Your Time, Your Way

This week, what does it take to be organised and productive? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived 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 | 366 Hello, and welcome to episode 366 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 will discover if you begin reading around the subject of time management and productivity is the importance of planning your week and day. Every successful person i have come across, or read about, never fails to plan their days and week. Every person who is struggling, and not achieving their goals are not. Instead, they find excuses. “I’m too tired”, “I don’t have time”, “I have more important things to do”, etc, etc. Yet, there’s more to it than that. It’s not just about having a plan for the day and being clear about what needs to be done. it’s also about protecting time for the important, but not urgent work, and knowing when to say no, when to push and when to pull back and take some rest. In essence, it’s about understanding yourself and knowing your limits. 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 Tammy. Tammy asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to understand what I need to do to become more organised and productive. I know it’s holding me back, but there’s so much conflicting advice out there that I am confused. Can you help? Hi Tammy, thank you for your question. As I just alluded to, the best place to begin is to understand yourself. This means knowing when you are at your most focused, when you are prone to distractions and how much sleep you need. The chances are, if you stop and step back, you will already know this information. Perhaps you find yourself being able to get quite a lot of work done in the morning, but struggle in the afternoons. Or, you may come alive around 3 pm and can get a lot of work done then. This knowledge, allows you to better structure your days. You can avoid meetings, where possible, at the times you are at your most focused, and rely on human connection to keep your energy levels up by holding meetings when you are less focused—there’s something about human interaction that raises our energy levels. You can also ensure you are getting enough sleep, and that means being consistent when you wake up. As I recently learned, it’s not the time you go to bed that matters, it’s waking up at roughly the same time each day as that starts your 24 hour sleep/wake cycle. If you mess around with your sleep/wake cycle, you will feel dreadful, and that destroys your productivity. Once you have the basics locked in, you can then move on to structuring your days. A couple of years ago, I wrote quite extensively about some famous authors. This was inspired by the book Daily Rituals by Mason Curry. In that book, Mason Curry wrote about incredibly productive people and how they got their work done. One person, not featured in the book, I wrote about was author Jeffrey Archer. He writes a book every year, and he has his year structured to allow him to take care of writing the new book, promoting the book he wrote the previous year and dealing with his publishers, book cover designers and much more. Archer also loves cricket. So his year is structured so he can reduce his workload in the summer when the cricket season is on. This works brilliantly. Jeffrey Archer is consistent. Everyone who works with him knows he will be in Majorca between 27th December and the beginning of March writing his next book. They also know he will be available for meetings, promotions and events between March and June. From July to October, Archer is less available, and from October he’s happy to do book tours, interviews and anything else his publisher needs him to do. It’s simple, consistent and makes working with Jeffrey Archer easy. Now, I know it’s unlikely you are a multi-million selling author. It’s likely you work in a place where there are multiple demands coming at you each day from bosses, customers and colleagues. Demands such as wanting to know how you’re getting on with this or that. If you dig a little deeper, though, most of these demands are because people don’t trust that you remember that you committed to doing something for them. What’s the most common reason you chase someone up? It’s most likely because you’re worried they’ve forgotten they said they would do something for you. Why is that? The most common reason is because most of the p

This week, how to manage your team (and your boss) productively You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Take The NEW COD Course 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 | 365 Hello, and welcome to episode 365 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 work a lot with managers and business leaders, where a part of their job is to manage teams of people. This kind of work can be quite different from a self-employed graphic designer, for example, whose main work each day is designing. There’s an interesting interplay going on in a team environment. Managers need information from their people. To get that information, they need to stop their team from doing their work. Then there is the team who need less distraction in order to get their work done to the highest quality and on time. In my experience, the most productive teams are the ones who have found a happy balance between the manager’s need for information and the team’s need to work undisturbed. So, the question is, how do you find that balance and if you are a member of a team with a boss who is interrupting you a little too much how do you retrain your boss? Two questions from one wonderful listener who has sent in a question. And with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips and ideas for managing a team productively (I manage a team of eight) and how to manage a boss who is disorganised and never remembers what she’s asked us to do. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Hi Sam, thank you for your question. It sounds like you’re caught in the middle of a productivity nightmare. A boss who has no idea how to get the most out of their team and as a consequence you are unable to help your team work productively. Let’s start with the easier of the two. Managing a team. To help you get to the right place, we need to step back a little. A manager’s role is to support their team. To provide them with clear instructions and the right tools, and then to keep out of the way and let them get on and do what they were employed to do. At a strategic level that means clear communication—what do you want, how do you want it and when do you want it delivered? And then to step back and let them get on and do it. Let me give you an example of this in play. I record my YouTube videos on a Wednesday. I then create the timeline of the video in Adobe Premiere Pro and send everything to my video editor to do the animations, clean things up and get it ready for publication. In a Google Doc, I write out what I want—where I want split screen effects and other animations. I also add the date I need the finished video for. That’s communication part. I then step back and let my video editor get on and do her thing. I don’t care how she does the animations or what tools she uses—she likes to use something called CapCut, for example. Once I hand it over to my video editor, the task is in her hands and as long as she gets the edited video back to me by the deadline. I’m happy. If she has any questions, we use a messaging service called Twist—similar to Microsoft Teams and Slack but a lot less distracting—she will message me. And that’s the support part. It’s simple, effective and allows my video editor the time and space to get on and do the work without me constantly chasing her. Now there is another element going on here. I trust my video editor. She’s never let me down and on those rare occasions when she thinks she will be late, she will message me immediately and inform me. If you don’t trust your team, who’s at fault? If you want to build a productive team, you must trust your team. It’s that trust that enables you to leave your team alone to get on and do the work you employ them to do. Constantly interrupting them for updates destroys their productivity. It’s the same if you ask them to fill out activity reports and update statuses on complex software systems. I’ve worked with companies that required their sales teams to maintain a Salesforce CRM system. This meant many of them stop selling on Friday afternoons to update these complex systems which often took them two or three hours. When I was in sales, I found the best time to sell was Friday afternoons. People are more willing to close out a sale before the end of the week. Yet, in that company, they were missing out on so m

Podcast 364 What are the solid basics of becoming more productive that anyone can use today? That’s the question I’m answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Take The NEW COD Course 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 | 364 Hello, and welcome to episode 364 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. When I was little, a police officer lived in our village. The police service provided his home, and his job was to look after the local community. Sargeant Morris was my first introduction to the police, and he taught me some valuable lessons—not least about the importance of being a law-abiding citizen. Yet, a lesson he taught me that I never realised how important it was until later was the power of daily routines. Each morning at 8:00 am, Sergeant Morris would walk up and down the main street in our village, ensuring that the schoolchildren got to school safely. He was also there when we returned from school at the end of the day. I’m sure there were days he was unable to be there, but all I remember is his presence on the street when I went and came back from school. He would wear his hi-viz jacket, chat with the parents and children, and make sure we crossed the road at the pedestrian crossing and that the traffic didn’t drive too fast down the street. I also remember because of his presence, seemingly day and night, crime was almost non-existent in our village. It was the simple things—things that did not require a lot of effort or knowledge—that made Sergeant Morris a part of my childhood I will never forget. And that is the same for you and me today. It’s the little things repeated that make the biggest difference to our productivity. And 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 Mike. Mike asks, hi Carl. What would you say are the basics of becoming more productive? Hi Mike, thank you for your question. It’s funny you’ve asked this question as it’s something I have been thinking a lot about recently. What are the absolute basics of being productive? I would first start with something I wrote extensively about in Your Time, Your Way, and those are the three foundations: Sleep, exercise, and diet. How do you feel when you’ve had a bad night’s sleep? Perhaps you only get two or three hours of sleep. How does your day go? Probably not very well at all. You may be able to get through the morning, but when the afternoon comes around, you’re going to slump. If that poor sleep continues for a few days, and you’re going to get sick. Now let’s flip that. How do you feel when you get a solid night’s sleep? What does that do to your productivity? The difference between the two is huge. On the days you get enough sleep, you’ll focus better and for longer. You’ll make less mistakes and, something rarely talked about, you’ll make better decisions. That helps you as it ensures that when you decide what to work on next it will more likely be the right thing. When you’re sleep deprived, your decision making abilities sink. You’ll pick up the easy, low-value tasks—because you feel you’re doing something—but it will have little value and the important work will be left until another day. And then you have a backlog of important stuff to do, stuff that’s probably going To have deadlines which means you put yourself under pressure and a low level of anxiety sets in, distracting you and leaving you feeling exhausted at the end of the day. Exercise, or as I prefer to call it “movement” is another of those simple productivity enhancers often overlooked. Sitting at a table staring at a screen all day is not good for you. You know that don’t you? You’re a living, breathing organism that was designed to move. We know that exercise, and when I say exercise I don’t mean going to a gym or out for a run, I mean some walking, chores around the house or some light stretching in your home or office, helps your thinking and creativity. It also helps to reduce stress and resets your brain after a hard session of focused work. One of the best things you can do if you’re working from home is to do some of your chores in-between sessions of sit-down work. For example, do two hours of project work, then stop, and take your laundry to the washing machine or vacuum your living room. Then sit down and do another session of deep work. You’ll be amazed at how

How flexible are you? That’s what we’re looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Take The NEW COD Course 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 | 363 Hello, and welcome to episode 363 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. You may have heard this week that my Time Sector System is five years old. And to celebrate, I updated the whole course. Now, before I start to update a course, I go into Evernote and review all the comments I have collected from students and see if there are any common issues or difficulties that I could improve or explain better. The Time Sector System works. It’s based on timeless principles that have been used by some of the most productive people who have ever lived. As with all solid principles, there needs to be a degree of flexibility to accommodate the different ways we all work and the type of work we do. The way authors, for example, will protect three to four hours a day for writing might not be practical for a customer support assistant or a manager managing a team of twenty salespeople. Similarly, an architect will work differently from a doctor in an emergency room. Yet, there are still some timeless principles that work no matter what role you have. For example, it doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have the time to do it. Makes sense, right? I could decide to write my next book today. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is finding the time to write the book. I’m not sure how many hours I spent writing Your Time, Your Way, but from the first day I sat down to begin writing the first draft to when it was published in May last year, it was three years and I know every week, I spend at least ten hours on it— so roughly 2,000 hours. Given that each week only has 168 hours, it would not be possible to write a book in a week. One of the most productive companies I worked for was an advertising agency in Korea. The manager, Patrick, was smart. He realised that for his team to get the campaigns completed on time, he had to protect the time of his copywriters and graphic designers. They needed quiet, undisturbed time to do their work. Yet the account managers and social media planners needed to be talking with each other and external companies to arrange space for the billboards, and media companies. The account managers and planners generally had a meeting with each other each day. The creative team only had two meetings per week. The Monday planning meeting where they planned out the work to be completed that week and the Friday morning team meeting where everything was discussed. This meant the creatives (as they were called) had the quiet time to focus on their work. In the four years I worked with that team, I never recall a time where they missed a deadline or even felt under pressure to complete a campaign. I’m sure there were occasions when they were under pressure—clients can be very demanding—but it was never noticeable. What made this team so productive was that each person knew the objectives for the week. They knew what needed to be finished and ensured that they had the space and time to get on and complete the work. Patrick, as the boss, protected the time of his team. He knew if he was constantly asking his creatives for updates, he would be slowing them down. He trusted his team and they trusted him. If they had a difficulty, or discovered that a piece of work would take longer to complete than initially anticipated, they could go to Patrick and tell him. This comes back to something I learned from Brian Tracy—one of the world’s best self-development teachers—that if you want to be successful at anything, you first need to establish what you need to do to be successful at it. Once you know that, you can dedicate enough time to doing that and eliminating everything else. There’s the famous advice that Warren Buffett gives about managing your work. Write down the twenty-five things you feel you should do, then put a star next to the five most important, delete the rest and focus all your time and effort on completing those five. So, where does flexibility come into this? Well, if you have an overflowing inbox with emails and messages piling up by the hour, you are constantly interrupted by people asking you questions about this and that, and you have no idea what needs to be completed this week, you lose all flexibility. There’s too much

This week, I’m exploring where much of our overwhelm comes from and how to sharpen up your inbox processing. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 362 Hello, and welcome to episode 362 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 feel overwhelmed? It’s a good question to ask because some of that overwhelm is caused by what has been called “open loops” or in other words stuff to do that has not been looked at to see what is involved. A lot of this will come from your inboxes. We throw all sorts of things in there without much thought about what needs to be done. With our email and messaging inboxes, we don’t have any control over what arrives in there—that’s out of our control. The issue here is we have it collected, and that’s often a weight off our minds, but there’s a sense of anxiety because we don’t know for sure what needs to be done and how long it will take us to do it. If we are not processing what we collected frequently and correctly, then there is a gaping hole in the system that needs filling in. If not, there will be a lot of things that need to be done that gets missed. And that then leads to a distrust in your system which creates its own set of issues. This week’s question is how to develop the right habits and processes to make sure that our inboxes are cleared and what gets into our system is clear, actionable and with realistic timelines. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks, Hi Carl, could you walk us through how to best clear a task manager’s inbox as well as some “best practices” for clearing email and other inboxes? Hi Stephen, yes I can and thank you for your question. This is a place that I feel I must tread very carefully. On the one hand I want to encourage you to stop trying to remember everything in your head and to externalise it so you reduce the stress of trying to remember everything. On the other hand, I also want to encourage you to maintain a clean and tight task management system. By that I mean that your task manager only contains genuine things you either must or should do and anything you think you’d like to do can be put into your notes app. Email and messaging services are reasonably straightforward. There’s a two step process. The first is to clear the inboxes. This part is about speed. The faster you can do that the better. When processing your inboxes here you want to get into the habit of asking the questions: What is it and what do I need to do about it? An email rom a customer asking for some information about their account, for example, would give you the answers; it’s an email from a customer that requires me to answer a question. So, it’s actionable and you would then send it to your Action This Day folder for action later in the day. The temptation is to deal with it immediately. It’s from a customer! I must reply immediately. I get it. I know there’s a sense that anything from a customer must be dealt with instantly. Unfortunately, doing so will create challenges for you in the long-term. The first is you set an expectation. Instantly replying to a customer means they expect you to reply instantly next time too. And next time may not be as convenient as it is now. You might be at your son’s sports day, or having a romantic lunch with your partner. It’s not very romantic if you have to pause the conversation while you respond to your customer is it? The second challenge is it rarely ever is just one. It’s often several emails or messages like that. Each one will likely take you five to ten minutes. Just six of those and you’ve eaten up forty-five minutes of your processing time. What about the six other emails you need to clear from your inbox. This is how inboxes fill up and become overwhelming. If you have sixty to seventy emails in your inbox you should be able to clear those in around twenty to twenty-five minutes. Stopping and dealing with individual emails because you think it will only take a few minutes to deal with them lengthens the processing time, which means you won’t have time to clear it. Your customers are in the same place as you. Swamped with stuff to do with a shortage of time to do it. The chances are they’re going to hate you for responding instantly. Now you’ve given them more work to do. And let’s get real here, if something’s genuinely urgent, they’re not

This year, the Time Sector System is five years old! For thousands of people it has changed their relationship with tasks and time in so many positive ways. Today’s question concerns the basics of the Time Sector System and its philosophy. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 361 Hello, and welcome to episode 361 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 still remember the day that the Time Sector concept came to me. I was walking to the gym one sunny afternoon and was reflecting on my overwhelming task list waiting for me at home. I remember thinking to myself that all these tasks hitting me day after day was not sustainable. I was organised and knew where everything was, but I felt trapped in a cycle of never-ending tasks and emails. Whenever I feel this way about anything I always tell myself that there must be a better way. And then it hit me. I think it was the word “unsustainable”. The number of emails I was getting was never going to reduce. It was going to increase. The amount of work I had to do was equally never going to reduce. At some point I would reach breaking point. It wasn’t the work itself. It was time. I just didn’t have enough time. That was the clue. You cannot control the number of tasks, messages, and emails you receive. It’s a random number. Yet, the one constant—a constant not controlled by you or me, but by science, and in particular physics, is time. Time is our constraint. If I could allocate time for doing the different categories of work I had to do and decide when to do the tasks in those categories, it would not matter how much work I had coming in. Everything would get done in due course. And that was the seed that sprouted into the Time Sector System five years ago. So, with the history told, it’s time now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Elaine. Elaine asks, “Hi Carl, I recently came across one of your videos where you talk about the Time Sector System. Could you explain its philosophy and how it differs from other time management systems?” Hi Elaine, Thank you for your question. The thinking behind the Time Sector System is that we are limited not by what we can do—we can do a lot—but by how much time we have to do things. We need to eat, sleep and move (exercise), at our basic level. On top of that we likely have family commitments, school runs, doctor appointments and friends that need seeing. Then we have our work to do. The limiting factor is time. It’s fixed. We only get 24 hours a day. Now you can manipulate time by hiring people to do stuff for you. For example, you may be fortunate to be able to afford a nanny to take care of your kids when you are at work. Or, you may be able to hire an assistant. But no matter how you manipulate time, it’s still only 24 hours. So the philosophy behind the Time Sector System is, it’s not about what you have to do, it’s about when you will do it. After all, that’s the only thing you have control over. At a wider level, that means organising your tasks into tasks that need to be done this week, next week, this month, next month or long-term or on hold. When you divide your tasks up into when you will do them you narrow down the decisions you need to make on a day to day basis. When a new task comes in, you only need three questions: What is it? What do I need to do to complete it? When will I do it? So, for example, imagine I get a notification from my health insurance provider informing me I need to book myself in for a medical check-up. What is it? It’s a request for me to make an appointment with the doctor. What do I need to do? I need to make an appointment with the doctor. When am I going to do it? That depends. It depends, in my case, on when is convenient for my wife. We go together to the clinic for our annual check-up. In Korea it’s a six-hour ordeal, some turn it into a family outing. So, before I can make the appointment I need to consult with my wife. So, back to question 2. What do I need to do? Consult with my wife. So, there’s the task. When do I need to do it? This week would be good because if I don’t it will sink to the bottom of my list/ So. I choose today when I see my wife. When you are processing your inbox, that’s the process. What is it? What do I need to do? When am I going to do it? Another example might be I have a project th

