Your Time, Your Way

Do you feel your digital notes are not giving you what you want? And, is there a right and wrong way to manage all these notes? 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 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 | 317 Hello, and welcome to episode 317 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. Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of discussion around how we manage our digital notes. There have been hundreds, if not thousands of new notes apps promising to do wonderful things for us and there have been numerous ways to organise all these notes from Tiago Forte’s PARA and the Second Brain to the Zettelkasten system. The question is do any of these apps and systems work? I feel qualified to answer this question as I have been down every rabbit hole possible when it comes to digital notes. I’ve tried Michael Hyatt’s Evernote tagging system, Tiago’s PARA and I even developed my own system, GAPRA. But, ultimately do any of these work ? And asking that question; do any of these systems give you what you need? Perhaps is the right place to start. What do you want from a notes app? What do you want to see and how? Before we get to the answers here, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Susan. Susan asks, Hi Carl, I’m having difficulties trying to understand how best to use Evernote. I just do not know how to organise my notes. I have thousands of notes in there going back at least five years and it’s a mess. Do you have any suggestions on how best to clean all these notes up? Hi Susan, thank you for your question. I don’t think you are alone. The popularity of books like Building A Second Brain and the number of YouTube videos on this subject suggests many people are struggling to know how best to organise their digital notes. But, I wonder if what we are doing is over-complicating something that should be very simple. I’ve recently been reading Walter Isaacson’s brilliant biography of Leonardo Da Vinci and on the chapter about his notebooks Isaacson points out that Leonardo Da Vinci instilled the habit of carrying around a notebook into all is students and apprentices. It was something Leonardo did himself and everything he collected, wrote and sketched was random in order. We are very fortunate that many of these notebooks survive today and what we get to see is the complete randomness of what he collected. In these notebooks there are designs, sketches, thoughts and to-do lists all on the same page. It was this randomness that led to Leonardo discovering new ways to connect ideas to solve difficult problems and to paint in a way no one else had ever done. And, I think, this is where we have gone wrong with our digital notes. It’s the randomness of your notes that will lead you to discover new ways of doing things. It will help you to be more creative and help you develop your ideas. If you try and strictly organise your notes—something a digital notes app will do—you lose those random connections. Everything will be organised by topic, thought or idea. That does not mean that you want complete randomness. There will be projects, goals and areas of interest that you will want to keep together. A large project works best when all related notes, emails and thoughts are kept together. After all, they are connected by a common desired outcome. This is where your digital notes will excel—everything together in one place. This is why having a project notebook or folder is a good idea. You can keep all these materials together and it gives you a central place to review your ongoing projects. Then, there are what I would describe as critical information materials—things like your clothing and shoe sizes for the various places you buy things from. You may collect your receipts in organised months, and if you trust your digital notes, you may want to keep information such as your ID numbers, driving licence details, and health insurance certificates. Again, digital notes are great for storing this kind of information as they make it easily retrievable whenever you need it. What about everything else? The random thoughts and ideas you have. Well, if you want these to be useful to you at some future date, you will want to keep them random. Why is that? Your brain works at a very high level of illogicality. This is the opposite of what a computer does. A computer operates on very strict logical lines. Even AI works logically. AI will look at data and information and

This week, I’m answering a question about the basics of building your very own time management and productivity system. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The 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 | 316 Hello, and welcome to episode 316 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. Do you ever feel there is too much conflicting advice on productivity and time management? There are those who tell you never to look at your email first thing in the morning and others who do (me included). Then there are those who advocate time blocking and many who don’t. And there are the proponents of the Getting Things Done system or, as I discovered recently, people who swear by their Franklin Planners. It’s a confusing landscape, yet if you look at almost any way of doing things, there will always be conflicting advice. That’s because humans have different ways of doing things and varied tastes. There are those who say a stick-shift car is better than an automatic; others will give you different advice on how to raise your children. So, how do you navigate all the advice on time management and productivity? That’s what we’re looking at this week. This week’s question comes from Meg. Meg asks, Hi Carl, I’m a recent convert to your YouTube channel, and I wanted to ask if you have any recommendations for time management systems. There’s a lot of different advice, and I just want something I can use and stick to. Hi Meg, thank you for your question. I’ve always felt when it comes to time management and, by extension, productivity, the best place to start is with what you want to know and when. By this, I mean, what do you want to see on your calendar, and when do you want to see it? You can set up notifications on your calendar to alert you to upcoming events, and you can choose when those notifications appear. For instance, if you work from home, perhaps you may only need a fifteen-minute alert before a meeting. If you work in an office or travel to meet clients, you may prefer to see when your next appointment is thirty minutes or an hour before. Getting fundamentals like this right for you would be a great place to begin. Next would be how you manage your calendars. You will likely have a work and personal calendar. I know many people also have shared calendars with their families. The question here is how you want to be able to see all these calendars. Separating them by keeping your work calendar only on your work devices and your personal calendars on your personal devices can give you a nice clean edge between your work and personal life but can also create conflicts. If you were sent on a one-day training course, you may need to leave home a little early to arrive at the training site. If you were also committed to taking your kids to school on that day without seeing them all on the same calendar, it would be easy to double-book yourself. Think of it this way: you live one life, not multiple. Yes, you may have different roles in your life—a parent, a brother or sister, a son or daughter and an employee, for instance, but all those roles are just a part of your one life. When thought of that way, would it not make sense to keep that one life on one calendar? You could separate your roles by creating different calendars within your calendar app. Each role could be allocated a different colour on a single calendar. This way, you would see everything on one calendar and easily manage conflicts, such as attending a training course and taking your kids to school. If you work with a company that is very strict about sharing company data, you may not be able to have all your different roles in one calendar. If that is you, you could block your work times out on your personal calendar so you can identify when you have work commitments. Your calendar only needs to show you where you are meant to be. You can always refer to your work device for the details. This will mean a little extra work when you do your weekly planning, but checking your work calendar for any unusual start or finish times shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. How best to manage your notes can be confusing. There is a lot of conflicting advice in this area. There are thousands of different note apps and multiple ways to organise your notes. But let’s step back a little and think about how YOU want to use your notes. Some of you may want to store important project information in a single place, and many of you may want to keep your ideas centrally so you can access them when you need new ones. There’s so

