to delete them, I’ve never come across anyone courageous enough to do it. Although, if you think about it. Deleting them gives you a perfect excuse if someone follows you up—“sorry, I don’t seem to be able to find your email. Could you resend it?” Doing this means you’ve cut your list by a large margin. What’s left can be processed. Email is a two step process. Just like we used to do with regular letters. Open your post box, take out the mail and sort it between letters you need to read or respond to and throw away or file anything you don’t need to act on. And by the way, nobody left their mail in the mail box. Why do we do that with email? With email, it’s the same process. Clear your inbox. As you clear ask yourself two questions: What is it? What do I need to do with it? If you need to read or reply to an email, then move it to a folder called “Action This Day”. If you don’t need to do anything with it, either delete or archive it. This is the processing stage. All you are doing is processing. You are not replying or reading. That comes later. This means, with practice, you’ll be able to process an individual email in a second or two—ten tops. Now, towards the end of the day,

Where would you start if you were to completely redesign your productivity and time management system? That’s what I’m looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 367 Hello, and welcome to episode 367 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 things that can hold you back from creating a solid time management and productivity system is the legacy of your old habits and systems. It could be you have always done things a particular way, which may have worked well in the past, but no longer does. Yet, the hold of the familiar keeps you wedded to that old habit. Or, your company may have adopted a new system or piece of software that has a number of possibilities that you haven’t explored yet. And, of course, the elephant in the room where you have so many tools it’s paralysing you when it comes to deciding what to use. So, how would you go about doing an overhaul on your system so it’s simple, easy and does not require a lot of maintenance to keep working? That’s the topic of this week’s question 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 Lindsay. Lindsay asks, hi Carl, I recently took your new Time Sector System course and I love it. The trouble I am having is I have so much stuff all over the place, I don’t know where to start to rebuild my system. Do you have any tips that may help? Hi Lindsay, thank you for your question. There’s a great YouTube video, where David Allen, author of Getting Things Done spends a day with Linda Geerdink, a Dutch journalist showing her how to get her life organised. (I’ll put the video in the show notes) It’s quite emotional at times as Linda has never had any kind of system in the past and has lived her professional and personal life by the seat of her pants. David Allen comes across as being a little cruel at times, yet, I can understand where he is coming from. Sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind in order to help someone get to where they want to be. What fascinated me about this video is the utter chaos the start of the process of building a system can be. When you gather everything you may or may not need to do into one central place, it can seem daunting. And when that involves papers, documents and digital stuff, it can feel like you are drowning in an ocean of stuff that must be done. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. So, where would I start if I was to rebuild my system? I would suggest watching that David Allen video. It starts in Dutch, but when David is introduced to the video, it continues in English. What David gets Linda to do is exactly right. Gather everything you have into a central place. Today, that’s going to be largely digital stuff. If you have notes in several notes apps, pick one and go through the process of bringing everything together into one. Which notes app you choose doesn’t really matter too much, although I would choose one that is simple to use. The more complex a notes app is, the more time you will need to maintain it in the future. (Which is not a very productive way to go about it) The good thing about notes is they are rarely urgent. Notes are support materials for meetings, projects and ideas. Most notes apps will allow you to get a URL link so you can link the important notes to tasks in your task manager. Now with you task manager, again, if you have a few of these laying around, again, pick one—a simple one, and move any tasks from the apps you discard into the one you’ve chosen’s inbox. Then process your inbox. Use the three questions: What is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? And then move the task to the appropriate folder. Now, I know all this may take a long time. Often it can take a few days. The best way to do this is to take a day or two off and dedicate those days to getting your system sorted out. It can be fun, no really, it can be. Just be careful when you do this. We can become quite nostalgic when doing this and keep stopping to read through old notes. Now’s not the time to do this. If you do find yourself doing this create a folder called “nostalgia” and drop them in there. You can then go back to that folder when you’re finished. One tip here is to think elimination not accumulation. In other words focus on deleting as much as you can. Notes can be archiv