Is self-discipline overrated? That’s what we’re looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 360 Hello, and welcome to episode 360 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. We hear a lot about self-discipline and how we should develop our discipline to achieve our goals or become more productive. But is this true? Self-discipline is hard—more so these days with all the instant gratification distractions—and anything that is hard is going to be tough to do consistently. Whether you are trying to accomplish a goal or become better organised, if you rely on self-discipline to get you through there’s going to be a good chance you will fail. There are some people who thrive on self-discipline. The most famous being David Goggins—he’s a tough cookie. Pain, discipline and a never die mindset are what he appears to live for. But, people with that mindset are rare and you don’t need it. There is a better way. It’s not easy—nothing worthwhile ever is—but with practice, a little determination, persistence, and consistency, you soon find you don’t need discipline to achieve these things. Now, before we get to the question, Here’s a little reminder about this week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop. If you have not yet registered, you can still do so, there’s a link in the show notes or you can visit my website—carlpullein.com— to register. The workshop will cover how to transition from an unsustainable task-based productivity system to a more sustainable time-based one. I will show you how to manage your work, how to time block effectively and how to prioritise your work so you know you are always working on the right things at the right time. For those of you already registered, I will be sending out the first workbook in the next day or two so keep an eye out for that. I will also include the joining instructions. If you want a less hectic and overwhelming life, then this workshop is a must. It’s your chance to create a time management and productivity system that works for you. Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips on getting better with self-discipline? I’ve never been very good at being disciplined but as I get older, I feel I need to do better at this. Hi Ryan, Thank you for your question. I’ve always found the concept of “living a disciplined life” interesting. You see, the word discipline suggests “punishment” of some kind. When we’re at school if we do something wrong, we are “disciplined”. That was my first introduction to the word. (Or perhaps my parents disciplining me for whatever reason.) And yet, when we talk about living a “disciplined life” it’s often spoken of in positive terms. Yet, there’s that underlying sense that it’s bad. I recently wrote about Charles Aznavour, the prolific French singer/songwriter. Aznavour wrote over a 1,000 songs and recorded many more. He lived until he was 94, exercised every day and was still touring when he passed away in 2018. In interviews he was frequently asked about his productivity and how he created such a disciplined life. Yet Aznavour never thought he was disciplined. He woke early every day, and spent his mornings writing songs. For him it wasn’t discipline, it was his passion, his purpose. He couldn’t wait to get started each day. And on those rare days he wasn’t in the mood to write, he still wrote. Why? He didn’t need to. He wrote because that was what he did. It was a habit. Have you ever tried starting your day without your morning coffee or not brushing your teeth? How did you feel? Probably uncomfortable and little self-conscious. You don’t need discipline to brush your teeth or make your coffee in the morning do you? It’s just what you do. And there is where you will find the answer to living with a little more discipline. Don’t think of it as discipline. It isn’t. It’s just what you do. Take planning your day at the end of the day. Last night, I spent three hours in a recording studio recording the audiobook of Your Time Your Way. That was after a full day recording and editing videos. I was exhausted. My voice was ragged. Yet, after getting home, I got my Franklin Planner (Yes, I’m still using it), sat on the sofa and planned today. There was no discipline involved. I also

In this week’s episode, what’s the best way to manage projects? 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 Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 359 Hello, and welcome to episode 359 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. From time to time, something comes along that sounds great when first described but then turns nasty. In the productivity world, that something is Getting Things Done and in particular the definition of what a project is. This is not the fault of David Allen, Getting Things Done’s author; this is how his description of a project has been horribly misinterpreted. At its essence, Getting Things Done is about categorising your work into contexts. That could be work you can do on your computer or phone. In your office or at home. It is, and never was about “projects”. Projects, at best, are a sideshow. A simple way to organise your work. Nothing more. Yet for some reason, a few early readers misunderstood GTD, wrote about it and now there’s a whole generation of people believing anything that involves two steps or more is a project and must be organised as such. And there, is the source of overwhelm, time wasted to organising stuff instead of doing stuff and huge backlogs of things to do. Before we get to the heart of today’s podcast, it’s important that I clear this misunderstanding up. If you ever bought one the fantastic GTD setup guides that was, and may still be, sold on the GTD website, you will notice that whatever task manager you are using, you set up the lists, folders or projects (depending on which task manager you are using) as contexts. Those contexts usually related to people, places or things. For example, your home, or office. Your computer, printer or car. Or your partner, boss or colleagues. You then dropped any task related to these contexts into its appropriate context. Your projects were organised in a file folder system that you kept in a filing cabinet. Current projects—the things you were working on this week or month—were kept on or near your desk for quick access. In those folders you kept all the details of the project. Notes, documents, outlines, etc. Perhaps you also had a checklist of what needed to happen next. Today, you can use your digital note app for that purpose. The key thing about GTD was it was task context driven—ie, you could only do something if you were in the right place, with the right tool and with the right people. It was never about projects. So, now you have the background, I think it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, How do you best manage projects using your task manager, notes app, and calendar together? Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question. I think the first place to start is to avoid looking for a way to treat any new input as a project. Most things are not. Theoretically, this podcast is a project. I need to choose the question, write the script, set up the studio, record the podcast, edit it, then publish it and hand it over to the my marketing manager for sharing on social media. That’s seven steps. Well within the definition of a GTD project. Yet, if I were to treat each podcast episode as a project, I’d waste hours just organising it. A podcast episode is something I do every week. It’s not a project. It’s just part of my work. Usually, on Thursday I will write the script. That means I go into my list of questions which is in a single note in Evernote, select a question, then begin writing the script. Then on Sunday morning, after my coaching calls have finished, I set up my little studio, and record the podcast. Once recorded, I edit it and then publish it. The only tasks on my task manager are a task on Thursday that reminds me I need to write my script and a task on Sunday that reminds me to record the podcast. Two tasks. That’s it. I don’t need a project folder for any of this. There is one other thing I do that relates to your question, Benjamin. I have a two hour writing block on my calendar on a Thursday for writing the script and a two hour block on Sunday for recording it. So, there in essence you have all three tools working together. I have a single note in my notes app with the title “podcast questions”. That makes it easy to search for. My task manager reminds me when I need to write the script and record the podcast. My calendar protects enough time each

Where are you spending most of your time? Are you planning or doing? That’s what we are looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 358 Hello, and welcome to episode 358 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. Podcaster Chris Williamson has recently caused a bit of a stir in the productivity world with the phrase “the productivity rain dance”. Cal Newport picked this up and it’s something I’ve written and spoken about for many years. If you are obsessing about productivity tools—apps, techniques and systems—you’re not doing the work. You’re doing the productivity rain dance. It’s organising, planning and searching for new tools in the hope that somehow the work will get done. It won’t. And while you are wasting all that time planning, and playing, the work continues to pile up. This week’s question is linked to this in that it’s about tools and organising work and I hope, my answer will help you find the balance between collecting, organising and doing. Before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question, I’d like to mention that the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025 is coming. On Fridays 14th and 21st March I invite you to spend two hours with me learning how to create a time management and productivity system that’s focused on doing the work so you have time for the things you want time for. In the workshop, we will cover getting control of your calendar and task manager . Then in week two, I will show you some simple techniques to get control of, and more importantly, stay in control of your communications—email, Slack/Teams messages AND the all important daily and weekly planning sessions. Places are limited so, if you would like to develop a personal productivity system that is focused on doing rather than organising and planning, get yourself registered today. The link to register is in the show notes. Okay, back to this episode. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Alastair. Alastair asks, hi Carl. I recently came across your work and wonder how you avoid getting caught up in the wonderful world of productivity apps. I never seem to able to stick to anything and I know I am wasting time. Hi Alastair, thank you for sending in your question. I’m not sure you are necessarily wasting time looking for the right tools. If you are at the start of your productivity journey, finding the right tools is inevitable and yes, it can be confusing. There are so many. However, there comes a point when you need to stop and settle down with a set of tools. Those tools are: A calendar, a notes app and a task manager. The good news is the built in tools that comes with your computer will do. You don’t need expensive subscriptions to so called AI enabled tools or collaborative project management tools. What are you trying to do when you decide it’s time to get organised and be “productive”? It’s not about getting more work done. That’s a bit of a misnomer about productivity. It’s about getting the important stuff done and eliminating the less important. Getting your kids up, dressed, fed and ready for school each morning is important at 7:30 am. Checking email and messages is not. There’s a time and place for those messages, but 7:30 am is not the time. The world we live in today has made communication incredible fast and easy. Forty years ago, the only forms of communication were letters and telephone calls. (Although some offices had fax machines too). If you were not next to a telephone, no one could contact you. And if you were not in the office, you didn’t know what surprises were contained in the correspondence waiting for you. It was therefore easier to compartmentalise your days. Today, it’s much more difficult because you can be alerted to problems instantly, and those problems can derail your day very quickly. The challenge therefore is to be able to quickly sift through all the stuff coming at us and to decide what is important and what is not. When things are coming at us all day, they appear loud and urgent. But urgent is not necessarily important. If you have a thousand emails backlogged in your email system and your boss is demanding you send in your employee evaluations by the end of the week, your employee evaluations are the more important task. The backlog will have to wait.

This week, why managing your time is better than managing tasks. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 357 Hello, and welcome to episode 356 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 is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 where astronaut Ken Mattingley, played by Gary Sinese, is trying to find a way to power up the Command Service Module to bring the three in danger astronauts through the earth’s atmosphere and safely back to earth. All they had to play with was 16 amps; that’s it. Sixteen amps isn’t enough to boil a kettle. And we’re talking about life support systems and navigation that was critical to bring Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise back to earth safely. In the scene, we see Ken Mattingley testing every switch in every possible combination so they do not exceed 16 amps . It’s painstaking; it takes a lot of time, but eventually, they devise a sequence that the astronauts can use to power up the command service module within the 16-amp limit. We know that Apollo 13 landed, or splashed down, safely to earth after five days. Each day, you, too, are dealing with a similar situation. You have a limited resource—time—and that’s it. You get the same 24 hours every day that everybody else gets. How you use that time is entirely up to you. The problem is you don’t have 24 hours because some critical life support measures require some of that time, including sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, that will have a subsequent effect on your performance that day; you won’t be operating at your most productive. This is one of the reasons why it is crucial to have a plan. No flight ever takes off without a flight plan. They know precisely how much weight they are carrying. They can estimate to some degree of accuracy the weight of the passengers, and they know precisely where they’re going and what weather conditions to expect. Yet many people start their day without a plan; they turn up at work and email messages. Bosses, customers, and colleagues dictate what they do all day, and they end up exhausted, having felt they’ve done nothing important at all. And that will be very true. Well, not important to them. This week’s question is about getting control of your time. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Tina. Tina asks, Hi Carl, I am swamped with all the stuff I have to do at work and home. It’s never-ending and I don’t have time to do it all. Do you have any tips on getting control of everything? Hi Tina, thank you for your question. There’s an issue when we focus on everything that we have to do. We forget that ultimately, whether we can or cannot do something will come back to time. Time is the limiting factor. There are other resources—money, ability, energy, etc but if you have all those resources, and you don’t have time, it’s not going to get done. Things get even more messy when we consider that as humans we are terrible at estimating how long something will take to do. There are too many variables. For instance, as I am writing this script, my wife is messaging me and Louis, my little dog, is looking at me expectantly, hoping I will give him his evening chewy stick early. When I began writing, I thought it would take me a couple of hours, I’ve already spent an hour on it and I am nowhere near finishing it. One place to start is to allocate what you have to do by when you will do it. This helps to reduce your daily lists which in turn reduces that sense of overwhelm. I recommend starting with a simple folder structure of: This Week Next Week This Month Next Month Long-Term and on Hold. When something new comes in, ask yourself: What is it? What do I need to do and when can I do it? The questions what is it and what do I need to do will help you to classify the task. Classifying a task is helpful because it will allow you to group similar tasks together. For example, if you walk into your living room and notice the windows are looking dirty, you may decide to create a task to clean the windows. The next question is when will you do it? The best time to do this kind of task is when you do your other cleaning. Grouping similar tasks together work to prevent procrastination. When I was growing up, my grandmothers and my mother all had what they called “cleaning days”. This was a day, once a week when they did the big clean. Vacuuming, dusting and laundry. It w

This week, Dr. Kourosh Dini returns to the podcast to discuss how we can ensure that the goals we set are achieved. Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work. Newsletter: https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/ Waves of Focus https://wavesoffocus.com/ on SMART goals https://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/

Should you take up journaling, and if you do, will it help you with your time management and productivity? That’s what we’re exploring this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 355 Hello, and welcome to episode 355 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 year is the 10th anniversary since I took up consistent journaling. And it’s been one of the best things I’ve ever taken up. Not only is it one of the most therapeutic things you can do, it’s also one of the best ways to organise your thoughts, work your way through problems and vent your anger towards those who really wind you up. Over the years, I’ve also found that journaling has helped me to achieve my goals because each day I am writing about how I am doing and if I find myself making excusing, the act of writing out my excuses exposes them for what they really are—excuses. So, this week, I’ve chosen a question related to journaling and I hope it will inspire you to invest in a quality notebook and pen and start doing it yourself. And if I can inspire just one of you to take it up and become a Samuel Pepys, I’ll be very happy. So, to kick ups off, 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, I’ve heard you talk about your journaling habit numerous times. Do you think writing a journal has helped or hindered your productivity? Hi Tom, thank you for your question. To answer your question directly, I can say with certainty that journaling has contributed to my overall productivity. To explain further, I write in my journal every morning, no matter where I am. And one of the things I always write down is my two objective tasks for the day. Those objectives are the two non-negotiable tasks for the day and by writing them down at the top of my journal entry, I have a way of ensuring I did them when I write my journal the next day, But more powerfully, writing them down each morning focuses my mind on what needs to be done and how and when I will do them. Those tasks are also in my task manager, but it’s the act of writing them out by hand that gives me the focus. Writing a journal is much more than being an aid to productivity. It’s also a form of therapy. Like most people, I feel frustrated, overwhelmed and stressed at times. Those feelings need an outlet. A negative way to do that is to get angry, shout, and scream. Sure, that blows off steam, but it also transfers your negative feelings to others—your colleagues and family. Not great. Instead, if you have a way to write about these things, you start to find ways to solve whatever the underlying issues are. Writing slows down your thinking, and if you were to step back and analyse why you sometimes feel stressed, frustrated and overwhelmed, it is because you feel—incorrectly—everything has to be done right now. That slowing down helps to bring back some perspective and you can decide when you will do something and what can be left until another day. When it comes to achieving your goals, a journal is perhaps the best way to track progress. It can also help you establish new, positive habits. When I developed my morning routines around eight years ago, I chose to track them in my journal. I always draw a margin on left of the page, and I list out the six items I do as part of my morning routine: make coffee, wash face and teeth, drink lemon water, write my journal, clear my email inbox and do my shoulder stretches. I write them down at the top of my journal entry for the day in the margin. And, for the dopamine hit, I check them off too. I exercise in the late afternoon and, again, I will write out what I did in the margin of my journal. Now, I could spend a lot of money on habit-tracking apps, but with my journal, I’ve found no need. I have my record and can review it at any time. Over the years, I’ve been asked what I write about and if I use any prompts. The answer is no. Well, apart from writing out my objectives for the day. Now, prompts can be helpful when you first start—you can think about them as those little stabilisers we put on kids’ bikes to help them learn to ride. Sooner or later you want to take them off so you can experience the freedom of riding freely. I write whatever’s on my mind that morning. If everything’s going great I write about that. If things are not so great I write about it and why I think things are not going

Do you feel you are rushing from one task to another while not getting anything important done? Well, this week, I’m going to share with you a few ways to change that. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 353 Hello, and welcome to episode 354 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 rush? This is one of those powerful questions you can ask yourself when processing the things you have collected in your inboxes. It’s easy today to feel that everything you are asked to do must be done immediately. While there is a category of tasks that require quick action, most of what comes across your desk (or pops up on your screen) does not fall into that category. The trick, of course, is knowing which is which. This is where developing confidence in your judgement and abilities helps. But that can only come from establishing some “rules”. In a way, automating your decision-making. I recently heard an interview with President J F Kennedy, in which he said as president, the kind of decisions you make are always high-level. Anything smaller will be dealt with at a lower level and rarely reach your desk. That’s an example of government in action. The president or Prime Minister cannot decide everything. Lower-level, less urgent things can and should be handled at a department level. That’s the same for you. Most of your decisions should be automated. What kind of emails are actionable, and what can be archived or deleted, for example. 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 Edward. Edward asks, Hi Carl, I recently read your newsletter in which you wrote about slowing down. Could you explain a little more how to slow down and still be productive? Hi Richard, thank you for your question. One of the disadvantages of technology and how it has advanced over the last twenty years is the speed at which tasks can now be done. While technology has speeded up incredibly, our human brains have not. That causes us many issues. The biggest issue is because everyone knows how quickly we can reply to an email, they expect almost instant replies which ignores the fact we might being doing something else. For example, when I am driving or in a meeting or on a call, I cannot reply to an “urgent” email or message. I am doing something else. In the days before email, there was a natural delay. I remember when I was working in a law firm, email was very new and lawyers didn’t trust it. So, we continued writing letters. This meant, if we received a letter in the morning, we had until 4 pm to reply—that was when the mail went to the post office. If we missed the post, that was okay, we could blame the post office. And that was accepted. Other lawyers knew this as did our clients and the clients of the other lawyers. This also meant we had time to think about our response, talk to a colleague if necessary or escalate to our boss if the issue was complex. Today, we often don’t feel we have that time. The truth is you do. One thing I’ve learned is when someone sends you something they are secretly hoping you do not respond quickly. They’re snowed under with work too. If you reply quickly, you’ve just given them more work to do today. You’re not going to be their favourite person. One of the easiest ways to reduce some of this anxiety is to put in place some rules. Let me give you an example. I receive around 100 to 150 emails a day. Most of the mail I receive comes through the night. I therefore process my inbox each morning before I start my work. The goal of processing my inbox is to clear it as fast as possible. There’s no time for applying the legendary two-minute rule (where anything that can be done in two minutes or less should be done). All I need is ten emails where I could apply the two-minute rule and I’ve lost twenty minutes. No thank you. I want a cleared inbox as quickly as possible. I’ve applied this rule for over ten years now and can clear 150 emails in less than twenty minutes. My record is 380 (ish) emails cleared in 36 minutes. Then around 4 pm, I will go to my email’s Action This Day folder. Begin with the oldest email and work my way through that for an hour. I aim to respond to any actionable email within 24 hours. And I would say I have a 95% success rate with that “rule”. It’s a process I repeat every day, and it’s ensured I never have an overwhelming b