This week’s question is all about how I use the technology I have to be more productive and better manage my time. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The 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 | 315 Hello, and welcome to episode 315 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. There’s a lot of technology today that helps us be more productive. Our computers make producing work easy compared to twenty-five years ago. It’s also made producing some kinds of work a lot cheaper. Imagine the cost of studio time if you wanted to record an album in 1999. Today, all you need is a laptop and a microphone, and you are good to go. However, with all that wonderful technology, it’s likely we have a lot of devices lying around gathering dust. I have a camera with four or five lenses sitting in a gorgeous canvas camera bag I haven’t used in over five years. Now, all I take with me when we go on a trip is my phone. I’m not a professional photographer; I don’t need all that equipment. And don’t get me started on all the apps I find I need to purge every once in a while because I don’t use them anymore. Then, there are all the subscriptions you may be paying for that you are not using. As an example, I recently discovered I had a Fantastical subscription. I used to use Fantastical. It was a cool calendar app that allowed me to have all my Todoist tasks and events in one place. Shortly after seeing what that did to my calendar, I stopped that integration (it was horrible. It made it look like I had no time at all for anything but work and meetings). Why was I paying for a service I was not using? I don’t know, but it did cause me to go through all my app subscriptions to see if there were any more. (I found four more services I was paying for I was no longer using). This week’s question addresses the heart of this technology overwhelm, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Mark. Mark asks, hi Carl, I was wondering what digital tools you use to get your work done. You seem to be using a lot of tools, and I thought it must be very confusing to decide what to use. Hi Mark, thank you for your question. I remember hearing an interview with Craig Federighi in which he explained Apple’s thinking on its products. He talked about how sometimes you work on your laptop, and other times, you may find the environment more suitable for an iPad. A good example of this would be when working at your desk, you may prefer the laptop, and if you attended a meeting, the form factor and mobility of an iPad might work better. It certainly did for me when I was teaching. I would create all my teaching materials from my computer, but when I went to the classroom I took only my iPad. That was all I needed to teach with. Today, I no longer teach in classrooms; I work from home. However, I do like to step away from my desk and work somewhere else occasionally, and when I do that, I will only take my iPad with me. It’s great for writing and fits nicely into a small shoulder bag I carry when I go out. But let’s look at how I use each individual device, and I will explain why. My phone is always with me, which means it’s the perfect UCT (Universal Collection Tool). I have my phone set up so I can quickly collect tasks, ideas and articles I would like to read later. I use Drafts, an amazing little app that connects with Todoist and Evernote. With Evernote, I have it set up so that if I have a blog post or YouTube video idea, I can send it directly to my content ideas note without having to open Evernote. Drafts also allow me to dictate my ideas, which is essential as I have most of my ideas when I am walking my dog, Louis. I can then collect my ideas and keep an eye on Louis at the same time. When I am out and about, I process emails from my phone, but I rarely respond from there. There are better tools for responding to actionable emails. I have a process for email management which involves clearing my inbox between sessions of work and then setting aside an hour later in the day for responding. I will respond usually from my computer, but if I am away from my office, I will use my iPad. And, of course, I use my phone for instant messages and occasionally scrolling social media when waiting for my wife (A daily activity haha). I also have an old iPad Mini. I love that iPad. It’s my content consumption device, and on there, I will read blogs and articles I have collected through Readwise (an app for collecting articles you want to read later) and books throug

What can you do when your calendar’s full, your task manager is bulging at the seams, and you find yourself stuck with nowhere to turn? 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 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 | 314 Hello, and welcome to episode 314 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. Do you feel, or often feel, that no matter what you do, there is always too much to do? Hundreds of emails that need responding to, several projects all coming to a close at the same time, and a demanding personal life? It’s a horrible feeling, isn’t it? It feels like there’s no room to move or do anything you want to do. Turn up each day, and the noise destroys your energy, willpower and sense of being human—the “rinse and repeat” approach to life. It leaves you exhausted at the end of the day, yet with a feeling you got nothing important done. The good news is all is not lost, but you are going to have to do something that every instinct in your body will tell you can’t do. Yet, if you do not do anything, these miserable days will continue forever. Those who have managed to drag themselves out of that pit of despair have had to do something that was uncomfortable yet brought them the organisation and calm they were looking for. The good news is the action you need to take is not so dramatic that you need to quit your job. In fact, once you commit to taking action it can be a lot of fun. (No, really!) 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 Anthony. Anthony asks, Hi Carl, Can you help? I am completely overwhelmed with emails and tasks. I have three deadlines coming up at the end of this month, and I am so far behind I know I will miss those deadlines. How does anyone stay on top of their work? Hi Anthony, Thank you for your question, and I hope you had time to renegotiate your deadlines before the end of February. Okay, where to start? When anyone finds themselves caught in a spiral of never-ending tasks, emails and projects, there is only one thing you can do, and that is to stop. And this is the part every instinct in your body will scream NO! I don’t have time. You are right in one respect; you don’t have time, but then you don’t have time to do your work either, do you? So, really, there’s nothing to lose by stopping altogether. Let me explain why stopping altogether, at least for a couple of days, is the best thing you can do. A lot of what you have accumulated likely does not need doing, but it is swirling around in your head or in your task manager telling you it does need doing. It’s only when you stop, step back and look at everything as a whole that you begin to see what needs doing and what likely does not. You won’t see that unless you stop. Let’s take email as an example. At what point will responding to an email become embarrassing for you? A week, two weeks, a month or three months? If you have not replied to an email after three weeks, do you think the person who sent the email to you is still waiting, or do they even remember sending you the email in the first place? Where is your line? You see, there is a professional consideration here. If you have not responded to an email for three weeks, what do you think the sender will feel about you if they get a reply now? Unprofessional? Disorganised? A mess? The thing is, if you have failed to respond to an email for three or more weeks often the best thing you can do is to leave it. Archive the email and move on. If it is important or does need your attention it will come back at some point. I would say if it has been a few weeks, the chances are things have moved on already anyway, and you won’t need to worry about it. In my email system, Inbox Zero 2.0, I advise you to pick one of two options. A hard or soft email bankruptcy. Most people choose the soft email bankruptcy; this is where you select all the emails you have not responded to that are older than two to three weeks and move them to a new folder called “Old Inbox”. Then clear off the remaining emails in your inbox. For these older emails you can go through them at leisure over the next few weeks and decide what to do with them. The reality is most people end up deleting this folder after a few weeks because they realise nothing in there is worth keeping. The hard email bankruptcy is more effective but scary. Do the same as you would do with the soft email bankruptcy, but instead of moving them off to a folder, yo

Where does technology help, and where does it hinder your productivity? That’s what we’ll be exploring in this week’s episode. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 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 | 313 Hello, and welcome to episode 313 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Over the last ten years or so, there’s been an explosion in the world of productivity technology. Prior to around 2010, most of our technology use was to create documents and presentations and send and reply to emails. We were in control, and technology served us. Today, technology is creeping more and more into our lives. Now, you can use apps that will look at your task manager and your calendar and tell you when to work on what. Microsoft Outlook suggests times for focused work (not taking a walk or a rest, I notice), and many developers are promising more and more automation. The thing is do we really need that? When it comes to time management and productivity, I believe it’s important to retain control. My calendar or task manager telling me to work on the report when I feel exhausted is only going to leave me feeling guilty if I do what’s best for me—taking a rest. Now, don’t get me wrong here. I think technology is great, and one of my favourite features of Spotify and Apple Music is how these apps use my listening history to create random playlists. I love playing those playlists. I like how YouTube serves up recommendations, again, based on my watch history. This is useful. I find documentaries I would otherwise have missed. However, I get to choose what to watch and when. I was reminded of this recently with the sad death of BBC Radio 2’s DJ, Steve Wright. I was able to open YouTube and type in Steve’s name and was able to listen to some of his most iconic moments. I discovered long-lost recordings of him—stuff I would never have been able to find ten years ago. These are some examples of where technology works and enhances our lives. But (and there are many buts here) that nicely leads me to this week’s question. 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 Scott. Scott asks, hi Carl, what do you think of apps like Motion and others that will organise your appointments and tasks for you so you no longer need to do any planning? Hi Scott, thank you for your question. Let’s look at where technology has an advantage. Communications. Digital communications are brilliant. They are instant, and because of that, the number of phone call interruptions has significantly reduced over the years. Phone call interruptions are the worst, aren’t they? Your phone rings, and it’s like an alarm call that we feel obligated to answer. We have no idea what the caller is calling about or how long it will take, and that creates its own anxieties. Today, I can see who’s calling and can decide whether to answer or not. I can also put my phone on silent so I don’t get that horrendous shock when the phone rings. And I know a lot of you may have a downer on email, but compared to what we had thirty years ago, it’s far better. And, no, we are not getting more emails than letters. It’s about the same. The difference is with letters, we did not feel they had to be replied to instantly, and we could take our time. Although, as an aside, in the past, large companies employed people to work in the mail room. These wonderful people’s job was to sort the mail, so you only got the correspondence that mattered. Sadly, these people are gone now, and we are left to sort our own mail. That’s where the problem is. A large proportion of people don’t set up rules in their email service to filter out the rubbish from the stuff that matters. Give yourself a couple of hours to set up some rules, and in effect, you will have given yourself your own mail room staff. Digital calendars are fantastic. Rather than having to carry around a large diary with all your appointments, you can now have your calendar on all your digital devices, which makes it so easy to see where you should be and with whom. It’s also a lot easier to make appointments with people with services such as Calendarly—where you send a link to the other person, and they can choose the best time for them based on your availability. Now, things go wrong when you blindly accept meeting requests. When we had paper diaries, we had to manually enter the appointment, and we could see instantly we had already committed to something else. We either asked for another dat