This week, how to reduce procrastination and why you don’t want to completely remove it. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 353 Hello, and welcome to episode 353 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. We recently asked what’s the biggest thing that ruins your productivity on my YouTube community page. 58% of participants said procrastination. In a way, that doesn’t surprise me. When you see the statistics on how many people spend time planning their days and weeks, I am actually surprised that the number isn’t higher. I’ll explain shortly. Now, procrastination has been around for a very long time. Leonardo Da Vinci only managed to finish a small number of paintings. Of the twenty paintings attributed to him, around five were finished. Leonardo was a serial procrastinator. Yet, it was that procrastination that led to many of his inventions. If he had not procrastinated as much as he did, we would have many more of his paintings but very few of his notebooks full of drawings and diagrams. The good news is, there are a few practices you can do that will reduce procrastination and enable you to be more internal about your days. 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 Carlos. Carlos asks, Hi Carl, what advice do you have for overcoming procrastination? Hi Carlos, thank you for your question. As I alluded to, procrastination and daily and weekly planning are linked. When you are clear about what needs to be accomplished you will procrastinate less. The problem when you have no plan is you waste a lot of time trying to decide what needs to be done. And then, it’s likely you will pick the easiest thing to do in the hope it will get you started. It’s true, you will get started, but you will be doing low value tasks leaving behind the higher value ones. The ones you don’t know what needs to be done or what the first action is because you don’t have a plan. And that leaves you at the end of the day looking at a list of important, high value things you didn’t do. One way to overcome this is to be very clear about what the next action is. In my next YouTube video, coming out on Thursday, I explain why “think about” tasks are not really tasks and will be the ones you will sacrifice the moment your day becomes busy. The reason why these get put off is because it’s not clear what the real action is. For example, if I had a task like “think about what to buy mum for her birthday”, I would procrastinate. It’s too much effort and is not the real task. The real task might be to talk to my brother and sister about what they re getting my mum. Or I could talk to my father and ask him what he thinks she would like. Which task would you most likely do: Think about what to buy mum for her birthday, or, call my brother and ask him what he’s getting mum for her birthday? One is actionable the other is wishy washy. The wishy washy task is the one you will procrastinate on. You will procrastinate because it’s not clear what needs to be done. This is where planning comes in. When you have a plan for the day and are clear about what needs to be done, you will be less likely to procrastinate because your brain is subconsciously planning ahead for you. You’re doing one task and your brain is thinking, subconsciously, about what you will do next and how to complete the task. This prevents your brain from going offline and procrastinating. However, when you don’t have a plan for the day, none of that happens. Instead, you procrastinate. You are always on the lookout for something interesting to do, and anything that does not fit the mood you’re in will be skipped for something more interesting. So, the first practice to develop is to plan your day. This does not take a long time. It can be done in five minutes. And the ideal time for maximum procrastination protection is to do it before you finish the day. There’s something more intentional about starting your day knowing exactly what it is you want to get accomplished. Now, there is a caveat here. If you are an early riser, you can do your planning for the day as part of your morning routine. After all, it’s only five minutes. So how do you effectively plan your day? Step one. Look at your appointments for the day. How much time do you have left after your meetings and meal breaks? Step two is to look at your task list and choose ac

What happened to my 2020/21 minimalist project, and where am I today? That’s the question I am answering today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 352 Hello, and welcome to episode 352 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. Towards the end of 2019, I decided that in 2020, I would go all in on a minimalist project. I had played around with it for a number of years, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I formally turned it into a project and began the process of clearing out a lot of stuff I had collected that was no longer benefiting me. And yes, four or five years ago, minimalism was a thing. Everyone was talking about it, and there were thousands of videos of people showcasing how bare and minimal their workspaces were. It was a trend, and while that trend appears to be forgotten, I learned many things that I still practice today. So, it was a nice surprise to find a question about it in my inbox a few weeks ago. I realised it was a good time to tell you about what I learned and what I am still practising today. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question… Which I realise I’ve already told you. This week’s question comes from Milos. Milos asks, hi Carl, I remember a few years ago, you mentioned that you were about to start a minimalist project. How did it go, and are you still a minimalist? Hi Milos, thank you for your wonderful question. Like most projects, or goals, designed to change how you do things, once you complete them, it’s easy to forget you ever did them. My minimalist project was such a project. I changed a lot of things that I do automatically today, so your question caused me to reminisce on how things used to be. I should point out that I wasn’t into extreme consumerism. I would replace my phone, iPads and computers when they stopped functioning in a way I needed them to do. For example, my old Intel computer became very slow over a year when Apple switched from Intel chips to their M series. So much so that it took up to an hour to render a fifteen-minute YouTube video. When I changed my computer to an M series one, that time came down to around six minutes. However, I think I am a bit of a hoarder, and I had boxes of old papers from my teaching days I no longer needed. I was always reluctant to throw away old clothes, believing one day I might regain the weight I had lost and would require those bigger sizes again. My wardrobe, drawers and other cupboards were full of stuff I no longer needed and would never need again. So that was where the project began. Clearing out old clothes and papers I no longer needed. As with all endeavours like this, I did go a little extreme. My desk, for instance, was stripped of its soul—well, it felt like it. All I had on there was my computer, keyboard and trackpad. I found it became an uninspiring place to work. So, gradually, I added some things back. An analogue clock—a tool I use to prevent time blindness when I get into a focused zone and a few little mementoes to bring some character back. The biggest part of the project was clearing out drawers, cupboards and my wardrobe. That was liberating and I was surprised how much space I had once everything was cleared and either thrown away or taken to the recycling. I moved house at the end of 2021, and that was an opportunity to complete the project—well, the clearing out of the old part of the project. However, the biggest change was in the way I approached purchasing. I stopped buying electronic gadgets. I am in the Apple ecosystem and Apple’s products, on the whole, last a long time. For example, I have an iPad mini for reading ebooks, magazines and the newspaper. I’ve had the same iPad mini for the last five years. And I have no intention of replacing it any time soon. Another change was to apply some rules to my purchasing. This was inspired from how the British gentry in the early 1900s approached buying clothes and personal consumption items. In the 1920s (and 30s), aristocrats bought clothes and necessities once. For instance, a young aristocrat would purchase a set of luggage that would last a lifetime. If something broke or the leather tore, they would fix it. A new suitcase was not necessary. These repairs added character and gave these items a unique look. It was also a much more environmentally friendly way to treat possessions than we do today—throwing away items once the

What one thing could you do this month that would transform your productivity? That’s what I’m answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 351 Hello, and welcome to episode 351 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 one of the strange quirks of human nature to overcomplicate things. This is particularly so when things start to go wrong. In my favourite sport, rugby league—as in most team-based ball sports—the basics of winning a game are possession of the ball and territory. If you can consistently complete your sets in your opponent’s half of the field, you will likely win the game. Drop the ball or give away silly penalties by overcomplicating moves, and you’ll make it very difficult to win the game. Teams that lack confidence are particularly guilty of these mistakes. Watch any winning team, and you will see they stick to the basics and never panic when they go a try or goal behind. You can see this in any workplace, too. Those people who rarely appear stressed or overwhelmed stick to the basics. They have processes for getting their core work done—the work they are employed to do. Top salespeople dedicate time daily to prospecting and following up with their customers. CEOs ensure they have time for meeting with their leadership team weekly so they are aware of what’s going on and know where the potential issues are. So, what can you do to ensure you stick to the basics each day to avoid those pernicious backlogs? Well, before I answer that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from George. George asks, hi Carl, are there any strategies you know of that guarantees someone will always be on top of their work? Hi George, thank you for your question. I’ve always found it fascinating to look at occupations where mistakes can lead to a loss of life—airline pilots and surgeons, for example. Before any flight, a pilot goes through a checklist to ensure the plane is in working order. They check the weather and the weight of the cargo—both of which can affect how the aircraft will fly. They calculate the speed they need to reach before taking off and plot their flight path to avoid storms or dangerous weather fronts. No pilot would ever consider not doing these checks. Indeed, not doing them would be an act of gross negligence and could potentially be career-ending. Similarly, surgeons follow a checklist. They check the patient’s name, the type of surgery being carried out, and, if necessary, which side they will be operating on. They also check the patient’s blood pressure and other measurements. Again, failure to do so would be considered gross negligence, and a doctor could be fired for not doing them. Now, perhaps lives do not depend on you doing your job correctly, but approaching your work in the same way a pilot or surgeon does can ensure that your work gets done without missing essential tasks. The first step is to identify your core work. The work you are employed to do at a micro-level. For example, if you manage a team of people, what do you need to do at a task level to manage your team? That could be to prepare for and hold a weekly team meeting. It may involve setting aside time each month for a thirty-minute one-to-one session with each team member. That would translate into weekly tasks for preparing for the team meeting and scheduling appointments with your team. A journalist’s core work may be to research a story and then write the story before the deadline. Imagine their deadline is 1 pm on Thursday; then the journalist could ensure sufficient time is protected before Thursday to get the story written and submitted before the deadline. What are your core work tasks? Next comes the all important communications and admin tasks. We all have them. The problem with these tasks is we cannot accurately estimate how much will come in. Each morning, when I start my day, I have no idea how many emails I will have. Some days, it’s 80; other days, it can be as high as 150. Yet, one thing I can guarantee is that I will have email to deal with. So, I protect an hour a day for dealing with communications. This way, I know that no backlogs will ever build, and nobody is waiting longer than 24 hours for my response. Somedays, I need the whole hour; I may only need thirty minutes on other days. Yet I still protect an hour. It’s no good “hoping” you will fin

This week, I've delved into my archive to bring you an episode first published on the 1st of January this year. This will help you prepare yourself for an outstanding 2025. ----more---- You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 305 Welcome to episode 305 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. So, 2024 is here. A New Year with a lot of potential new opportunities and plans. The challenge you will face (because we all face this challenge) is executing on all the ideas and plans you have for this year without a loss of enthusiasm or energy. And that will happen because no matter how well you have planned the year, things will not work out as you imagine. Some things will go exactly how you expect them to, but most will not. And that’s the same for everyone. If you deliver all your plans and projects exactly as conceived, you are not ambitious enough to move forward. You’re making things too easy. So how do you avoid the loss of enthusiasm and energy that you will need to see you through the year? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s question, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for the question. This week’s question comes from Carrie. Carrie asks, hi Carl, every year I get excited about all the things I want to do, and when it gets to February or March, I lose all my enthusiasm because I haven’t done anything I had planned to do. Do you have any advice on avoiding this? Hi Carrie, thank you for your question and Happy New Year to you too. One thing I can tell you straight up is you are not alone. It turns out 92% of those who set New Year goals or resolutions have given up by 16th February. Only 8% manage to achieve some of their goals. This means we need to learn what those eight percent do that is different from the 92%. The first thing I discovered about the 8% is they have no more than three goals for the year. And those three are very specific. For example, they may have a financial, a physical and perhaps a career goal. And that’s it. If we use these as an example, the financial goal is possibly the easiest. Imagine your financial goal is to save $5,000 this year. You can break that down into twelve months and send $417.00 per month to your savings account. On the 31st of December, you will have a little over $5,000 in it. On a task level, this is a 30-second task once a month where you send the $417.00 to your account. Now, if your finances are tight, you may have to review what you are spending money on and make some changes to what you spend, but the action to take is just thirty seconds per month. Physical goals can be a little more complex. Not everyone does exercise to lose weight. Some just want to improve their overall health; others would like to challenge themselves physically by running a marathon or climbing a big mountain. However, whatever the purpose or “what” the goal is, physical goals mean you need to find time for regular exercise. The essence of the goal is to find the time and do the exercise, and that will almost certainly achieve your goal. The difficulty with these types of goals is the starting point. If you have not exercised for a number of years and are not in great shape, it is going to be hard. This is like pulling a large truck. The hardest part of pulling a truck is the start. When the rope you are attached to takes the strain to get the truck moving, it takes an inordinate amount of strength. However, once the truck begins to move, it gets easier and easier. The difficulty then becomes stopping the truck. Starting an exercise programme is the same. It’s incredibly hard to begin with. The first session’s never that bad until you wake up the following morning. When you step out of bed, your muscles scream out in pain, and you’ll wonder how on earth you will be able to repeat your exercise again today. The thing is, getting fit and staying fit is the same. It’s all about turning up and doing the exercise. But it doesn’t have to be the same exercise each day. Jog one day, walk the next. Then perhaps go for a swim or do some light weights in the gym on other days. Fitness is all about movement, so find time each day for movement. What I’ve discovered about fitness is that it’s all about routine. It needs to be built into your day, and the time of day you do it needs to work for you. Once it becomes a routine and you get through the first fourteen days, it becomes much easier, and there’s rarely any muscle soreness (and

This week, why it’s important to know what kind of person you are. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 350 Hello, and welcome to episode 350 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. WOW! 350 episodes. I never thought this podcast would still be going strong after six years. Thank you to all of you for following me and this podcast and to everyone who has sent in questions. Please keep them coming in—they are the fuel of this podcast. So, back to this episode. One way to destroy your efforts to become better organised and more productive is to fight against yourself. This can manifest itself when you are a deadline-driven person trying to be a carefully planned out person. Let me give you an example: if you struggle to find the motivation to begin a project because the deadline is six months away, yet you pressure yourself to start now. You’ll likely find yourself losing interest and giving up after a few weeks. Then you beat yourself up. But, perhaps you’re not doing anything wrong; you’re just trying to do something you are not wired to do. That’s why it’s important to know what kind of person you are and to figure and what works and what doesn’t. Okay, before we go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Matthew. Matthew asks, Hi Carl, What do you recommend to someone who finds it difficult to get motivated unless there the deadline is right on top of them? Ho Matthew. Thank you for your question. I’ve witnessed something like this very close to home. My wife struggles to start work on a project or a task until the deadline is right in front of her. She then pulls out all the stops pulling all nighters if necessary. Yet, she always meets her deadlines. In the twenty + years I’ve known her, I cannot recall a time she missed a deadline. Ever. My mother, on the other-hand is the complete opposite. She will begin getting her holiday items together sever months before she travels. I know, when we travel to visit my family over the Christmas holidays, he will be wanting to plan her next trip to Korea with me. Six months before she’s likely to travel. She even gets her suitcase ready. It would be fruitless to encourage my wife to be more like my mother or vice versa. My mother hates stress—it gives her a headache. My wife doesn’t see the point in over preparing. Yet, we shouldn’t be looking at the methods, instead look at the results. Neither my wife nor my mother miss deadlines. They have different approaches, but still achieve the same results. Some of my coaching clients wake up very early 4:30 - 5:30 am and like to plan their day before they finish their morning routines end. Others find it more beneficial to plan the day the evening before. Yet, as long as you begin your day with a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished that day, does it really matter when you do your daily planning? I recommend if you are an early bird, do your planning in the morning. If you are more of a night owl, do it the evening before. What matters is you plan the day. The benefits of having a clear idea of what you want to get accomplished that day, far outweighs the timing of your planning. I have clients who see Ali Abdaal’s productivity recommendations and wonder how he gets any work done with so many tools being used to organise something as simple as what to do and when. Yet, I have other clients who love using the tools Ali recommends. There’s no right or wrong way to do this as long as you are getting the results you want. In your case, Matthew, the productivity tool that you should master is your calendar. If you are motivated by deadlines, you will need to be very clear about when you deadlines are. Having your deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section and in a colour you cannot fail to see will ensure you know when your deadlines are. All my project deadlines are in my calendar in red. These are hard deadlines and when I am planning my week, all I need to do is look ahead two or three weeks to see what’s coming up. You may also find it helpful to have a Master Projects list in your notes app so when you are planning the week you have a central place where all the information you need is. On your Master Projects list you can have the deadlines, and what needs to happen next. That way you can judge how much work is still required to meet your deadline. That’s someth

This week, the question is on how to reduce the time it takes to complete a solid weekly planning session. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 349 Hello, and welcome to episode 349 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One issue that frequently comes up in my YouTube video comments and email messages is the subject of weekly planning and it taking too long. It’s taken me a while to see how this might be happening, but a recent coaching call pointed me in the right direction. The issue is the difference between what David Allen calls the Weekly Review and planning a week. The Getting Things Done Weekly Review is, about looking backwards. You spend a lot of time looking at what you have done on individual projects. Given that in GTD, anything requiring two or more steps is a project and that by following that definition, you are going to have between, and I quote from the Getting Things Done book, thirty and hundred and fifty projects at any one time, is it any wonder weekly reviews take so long. This is why I do not call my planning session a weekly review. Instead, I am planning the week, not reviewing my work. The word “review”, at least to me, suggests looking at something that happened in the past. Yet, planning is about looking ahead. What’s happened has happened. What matters is what you do in the following seven days, and that will be contingent on appointments and commitments you have in those seven days. So, without further ado, let me turn you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling with doing my weekly plan. I’ve taken your advice to do it on a Saturday morning, but it still takes me almost two hours. Are there any secrets to getting it down to less than an hour? Hi Greg, thank you for your question. The question I would start with is, “Are you planning the week or looking back at the week just gone? If you are following the Time Sector System, one routine task I recommend is to give yourself ten minutes before you close out the day to process your task manager’s inbox. Processing your inbox is about asking three questions: What is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? The second question, What do I need to do? May give you the answer, nothing. In that case, you can delete the task altogether. When you do a task, will depend on its urgency. It may be something that doesn’t need to be done this week, in which case you can move it directly to your next week, this month or next month folder. If it does need to be done this week, when will you do it this week? You then add the date. Doing this routine task everyday, means when you sit down to do your weekly planning on Saturday morning, you only need look at your next week and this month folders and move anything to your This Week folder if you must or want to do it in the next seven days. In my experience, that only takes ten minutes. Now what about all those projects? Well, if you are still trying to manage you projects in a task manager, good luck. Weekly planning is going to take a long time. You will have to go through each project and make sure nothing has been missed. That’s going to take a long time if you have between thirty and 150 projects. However, if you manage your projects in your notes app, then these won’t need reviewing. Every time you touch a project you update the project note. You can, if you wish, move the next task to your task manager, although if you create tasks that tell you to work on a given project, you should not need to do that. I don’t define a project in the same way as David Allen does. A project for me is something that will take at least three months to complete and will have a lot of tasks to complete. In the Getting Things Done world. My upcoming trip to Europe is a project. Yet, for me, it’s a single task. Book flights. Once that task has been done, I will know exactly what needs to happen next. Do I need to book a hotel? This year, no, but I will need to book bus tickets once I arrive in Dublin. So the next action is to book the bus tickets. The thing is, I didn’t know if I needed to book a hotel or a bus ticket because that depended on what time we arrived at Dublin airport. And I didn’t know that until I had booked the flights. I do have a note in my notes app called “Ireland 2024” and in there, I have my packing list and a list of things

This week, I’m going to show you how to design your “perfect” day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 348 Hello, and welcome to episode 348 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 would a perfect day look like for you? I’m not talking about drinking sangria in a park, feeding animals in the zoo, and later, a movie. I’m talking about how a typical day would go. What time would you like to wake up? What would you enjoy doing for the first hour of your day? What would you like to do in the evenings? And what time would you like to go to bed? These questions are all part of what I call designing your perfect week. It’s an exercise that helps you to bring some structure into your day. Once implemented, this reduces the number of decisions you need to make each day and makes planning less demanding and a lot faster. Not taking control of your calendar means others will take control of it. If not your boss or customers, it’ll be your family and friends. This leaves you being pushed and pulled all over the place. When you wake up in the morning, you have no idea what will happen or where you will end up. More dangerously, you will have no idea whether you can get your work done, and inevitably, you’ll find yourself with huge backlogs and a lot of accumulated stress. Not a great place to be if you want to be better organised and more productive. So, let me show you how you can regain control of your calendar and start putting what you want first. This means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Megan. Megan asks, hi Carl, I’ve tried designing a “perfect” week but found I don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do. Do you have any tips to fit everything in? Hi Megan, thank you for your question. That you have discovered you don’t have enough time for everything you want to do is part of why I recommend people do the Perfect Week calendar exercise. The purpose is to help you see what you do and don’t have time for. But first, how do you set up the Perfect Week calendar? First, open up your calendar—it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar. What you are going to do is create a new calendar and call it “Perfect Week”. I recommend you do this on a larger screen. It is possible to do it on a phone, but you won’t see the bigger picture of the week. A laptop or tablet works better when you do this. Now, begin with your personal life. How much sleep do you want? What time will you go to bed? Block those times in first. For instance, if, in your perfect world, you go to bed at 11:00 pm and want seven hours of sleep, then you would block 11:00 pm to 6:30 am. (Allow yourself thirty minutes to fall asleep). Now, how long do you want for your morning routine? Perhaps you want the first hour of your day dedicated to you. To exercise, read, plan, meditate and/or write a journal. All you need to do in your perfect week calendar is block the time you want for these activities on your calendar. Call it your Morning routine time. (The details of what you do in that time can be added as a checklist in your notes later.) Next look at the evening. What would you like to do? Be careful here; you may wish to block time out for family and friends. When you do this, you are involving other people, and they will have a different agenda to you. You could, for instance, protect 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm for family time, but be flexible. Your teenage daughter will unlikely want to spend much time with you. Your partner, on the other hand, may wish you to sit with them and talk or watch their favourite TV show. Consider “family time” as being flexible. If no one wants to spend time with you, be available. Perhaps you could read in the same room as your family or do some chores around the house. Next, what would you like to do later in the evening before you go to bed? Put that on your calendar. Many of my clients enjoy playing a musical instrument, others use that time for self-study and some go out for an evening walk. Whatever you want to do, put it on your calendar. Now, your work. A couple of questions you can ask here are: how much time do you need to do focused work? Work that if you are consistent with will prevent backlogs and ensure you meet your deadlines. And how much time will you allow per week for meetings? Limiting your available meeting time is a great

This week, why you should not be copying other people’s systems. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 347 Hello, and welcome to episode 347 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 is a lot of advice on managing your to-dos, organising your notes and controlling your calendar. And it can be tempting to copy whatever you have seen, believing if it worked for someone else, it must work for you. Well, not so fast. One thing I’ve learned from coaching hundreds of people is that no individual is the same. We think differently, have different jobs, and have different family lives and interests. One example is Tiago Forte’s PARA method. It’s a great way to organise your notes, and many people swear by it. However, it never worked for me. I’m a goal-orientated person. Goals motivate me. I also define Areas of Focus differently from how Tiago defines an area. This is why I settled on GAPRA (Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive.) This does not mean that PARA does not work. It works, for some people. Similarly, I have coaching clients who find GAPRA works better. It all depends on how you think, like to organise things and do your work. So, what can you do with so much conflicting advice? How can you find the methods for you? Well, before I get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, hi Carl. I’ve been a life-long follower of productivity systems and have struggled to find a system that works for me. How would you advise someone to find a way that works for them? Hi Frank, thank you for your question. Around 20 years ago, I began my career as an English teacher in Korea. I had come from working a typical 9 til 5 office job and suddenly I was on the other side of the world, working from 6:30 am to 12:00 pm and 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. It was tough. I’m not a natural morning person—never have been—so waking up at 5:00 am was a shock to my system. It wasn’t long before I began taking naps. I would get home at 12:30, and go straight back to bed for two hours. For the next ten years, that’s what I continued to do. I had learned about the power of taking naps from none other than Winston Churchill. He believed that if you took a solid 90 minute nap every afternoon you would be able to get at least a day and half’s worth of work done in a day. He wasn’t wrong. By taking an afternoon nap I found I was full of energy when teaching in the evening and was able to spend an hour preparing for my next day’s classes when I got home in the evening. Yet, I knew Churchill took his naps between 3:30 pm and 5:00 pm. That didn’t work for me. So I adapted it to work better for me. Likewise, back in 2016 or so, I read Robin Sharma’s brilliant 5 AM Club book. I was sold. I thought, okay, let’s give this a try. For those of you not familiar with the 5 AM Club, this is where you wake up at 5:00 AM and do twenty minutes of exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of learning. It’s solid way to begin your day. Yet, I had a problem. I’ve never been comfortable exercising in the morning. So, I adapted it. I did twenty minutes journal writing, then ten minutes planning the day and finally studied Korean for thirty minutes. And it worked. I was consistent for around eighteen months and I loved it. But then I hit a problem. My coaching business began taking off and I was doing coaching calls late at night—sometimes not finishing until midnight. This meant I was trying to survive on four or five hours of sleep. Not a good thing if you want to be productive. It then occurred to me, the “secret” to the 5 am club is not waking up at 5 am. It’s what you do immediately on waking up that matters. Today, I wake up around 8:00 am, and start my day with a solid set of morning routines that include journal writing, some stretches and learning my email inbox. It works perfect for me. It sets me up for mostly productive days. And that’s the key point. Whatever you learn about productivity, time management and living life doesn’t have to be followed exactly as described. We all live different lives and it can be modified to better work for you. However, there are a few caveats here. The first is you will not be able to break basic principles. For instance, if you want a solid way to manage your life, you will need to collect stuff into a trusted place and not rely o

This week, I have a special episode for you. A second interview with Dr Kourosh Dini. In this episode, we talk about rationalisation and how to change our approach to many of the false beliefs that come from it. We also discussed pens and paper and a little more about managing ADHD. Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work. Newsletter: https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/ Waves of Focus https://wavesoffocus.com/ on SMART goals https://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/

Is it possible to expand time? Literally, no. But there is a way to find more time if you’re willing to use these techniques. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 345 Hello, and welcome to episode 345 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Common phrases you will hear are “I don’t have time” or “I wish I had more time”, and yet you already have all the time you need. The problem is not time, the problem is often the amount of things we want to do in the time we have. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, life was simple. Find food and water, make babies and stay safe. Neglecting either of those three things would result in some serious issues—the biggest of which would be death. Given that human evolution is slow, we are not best suited to deal with hundreds of emails and messages, requests from bosses, finding child care, commuting to and from work and all the other modern-day accessories we’ve chosen to add to our lives. We cannot expand time, yet if we are unwilling to reduce what we want to do, we will feel overwhelmed and that more modern ailment, the fear of missing out, or FOMO. However, there are a few techniques you can use that will give you enough time for the things you want to do if you are willing to try them. But before I get to how, allow me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Giles. Giles asks, Hi Carl, I’ve done your “perfect week” exercise and realise that my problem is I want to do too much. There isn’t enough time in the day. Do you have any tips on fitting in hobbies and still get enough sleep? Hi Giles, thank you for your question. The good thing is you’ve discovered that no matter what you want to do or feel you must do, you will always be limited by the amount of time available. And, now that you’ve done the Perfect Week calendar exercise, you can see what you have left after taking care of your work and family obligations. One of the first realisations about finding time was when I learned of Ian Fleming’s writing routine. Ian Fleming wrote a new book each year from 1952 to his death in 1964. He never missed a year, even in the year he had his first heart attack in 1961. In the early years, Fleming worked For The Sunday Times as their foreign editor, yet he negotiated a two-month vacation each January and February. During those two months, he would fly off to his Jamaican home, Goldeneye and almost from the first day, would begin writing the next book from 9:30 to 12:30. After lunch, he would nap, and then the day’s socialising would begin. Around 4 pm, he would go back to his writing desk for an hour to review what he had written that morning, and that would be it. Four hours a day for six weeks. That produced the first draft of his next book. For the rest of the year, he worked his regular job in London. Dealt with any rewrites and began marketing the book that was being published that year. If you were to analyse how Ian Fleming managed his time, he wasn’t looking at the day-to-day. He looked at the year as a whole. He knew he needed six weeks to write a new novel each year, so he made sure those six weeks were blocked out in his diary before the new year began. That’s just six weeks out of fifty-two. This is similar to blocking time out for your core work. If you know you need ten hours a week to do your core work, hoping you will find the time is not a sustainable strategy. You won’t, so it will be more a case of hoping you will find the time. Those ten hours need to be locked in each week. Ian Fleming would never have written fourteen James Bond novels if he had “hoped” to find the time to do so. He had to find the time and then protect it. You have 168 hours a week and twenty-four each day. Squeezing everything into those twenty-four hours will be tough—almost impossible. Yet, if you were to schedule for the week, where you have 168 hours, things become possible. I see many people anxiously trying to find family time every day. It would be nice if you could do that, but you are dealing with other people and your 6 to 9 pm might not be convenient for them. Instead, you could agree with your family that certain days or evenings are for family time. For instance, my wife and I ensure that Wednesday afternoons and Saturday evenings are protected for family time. It’s lovely because while it is flexible, there’s no need for us to be trying to s

Backlogs… A rather bigger part of life that we probably wish wasn’t. Did you know that there are three types of backlog, two of which you don’t really need to worry too much about? Let me explain. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 344 Hello, and welcome to episode 344 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Let’s be honest: somewhere in our carefully organised lives, backlogs will build. It could be email, the ever-increasing list of house repairs, or the daily admin life generates. With everything going on in our lives, it would be easy to believe that finding the time to stop these backlogs from growing is impossible. Yet, when you understand the three types of backlogs, you can develop a process that stops the backlog from growing. The three types are the growing backlog, the stalled backlog and the shrinking one. You don’t need to worry about the shrinking backlog. It’s doing what you want it to do—shrinking. That could be getting your receipts together in preparation for doing your taxes. You’re gathering and sorting them, so the backlog is shrinking. This generally happens when the tax submission season is almost upon us. The stalled backlog is also a little less urgent. It’s not growing, but you need to watch it carefully because this kind of backlog can start snowballing—house or car repairs, for example, often do this. The most dangerous backlog is the growing one. This often happens with email and admin tasks and can occur when you try to expand your business too fast without adding resources. Before we go any further, let me first hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Janice. Janice asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to get my life organised but don’t have time because I have so many things to do. My email’s a mess, and every weekend, I spend all day cleaning up my home. How do you get on top of things when you are far behind? Hi Janine, thank you for sending in your question. This is a tough one. It can feel like we are stuck between wanting to get ourselves organised and realising that we have such a big backlog of stuff to do that it would take several months to break even—so to speak. The strategy here is to first determine what kind of backlog you’re dealing with. Is it growing, stalled, or shrinking? If it’s shrinking, keep doing what you are already doing. It’s shrinking, so it’s doing what you want it to do. Don’t stop. The one that needs immediate attention is the growing one. Imagine that you have over a few thousand emails in your inbox. It’s making finding important emails slow and cumbersome, and you want to get it cleared. The challenge is that more emails appear every day, and that number is not fixed. Some days, you may receive 150+ new emails, while other days, perhaps it’s eighty. Either way, until you can achieve a net gain—i.e., processing and clearing more emails than come in—the backlog will continue to grow. With email, I would first clear out the older emails. There will be a point where you’ve ignored an email for so long that it would be embarrassing to respond to it now. Where is that point? For me, that’s two weeks. It would be embarrassing for me to respond to any email that’s been sitting around for two weeks or more. You may be more tolerant than I am. You may be happy responding to emails older than a month or two. Where is your limit? Once you know your limit, take any email older than your limit and move it to a new folder in your email program called “Old inbox”. This way, nothing has been lost, and you can go through that list when you have time. That list will no longer be growing. You’ve put a stop to it. Now, to prevent the backlog from growing, you will need to clear whatever emails remain in your inbox first, so you start from zero. Now, here’s where you will need to be cautious of FOMO—the fear of missing out. This can paralyse you because you are fearful that you might be deleting something important. Fear not. Always remember with email if you have been sent something there will be a copy of it somewhere. If for whatever reason you do need something you’ve deleted, you can reach out to a colleague and get a copy. One of disadvantages of digitalization is we no longer see things piling up. Back in the day when most of what came across our desks was paper, it was very easy to see backlogs growing. The pile was physical and you co

What can you do to simplify your productivity system to keep you focused on what’s important each day? That’s what we’re looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 343 Hello, and welcome to episode 343 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Oh dear, I seem to have opened up a storm with some people with one of my recent YouTube videos on managing a task manager. That also resulted in a few questions about keeping a system simple. The question is, what is a time management and productivity system meant to do for you? The answer is easy—to inform you of what needs to be done and ensure you are prepared and in the right place at the right time. When you strip productivity systems down to their basics, as long as your calendar is accurate and tells you where you need to be and when, and you have a way to see what tasks you should be working on today, you have a system that works. Yet, it can be tempting to want more. A way to organise tasks by your energy levels or to know how many days are left until the deadline is reached, for example. The problem here is that you have no idea what your energy levels will be, and deadlines change… A lot… and for the most part, they are arbitrarily added, which means you know they are not real deadlines—ah, more fiddling. While all these extras are nice, there is a danger of becoming dependent on them. That’s when it becomes a slippery slope. They pull you into fiddling with your tools, which prevents you from doing the work you need to do. Which ultimately means you don’t have time for the things you want time for. So, this week, a very simple question and for that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Martha. Martha asks, Hi Carl, how would you make productivity simpler? Hi Martha, thank you for your question. The first place I would start is to clean up and organise my calendar. It’s your calendar you refer to when you need to know where to be and what you are committed to doing. This involves removing conflicts. Conflicts occur when your calendar shows two meetings at the same time or your next meeting begins before a previous meeting ends. You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one. If you have a meeting start before you are able to get there, inform the meeting organiser so they can either accept your late arrival or move the meeting to a more convenient time. The sooner you do this, the better it is for everyone concerned. I use a scheduling service for my coaching client appointments. That service will not allow any conflicts to occur and automatically puts in a ten-minute buffer between meetings. That’s always a good practice to follow. Make sure you have buffer time between meetings. Meetings occasionally overrun, and you need to reset yourself before the next meeting. The next step is hard for many people. Throughout our working lives we’ve become conditioned to be available at all times for our customers and bosses. And while you should not ignore these people, you are employed to do a specific job. I know it’s become common for companies to create job titles and job descriptions in the vaguest possible ways but underneath that vagueness, there will be a set of core work activities we are expected to do—what was once called “our duties”. What are your duties? What do you need to ensure is done on time each day or week? That’s your core work. What does doing your core work look like at a task level? For example, if you were employed as a construction worker (a vague job title) and were given the responsibility to build the perimeter wall. At a task level, laying bricks would be your core work. Now within that, they may be other tasks such as ensuring you have a sufficient supply of bricks and cement and that you laid the guide lines to ensure the bricks were laid straight. What do those activities look like at a task level. What do you need to do (and how frequently) to order bricks and cement? By looking at things from a task level, you put yourself in a better position to estimate how much time you need to complete your work. For instance, if you find you need to place an order for bricks and cement every Monday morning and it takes you thirty minutes to do that task, you can create a thirty-minute block of time for admin every Monday morning. If you must place the order before 10:00 AM, then you may