How important is your calendar in your productivity toolbox? I would argue that it’s the most important tool you have and the key to finally getting control of your time. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The 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 | 312 Hello, and welcome to episode 312 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. Reading the comments on some of my YouTube videos, I see a lot of people trying to make their task manager their primary productivity tool. I would argue this is a mistake. A to-do list or task manager is, at its heart, a list of things you think you need to do. And no matter what you throw at it, your task manager will willingly accept it. And that is exactly what it should do. Make it fantastically easy to collect stuff. However, after you have collected stuff, what next? It doesn’t matter whether you have fifty, a hundred or a thousand tasks in your task manager. What matters is when you will do those tasks. There’s no limit on what you want or need to do; that’s infinite. Your limitation comes from time. You only get twenty-four hours a day to do all this stuff, and somewhere in those twenty-four hours, you’ll need to sleep, eat and wash. Given that the limitation on what you can get done each day is time, that means that the primary tool in your productivity toolbox is always going to be your calendar. So, with that introduction complete, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Pablo. Pablo asks, hi Carl, I noticed that you seem to be very careful about what you put on your calendar. It looks so clean. How do you keep it looking like that? Hi Pablo, thank you for your question. Your observation is correct. I am very protective of my calendar. To me, knowing where my commitments are and where I have space is important each day. It allows me to control my day and to ensure I am not pushing myself beyond my healthy limits. I have an unhealthy fascination with the routines of highly successful people. It’s always interested me to learn how immensely productive people manage to get their work done. I’ve learned about Winston Churchill’s afternoon naps and late-night writing. Of Leonardo Da Vinci’s polyphasic sleeping, Maya Angelou’s hotel writing room and Albert Einstein’s love of sleep. One thing these incredible people had in common was their understanding that to get work done, you needed to protect time. Painter Picasso hated interruptions and would go to great lengths to protect his painting time. Maya Angelou would hide herself away in a hotel room between 7:00 am and 3:00 pm to do her writing and thinking. Ian Fleming screamed at anyone who dared to interrupt his 9:00 am to 12:00 pm writing time. I find it strange that so many people want to become better at managing their time and get more work done yet refuse to take any action to achieve that goal. It’s not the tool that will do the work for you—only you can do that—it’s carving out the time you need to do it. And that’s where your calendar becomes your most powerful tool. It’s the only productivity tool that will never lie to you. You get a new twenty-four-hour canvas each day, and you are given the freedom to create any kind of day you wish. You could choose to call in sick and stay in bed all day if you wished. However, you will then need to deal with the feelings of guilt and FOMO that inevitably come when you do something like this. Every decision you make has consequences. I recently did a video on getting control of your calendar, and in my example, I had meetings and blocks of time set aside for doing my important work. There were so many comments on how neat and tidy my calendar looked. Yet, I see so many people with two or three meetings scheduled at the same time. Why? I mean, you cannot attend all three meetings, so why do you still have three meetings booked at the same time? I don’t think my calendar looks neat and tidy. The difference is I will never allow myself to become double (or triple) booked. I know you are busy. However, surely, when you receive a calendar invite, the ten seconds it takes to check your calendar to see if you have anything else booked in at that time is not beyond the realms of possibility. Just clicking “accept” without checking will cause you so much damage. Check before you accept. That should be a non-negotiable rule. Not checking is like driving through a crossroads without looking. Sooner or later, you’re going to get hit by a 40-tonne truck. One question

Do pen and paper have any role in your productivity system these days? If not, you might be missing out on something very special. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The 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 | 311 Hello, and welcome to episode 311 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. A few weeks ago, I posted a video on YouTube that demonstrated how I have gone back to using a pen—or rather, a few of my old fountain pens—and some paper to start planning a project. I’ve since added doing my weekly planning on paper too. This video and a subsequent follow-up video garnered a lot of interest and some fantastic questions. It also goes back to a question I was asked on this podcast last year on whether it was possible to create an analogue version of the Time Sector System. This week’s question is a follow-up to that question, and I hope my answer will encourage you to explore some of the unique ways the humble pen and paper can aid in your productivity journey. 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 Tom. Tom asks, hi, Carl, I recently saw your video on going back to pen and paper. What was your thinking behind that decision? Hi Tom, thank you for your question. In many ways, the reason for the “experiment” was something I tried when I was flying over to Ireland for the Christmas break. I decided to take a pen and notebook with me to see if my planning and thoughts would flow better on paper rather than how I usually do it through a keyboard. The idea came from a video I had seen with Tim Ferriss, where he discussed how he finds his ideas flow better when he puts pen to paper. Plus, I have seen Robin Sharma, Tony Robbins, Andrew Huberman and read about many historical figures such as Presidents Kennedy and Nixon as well as Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming and Charles Darwin all take copious notes on paper. I wondered if there was something in it. When you think about it, the chances are you spend far too long in from of a screen these days. If it’s not your computer, it’s going to be your phone or TV. We just don’t seem to be able to get away from them. When you pick up a pen and a pad of paper, you are no longer looking at a screen. The whole effect on your eyesight is going to change. This is certainly something I was beginning to feel. Pretty much everything I do involves a screen. There’s even a heads-up display in my car! I just don’t seem to be able to get away from them. Then there’s the type. I was recently looking through some of my old planners from 2009 and 2010 and found myself being transported back fifteen years to what I was thinking back then. It was a wonderful, nostalgic journey. My handwriting was unique; I could tell which pen I used and even the ink I was using back then. I can look at a digital document I created ten years ago, and it’s boring Helvetica in black. It pretty much looks the same as any document I create today. There’s nothing nostalgic. There’s a wonderful video on YouTube by Adam Savage (yes, the Adam Savage formerly of Mythbusters) where he shows an exact copy of one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codecs. WOW! I was blown away. It looked gorgeous—even though Da Vinci wrote backwards. The aged paper, the diagrams, the pen strokes. Everything looked so beautiful. So, as I was thinking about how I could bring pen and paper back into my system, I realised the one area where paper, for me, always works better than digital is in planning—well, certainly the initial planning stages. I also find despite Apple’s attempts at creating quick notes using the Apple Pencil, it’s still not faster than having a notebook next to you on your desk with a pen. Now, one problem many people face with using pen and paper is you end up with a load of half-empty notebooks all over the place. I can assure you if you think there are too many productivity apps around, wait until you begin going down the notebook rabbit hole. There’s thousands of different styles, colours and papers. You’ll learn about the incredible quality of Japanese paper and what constitutes fountain pen-friendly papers. You’ll learn about dot grids, grids, graph and lined paper. Then there are the covers—leather bound, ring bound, sewn, bonded and WOW! So many decisions. You’ve been warned. And if you start investigating fountain pens, you’ll find yourself in serious trouble. YouTube is full of videos on what constitutes the best pens for all kinds of writers. You’ll learn about grail pens—pe