Did you know that your calendar is the only productivity tool that can protect you from burning out and overcommitting yourself and, if used correctly, help you bring balance into your life? No? Well, let me explain in this week’s podcast. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 342 Hello, and welcome to episode 342 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Professor Barry Schwartz explains how too many choices can slow us down, create confusion and reduce sales. You can see this in recent times with the explosion in new productivity apps. Thirty years ago, the only tools you had to manage your time and your work were diaries. There was a lot of different styles to choose from, but the price point of these diaries helped to make choosing a diary reasonably simple. Many companies gave away diaries as gifts to customers, some issued all their staff with one, while some people would go out an buy their own—I was one of those. Yet because a diary can only show you the same thing—your twenty-four hours or seven days—people were much more focused on the doing part, and less on collecting and organising. And let’s be honest, if all you have is a diary, there not a lot of organising you can do. While we now have digital calendars, task managers and notes apps, really only two things have changed. The speed at which we can collect information and the increase in the number of potential tools we can use to help our productivity. Unfortunately, that increase in productivity tools has caused a lot of confusion. Many people confuse events—something that happens at a specific time on a given date—and tasks—something that can be done at any time. When that happens, the only outcome is going to be overwhelm and a lot of rescheduling. Not a very productive way to go about your day. This week’s question goes to the heart of this issue. So, without further a do, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weeks’ question. This week’s question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, hi Carl, I’m very interested in your ideas around how to use a calendar versus using a to-do list. Could you explain your thinking around this? Hi Jeff, I certainly can. In Your Time, Your Way, I mentioned when I visit companies I notice that those people who began their careers in the early to mid 1990s are generally more organised than their younger colleagues. Of course that’s not a scientific observation, but I wonder if that’s down to how large corporations in the 1990s often sent their staff on time management training courses. You don’t hear of those courses much today. It’s also likely that those who began in the 1990s developed solid time management practices and have not changed their approach much over the years. I’m sure they’ve switched over the a digital calendar, but a lot still carry round note books. I remember seeing an interview with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, in around 2015. He was interviewed in his then office, and while there was an iMac on his desk and a MacBook Pro on a table behind him, there was also a notebook and pen. This was after the Apple Pencil had come out, which, in theory, meant he no longer needed to carry a notebook and pen. Tim Cook will have begun his career in the mid to late 80s, and while at IBM, he will have been sent on a time management course—I do believe, IBM worked with the Franklin Quest organisation back then—which meant he will have gone through his career with a solid knowledge of time management principles. So, that’s a little background. Now, how do we use our calendars today so we are operating at our most productive each day? Well, first we need to know to difference between a task or to-do and an event. A task or to-do is something you can do at anytime. For example, if you need to respond to a question from a client via email, you could do that at 9:15 am or 2:35 pm. There’s no fixed time. Similarly, if you want to finish off a report for your boss, you could do that at 10:00 am or 3:20 pm. As long as you finish the report today—your plan, it doesn’t really matter when in the day you finish the report. And event on the other hand is time specific. If you have a meeting with your boss at 10:00 am in your boss’s office. You’d better be there at 10:00 am. If it takes you thirty-five minutes to get to your office, that means you will need to leave your home around 9:15 am to be sure you will be

Is there a gulf between what you want and where you are? That’s what we are looking at today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 341 Hello, and welcome to episode 341 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Many time management and pro ductivity problems result from a disconnect between one’s goals and what one is prepared to sacrifice to achieve them. If you want to spend more time with your family yet are not prepared to say no to working beyond your regular working hours, there is a disconnect. If you want to lose twenty pounds yet are not willing to cut back on sugary treats and exercise a little, there is a disconnect. And, if you want to be more productive yet are unwilling to protect time on your calendar for doing the work you want to productively do, there is a disconnect. It is sad to watch people desperately scramble for any excuse for not doing the things they say they want to do. It’s easy to find excuses, but much harder to be honest with yourself and accept that whatever you say is important to you is not important at all. As the saying goes, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”. Worthwhile goals take time. Often, you will need to learn new skills, gain experience and build endurance. There will be setbacks and sacrifices to be made. And, of course, time to be found. That’s all part of what makes achieving goals exciting. If it were easy to achieve your goals, you would feel empty and unfulfilled and likely not bother trying to improve yourself. It’s an interesting topic, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Suzie. Suzie asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to find the time to do everything I want to do. I’ve done your Perfect Week exercise but never seem to be able to fit everything into my week. My Perfect week looks great; my real week is a mess. Is there anything else I can do to fit more into my week? Hi Suzie, Thank you for your question. This is something I come across a lot in my coaching programme. An ambitious person discovers there are not enough hours in the day to do everything they want to do. Often, it’s someone who works a full-time job from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, who wants to exercise for an hour every day and start their own side business in the evening. Now, all of that is possible, but it won’t be if you also want to spend time with your family, go out every weekend with your friends and watch episodes of your favourite TV show each evening. As David Allen says, you can do anything you want, but you cannot do everything. One of the first things you can do is to begin with the basics. How much time do you need to sleep and eat? Typically, people require between six and eight hours of sleep each day. If you sacrifice sleeping time, what’s going to happen? You’ll first become tired and easily distracted; if you continue not getting enough sleep, you will become sick. How will that help you do the things you want to do? So, get the basics right first. For any human to operate at their optimum level, they need the right amount of sleep, healthy food and some exercise each day. Lack of sleep, poor-quality food, and sitting around all day will destroy your energy levels, mess with your emotions, and result in you not getting very much done. Get those three things right first. The next step is to look at your calendar. Where can you protect time for doing what is most important to you? This will depend on what it is you want to do. For instance, if you want to start building your own business, you may only be able to do this in the evenings after work. Perhaps, if you are more of a morning person, the only time available might be early in the morning. Author John Grisham used to write his books before going to work in the morning. He’d wake up at 4:30 and write for two hours before getting ready for work. However, it comes down to how much you are willing to sacrifice to pursue your goals. If waking up at 4:30 AM is not something you are willing to do to work on your business dream, that’s fine. Nobody will judge you. That’s simply a choice you have made. There’s very little I would wake up at 4:30 AM for. This isn’t just about our dreams and goals. Perhaps you want to be a great parent—who doesn’t? What does being a great parent look like? Maybe you decide to have a family meal every evening at 7:00 pm

One of the biggest drains on your time (and productivity) is a disorganized workspace. This week, I’m sharing some ideas for getting organised so you can find what you need when you need it. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 340 Hello, and welcome to episode 340 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. I remember watching videos by David Allen—author of Getting Things Done—where he explains the importance of having an organised workspace. These videos were recorded before the digital takeover, yet the principles remain the same whether we deal with paper or digital documents. If your stuff is all over the place, you will waste a lot of time trying to find what you need, and it’s surprising how much time you lose. This week’s question caught my attention, as getting and keeping your workspace organised is an overlooked part of the modern productivity movement. It won’t matter how clever your digital tools are if you don’t know where everything is or how to organise your notes so you can find what you need when you need it in seconds. You’ll still waste much time doing stuff you shouldn’t need to do. As I researched this, I could only find advice on keeping desks and physical files, notes, and documents organised. There is little advice on keeping a digital workspace clean and organised. Well, that is apart from some older articles about how an untidy computer desktop slows down your computer and makes finding anything slow and cumbersome. Now before I go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Alice. Alice asks, Hi Carl, How do you keep all your files, notes and other digital things organised? I’m really struggling here and would love some advice. Hi Alice, thank you for your question. One of the first things you will need to do is allocate a single place for your digital documents. Today, most people are comfortable storing all their personal files in a cloud storage system, such as Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, or Apple’s iCloud. If you are concerned about security, an external hard drive also works. Now, just as before the 2000s, you will likely have two places: one for work and one for your personal stuff. Your company will probably dictate your work storage system. The important thing about storing documents and files you may need is accessibility—i.e., how fast you can access the files. In the past, if we wanted a file for a client named Rogers, we would go to the filing cabinet, locate the letter R, and find the file for Rogers there. If it wasn’t there, one of our colleagues probably had it. (And how frustrating was that) Today, all you need to do is open iCloud, One Drive or Google Drive and type in the name of the client you are looking for. You will then be presented with a list of all the documents related to that client. And perhaps you may already be seeing a problem. In the past, everything was kept together in a single file folder; today, client notes can be found everywhere. We have CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management software) that track communications with customers and clients. However, these are only as good as those who enter the data. We receive phone calls, emails, perhaps text messages, and all the documentation generated by orders, invoices, and quotes. If the people entering the data are not timely and perfect, time can be wasted just looking for all that stuff. Those CRM systems may track documents related to that client, which makes things a little easier. But do you trust them? So, how can you keep your workspace organised and in order? First, choose your tools. Your calendar and email will likely already be selected for you in your professional environment. Fortunately, you should have freedom over your task manager and notes app. Rule number one. Use only one. By this, I mean one task manager, one notes app and one calendar. Now, it is okay to use a separate calendar for your work events; after all, you may only be able to access your work calendar through selected devices. I would always advise you to try to connect your work calendar to your personal one where possible. By this, I mean that if you use a Google or Apple calendar for your personal life, you can subscribe to your work calendar. Not all companies allow this, but I’ve found that most do. This way, you have all your events viewable in one place. (Wasn’t

Podcast 339 How do you prioritise your tasks and estimate how long something will take to do? That’s what we’re looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 339 Hello, and welcome to episode 339 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. This week, I have two common questions to answer: The first is how do I prioritise when everything’s urgent, and the second is how do you know how long a task will take? Your areas of focus and core work determine one, and the other is impossible. Before I answer the question, I’d like to let you know that I am now on Substack. There will be a link in the show notes for you to subscribe. I have a crazy plan to write on Substack every week and, over a year, complete a book. The book will tackle the time management and productivity problems we face today and use subscriber comments and questions to enhance the book. If it’s any good at the end of the year, I will publish the book. So, please help and become a subscriber. You can become part of something very special. Okay, on with the episode. Let me deal with the impossible issue first. How do you determine how long a task will take? The problem here is you are human and not a machine. This means you are affected by how much sleep you got last night, your mood, and whether you are excited by the task or not. You will also be affected by things like jet lag, whether a close family member is sick or if you had a fight with your spouse or partner that morning. This is why I don’t recommend task-based productivity systems. They are not sustainable. Sure, some days you can do all your tasks and have oodles of energy left in the evening. On most days, you’ll struggle to do two or three of them. I usually write my blog posts on a Monday morning. I’ve been doing this for eight years. I write roughly the same length each time—around a thousand words. Yet, some days, I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes; others, it takes me ninety minutes to write 750 words. I cannot predict what type of day I will have. Yet, what I do know is that if I sit down and start, I’m going to get something done. And that’s good enough. This means I know I have two hours to write, and something will get done as long as I write in those two hours. I want to finish everything, but if I can’t, as long as I’ve got something written when I return to finish later, it will be much easier than if I had not started. However, that said, sometimes time constraints can help. If you know you have a deadline on Friday, and you also know you still have a lot to do, putting yourself under a bit of pressure to get moving on the project can help tap into your energy reserves. The trouble is that this is not sustainable or productive in the long run. Doing that means you will neglect other parts of your work. Emails will pile up, your admin will become backlogged, and you will neglect other things you should be doing, meaning you will need to tap into those reserves repeatedly. And that becomes a vicious circle. What works is to allocate time for your important work each day. Instead of focusing on how much you have to do, you focus on your available time. Imagine you are in sales, and you have follow-ups to do each day. If, on average, you need an hour to do your follow-up, that would be the time you protect each day for doing your follow-ups. Some days, you will complete them in less than an hour; others, you won’t. But it doesn’t matter. As long as you do your follow-ups daily, you will always be on top or thereabouts each week. And let’s be honest: When dealing with phone calls, nobody knows how long they will take. It’s just not something you can predict. Now, on to the question of prioritising your day. This comes back to knowing what is important to you and your core work—the work you are paid to do (not the work you volunteer to do). All the classic books on time management start with you thinking about what you want before you dive headfirst into sorting out the mountain of work you think you must do. You see if you do not know what is important to you, everything that seems remotely urgent will be important to you. And that is not true at all. It could be argued that not knowing what is important is just plain laziness. You’re delegating an essential aspect of your life to everyone else because you cannot be bothered to decide. If you don’t determine what’s critical, then ev

What is the Eisenhower Matrix and how can you use it to help you focus on the important things in life. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 338 Hello, and welcome to episode 338 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. You may have heard of the Eisenhower Matrix, or as Stephen Covey called it in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the Productivity Matrix. It’s a matrix of four squares divided up between Important and urgent (called quadrant 1), Important and not urgent (quadrant 2), urgent and not important (quadrant 3) and not urgent and not important (quadrant 4). It’s one of those methods that gets a lot of attention after a book has been launched. Yet, this matrix was first introduced to us by President Eisenhower in the 1950s after President Eisenhower mentioned in an interview that "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. This “quote” was first spoken by Dr J Roscoe Miller, president of the North Western University at that time. So, it’s questionable if Eisenhower ever applied this method to his work, but whether he did or he didn’t, it is an excellent framework to help you prioritise your work and help you to get focused on your important work and aspects of your life. This week’s question is all about this matrix and how you can apply it to your life so you are not neglecting the important, but not urgent things that so many of us neglect because they are not screaming at us and because they need an element of discipline which so many people find difficult today. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Michele. Michele asks, hi Carl, I recently read your book and saw that you wrote about the Eisenhower Matrix. I’ve always been fascinated by this matrix but have never been able to use it in my daily life. How do you use it to get things done? Hi Michele, thank you for your question. This matrix is one of those things that once you’ve learned and begin to apply it to your daily life, you soon forget you are using it. Let me explain. Much of what comes our way is “urgent”, or it is to the person asking us to do something. That could be your boss, a client, your spouse or partner or your kids. Whatever they want, they want it now, and only you can give it to them. Then, there are quite a few things that are important but not urgent. These include taking care of your health, planning your week and day, sitting down for a family meal at least once a day, and self-development—whether that is through reading books, going to night school, or taking courses. These are often neglected because the urgent and important drown them out. Ironically, if you consistently take care of the important and not urgent things, you will spend less time dealing with the urgent and important. Yet, most people cannot get to these quadrant 2 tasks because the quadrant 1 tasks are swamping them. It becomes a vicious circle. The bottom part of the matrix—the not important things—is what you want to avoid. these are the urgent and not important and the not important and not urgent things. (What’s called quadrants 3 and 4). The urgent and not important things (quadrant 3) are the deceptive things. These are unimportant emails dressed up to look important. Most emails and messages will come under this quadrant. One of the things I’ve noticed when I begin working with a new client is the kind of tasks they have in their digital task manager. 80% of the tasks there are not important tasks. It’s these tasks that are drowning out the quadrant 1 and 2 tasks (the important ones). I am starting an experiment to see if using a paper Franklin Planner for three months can still be done in 2024. One thing I’ve already noticed is because I have to write out the tasks I need to or want to do today, I am much more aware of the kind of tasks I am writing. My daily task list is much shorter than when I do this digitally. As a consequence, tasks that are not important (urgent or otherwise) rarely get onto my list. This paper-based task list has reversed the type of tasks on my list—now, 80% are important. So, what kind of tasks fall into these different categories? Let’s begin with the easiest one: Quadrant 4. These are the tasks that are not important and not urgent. These tasks include watching TV, scrolling social media,

What are the time-tested principles of better time management and productivity? That’s what I’m exploring in this week’s episode. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 337 Hello, and welcome to episode 337 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you have read books on time management and productivity, you may have picked up that there are a few basic principles that never seem to change. Things like writing everything down, not relying on your head to remember things, planning your day and week, and writing out what is important to you. These are solid principles that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The tools we use may have changed, but these principles have not and never will. What is surprising are the attempts to reinvent time management. New apps and systems seem to come out every month claiming to be “game-changing”—I hate that phrase—or more ways to defy the laws of time and physics and somehow create more time in the day than is possible. Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin Planner, an icon of time management and productivity, always said that time management principles have not changed in over 6,000 years. What has changed is the speed at which we try to do things. Technology hasn’t changed these time management principles; all technology has done is make doing things faster. Today, I can send an email to the other side of the world, and it will arrive instantly. Two hundred years ago, I would have had to write a letter, go to the post office to purchase a stamp, and send it. It would arrive two or three months later. Funnily enough, I read a book called The Man With The Golden Typewriter. It’s a book of letters Ian Fleming sent to his readers and publisher. He often began his letters with the words “Thank you for your letter of the 14th of February,” yet the date of his reply was in April. Not only were things slower fifty years ago, people were more patient. So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Lisa. Lisa asks, Hi Carl, I’ve noticed you’ve been talking about basic principles of productivity recently. Are there any principles you follow that have not changed? Hi Lisa, thank you for your question. The answer is yes, there are. Yet, it took me a long time to realise the importance of these principles. The first one, which many people try to avoid, is establishing what is important to you. This is what I call doing the backend work. You see, if you don’t know what is important to you, your days will be driven by the latest urgent thing. That’s likely to come from other people and not from you. Stephen Covey wrote about this in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, with his Time Management Matrix, also called the Eisenhower Matrix. This matrix is divided into Important and urgent, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, and not urgent and not important. The goal of this matrix is to spend as much time as possible in the second quadrant—the important but not urgent. This area includes things like getting enough sleep, planning, exercising, and taking preventative action. The more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent and important and urgent and not important areas. Yet, unless you know what is important to you, the only thing driving your day will be the things that are important to others. That includes your company, your friends and family. They will be making demands on you, and as you have no barriers, their crises will become yours. You, in effect, become part of the problem instead of being part of the solution. When you have your life together, you can offer calm, considered solutions to those you care about. You also know when to get involved and when to stay well away. Yet, you can only do that when you know what is important to you. Many authors and time management specialists refer to establishing what is important to you in different ways; Hyrum Smith calls this establishing your governing values, Stephen Covey calls it knowing your roles, and I call them your areas of focus. These are just names for essentially the same thing. Get to know what is important to you as an individual. Then, write them down in a place where you can refer back to them regularly so you know that your days, weeks, and months are living according to the principles that are im