Are you restricting yourself too much? Attempting to stick to a too-embracing structure? It might be time to loosen up a bit. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 2024 ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP 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 | 310 Hello, and welcome to episode 310 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. Having some kind of structure or routine built into your day is important if you want to consistently get the important things done. The trouble starts when you try to stick to that structure or routine too rigidly. It begins to limit what you can do and holds you back from accomplishing the things you set out to accomplish. Plus, if your plan is interrupted by the inevitable “emergencies”, the plan is usually thrown out the window, and everybody else’s problems become the focus. I’m all for building a structure around your day and week. It’s this structure that will ensure you get the right things done on time every time. But sometimes, something will inevitably come along and stop you from sticking to your routine or structure, and then, if you don’t have built-in inflexibility, everything will come crashing down. Either you drop everything, which leads to a build-up of backlogs, or you’ll stay too rigid and miss an opportunity that could lead to bigger and better things. This week’s question goes to the core of this dilemma, and I hope to give you some ideas to prevent it from happening to you. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Andre. Andre asks, Hi Carl, I love the idea of having a structured day, but I am having a hard time sticking to my plan. I never seem to have enough time to get all my work done, and I have a huge backlog of emails and project work to catch up on. It’s causing me so much stress and worry. Do you have any advice? Hi Andre, thank you for your question. You are right to create a structure around your day and week. Aside from weekly planning, I would say if anyone wants to become better at managing their time and ultimately more productive, they are going to need some form of structure to their day. However, as with most things, this can be taken too far. Take time blocking, for example. Time blocking is an excellent way to make sure you have enough time to do the critical things that need doing, yet if you try to micromanage your day—that is, you block your whole calendar—you only need one meeting or one task to overrun by just a few minutes and your day is destroyed. For time blocking to work effectively, you will need plenty of blank spaces. For example, you may wish to block two hours for some deep work in the morning, say, between 9:30 and 11:30, then an hour for managing your communications and an hour for clearing your admin tasks for the day. That way, if you work a typical eight-hour day, you have four hours for anything else that may come up. However, this rigidity may also be coming from outside forces. I love reading contemporary history. My favourite era is between 1945 and 1990. These were transformative years in both the US and Europe. I am particularly interested in how creative people, like Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, managed their days. What was noticeable was with few exceptions, there were no rigid working hours. If you worked in a factory doing physically demanding work surrounded by dangerous machinery, there were laws in most countries preventing you from being forced to work beyond eight hours. For the rest, you worked until the work got done. And between 1940 and 1980, there were no computers helping you to do your work. If you needed to write a report, you either sat down at a typewriter and typed it yourself (no delete key with typewriters—if you got a page wrong, you began again), or you may have been lucky and were allowed to hand the work to the typing pool for typing up—and then you either needed to handwrite the report or dictate it. And don’t let anyone tell you that people got less mail in those days. People got a ton of mail each day (often quite literally). It wasn’t electronic mail; it was physical mail, and responding to that wasn’t as simple as hitting the reply key and typing. There were conventions to a written letter. You could never write, “Please find attached the file you requested”. You had to include a greeting and an ending, then sign it by hand, stick it in an envelope and take it to to post room. There were a lot of late nights in the office getting work finished

How much time do you spend organising and reorganising your work each day? A key question to ask if you are seeking better productivity and time management. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 2024 ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP 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 | 309 Hello, and welcome to episode 309 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. Deciding to get organised and better at managing your time is a good goal to have. After all, when you know where everything is and what needs to be done, you will see an exponential increase in your productivity, and that means, if managed well, your time management will also improve. However, there is a fine line between spending too much time managing your stuff and not enough time doing your stuff. When you get caught up in that trap, you are lulled into feeling you are being productive when, in fact, you are not getting anything important done. There are many reasons why this happens, the most common of which is becoming obsessed with tools—the apps and technology that promise to make organising and doing your work easier. No, this does not happen. Sure, a solid set of tools can help, but these tools will never do the work for you. Some of the worst tools will cause you to waste a lot of time organising and maintaining them instead of helping you to do your work more effectively. Now, before we get to the question, I’d just like to give you a heads-up about this year’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop. This will be held on Friday the 9th and 16th February. Starting at 7:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (A little under two weeks away), This workshop will cover your calendar and task management in week one. In week two, we will look at how to manage email and other communications, as well as the all-important daily and weekly planning. By the end of these two sessions, you will have the know-how to build your very own “perfect” productivity system. But what’s more special about this workshop is when you register, you get access to four of my mini-courses for FREE, as well as a workbook for all sessons. PLUS, you get a chance to ask me anything about time management and productivity. Now, places are going fast, so if you don’t want to be disappointed, get yourself signed up now. Full details for the workshop are in the show notes below. So, what do you need to do to ensure you are spending the appropriate amount of time doing your work and managing the work coming in? Well, before we get to answering that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Kris. Kris asks, Hi Carl, is there a right balance between keeping my tasks and notes up to date and organised and doing the work? I find that keeping everything up to date takes me at least an hour a day and sometimes longer. It’s very frustrating. Hi Kris, thank you for your question. I am always very careful with these types of questions because it is a good thing to use a few tools to help you with your organisation. For instance, a well-maintained notes app will do a lot for your overall productivity because note apps today have incredible search functionality. This is far better than when we were trying to keep all our notes up to date in paper notebooks and file folders. However, because of this search functionality, we no longer need to spend a lot of time organising notes into folders (or notebooks, as some note apps call them) and tagging. All we need to do today is make sure we are making the title of the note easily searchable. That involves ensuring you have a keyword you would naturally search for and perhaps the date in the title. After that, all you would need to have in your notes app is a simple folder structure, so you have at least the remnants of a system. A simple work and personal folder system would work today because search is so powerful. The more complex you make your folder structure in notes, the longer it will take you to keep things organised. One other tip on notes. It’s likely that anything you put in your notes is not going to be urgent. Urgent things are normally things we have to do, and we would put those into our task manager or calendar. This means when it comes to cleaning up what you collected, you can do this once a week. I do this on a weekend when I do my weekly planning. Another issue I come across is prioritising the task manager above the calendar. If you stop and think for a moment, this does not make a great deal of sense. A task is something that ca

Podcast 308 If you’re not in control of your time, who is? 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 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 | 308 Hello, and welcome to episode 308 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. One of the most common comments I get on my YouTube videos is about who controls your work day. The answer to that question is you. It’s always been you. Even at its most basic level, you accepted an offer to work where you work at some point, which was a choice you exercised. Similarly, as each day begins, you could choose to stay in bed and fake sickness—not something I would recommend, of course, but you always have that choice. And, you always have the nuclear button option—to quit at any time—although I hope it doesn’t need to come to that. The problem with all these choices—choices you make every day—is while you are free to make these choices, you also have to accept the consequences of your decisions. So, what you are really doing is calculating the cost/benefit of the decision you make. Staying in bed might seem a great idea on a cold, wet morning, but you probably know that by 11 am, you’ll be feeling guilty, and when thought about further, you will likely begin to feel a little anxious about all the things you might be missing out on. But one thing you should never tell yourself is you have no choice. You do, and you always will. Let’s put it this way: you may have an important, critical meeting with your CEO arranged at 11:00 am tomorrow morning, but if a close family member—your son or daughter, mother or father—is taken seriously ill overnight, you’re going to choose to be at the hospital with your family. (Well, at least I hope you are) In that situation, you are exercising your choice. You cannot be in two places at once, and therefore, you have to choose your priority. So, with all that said. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Isaac. Isaac asks, hi Carl, I have tried time blocking, but my boss won’t let me. Every time I sit down to get on with some deep work, he’ll call or message me, and I have to answer immediately. How do you deal with these scenarios? Hi Isaac, thank you for your question. One of the benefits of getting organised and in control of your day is you get to clearly see what needs to be done each day. Being able to see everything that needs to be done allows you to prioritise your work. The problems we face, though, rarely come from the work we have to do. They come from the interruptions and distractions coming at us from other people. But let’s get serious here. Most of us are not working in jobs that involve the life or death of patients. It’s not like someone in need of urgent attention from us is being wheeled into our offices for our immediate attention. So, let’s get real about how much time we have to do the work that comes at us. Your boss might like you to respond immediately, but I am sure they can wait, and if you have allowed them to become accustomed to your quick responses, perhaps it’s time to slowly ween them off that expectation. In my experience, bosses who demand instant attention from their team have been conditioned to expect instant responses. It’s not often your boss’s fault; it’s yours because you do it, therefore they expect it. In this situation, you have two options. You can have a face-to-face meeting with your boss and explain the difficulties they create when they expect instant responses and how the quality of your work and productivity would improve if they allowed you some breathing room. The second option is to re-train them. Slowly, over a few weeks, lengthen your response times. Begin with five minutes, then ten, then fifteen and so on until you find the right balance. When I’ve tried this experiment on bosses in the past, I’ve found anywhere between fifty minutes and three hours can be gained here. If you’re lucky, you may find you have a boss who forgets they ever asked you and never chases you up. (Although, I admit they are rare) However, Isaac, I was a little concerned with your choice of words, “I have to”. Do you? I mean, really, do you “have to”? In life, there rarely are any “I have tos”; these are concepts created by ourselves to create a sense of urgency. If you’re listening to this podcast, you live in a free society, and that means you always have a choice. When we use the words “I have to”, we ar

How much time do you spend organising and shuffling your work? And how much time do you spend doing the work? That’s what we’re looking at in this week’s episode. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin 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 | 307 Hello, and welcome to episode 307 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. One of the great things about deciding to get organised, becoming better at managing time and being more productive is a sense of being in control and on top of everything coming at us. Nothing beats that feeling of knowing what needs to be done and that you have sufficient time today to get it done. However, there is a dark side to all this. That is elevating the tools and practices above actually doing the work. It’s great that all your tasks are neatly organised in a task manager, and your notes are all perfectly tagged and in their respective folders. But is the return on the time invested in maintaining all that worth it? I would go as far as to say that with all the technology built into your apps’ search engines, 90% of what you are doing to maintain all these apps and tools is wasted time. You don’t need to spend all that time doing it because a couple of hours spent learning how to search on your devices will render most of these maintenance activities redundant. And that is where this week’s question comes in. How much time do we need to spend each day organising and processing? The answer to that is probably a lot less than you think. 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 Alysha. Alysha asks, hi Carl, I have been on a quest to get myself organised and become better at managing my time, but all the books and articles I read seem to tell me I have to spend hours each week organising, tagging and filing and I wonder if that is actually the best use of my time. Do you have any thoughts on this area? Hi Alysha, you make a very good point and one I often find myself despairing at when I see some of the questions I get in the comments section on my YouTube videos. It seems a lot of people are not actually interested in getting better at managing time or being more productive. They are much more interested in playing with the tools instead of doing the work. Let me explain. The tools and devices you use to be more productive are around 0.005% of what it takes to be more productive. To be more productive is about what you are producing. It's not about how well your task manager is organised or how precisely you have your notes tagged or organised. I mean, let’s be honest here, you can be exceptionally productive armed only with a paper notebook and a calendar. You don’t need anything more. All these wonderful digital tools are great, don’t get me wrong, but if they become the main focus of your whole system, then they become the distraction and prevent you from doing what needs to be done to be productive—that’s doing the work. Recently, I’ve been re-reading some older time management and productivity books. Books from the late 1980s and early 90s. These books were written before the massive advances in computer technology in the workplace and yet, the problems people were facing back then are the same fundamental problems people are facing today. There are the parents who are trying to juggle their career with raising their children. There’s the busy executive who is struggling to get their core work done because they are always having to be in meetings or dealing with clients calling them all the time. And there are the people struggling to respond to all the letters and messages they receive each day. The tools and channels may have changed, but the problems in managing all this work have not. It’s still there, and I am sure it will still be there in fifty or a hundred years’ time. The thing is, it’s never been about the tools. You can have the best, most advanced tools available today, but if you are not getting on and doing the work, you will still have backlogs and be overwhelmed. If you are not keeping control of your calendar and allowing other people to schedule meetings for you, you will be overwhelmed and unable to do your core work. I was reminded of this recently when listening to David Goggins on the Andrew Huberman podcast. In one part, they talk about all the supplements and protocols we are supposed to be taking and doing. Yet, unless you put on your running shoes and get out and

Are you guilty of attempting to do too much each day? If you are, you may be suffering from something called “hero syndrome”, and it’s not a very productive way to manage your life. 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 | 306 Welcome to episode 306 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. I remember a few years ago someone commented on a post I had written about only having 24 hours a day. The lady suggested that this was not strictly true because some people had more privileges than others. For instance a CEO might have an army of assistants, or a wealthy individual may have cooks, nannies and butlers in their home to do a lot of the work less privileged people need to do. I don’t disagree with her. What she pointed out is true. But, no matter who you are, you still only get 24 hours. A CEO is employed to make decisions, meet with key people within the organisation which their army of assistants cannot do for them, and if the wealthy individual wants to sit around all day with nothing to do drinking champagne and canapés, then good luck to them. It’s not a life I would like to live. The key to becoming more productive and better at managing your time is in how you make the most of your twenty-four hours. Knowing what your essentials are would be the first step, but what else can you do to ensure you are making the most of each day while ensuring you are getting enough rest and relaxation? Well, that’s the subject of this week’s question. Speaking of which, that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery podcast voice. This week’s question comes from Richard. Richard asks, hi Carl, I’ve always struggled to get everything I need to do done and when I get home at the end of the day, I’m just too exhausted to do anything but crash on the couch. Do you have any suggestions on better managing my time? Hi Richard, thank you for your question. It looks like what you describe is part of the journey to becoming better at managing your time. The first step is to acknowledge that things could be better. Your question suggests you are at that stage. One thing I would recommend is to do a task audit. What tasks are you trying to complete each day? Are they strictly necessary and if they are, could you group similar tasks together so you develop processes for getting them done. Let me give you an example. Most days I cook my own dinner. I also like to do my fair share of the house chores. So, I found a way to group cleaning up the kitchen and dining room while I cook my dinner. At first it felt a little overwhelming—watching my dinner cook while I was cleaning down the fridge or vacuuming the floors, yet today, it’s just something I automatically do. I no longer need to think about what I am doing. I’ve also taken to sorting out the laundry at the same time now. The laundry room is just off from the kitchen so it just seemed logical to either put a load of washing on or to fold the freshly laundered clothes. Now, I am cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen and dining area and checking the washing. Now if I put all those tasks onto a task list, it would look ridiculously overwhelming. Yet it isn’t. It’s surprising what you can do in three and 3/4 minutes while you wait for your eggs to boil. The great thing is, I no longer need any of these chores on my list. When I make dinner, that’s my trigger to do the chores. Doing a task audit will likely highlight a lot of inefficiencies. I certainly found a lot. The key is to look at different areas of your life and work and to find better ways of doing it. It will naturally feel strange at first. You’re changing a habit and that’s always hard. Yet, the long-term benefits are huge. I’m reminded of a story about the former Ferrari Formula 1 Technical Director, Ross Brawn. When he started his own team, Brawn Racing in 2009, he quickly discovered that he didn’t have time to read all the documents and emails he was receiving. One of his team members suggested printing out all the documentation and emails and placing them in a folder he could then read as he was commuting in to work. The commute was one hour each way, so this gave him two hours of reading time each day. Being self-employed, I generally eat my lunch alone. I use this time for reading articles related to my work. This gives me around forty-five minutes each day for reading. This way of managing our work is called leveraging time. We cannot change the amount of time we hav