This week, how to process your task manager’s inbox quickly and effectively so you can get focused on what needs to be done. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 336 Hello, and welcome to episode 336 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One issue that pops up regularly in my coaching programme is an overwhelming inbox. There are too many unclear items left to fester and fill up space, with no clear pathway to dealing with whatever needs to be done. Now, it’s true that you need to collect things. If you’re not collecting your commitments and ideas, you soon find yourself forgetting to do the important things you have committed to. However, collecting is just the first part of a three-part process. You also need to organise what you collect and then do the work. There are no shortcuts around this. These are the three principles of task management. Collect whatever needs to be collected, organise what you collect and then do the work. This is something I have learned the hard way. I’ve collected thousands of items over the years, and in my early days, before I had learned the basic principles, that meant my inbox filled up and just became an overwhelming mess. It was a place I never wanted to visit because it just reminded me of how unproductive and disorganised I was. I know those basic principles now: I collect stuff, regularly organise what I collect, and then do the work. Today’s podcast is about organising what you collected. I will tell you how to quickly clear your inbox, sort out the important from the unimportant, and, more importantly, get comfortable deleting stuff that is low in importance. Oh, and before I forget, Friday this week—that’s the 6th of September— sees the opening session of my Ultimate Productivity Workshop. This is your chance to learn the fundamental principles and put them into practice so you can become a master of time management and productivity. There are just a few places left, so if you want to become better organised, more productive, and in control of your time, join the workshop today. Details for the event are in the show notes and on my website, Carl Pullein.com. Okay, on with the show, which means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, “Hi Carl, I am really struggling with my inbox. I put a lot of stuff in there, from ideas to things my wife asks me to do and emails that need a response. Each day, I feel I am collecting thirty or more things, and then it takes forever to clear the inbox. I hate doing it, so I don’t. And, of course, that just makes things worse. What can I do to make keeping my inbox manageable. Hi Jeff, Thank you for your question. The good news is there are a few changes you can make that will help to reduce the overwhelm caused by an overloaded inbox. Let’s first deal with the three questions to ask when you process your inbox. These three questions will clarify what you have and help you to determine if you really need to do them or not. The first question is, “Do I need to do it?” This is designed to clear tasks that have already been done or are no longer relevant because events have moved on. You will often add a task like “Find out if Margo has all the documents she needs.” Later that day, Margo may ask you a question about the documents. You now know she has them. The task can be deleted or modified if the question requires you to do something. Or you may have been asked by someone to do something only for them to tell you later that the task no longer needs to be done. These can all be deleted. Similarly, you may have added tasks to look up something or find out more about something, only to look at the task later and wonder what you were thinking. You are no longer interested in the idea. Again, delete these. If the task still needs to be done, then move on to the next question, which is: What do I need to do? This question concerns properly defining the task. It’s not good to have a task that simply says, “Tony script.” That might have meant something to you when you added it to your inbox, but if you do not need to do the task for a week or two, when the task comes back you’ll be unsure what needs to be done. Make it clear. Rewrite the task as something like, “Send Tony the amended voice-over script.” This makes sense. If you are sending Tony many different scripts, yo

One of the most productive things you could do is to start writing a daily journal. In this week’s episode, I answer a question about how to get started journaling. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 335 Hello, and welcome to episode 335 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Possibly the most productive thing I have done over the last ten years is to write a journal. This habit has taught me many things. For one, it has taught me the value of consistency. The act of spending ten to fifteen minutes every morning before I start the day has given me something deliberate—I sit down and write—which has led to me building out a solid set of morning routines that start my day in a way that’s healthy (mentally) and productive. It is productive because it gives me a few minutes to think about the day ahead and review my objective tasks—the things I want to or must complete that day. This is far better than rolling out of bed at the last minute, rushing around to get dressed and out the door only to realise I left something important at home. Writing a journal every day has also given me a space to analyse where I am doing well and where there is room for improvement. It allows me to write how I am feeling and what I am worrying about and consider future directions. It’s almost as if I have a close friend I can confess all to. Now, if you search YouTube for journaling, you will find thousands of videos advising how to start. Yet, it can be difficult. What do you write about? Do you use a digital tool like Day One or Apple’s Journaling app, or an old-fashioned paper notebook? There’s a lot of questions. This week, I received a question about starting and what I suggest you use. So, I decided to share all the tips I’ve learned over the years so you, too, can begin this fantastic habit. Before I get to the question, there are just under two weeks until the start of September’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop. This workshop will teach you how to build your own productivity and time management system from the ground up. We begin with your calendar and task manager, and I show you how to connect the two so that they work in harmony. This removes the overwhelm we face when tasks swamp our days. In the second week, I show you how to do an effective weekly planning session and how to get, and more importantly, stay on top of your communications—those hundreds of emails and messages that must be dealt with daily. By the end of this workshop, you will have a perfectly balanced system that works for you and your work style. What you will learn will eliminate backlogs, help you identify what is important (and what is not), and establish your core work and areas of focus. You will learn a lot in this workshop. Plus, your package includes four courses, which gives you lifetime access to the four key elements of maintaining your system. There are only a limited number of places, so if you haven’t registered yet, you can do so with the link in the show notes. I hope to see you there on the 6th of September. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Naomi. Naomi asks, Hi Carl, I saw your recent video on how to get started with journaling. Could you talk a little more about what to write and your recommendations about the best way to write it? Hi Naomi, thank you for your question. Let me first deal with digital Vs paper journals. There are many advantages to writing your journal digitally. For one, you can add a photo each day and set the journal to collect data such as your exercise, the weather, and, if you wish, what you posted on social media automatically. I spent three years writing my journal in Day One. It was easy. I could write on my phone, my computer or my iPad. I preferred my iPad, but occasionally I would write on my phone. What stopped me was the realisation that technology was gradually taking over my life. I was no longer doing anything manually and was always on the lookout for more convenience. Sure, convenience is nice. In theory, anyway, it frees up time for other pursuits. Yet, I found those other pursuits were not productive or healthy. It invariably meant more time on social media and TV watching. So, back in January, I switched back to handwriting my journals. I’ve discovered that handwriting my journal has slowed me down. It’s helped me to be more thoughtful

You have an overflowing inbox, you’re behind on projects and your calendar for the next ten days is full of meetings and other commitments. What can you do to get things under control and meeting your commitments? That’s what we’re looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 334 Hello, and welcome to episode 334 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. I know it can be easy for productive people to say all you need to do is this or that, and you, too, will be productive. The reality is it’s not that simple. It’s not just about getting organised, reestablishing control of your calendar, and learning to use a to-do list properly; there’s also a mindset shift involved. Many people I work with individually have been told and come to believe that they are disorganised and sloppy with their time management. If you’re told this too often and your actions support it, you begin to believe it. Being poor at time management and productivity becomes an identity. Once you believe you are bad at these things, it becomes a self-fulfilling habit. Every attempt to become better organised and more productive will fail because you will sabotage your successes. Your brain has an incredible capacity to reorganise and adapt. Just look at how people adapted to the lockdowns in 2020. There was resistance at first, then the adoption of new ways of doing things. Those who enjoyed exercise found ways to adapt their exercise programmes and work from home—something many people believed was impossible for them- but they soon discovered it was possible. Your brain can adapt and remodel itself using “neuroplasticity”. All you need is a stimulus—such as a determination to get organised and be better at managing your time—like muscles in response to exercise. Sadly, most people don’t try. They accept these negative patterns as just who they are. Yet it’s not true. Your mindset and habits are not set at birth. You learn them. And that means you can unlearn them and develop better beliefs and habits. So, with all that said, it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Wim. Wim asks, hi Carl, for years, I have tried to get myself organised and failed every time. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve read all the books, watched thousands of YouTube videos, and learned all the tricks. But for some reason, I can never do anything I learn. How would you help someone like me? Hi Wim, Thank you for your question. Part of the problem for people who struggle to get themselves organised is trying to do too much at once. While we are good at changing things, we are not very good at changing everything. This is why it’s often said that moving house is one of the most stressful things a person can do. Moving house is exciting, yet it also involves a lot of change. That makes it uncomfortable. There’s a new home, a new way to get to the supermarket, a different drive to work and new people to get to know in the neighbourhood. Yet, after a few weeks, our new home becomes normal. We feel comfortable and safe, and the stress of the move disappears. All change requires an initial period of discomfort. We make mistakes and forget to do something we should have done, and going through the actions feels like a huge effort for a small gain. But we discovered during the pandemic that we can do it. We can adapt to change and do it quite quickly. So, where do you begin? As always, the best place to begin is with the basics. To get organised means learning and implementing the principles of COD—Collect, Organise and do. When it comes to collecting, how will you gather together all the stuff you either have to do, would like to do or have a passing interest in? For some, that may mean setting up their phones as their universal collection tool (UCT) or perhaps a pocket notebook. If you choose to use your phone—possibly the best UCT as we carry these things with us everywhere we go (including the bathroom!) what application will you use? The application you use for collecting is important because it needs to fulfil two requirements. First, it must be quick and easy to use. Too many buttons to press, and you won’t collect everything. Second, you need to trust that what you collect will be saved and not lost. A lack of either of those functions and it will fail. Once you have your collection tool set up, the n

What’s the difference between a project and a goal? That’s what we’re exploring this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 333 Hello, and welcome to episode 333 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One of the benefits of becoming more organised is that you begin to analyse what you do and why you do it in a little more detail. You start seeing what is important and what is not, what you need to do, what you can pass off to others, and what you can ignore. And, most importantly, you understand what your areas of focus mean to you. However, one area I’ve seen people struggle with is how to define a project and a goal and what the differences are. This week. I hope to clarify that so you know how to use each one. Before we get to the question, I just wanted to give you a heads-up that September’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming up. Registration is open now, and places, as usual, are going fast. I know there are no quick fixes or that the road from disorganised to organised is easy and problem-free. But if you follow a few core principles, you can build a system that works for the way you work. That is what you will learn in this workshop. I’d love to see you there. The dates are September 6th and 13th. Both days start at 8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (that’s 5:30 pm if you are on the West Coast of the US). Full details can be found on my website or in the show notes below. Okay, on with the show. Which means handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks, Hi Carl, would you explain the difference between a goal and a project? I find the distinction very confusing. Hi Janine, thank you for your question. You are not alone in this question. I get asked it a lot. Let’s start with the basics. A project is a desired outcome that requires time and a series of connected tasks to be completed by a given deadline. A simple example of this would be clearing out your garage. This would be a project in that there will be a number of things that need organising, such as a skip (a British word for a large container that you throw large items away in). You may need to go to the hardware store to buy cleaning materials and storage containers etc. For this project, you’d set a date for when you would like to do it—say a weekend—and block your calendar so that’s what gets all your attention on the given day. The project is complete once you have achieved the desired result. Now, a goal also has a desired outcome, and it may also have a timeline in that you want to achieve the desired result by a given date. However, a goal differs in that once the goal is achieved, you will want to maintain it. A simple example would be if you set a goal to lose twenty pounds by the end of the year. As I am recording this in August, that would give you four months to lose twenty pounds or five pounds a month. Once you have achieved your goal, though, you are unlikely to want to put those twenty pounds back on. So, a goal’s objective is to take you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future. I like to think of a goal like acting as a course correction engine burn. If you’ve seen the film Apollo 13 (a brilliant film if you’re interested in project management and dealing with crises). When a spacecraft goes to the moon, it is dealing with a moving object. The moon travels around the earth. Therefore, you need to anticipate where the moon will be when you arrive at its atmosphere. Get that wrong, and you are in trouble. Too shallow, and you would bounce off into outer space. Too steep, and you would burn up in the moon’s atmosphere. This means, from time to time, you need to adjust your course, and that’s where the engine burn comes in. You turn on the engines for a few seconds to push you back on course. That’s how goals work in your life. If you have established what your areas of focus are—these are the eight areas of life we all share that are important to us. For example, family and relationships, your career, health and fitness and finances. If any of these falls out of balance, you can set a goal to push you back on track. A simple example would be if, as part of your financial area of focus, you save a minimum of $5,000 per year, and currently, you have only saved $1,000 for the year, you would set a goal to get that back in balance. You could incre

This week is a very special episode. Earlier, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Kourosh Dini, a clinical psychiatrist who is also very prominent in the productivity world with his Waves of Focus programme and his fantastic weekly Wind Down newsletter (which I highly recommend you subscribe to) I first encountered Kourosh in 2012 when he spoke at the OmniFocus event at MacWorld. I then began following his work. In this chat, we discuss focus, ADHD, and much more. There’s so much in this episode, so get your pens and paper ready—you’re going to need them. Links Learn more about Kourosh’s work: Kourosh’s website → Waves of Focus → Kourosh’s newsletter → Get a $20.00 trial of Waves of Focus membership → Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page

Do you feel you never have enough time to do everything on your to-do list? Well, you’re not alone. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 331 Hello, and welcome to episode 331 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. How often do you begin the day with a to-do list that you know will be impossible to complete? What does that do to your motivation? If you are like most people, your motivation will sink, and the day becomes another stressful horror show. Why is that? Why do we find ourselves with a to-do list longer than any reasonable person could complete in a single day? Is it because we are over-ambitious and over-optimistic about our abilities or because we have too much to do? Well, this week, we will examine some of the causes of this problem and discuss potential solutions. While not necessarily easy to implement, these solutions will give you the necessary breathing room to create realistic, doable days and leave you with enough energy to enjoy your evenings doing what you want. Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, may I ask a favour? If you have been kind enough to buy a copy of my book Your Time, Your Way, could you leave a review? Reviews help other people discover the book, learn better ways to manage their time and their lives and reduce stress, which will ultimately help all of us. Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Heather. Heather asks, Hi Carl, I have tried for years to use a to-do list, yet after a few days, the list becomes enormous, and I stop looking at it (which makes the list even longer). I’ve tried all sorts of digital to-do lists and even pen and paper, but nothing works. How does anyone keep their to-do list manageable so it doesn’t become useless? Hi Heather, thank you for sending in your question. To get to the bottom of this, we need to go back to some basics. That is to understand the relationship between time and activity. To start, can we all agree that doing anything requires time? Whether taking your dog for a walk, cooking dinner, or meeting up with friends, all activities require some time. Can we also agree that each day has twenty-four hours? As long as we accept these two facts—that anything we do requires time and that there are twenty-four hours in a day—we have a solid anchor on which to build a reliable time management system. When I accepted these two facts, everything changed for the better. It didn’t matter how much was on my to-do list if I didn’t have the time to complete the tasks. I remember the days before I accepted this. I used to commute to the university I was teaching at—ninety minutes each way—and then teach for six hours. I had a to-do list with over thirty tasks on it, and I needed to stay two or three hours after my classes to talk with my students. In effect, my day was doomed the moment I woke up. There was no way I could drive for three hours, teach for six, do two hours of tutorials, and complete thirty tasks. Yet that was what my day looked like each day. That had nothing to do with time management or productivity. It had everything to do with me being unrealistic about what could be done in a single twenty-four-hour period. And that is where most of our problems start—being unrealistic about what can be done in a single day. If you are familiar with my Time Sector System—a way to manage your work and time more realistically—you will know about something I call your “core work”. Your core work is the work you are employed to do. It does not include work you have “volunteered” to do—those little favours you do for a colleague or looking something up for your boss. It’s just the work you were employed to do. As a university lecturer, I was employed to teach. My core work involved preparing for and delivering my lectures. There was some additional work, such as setting and grading exam papers, but for the most part, my core work was teaching my students. Sending attendance records and dealing with class time conflicts for my students was not a part of my core work. I did do those tasks, but they were never at the expense of doing my core work. Establishing what your core work is gives you some advantages. The first is you know what to prioritise each day. As your core work is what you are employed to do, it naturally follows that it will be your top priority for the day. The second is yo

This week, is it possible to stay disciplined, or is there a better way to ensure you are consistently doing the things you want to do? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 330 Hello, and welcome to episode 330 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. When I hear people discussing discipline, I am always interested in hearing about their struggles. Life is always a struggle. We are often torn between what we want to do and what we must do. I would love to watch my rugby team play live, yet the kick-off time is usually around 2 AM in my time zone, and I know I must be asleep at that time. I’ve discussed the importance of daily and weekly planning many times. If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably know how valuable a solid weekly planning session is to your overall productivity. The question is, how consistent are you? It’s easy to skip the weekly planning because there’s no immediate penalty. You could go through the whole week without any plan and get stuff done. Unfortunately, this approach leads to doing the work of others and never being able to do what you should be doing. Whether you do or you don’t do the right things will always come down to discipline. But is that true? Perhaps not. There is another way, and I will show you that by answering this week’s question. This means it’s time now for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Clyde. Clyde asks, hi Carl, I’ve loved following you and other people who teach time management and productivity skills. I know the concepts and what to do but never do it. I think I am too lazy or lack discipline. Do you have any strategies to help someone like me who lacks discipline? Great question, Clyde. Very few people are able to be determinedly disciplined every day. I can think of only one person—David Goggins—who has mastered this. Yet David Goggins was not always like that. If you know his story, it took him many years to develop the resolve and mental strength, and even after all those years, he admits that each day is a struggle. This means that being consistently disciplined will be an uphill battle for us everyday folk—one we will likely lose. So, what can we do instead? I’ve found that we can develop a set of standards by which to live our lives. This can begin with simple things like going to bed and waking up at a consistent time. You are likely already doing this; if you are, it will be much easier to set that standard. The great thing about standards is your mindset changes. Instead of thinking, “I have to wake up at 7:30 every morning”, it becomes something you do. It goes from “I have to wake up at 7:30 to “I wake up at 7:30” because that is who you are. It took me years to become consistent in writing my journal. During those years, I used to think, “I should write a journal.” The problem with that statement is the word “should.” That single word makes it optional. Remove that word, and now it becomes a standard. I cannot imagine a day not spending ten minutes writing in my journal after making my coffee. I look forward to sitting down with my favourite pen and journal and writing my thoughts, ideas, and fears on a page. I am a journal writer. It’s part of my identity. Yet I also remember the years of thinking, “I should write a journal”, and never writing one. I began to believe there was a problem with my discipline. The truth was it had nothing to do with my discipline. It was because writing a journal every morning was not a standard I followed. When I was in my final year of high school, my first part-time job was working in a hotel. I was very fortunate because, in the late 1980s, hotels were still focused on quality and personalised service instead of the standardised, automated service most hotels offer today. This meant that everything had to be pristine and in perfect order from the moment a guest walked into reception. I remember my induction training focused on little things like placing the pencils and notepads on the conference room tables in the exact same way and how the handles of the tea cups should always be placed, with the handle pointing to the right and the teaspoon placed on the left. Even how the decoration of the plates must always be pointing in the same direction. I learned those things thirty-five years ago and still follow the same standards today when laying the table for a family meal. It doesn’t f