Hello and welcome to 2024! And in this episode, I’m answering a question about sticking with your New Year plans. 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 when you do get sore, you feel a sense of achievement because you know y

In this week’s episode, how can you stay motivated and productive in retirement? 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 | 304 Hello, and welcome to episode 304 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. We often think time management and productivity are the realms of students and busy people trying to maintain a growing career and balance a growing family. The truth is once we begin making decisions for ourselves, how we use our time becomes a deciding factor in what we do each day. This means once we leave the workforce and take full responsibility for what we do each day, managing our time becomes even more important. If you think about it, when we are in work, there’s often a time we need to be in the office, an array of meetings and deadlines for projects that need to be completed. These deadlines and commitments are often given to us by our bosses and customers. Once you retire, those deadlines are no longer handed out by bosses and customers. Now you have complete control over what you do each day. You can go to bed and wake up whenever you like; you no longer need to wait for the weekends or evenings to meet up with friends, and all those activities you promised yourself you would do once you retire can now be done. Just because you are retired and no longer working does not mean you no longer need to worry about how you manage your time. In many ways, now you have complete control over what you do each day time management and productivity practices are more important than ever. And that neatly leads me to this week’s question, and to give you the question it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Kai Yee. Kai Yee asks: Hi Carl, how would you suggest a person apply your systems after they have retired? Hi Kai Yee, thank you for your question. One of the things I’ve learned is that no matter where you are in life, there will always be things to do. In many ways, when you are working, managing your time is much easier because your work gives you structure to your day. You have a time to wake up, a regular place to be at a set time each day and a finish time. When you retire, that structure disappears, and it can be disorientating. You no longer need to wake up to be somewhere at a given time, and without a plan or a reason to get up, time will disappear incredibly fast. So the first thing you should do is to give yourself a solid structure which means bringing your calendar into play. What do you want time for each day? You could begin with your wake-up and going-to-sleep times. Get these fixed into your calendar. If I were in the fortunate position to retire today, I would set my wake-up time at 8:30 am and bedtime at 1:00 am. I love the quiet between 11 and 1 am, and I get a lot of reading or learning done at that time. Your wake-up and going to bed times will act as the bookends for your day. One of the most important things you can do when you retire is to find time each day for exercise. And as I have mentioned before, exercise does not necessarily mean going to the gym or out for a run. All it means is movement. When you don’t have any commitments for the day, it can be tempting to wake up, make your morning beverage sit down and not do anything all day. Time will just slip away. I experience this frequently when I head over to Ireland for the Christmas holidays. I don’t have a structure, so after waking up, I will make coffee, sit down and read the news or scroll social media and before I know it, it’s lunchtime, and I haven’t done anything. To overcome this, I give myself some structure. This year, for example, my wife and I have decided we will go out for a morning run as soon as the sun comes up. The act of getting into our running gear, going out for thirty to forty minutes, coming back and preparing for the day will give us structure and ensure we don’t gain too much weight over the holidays. What is your preferred way to get some movement into your day? That could be going out for a walk or a bike ride. It could mean you go to a gym or an exercise class. Or perhaps you do some resistance band exercises. Maintaining your mobility is going to be very important, and that means you can use movement and exercise as part of your daily structure. What else would you like time for each day? Perhaps there will be things that don’t necessarily need to be done daily but weekly. Get these into your calendar. All of the

I and many other people in the productivity world talk a lot about planning your day. However, what happens when your plans are frequently destroyed by other people? 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 Episode 303 \ Script Hello, and welcome to episode 303 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. As the Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote “The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley”. “Gang aft agley” can be translated as go awry. This means that no matter how well you plan your day or week, things are not going to go according to plan. Similarly, one of my favourite quotes that is often attributed to Mike Tyson is, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face.” And it’s so true. One of the reasons so few people actually do a daily or weekly plan is because they believe that no matter what they plan, it is going to be torpedoed once they begin the day. A simple text message or email can derail the whole day. Yet, I still believe it is important to have a plan. Without a plan, you will be waiting for others to give you something to do. You will feel lost and never get anything important to you done, and you are guaranteed to build horrendous backlogs. This leads me to this week’s question, and for that, it means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week’s question comes from Sasha. Sasha asks, Hi Carl, what tips do you have for me to harden my system so that it doesn't constantly wobble when life experiences significant deviations outside of the planned week? Hi Sasha, thank you for your question. Now, I know there is a little more background to your question. Specifically, managing two young children and both yourself and your wife working full time. So with that in mind the first problem people face is with being too structured. What I mean by this is being too specific about what you want to get done each day. Most of the things we want to get done around the house do not really need to be done on a specific day. For instance, I like to give my home office a really good clean on a Saturday morning, but more often than not something will come up that prevents me from being able to do that. Now if I want to follow my calendar religiously, it would annoy me if I was prevented from doing what I had planned, but really, does my office need a good clean specifically on a Saturday morning? No of course not. It would be nice, but it really doesn’t matter if I do it on Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. The only thing that really matters is at some point in the week I do it. (But even then that is debatable). This problem can be exacerbated if you have young kids. With kids under the age of 13, there’s no way you will be able to maintain a well structured home. Kids were born with the natural ability to destroy all well intentioned plans. And that’s fantastic. It’s all part of the experience of raising children. If it didn’t happen, you’d miss out on one of life’s joys. I can promise you on the day your kids turn 13 you will miss all that disruption. Your kids are going to go from being entirely dependent on you to wanting to have nothing to do with you as they go through adolescence. For most of you, I hope, your family comes first. This means if you get irritated because a family member ungently, and unexpectedly, needs you you should be happy. It might be inconvenient, but family comes first. There’s no debate. If there is a debate, then perhaps family (or this particular family member) is not really your number one. One thing I’ve learned over the years is as soon as you involve another living creature in your plans, you are going to need to be flexible. My wife, for example, has no concept of time when it comes to family plans. She’s spot on with her time when it comes to friends or strangers, but when it comes to her family, her buffer is two or three hours. I remember not long after being married I used to have to lie to her about when we needed to be at the airport. If check in time was at 9:00am I would tell her it was 8:00am. This meant we were able to build buffer time into our plans. Today, she’s much better—I must have coached her well, but it did take ten years to get her to that state. And there will always be the unexpected. As you say, kids get sick and that changes everything. Now, as you both work, what contingency plans do you have in place for when a child cannot go to school or daycare centre? This is critical

This week, what to do when your day, or week, turns sour and you’re left feeling overwhelmed and stressed out. 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 Episode 302 \ Script Hello, and welcome to episode 302 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 my weekly newsletter last week, I wrote about how, for some reason, the end of the year seems to throw up a lot of stuff that suddenly needs to be finished before the end of year. While deadlines are always around us, it seems December is the month that projects and tasks, that were slowly moving along just fine, become urgent and must be complete in the next two weeks or so. This leaves you feeling stressed out and under pressure at a time of year you want to be slowing down and relaxing. This week’s question talks directly to this phenomenon and I want to give you a number of strategies that will help you to stay on top of things and get through to the end of year break feeling in control and ready to enjoy Christmas and the New Year celebrations. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Brett. Brett asks, hi Carl, I want to know if you ever feel under pressure or overwhelmed at the end of the year. And if not, what do you do to stay in control when everyone around you is demanding their projects are completed before the Christmas holidays? Hi Brett, thank you for your question. You’re right, for some reason before any long holiday there does seem to be a big rush to get things finished. Whether it is Christmas, Eid, Yom Kippur or the end of the calendar year bosses and colleagues suddenly wake up and realise they are behind on a number of projects and so the panic sets in and everything needs to be completed yesterday. The truth is, it shouldn’t matter where you are in the year, if you have planned things out and developed a timeline for getting things done, there should never be a rush to complete things at the last minute. Now, when I say planned things out and developed a timeline, I don’t mean micro-managed plans, but a rough set of milestones for each project that needs to be completed in the year. One trick I use is to divide my year up into quarters and to limit the number of projects I allow to no more than four each quarter. That still means I get between ten and twelve big projects complete each year but I do it in a way that ensures I am not overly stressing my system and I have sufficient breathing room between each one that allows for small over-runs and delays. Sure, I could set about trying to complete ten or more projects each quarter, but then most of them won’t be finished and all I am doing is letting people down by constantly missing deadlines. That’s not something I will allow myself to do. Now, when I talk about projects here I am talking about projects that will take four to ten weeks to complete. A lot of what I do each week are things I do every week. Preparing this podcast is not a project, it’s part of my core work and is a process. Likewise my blog posts and YouTube videos are all a part of my core work and I have processes for getting these done each week. For me, a project is something like developing a new course, or redesigning my website or even writing a book—which I confess took up three quarters this year. And on that subject, the book is now being edited and the cover design is close to completion. We are still looking at publication early next year. And even if I say so myself, this is a fantastic book. I’ve loved writing it AND reading through it. Anyway, back to staying in control as we approach the end of year. So the first tip is, where possible make sure you retain control over the number of projects you are committed to each quarter. There is a limit and you need to ensure the people you report to know where you are in terms of the workload you have and what time availability to you have. If you are in the habit of automatically saying yes to everything you are asked to do, then you are not in control. Instead, it means other people are controlling you. It’s your responsibility to communicate with your pears and bosses so they know what you have on, and what space you have for new tasks and projects. If you re not willing to, or are afraid to do that, you will never find the answers in YouTube videos or podcasts like this. This is one area where you need to do the difficult thing and speak up. Expl

This week, how do you decide what to work on or put another way, how do you prioritise all the stuff you need to do? 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 Podcast 301 \ Script Hello, and welcome to episode 301 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’s question is on a subject I am sure you come across from time to time. That is how do you decide what to work on when you have an overwhelming list of tasks to choose from. In my role as a productivity and time management coach, I get to see how many tasks clients have in their today view and I am often shocked to see upwards of 30 tasks. Let’s be honest here, you are not going to complete 30+ tasks in a day. If you begin the day with this many tasks, your day is already destroyed. you see the problem is when you begin the day you will likely find it quite easy to choose which of those tasks to do. However, as the day proceeds and your decision-making abilities decline—something that happens to all of us; it’s called “Decision fatigue” and is a recognised condition that affects us all. This means as you head into the afternoon and still have 20+ tasks left you find increasingly difficult to decide what to do. this slows you down alarmingly and you find yourself reaching the end of the day with fifteen to twenty tasks still to do. Now, a lot of people will blame their task manager at this point. “My task manager cannot be working because I keep getting to the end of the day with tasks still to do.” Well, no. It’s not the task manager. It’s you. You allowed yourself to start the day with all those tasks. You added the dates. What did you expect to happen? So, with that little warning out of the way, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Lionel. Lionel asks, hi Carl, I’ve followed you for some time now and have always wanted to ask you how best to prioritise my tasks so I stand a chance of completing them all. This is my biggest challenge, and I just cannot find a way to make my list more manageable. Hi Lionel, thank you for your question. The first step here is to do a little bit of analysis. While you may be starting the day with say 20 tasks, how many on average are you getting done? You can go into your completed area of your task manager and collect this data. if you use Todoist, you can go into your productivity areas (The Karma points section) and it will give you the total number of tasks you have completed over the last four weeks. Take those numbers and divide it by 28. That will give you your average number of tasks you complete each day. This number is your optimum number. So to give you a benchmark, my average over the last four weeks is 79 tasks which means I average around 11 tasks per day over seven days. Now I cannot argue with that, that’s the historical data. I might like to think I can complete 20 or more tasks per day, but the evidence tells me I complete around 11 tasks per day. I should say I do not add things like drink five cups of water or take my vitamins in Todoist. The tasks I have in Todoist are work or home related. Tasks such as write this script, record my YouTube video or write my coaching client feedback. The average duration of a task for me is going to be at least forty minutes. I also don’t add individual emails or telephone calls. I have these in my notes or email app. Todoist triggers me to go to email or my notes and do the work. So, the first thing to establish is how many tasks per day are you really doing. Once you have that number, you can now plan your days. If, for instance, you find your optimum number is fifteen tasks, then at the end of the day when you plan the next, you see you have twenty-five tasks, you know you need to go in and reduce that number down. And that means you need to prioritise your list. How do you do that? Well, first go through the list and ask yourself if all these tasks really do need to be done tomorrow. You’ll likely find that 40 to 60% of them don’t. You’ll also discover that a few of them no longer need doing and you can remove these immediately. The chances are, this first step will get your list down to a more realistic number on it’s own. However, if you still have five or six tasks over your optimum number, the next step is to look through what you have on your list against your core work. Your core work is the work you are employed to do, not the work you volunteered to do

It’s the official 300th birthday of this podcast! And to celebrate, I’ve been digging into the archive to put together a comprehensive guide to getting better at managing your time and mastering productivity. 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 Episode 300 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 300 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. Over the last six years—yes, that’s how long this podcast has been around—I’ve answered around 300 questions sent in by you, and I’ve noticed there are a few common themes where a lot of people struggle. So, in this special episode, I thought it would be a good way to celebrate to give you some tips and tricks you can use every day to solve many of these common issues. So, let’s get started. The first issue many people face is the one of overwhelm. I would guess around 70% of the questions that have come in relate in some way to this problem. Now, overwhelming lists are created by us. We make these lists. Sure, other people may have given us all these tasks in the first place, but we accepted the tasks and added them to our lists. So, ultimately, the responsibility for these overwhelming lists rests with us. We could have explained we were already “fully committed”, so to speak, but we didn’t. We said yes, and that has led to a situation where we now have too many tasks and too little time to deal with them. The solution here is to learn to say no, but that is too simple, right? So what else can we do to eliminate this problem? Well, first is to group all similar tasks together. For example, all your admin tasks can be grouped, equally, and your communications, errands, and deeper-focused work can all be grouped together. You can use tags or labels in your task manager to do this. Next is to create time blocks on your calendar for these critical sessions of work. I’ve found admin and communications need to be allocated time each day, but project work and other unique types of work can be spread out throughout the week. For example, I have one project work session each week because I don’t have many projects to work on. I do have a lot of processes to get my work done each week, but unique project work is quite low. You may be different and have multiple projects going on at one time. If that’s the case, ask yourself how much time each week you need to stay on top of your project commitments. Grouping similar tasks together and working on them at specific times each day has a number of advantages. Primary of these is you reduce the number of times you are attention shifting, which is a huge drain on your mental energy. It also means at specific times of the day, you know what you should be doing and that reduces the number of decisions you need to make. Another advantage is you are working on these every day, and while you may not be able to clear everything each day, you will at least be keeping things under control, and nothing will get missed—which creates issues later. I would also add that you want to stop trying to complete everything in a day. Most things do not need to be completed in a day. A lot of overwhelm is created by our false belief that everything must be finished today. While some things may need to be done today, a lot of what you have on your plate doesn’t. Doing a little spread out over a few days will result in less stress and overwhelm and give you better results than rushing to complete something in a day. However, that means you will need to be doing a weekly planning session to ensure you know when the deadlines are. And that leads me nicely to the importance of a weekly planning session. Now, if I am being honest, most of your plans for the week will be torpedoed by Wednesday. And that is perfectly okay. Weekly planning is not about creating a plan you rigidly stick to. That would be impossible—there are far too many unknown emergencies and unexpected deadlines. The purpose of the weekly planning session is to give you a clear view of what needs your attention that week. I see it as setting out a number of objectives that enable me to stay on top of my work and my projects and goals. In essence, the weekly plan is where you get to decide what needs to be done and allocate sufficient time for those tasks and activities to be done. It goes you a direction and, more importantly, if something new comes in, you can judge whether you have sufficient time or not to complete them. With that knowledge, you can confidently