What can you do to be productive when you have a chronic illness or a very unpredictable schedule? That’s what we’re looking at today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 329 Hello, and welcome to episode 329 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It’s a daily challenge to protect our time and stay focused enough to get our work done. It becomes even harder when we don’t get enough sleep or are worried about something in our personal life. Yet, if you are suffering from a chronic illness or recovering from one, this challenge becomes exponentially more difficult. Not only are you trying to get work done, but you will also face unpredictable tiredness, low energy, difficulty consistently doing your work, or even knowing if you can do any work today. This means planning the week is almost impossible, and you’ll find yourself frequently changing events and meetings on your calendar. The good news is there are things you can do that don’t make you even more tired. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Mia. Mia asks, do you have any productivity tips or advice for those with chronic illness? Or just those who have incredibly unpredictable schedules? I'd love to find a way to be more productive that doesn't feel stressful, but obviously, time management is difficult for me. Hi Mia, thank you for your question. With illness, the priority is always to avoid making things worse. This means prioritising rest above everything else. Naturally, this can be difficult as an employee because of your company’s demands. Hopefully, you have an understanding boss. It’s also tricky if you are self-employed, as your work may be your only source of income. So, given that you must prioritise rest and recovery, the place to start is with your calendar. Don’t start with your task manager—that will never help you. All that will do is remind you that you have a lot of things to do. It will never tell you if you have the time to do it. Only your calendar can do that. Before opening your calendar, though, ask yourself when you will most likely be focused and have some energy. That could be in the morning if you are a morning person or perhaps in the evening if you are a night owl. It’s this time you want to be protecting. However, there’s an important factor to consider. According to recent research, and as Andrew Huberman points out, we focus in ninety-minute cycles. In other words, we can focus for about ninety minutes before needing a rest. However, that time will reduce if you are ill or recovering from an illness. Depending on the severity of your illness, the amount of time you can focus on before needing a rest could be very short. A couple of years ago, I worked with a client who was suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and her focus time was around twenty minutes before requiring a four-hour rest. Fortunately, she was on long-term sick leave, but being an ambitious person, she wanted to readjust her lifestyle so she could better cope when her condition improved. When you know your focus time ability, you can better plan a schedule that allows you to get at least some things done. For instance, if you know you focus better early in the morning, plan your focus block of time then. You want to work with your natural rhythms rather than fighting against them. It’s tough when you’re not sick to fight your natural rhythms; when you are sick or recovering from an illness, it will work against you and leave you more tired. When planning the week, try to book meetings and appointments when you are not at your most focused. There’s something about human interaction that produces its own natural energy. This means that if you are a morning person, you would schedule a block of time in the morning for doing your most important work for the day, then give yourself a sufficient break before allowing one or two meetings in the afternoon. The good thing about this approach is if you feel strong and can go a little longer with your focus time, you have the flexibility to do so. Although, be careful here. I usually need to wake up early Monday and Tuesday morning for calls. I only get three or four hours of sleep on Sunday and Monday nights. I find that on Tuesday afternoons and evenings, I am exhausted. Knowing this, I don’t schedule much work but keep things as free as possible, so I am not trying t

This week, what are the basics of time management? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Time Your Way | Time Well Managed. Life Well Lived. Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 327 Hello, and welcome to episode 327 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. A lot has been spoken and written about time management over the years. This has made the whole space of time management confusing when, in reality, time management is simple—or it should be. Today’s question concerns all this and, more importantly, how to return to the basics of time management so you can regain control and not feel guilty about not doing things when more important things need doing. Now, before we get to the question, just a quick reminder that Your Time, Your Way is now out in Kindle, Soft and hardback formats. You can get it right now and start building the foundations to live the life you want to live. Your Time, Your Way is a book, yet to me, it’s much more than that. It’a also a manual to build a resilient time management system that will work in the background for you. If you have already bought the book, thank you so much. Could you do me a little favour and leave a review? That really helps to get the book in more people’s hands, which can only benefit all of us. The more people who operate using these principles, the easier it will be to manage meetings and requests. Anyway, back to this episode, and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Robert. Robert asks, hi Carl, what do you suggest I do when, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot get control of my calendar? I try to block time out for my core work, but then I get so many meeting requests I have to either delete them or reschedule. It’s driving me crazy! Thank you, Robert, for your question. A good place to start is to look back at your calendar for the last two or three weeks and see where your time is going. How many internal meetings did you attend? There’s a difference between internal and external meetings. Hopefully, your external meetings—with customers, for instance—are important. However, you should look more closely at your internal meetings. Were they valuable? Did you really need to attend them? One important metric to consider is how many hours each week you spend in internal meetings. Internal meetings are, by their very nature, places where you talk about the work. Work rarely gets done. The biggest waste of time for people is those team update meetings. These benefit no one and just drag people away from doing their work. A good manager sets up systems and processes so that their team maximise their work time and minimises their meeting time. One thing you can do is set a limit on the number of hours you attend each week. For instance, you may choose to limit your internal meeting time to ten hours per week. Once that time is taken, you accept no more meeting requests that week. This approach has two benefits. The first is you can confidently create time blocks for your core work around these ten hours. The second benefit is if anyone in authority challenges you about declined meetings, you have evidence to show you are being asked to attend too many meetings. If your manager objects to this limit, you can increase the limit, but you do so in a way that they are fully aware of the time involved and how that will reduce your available work time. There is always a conflict within a corporation between the managers, whose job is to fill their calendars with meetings, training sessions, and one-on-ones, and the producers—the people who produce the work—whose goal is to minimise events on their calendars so they can get on and do their work. However, some compromise is needed here. Managers can only do their jobs if they know what’s going on and can give guidance and instruction when necessary. To do that, they need meetings. Equally, producers need to communicate what is being done, where there may be areas of difficulty and to ensure what they are working on is the right work. One thing that will always destroy any attempts to become better at managing time is to treat everything that comes your way as urgent. That’s never likely to be the case. Most things are not urgent and are tasks that are being passed off to buy the sender some time. Here’s something you can try when you are asked to do something. Default to doing it next week. This means if you receive a message asking you

Three years ago, I began a journey that came to an end last Saturday. Today, I want to share that journey with you, what I learned and how my journey can help you become better at managing your time and ultimately be more productive. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 327 Hello, and welcome to episode 327 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. My book, Your Time, Your Way, Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived!, was published last Saturday. It is the end result of a three-year journey that began with the idea of putting everything I have learned about better managing time together so you have enough time to spend with your loved ones, enjoy the hobbies you have always wanted to participate in, and so much more without feeling drained, overwhelmed, and rushed. The book is a manual for taking control of your time and making the things you want to do happen without stress or overwhelm. It gives you a complete roadmap for making time work for you instead of working against you. But more on the contents later. From a productivity perspective, when you begin a project like writing a book, there is one critical starting point: getting started. What often happens, and is the reason so few people do any of their personal projects or achieve goals, is that too much time is wasted in the thinking and planning stage. There’s a comfort in dreaming and thinking about landscaping your garden (backyard). That dreaming can be very seductive. It allows you to believe you are doing something about your project—‘I’m doing the planning’—yet nothing is happening. Your garden is not getting landscaped. This book was two years in the planning stage (I am not immune to being seduced by the dream). I was even telling people, “I’m currently writing a book.” That was a lie. I wasn’t “writing” anything. I was dreaming of writing a book. I was stuck in the planning stage. To get yourself out of that delusion—as that is what too much planning is, a delusion—you need to start doing something. Every project has a beginning. That could be visiting the local hardware store to purchase the tools you will need or, in my case, when writing a book, to write the introduction (this gives me a mini-outline of what I want to write about). Do that first step. The next critical part of any project, whether professional or personal, is to decide how much time you are willing to give it each week. You are unlikely to be able to estimate how long a big project will take accurately. There are too many unknowns, and if you involve other people, there will inevitably be delays. The only thing you have control over is your time. You don’t control other people’s time—even if you are a boss. So, how much time are you willing to or are able to give to the project each week? Once you know how much time you are giving the project each week, schedule it. Personal projects can be worked on in the evening and at weekends, while professional ones can be done during work hours. One thing you will eventually learn about time management is hoping you will find the time to do something is not a good strategy. It never works. If you want time to work on something, anything, you need to protect the time. Whether that is going out for a family walk in the evenings, washing your car or writing a letter to your aunt in New Zealand. Time management works when you are intentional about it. In other words, you must protect time for the things you want to do. When the early version of Your Time, Your Way went out to a select group of readers, many commented that it took over fifty pages to get to talking about time. That was intentional. Too often, books on productivity and time management are about showing you how to squeeze in more and more. That is not the purpose of this book. Not only is that approach unsustainable, it’s also unhealthy. Instead, my approach is to encourage you to start by thinking about your life as a whole. What do you want out of your life? What is important to you? While we share eight areas—family and relationships, career/business, finances, health and fitness, self-development, lifestyle and life experiences, spirituality, and life’s purpose—how we define these are different for each of us. That means what we want out of these areas will also be different. The order of priority is also different. As we go through life, the priority of these will change. When you are young, career/business and perhaps lifestyle and

This week’s question is all about unpredictability and the struggle to find some kind of structure in your day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 326 Hello, and welcome to episode 326 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. In an ideal world, we would be able to set our calendar for the week and allow it to flow from one event to another while getting all our work done in a timely and relaxed way. Sadly, that ideal world does not exist and never will. Life is unpredictable, and for the most part, we are dealing with other people who likely do not share our priorities or long-term vision and, in some cases, expect you to drop everything to deal with their crisis or problem. This week’s question goes to the heart of these issues: how do you cope when your carefully laid plans are destroyed by events and the urgencies of the people around you? So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Max. Hi Carl, I work in a job with competing demands. I can plan most things ahead but occasionally get asked, often at the last minute, to complete tasks that require an immediate or 24-hour turnaround. How do I fit these into my planning schedule so my other work plans are not thrown into chaos? Hi Max, thank you for your question. When asked what was most likely to blow governments off course, former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Well, the truth is, it’s not just governments that can be blown off course; we as individuals can also be blown off course by events, too. Around three years ago, I carefully planned a day to record the update to my Apple Productivity course. I had set up the studio the night before, checked my notes, and went to bed comfortably with the knowledge that nothing could stop me from getting the recording done the next day. Around 7:00 am, I woke up and noticed our beloved Yorkshire Terrier was looking very sick. He had thrown up his food and was unable to get up off the floor. He was old and suffered from a heart condition, and I knew something was terribly wrong. My wife was 50 miles up the coast staying with a friend, so I called her immediately, put Barney into the car and set off to pick my wife up before going to the vet. Barney passed away that day, and for the next two days, I was certainly not in the mood to record anything. The whole day was a nightmare. Later that day, I looked at my appointments for the next day and cancelled them all. No one objected; everyone understood, and I was able to mourn the passing of my best friend (anyone who has a dog will understand that one) for a couple of days without the worry of work. Whenever you are thrown off course by events, and your plans for the week get destroyed, it’s easy to think everything’s destroyed. Yet, is it? You see, we always have the power to renegotiate deadlines, put off a few things for a day or two, stop and review what has happened and reschedule a few of the lower-value things. However, probably the most powerful thing you can do is to build some structure into your day. I learnt this from possibly the most productive and relaxed person I have ever worked with. Andrew was one of the first bosses I ever had, and he would arrive at work at 8:30 am each day, walk into his office and close the door for 15 minutes. That was his sacred time, and everything could wait until he was finished. What Andrew was doing was going through his mail (it was paper back then—no email in those days), reviewing his calendar (a beautiful A4 leather folio with a week to view) and writing down the five most important things that needed to be done that day. He would then open his door, and he was available again. Andrew would block time out on his calendar each day for doing those five or six tasks. Some would be lengthy, requiring an hour or two; others may be a simple follow-up call with one of his leadership team members. On the occasions I saw Andrew’s diary, I saw that he always had at least thirty minutes between meetings and blocked time. The time blocks were written in pencil, and the meetings were in blue ink. As he completed his tasks, he would cross them out. Those gaps in his diary were to deal with the unknowns that inevitably came up each day. The chairman may have called and demanded a change to the marketing plan for that week, or there may have been an accident in the workshop that needed dealing with. None o

This week, it’s time to slow down. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 325 Hello, and welcome to episode 325 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. How often have you rushed to complete a task only to find you did it wrong or misunderstood what was required and wasted several hours doing something that wasn’t required? It happens to all of us, yet it can be one of the biggest drags on your overall productivity. But here’s the reassuring part: it has an easy fix. A simple change in approach can make a significant difference in your productivity and time management. One of the advantages of the Time Sector System is it helps you to slow down by asking when you will do something rather than saying “yes” to everything and finding you have no time to do it. This then causes you to rush to complete urgent tasks (which may not be important tasks), leaving behind the important tasks. Speed kills productivity, which may sound ironic, given that we think of productivity as doing things quickly and efficiently. And that is true, but speed ignores the “efficiency” part. Targeted speed is what you want, but to get fast at something takes practice and following a process. Without that practice and a process to follow, you leave yourself wide open to time-destroying mistakes that will need more time to rectify. And this is what this week’s question is all about. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from John. John asks, Hi Carl, I have so many tasks, and whenever I try to get them done, I end up having to redo them because I rushed and misunderstood the task or the request was unclear. How do you overcome these kinds of problems? Hi John, thank you for your question. This is a speed issue. Now, this might be part of your work culture, or it could be the expectations of your customers and bosses. The demands of others can create a sense that everything is urgent, and this leads to trying to do something that requires a little thought too fast. The result being mistakes are made or the wrong thing getting done. One of the most important parts of becoming more productive and better at managing time is slowing down. I know that might sound contrary to what you think improving productivity is all about, but you will only improve your productivity if what you do each day is the right thing and at the highest quality you are capable of. If Toyota wanted to increase the speed at which they produced a car, they could easily do it. Instead of screwing on the front bumper with twenty turns of the screw, they could reduce that to ten. On one car, that might save one or two seconds, yet over hundreds of thousands of cars, that adds up to hours saved. Yet, it would be a false economy. Within a few weeks, many of those cars would be returning to their dealerships with hanging-off front bumpers. The impact on their dealership’s time and costs would be huge. Plus, it would destroy their reputation for quality. It would be disastrous for them in terms of costs, productivity and reputation. Yet, so many people fall into this trap every day. They think if they rush and take shortcuts to get more things done, their productivity will improve. It won’t. What it will do is create a lot of unnecessary work fixing the mistakes that were made in haste. So what can you do? The first step is to look at the work you regularly do. Where are the processes? We all get email, Slack and Teams messages. What’s your process for handling these? There are two approaches to your communications. You can react instantly each time a message comes in. We often think this looks good. It shows we are on the ball, quick and efficient. Yet are you? Sure, some messages may require a quick yes or no, but what about those messages asking for your thoughts on something? Do you ever stop and think about your response? And then what happens to your other work? The work that is likely to be much more important? All this stopping to respond to a message and then starting again is slowing you down considerably. Of course, at the moment, you don’t notice that slow down. After all, you’re rushing from one thing to the next. You’re busy, and you’re moving fast. But what’s happening to the important work in front of you? It’s not moving forward. You stop, respond to a message, then you come back to the work, and you have to refresh yourself—where were you, what were you writing, where are the re

So, you’ve decided to get yourself better organised. What would be the best way to start? 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 Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 324 Hello, and welcome to episode 324 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Whenever I begin working with a new coaching client, one of the first places we often need to start is unpicking the old system that is not working and transitioning into a system that does work. Everyone is different. We have different times when we can focus, and we do different kinds of jobs. I recently watched an interview with J P Morgan Chase bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon, who wakes up at 4:30 to 5:00 am each morning so he can read the financial news, exercise and have breakfast before the day begins, which inevitably involves back-to-back meetings. Waking up at 5:00 am may not work for you. You may prefer working late and waking up around 8:00 am. But wherever you are in your productivity journey, if you want to develop a system that works for you, it will inevitably mean tweaking your old system at least somewhat. That being the case, where would you start? 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 Frank. Frank asks, Hi Carl, I’ve decided to get myself organised. I’ve tried everything over the years, and I have bits of all sorts of systems everywhere. If you were to start all over, what would you do first? Hi Frank, thank you for your question. I approach this by looking at the hierarchy of productivity tools first. There are three tools we can use to help us become more productive: your calendar, task manager, and notes. Of those three, your calendar is the top one. That’s the one tool that is never going to deceive you. It shows you the twenty-four hours you have each day and tells you what you can realistically do given that time. Your task manager is the most deceptive tool you have. You can load it up with hundreds of tasks, yet it never tells you if you have the time available to do those tasks. It doesn’t even tell you which tasks would be the right ones to do at any given time. Perhaps AI will help us in the future there, but I doubt it. I doubt it because while AI could see everything and may know what deadlines you have and where your appointments are, it will not know how you feel. You may be coming down with a cold, might not have slept well, or had a fight with your significant other. Any one of those could derail your effectiveness, and they are things you cannot plan for. So, when starting out, get your calendar fixed first. What does that mean? It means first letting go of all your double-booked times. You cannot be in two places at once, and if you do see a scheduling conflict on your calendar, these need fixing first. This may mean you need to renegotiate a meeting or move something to the all-day section. I’ve seen people putting their daughter’s driving lesson on their calendars. This often leads to seeing an appointment with a client at the same time as the daughter’s lesson. If you need to know your daughter has a driving lesson at 3:00 pm, put it in your all-day section of your calendar with the time in brackets—preferably in a different colour. You will find this cleans up your calendar significantly. The next thing I suggest you do, Frank, is to look at all the tasks you have to do and categorise them. It’s likely you will have tasks related to communications—emails, messages and follow-ups, admin, and chores. Beyond that, it will depend on the kind of work you do. A journalist will spend a lot of time writing, a designer will spend time designing, and a lawyer will likely spend a lot of time writing contracts or court documents. Whether you’re writing, designing, or doing something else, you want to group similar tasks together. In a task manager such as Todoist and Things 3, you can assign labels or tags to a task. You would use these labels or tags to assign a category to your tasks. This way, you can easily group all similar tasks together. The next step is to look at your calendar and assign blocks of time for these categories. Some may not need specific time blocks, but I encourage people to allocate blocks of time for communications and admin. These will always need doing. The problem is that if you do not have time assigned for them, the next day, instead of requiring forty minutes or so, you will need double that time just to

How do you create and maintain your motivation once you have your new productivity system in place? That’s what I’m answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 323 Hello, and welcome to episode 323 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One of the positive things about creating your productivity system is the excitement you get once you have your new tools and systems set up. We often cannot wait to get started using these tools and systems. Then, after a few weeks or months, the “newness” wears off, and we are back where we were before—looking for new tools and systems and convincing ourselves that the tools and systems we currently use no longer work. And if your tools and systems do work, it can be hard to stay motivated once the monotony of doing the same things at the same time each day beds in. This week’s question goes to the heart of that—staying motivated to do the work we know we should do but just don’t want to do. So, with that little introduction complete, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Keith. Keith asks, HI Carl, I feel like I’m doing something wrong. When it comes to the time of actually doing work allocated on my calendar, I often feel not bothered and I just simply reschedule it for the next time, I find myself doing that a lot, with both routine and areas of focus tasks and I find it strange that I am able to reschedule it all so easily… do you have any tips on what to do here? Hi Keith, thank you for your question. There are two distinct parts here. Your areas of focus should be self-motivating. These are tasks you have identified as important to you and for the life you want to live. The second, routines, are less important—these are the tasks that just need to be done to maintain life. Things like taking the garbage out, washing the car, doing the laundry or, mowing the lawn, etc. The more concerning part here is a lack of motivation in your areas of focus. Doing these tasks should be the things you look forward to doing the most. Well, mostly. I know it can be hard to head out for a 10-mile run when it’s pouring down outside and blowing a gale. (Although the way you feel when you get back is fantastic!) Let’s step back a little first. When you find yourself rescheduling calendar blocks, that’s not necessarily a bad sign. That’s just life. Emergencies happen, plans are changed, and occasionally, we get sick. That said, having structure does help you to be consistent. For instance, I recommend you protect time each day for dealing with your actionable emails and messages. Rather than going in and out of your email every few minutes—which is disastrous for your cognitive ability to focus—having time set aside for dealing with these gives you the time and space to get on with your important work. Similarly, you will likely find that if you can set aside an hour for admin and chores each day, the only thing you then need to decide is what admin tasks and chores you do in that time. Becoming consistent with this results in you rarely needing the full hour. You may find that if you move these blocks around every day, consistency will be difficult to achieve. The goal of setting aside a little time each day for focused work, communications, and admin is to get them fixed in your calendar. This is a using a little neuroscience to get your brain working for you. You are using neuroscience when you go to bed at the same time each day. It’s why you begin to feel sleepy at the same time each day. This is the same for meal times. Consistent meal times informs your brain when to tell you that you are hungry. As an aside, if you take up intermittent fasting, you will find skipping breakfast early in the morning difficult at first. Yet if your eating window is between 11:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., after a few weeks, your brain learns when to tell you to eat. You will no longer be hungry in the morning. Let’s examine the motivational aspect of this, beginning with your areas of focus. These activities should be self-motivating. Your areas of focus are the things that are important to you. If you lack motivation here, it’s likely that the way you have defined what each one means to you is not quite right and needs a little refining. Health and fitness can often be difficult if you find any form of exercise unpleasant. What may be happening if you skip exercise is you are trying to do too much. I have f

What is “Time-Based Productivity”, and how can you apply it to your daily work? 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 Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 322 Hello, and welcome to episode 322 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One of the huge benefits of the Time Sector System is that it removes the tyranny of task-based productivity and replaces it with something more concrete: time. You see, tasks will never stop coming at you. Your kids’ toys need to be picked up, the laundry needs to be done, your bed needs to be made, and you’d better check the refrigerator to see what you need to pick up from the supermarket. And that’s before you start your work day. If you base your productivity system on the tasks you need to do, you will wear yourself out. It’s impossible because it’s never-ending. There are no barriers, and you will see this rather quickly if you use a task manager. Task managers fill up, and everything is screaming at you to be done. But then you’re faced with the question: where am I going to find the time to do all these tasks? It always comes back to time. This week’s question asks how you can transition away from this tyranny of task-based productivity and bring a sense of control and calm into your world. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jens. Jens asks, hi Carl, I am always overwhelmed with tasks and never able to get all my work done. I am also constantly interrupted by messages and emails and never seem to be able to get a quiet moment. How would you handle this situation? Hi Jens, thank you for your question. You describe a real problem today. Over the last fifteen years or so, technology has broken down the barrier between our work and personal lives. Long gone are the days where when we finished work for the day we really did finish work. If we needed to respond to a work email, it had to be done from our office computer. Once we had gone home, that was it. No more work email. Sure, there were other issues—people staying late in the office for one, but at least when you left your place of work for the day, that was it. You left work at work. (Or it certainly felt like it.) So, what can you do today to establish some barriers so you do not always feel pressure to do more? A few years ago, I discovered that if you base your system on task management, you will lose. Tasks are never-ending, and there will always be more to do than time available to do them. It was that phrase—“always more to do than time available” that gave me a clue towards the solution. If tasks were unlimited, then perhaps I could work on the one area that was limited—time. Working with time gave me natural limits or constraints. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and during that time, I need to eat and sleep at the very least. That then gave me a new number to work with. Given that I personally need around seven hours of sleep and, let’s say, ninety minutes for eating, then all I had left was fifteen and a half hours for everything else. Once you work out how much time you need for sleep and eating, plus time for personal hygiene, you likely will have around fourteen hours a day to work with. So the temptation is often how much work can you fit into fourteen hours, yet that’s probably not the best place to work from. Work is just one part of your life. It’s an important part, but so is time spent with your family, getting a little exercise and perhaps some relaxation activities such as watching TV, reading a book or watching your favourite sports team. When you add up all the time you need for these activities, your work day will likely be around eight to ten hours. So, what can you do in, say, nine hours? Well, let’s break things down a little further. Email and Slack or Teams messages will probably be a big part of your work—particularly if you are a knowledge worker—i.e. you are employed for your brain rather than your physical strength. That being the case, how much time do you need to be able to stay on top of all these messages and emails? In my case, I need about an hour a day to respond to my actionable emails. You will likely be around the same figure. Think of it this way: if you had one uninterrupted hour each day for responding to your actionable emails, would you be able to stay on top of it? If that’s the case, then you need to protect an hour a day for managing your communications. If yo

If your notes are a disorganised mess, this episode is the one for you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 321 Hello, and welcome to episode 321 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. This week, I have a special episode for you. No question; instead, I want to share a way to think about your productivity tools, particularly how your notes app fits into the whole scheme of things. There is a trinity of productivity tools—your calendar, task manager, and notes app—that when connected, will enhance your overall effectiveness by reducing the friction between organising and doing work. Today, I want to focus on the notes app because this is the tool that is most often neglected. Within this Trinity of tools, your calendar is number 1. Everything flows from your calendar because that is the tool that will prevent you from being overly ambitious and give you the reality of the day. There are twenty-four boxes in your calendar, each representing an hour, and that’s all you get each day. You cannot change that, for time is the fixed part of your productivity system. Your task manager tells you what tasks you have committed to and when you will do those tasks. Its relationship with your calendar is critical because if you have seven hours of meetings, you’re committed to picking your kids up from school, and you have a hundred tasks to do; you will know instantly you have an impossible day. You can then either reschedule some meetings or reduce your task number. So, where do your notes come into this trinity? Your notes support your tasks. It’s here where you will manage your projects, interests, goals and areas of focus. It’s also where you can keep your archive, which, if used well, will become a rich resource of inspiration, ideas and creativity. But more on that later. Of all the productivity tools you use, your notes app is the one where you can be a little relaxed. Your notes do not need to be perfectly curated and organised. Most notes apps today have powerful search built in, and I would argue that the ability to search within your notes is a critical part of your choice when choosing a notes app. I suspect Evernote’s popularity over the years (despite its recent changes) is due to two factors: its search, which is arguably still the best in the field, and its brilliant web clipper. The ability to search your notes means that as long as you give any note a sufficiently descriptive title, you will be able to find it quickly and effortlessly. As a side note, I highly recommend that you learn all the different ways your notes app can search for your notes. Just Google your notes app of choice’s search functions. For instance, you can search “OneNote search” or “Notion search”. Learning this will save you a lot of time in the future. Evernote has a keyboard shortcut on the Mac operating system that I’ve been using for years. However, for a brief period in 2019, this feature stopped working while Evernote was transitioning from the old “legacy” version to the new Evernote 10, which was very frustrating. During that six-month period, I realised how important it was to be able to search your notes quickly in terms of overall productivity. Your notes do not just support your projects. They can also support multiple parts of your life, from tracking your goals to keeping your eight areas of focus front and centre of your life. Moreover, you can keep track of your hobbies, wish lists, book notes (if you read Kindle books), self-development topics, and interests. And all this information can be taken with you wherever you are through your mobile phone. All this is great, but what if you have a notes app up and running, but it has become neglected and lacking in a little TLC (tender loving care)? Well, fear not. As you do not need to be as strict about how tidy your notes are, getting things back on track can be a little project you do over a few weeks or months. Here’s how to get things started. First, create five folders. What these are called in your own notes app will depend on the app you are using. If your preference is OneNote, this would be your notebooks, Evernote would be stacks and Apple Notes would be folders. To help you, this is the highest level you have in your notes app. These five folders should be named as follows: Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources, and finally, your Archive. Again, depending on what app you are using, you will also need an Inbox for collecting your notes. T

Setting up a structured day makes sense. It reduces decision-making and helps you prioritise your work. But how strict should you be with this structure? That’s the question I answer this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 320 Hello, and welcome to episode 320 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. The change that has given me the biggest productivity benefit over the years was giving my calendar priority over every other productivity tool. This means that if my calendar tells me it’s time to buckle down and do some focused work, I will do that. If a customer or boss asks for a meeting when I have scheduled time to work on a project, I will always suggest an alternative time. This single change has meant I get all my work done (with time to spare), I can plan my days and weeks with a reasonable amount of confidence, and I rarely, if ever, get backlogs. However, when you adopt this method, the temptation is to adhere to it rigidly. And that is where things begin to go wrong. This week’s question is on this very question. How strict should you be with the plan you have for the week? So, with that said, literally, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Lucas. Lucas asks, hi Carl, I love your idea of blocking time out for your core work each week. The problem I have is I feel guilty now whenever I ignore a message or refuse to meet someone when I have a time block. What do you do to overcome this feeling of guilt? Hi Lucas, thank you for your question. Having structure in your day (and week) lets you know with a strong degree of confidence that you have sufficient time each day to do your work. Let me give you an example. Pretty much all of us get email each day. It’s just one of those inevitable parts of life. Now, if you are a typical knowledge worker, you will be getting upwards of 80 emails each day. Let’s say, of those 80 emails, half of them are non-actionable, 10 of them are for reference, and the remaining emails (thirty) require a response of some sort from you. How long will it take for you to respond to thirty emails? An hour? An hour-and-a-half? However, how long it will take you is rather less important. What matters is that at some point in the day, you will need to deal with those emails. If you don’t allocate some time, you will require double the amount of time tomorrow because you will have to deal with all the emails you didn’t deal with today. That’s how backlogs build: by being unrealistic about the amount of time you need to protect to stay on top of things like email and your admin. It would be easy for me to sit here and tell you to find an hour a day and dedicate it to responding to your emails. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, life will get in the way. It always does. And even if life doesn’t get in the way, you may be exhausted, or something could be worrying you. All of which will conspire to slow you down and make you less efficient. Instead of strictly sticking to a plan, you will find it better to work on the principle that one is greater than zero. In other words, while you may like to have an hour to manage your emails, on those days that you don’t, give yourself twenty or thirty minutes instead. The goal is not necessarily to clear your actionable email each day. The goal is to stay on top of it. This means that if you are unable to clear all your actionable emails today when you come to deal with your email tomorrow, you begin with the oldest and work from there. This way, no one will ever wait longer than twenty-four hours for a reply. This approach gives you the flexibility to deal with requests as and when they come in—and they will come in. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of waking up with a clear plan of action for the day, only to begin your work day and be told some catastrophic mistake has happened and all hands are required to get things back under control. That’s life for you. As the saying goes. “No plan survives the first shot being fired.” Getting comfortable with this reality means you retain some degree of flexibility to deal with colleagues’ and friends’ requests in a way that doesn’t make you feel guilty. But let’s look at this a little deeper. Attending meetings and answering messages and emails is what Call Newport describes as the administrative tax you pay for agreeing to do a project. Unless you are working on your own project, there will always be some form of communication that, while important, w

So, your calendar and task manager are organised, and you have enough time to complete your important work. But how do you define what your individual tasks are? That’s what I’m answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 319 Hello, and welcome to episode 319 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One of the most powerful ways to improve your effectiveness is to ensure you have sufficient time each day protected for your important work. Some of these tasks will be obvious. If you’re a salesperson and one of your customers asks you to send them a quote for a new product you are selling, that will come under the general category of “customers”. As this is an important part of your work as a salesperson, your “customer” category will have time protected each day. Well, I hope it does. Then there will be your general communications and admin to deal with. We all have these categories of tasks to do each day. There’s no point in sticking your head in the sand, as it were, and hoping they will go away. Emails demanding a reply do not disappear. Ignore these for one day, and you’ll have double the amount to do tomorrow. This means you will need double the amount of time, too—time you likely do not have. What this all means is that if your task manager supports tags or labels (and most do), you can use these for your categories. This week’s question is about how you choose which category for your tasks. So, with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from José. José asks, Hi Carl, I am struggling to define which tasks are admin, consulting, or sales-related. How do you go about choosing categories for your tasks? Hi José, thank you for your question. Let me first explain the different categories of work you may have. The concept here is that every task you have will come under a particular category. Those categories could be communications or admin, but they could also be sales activity, writing, designing, or marketing. Your categories will depend on the kind of work you do. Once you have established your categories, you protect time each day (or week) to work on those categories. For example, I have a category for “projects.” I block Wednesday mornings for project work. This means that when I plan for the week, the majority of my project tasks will be scheduled for Wednesday. The important thing is you do not add too many categories. The less, the better. To give you a benchmark, I have eight categories. Mine are: Writing Audio/visual Clients Projects Communications Admin Planning Chores It can be difficult to establish your categories at first, and the temptation will be to add more categories than you need. This is a mistake because very soon, you will have too many categories, which slows down your processing. If you’re familiar with COD (and if you are not, you can take the free course—the link is in the show notes), the purpose of Organising is to get everything in the right place as quickly as possible. If you have too many categories, it will slow you down and involve far too many choices. You may experience the paradox of choice, where too much choice paralyses your thinking. So, what are your categories? Well, you will likely have communications and admin. We all have to communicate, and email and Teams/Slack are pernicious and never-ending. Having some time protected each day to deal with your communications will keep you on top of these and prevent you from being overwhelmed. And there will always be bits of admin to deal with. Requests from HR, banking, filing, and expenses to process etc. You may not need a great deal of time for admin each day, but it’s worth protecting thirty minutes or so to stay on top of this. However, aside from your communications and admin, what other categories do you need? This depends on your core work. For instance, if you are a journalist, two categories spring to mind: research and writing. This is the core of your employed work and is what you are paid for. If you spend six hours out of an eight-hour working day in Teams or Zoom meetings, that leaves you with just two hours to manage your communications and admin AND do some writing. No chance. It’s not going to happen. Something will have to change if you want to spend more time doing what you are employed to do. One way to do that is to ensure before the week begins, you have enough time to meet your core work objectives. That comes first. After that, you will see ho

This week, it’s COD week. In a special episode, I’ll walk you through the fundamentals of what all solid productivity and time management systems have. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 318 Hello, and welcome to episode 318 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Now, some of you may be wondering what COD means. Well, it’s not a type of fish. COD stands for Collect, Organise, and Do, and these three parts of a productivity system are the critical foundations you need to develop if you want your system to work effortlessly. COD came about several years ago following a research project I did. In it, I went back to 1960 (not literally) and looked at all the time management and productivity systems I could find to see if there were any common denominators. There were multiple systems and approaches, from Hyrum Smith’s Franklin Planner system to Stephen Covey’s First Things First and Jim Rohn’s notebook and planning method. And, of course, I didn’t neglect to look at GTD (Getting Things Done) and the multiple variations that came from that. There were four standout features of all these systems. The first was to collect everything into a trusted place. The second was to organise or process what you collected. The third was to plan the day, and finally, there was doing the work. When I developed COD, I wanted to give you a simple framework on which to build your own system. A system based on how you prefer to do your work. Many of you will like routine, others perhaps like flexibility. What COD does is give you a three-step process you can customise to work in the way you want to work. Let me begin with collecting. Nothing will work if you don’t collect whatever comes your way in a trusted place. Here, there are two key parts. Collect everything and put it somewhere you trust you will see later in the day. Scribbling tasks and ideas onto PostIt notes can work, but I have observed that they often get stuck on computer monitors, whiteboards, and many other places, which means you don’t trust that you will see them later in the day. What works best is having a central place for all these tasks, appointments, and ideas. That could be a task manager on your phone and computer or a pocket notebook you carry with you everywhere you go. What matters is you use it consistently, and you trust it. This may mean you need to practice to develop the right habits. But this practice is well worth it. The second thing about your collecting tool (or UCT, as I call it, Universal Collecting Tool) is that it should be fast. If there are too many buttons to press or you keep a notebook in your bag and you have to retrieve your bag to get your notebook, you will resist and start to believe you will remember whatever you were going to collect in your head. And that will never serve you. It will forget to remind you to add it to your inbox. The second part of the process is organising what you collected. Here, you want to choose something that works for you. I recommend using the Time Sector System, but you may find organising things by project works better for you. What matters when it comes to organising is that you can quickly organise what you collected that day into their appropriate places. For instance, a task would go into your task manager, an event would go to your calendar, and an idea would go into your notes app. Where you put them will depend on how you have each of these tools set up. With your task manager, what matters is the things you need to do show up on the days they need to be done. Nothing else really matters. A side issue is that if you are going in and out of your task manager looking for things to do in individual projects or lists, you will be less effective. When you are tired, you will just scroll through your lists of tasks, causing you to feel depressed about how much you have to do and how little time you have to do them. This is why being clear about when something needs to be done prevents that scroll. You trust that what you have on your list of things to do today is the right thing to do today. That’s why I recommend the Time Sector System as your organisational system. It focuses on when you will do something, not how much you have to do. There are only twenty-four in a day, and you’re not going to be able to get everything done in a day. Be realistic about what you can and cannot do in a day. And then there’s the doing. And this is what it’s all about. You’ve collected all this stuff, and it’s organised, so you know where everyth