This week, it’s all about preventing yourself from becoming overwhelmed and learning to build more realistic days. 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 Episode 299 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 299 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 much “stuff” do you have to do today? Do you think you will complete it all? Does it even have to be all done today? These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself that will help you to see whether you are running close to being overwhelmed or are already overwhelmed. There are a number of reasons why you may find yourself consistently overwhelmed. One of which is not having any prioritisation techniques in place. If you cannot, or do not, prioritise the stuff coming at you, you will treat everything as being important and given you cannot do everything all at once, your brain will slide into panic mode, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and not knowing where to begin. Another reason is because you believe you can do a lot more than you realistically can. You cannot do fifty tasks, attend six, forty-five-minute meetings and deal with over 200 emails in a day. Nobody can. Even if you went without sleep, didn’t eat or bathe, you would still not get through all those meetings, tasks and emails. 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 Paolo. Paolo asks, hi Carl, I’ve learned a lot from you over the last two or three years, and I am very grateful to you. My question is, I still feel overwhelmed by everything I have to do and was wondering if you have any tips or tricks that will help me to stop feeling overwhelmed. Hi Paolo, thank you for your question. This is one area I have thought a lot about over the years—why is it, with all the technology we have today, do we feel more overworked and overwhelmed than ever before? I mean, technology is supposed to make our lives easier, not more stressful, yet life isn’t easier or less stressful. Part of the problem is with the technology. It’s more convenient than ever to collect stuff. If you wanted to learn more about Yoga, you would have had to find a few hours to go to your local library to research the subject. Today, you can read thousands of websites without leaving your sofa. Email is easier to send than a letter. A text or Team message is easier to compose than making a phone call, and adding another to-do to a task list is much easier than pulling out a notebook, finding our pen and writing it down. When something is easy, we will do more of it than if it were difficult. The other problem with technology and apps, in particular, is these are designed to keep you hooked. This means we are encouraged to pour more and more stuff into them and spend time organising and moving stuff around so we can tell everyone how wonderful a particular app is. Just look at how Notion hooks people. It has a ton of features; you can create beautifully designed templates and share them with the world, and this encourages you to join more and more groups looking for more and more templates to download and try out. Just remember, with all this “playing” and organising, you are not doing any work. So, while you have great-looking and fantastically organised tools, you have an ever-growing list of things that are not getting done. When we realise we have to do some of the work we are organising, it’s a huge disappointment and the fun stops. This is one of the reasons why I often say our apps need to be boring. If they are boring, we spend as little time as possible in them, which is great because if we are not organising and fiddling, we have no choice but to do the work. Which, in turn, reduces the overwhelming lists that are accumulating. But let’s return to the prioritisation point. The starting point here is to know what your core work is. What are you employed to do, and what does that look like at a task level? It’s no good saying I am employed to sell, or teach or design. That tells you nothing at a task level. What does selling involve? How many calls do you need to make each day? How many appointments per day will enable you to reach your sales target each month? It’s making those calls and setting up those appointments that are the tasks you need to be doing each day before anything else. That is your priority. Beyond your work, knowing what your areas of focus are, what they mean to you and what you m

How do you find a solution to your time management and productivity problems if you have no time to stop and find those solutions? That’s what we are exploring this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 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 | Episode 298 Hello, and welcome to episode 297 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. Have you ever stopped and given some thought to why you are struggling with managing time and productivity? I mean, asked yourself why you have over a thousand emails in your inbox, a desktop full of files, images and PDFs, and are unable to find anything you need to get your work done. One of the first steps to becoming better organised, getting in control of your time and completing your work on time is to establish what the problem is. Knowing that will help you to find the solution to getting everything back in control. Too often, people look for a solution to a problem that has not been fully explored. Or worse, shut down the possibility of a solution because they feel their situation is unique. It isn’t. Millions of people have been in the same position and have found a working solution. It may mean having to make some difficult decisions and perhaps upset a few people who have been exploiting your good nature, but I can promise you there is a solution. This is what this week’s question is all about. Finding solutions to the issues that are causing you to lose control of your time and feel out of control. So, let me take this opportunity to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I am struggling to keep my head above water with my work. I was recently promoted to managing a team of eight people, and now I am getting hundreds of emails, need to attend double the number of meetings I used to attend and have to work an extra three or four hours a day just to stay on top. Is there any advice you could give me? Hi Julie, thank you for your question. Starting a new position is always challenging. Your core work changes, and that means the routines and processes you had in place before your promotion will need to change. It can be disorientating and, worse, very time-consuming as you adapt and develop new routines and processes. You will need to give it a little time to get these in place. However, there are a few other factors to take into consideration, and that is things like a sudden doubling in the number of meetings you need to attend. Let’s say you had five one-hour meetings a week before your promotion, and now you have ten hours. This means you have effectively lost five hours of your work week or one hour a day. If you were busy before, you are now busy and having to cram everything in with five hours a week less. The problem with meetings is more often than not; you will come away from each one with more tasks to do. So, five hours lost and more tasks to do. Not a great situation to find yourself in. A question I would ask is, do you really need to attend all those meetings? You have a team of eight people. Would it be possible to delegate attendance at some of these meetings to your team? They can take notes and fill you in if there is anything important for you to know. There must be hundreds of meetings going on at Microsoft every day, but I am sure Satya Nadella does not attend all of them. He has to be very selective about which meetings he attends. Part of moving into a leadership role is learning to delegate, and to do that, you need to learn to trust your team. The great thing about delegation is you learn very quickly the strengths and weaknesses of your team members. This will help you become a better leader. And you can decide which of your team needs extra training. Now, that’s the leadership side of things. What about your personal work? Well, here, as I alluded to at the start you need to stop and take a step back and see where you are struggling. Without that, you will be running around in circles, not being able to find a solution. One area I find people struggle with today is the volume of messages coming at them. We’re receiving fewer phone calls—which is a good thing—but a lot more instant messages and messages. However, the good news here is this is something we can control. For example, a lot of issues with messages is we have too many channels. If you’re using WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, instant messages and many more, the problem has a simple solution. Reduc

How do you use your calendar? Is it just a place for your appointments or a powerful way to manage your daily activities? 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 Episode 297 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 297 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. For centuries, the great and the good (and not so good) have all used a simple time management system. It’s a system that has largely been unaffected by digital technology and one that has enabled such great things as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting, Charles Darwin’s Origins of Species, and the Apollo Space program’s moon landing. Without this method and tool, none of these amazing iconic events would have happened. What system am I talking about? The calendar. Or rather your diary. I was reminded of this recently while helping a high school student prepare for a particularly intensive period of exams and assignments. We began talking about where he was keeping his course notes and how he was managing his time. We considered using a task manager, which he rejected as being just another thing to manage (good point, I thought), and it was when we began talking about using his calendar that I could see instantly that here was the key to helping him through this busy time. So, just how can a calendar help you with your time management and productivity, and what should you be putting on there? Well, that’s for this week’s question to ask. 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 Alan. Alan asks; hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk a lot about your calendar and was wondering if you have any advice on using it better. At the moment, I only use my calendar for my meetings and public holidays. Hi Alan, Thank you for your question. I consider myself very lucky today because my introduction to the world of time management systems was a simple A4 desk diary. When opened, that diary showed my full week, and I had space at the bottom of each day for my tasks. At a glance, I could instantly see how busy I was on a given day, and it was that diary and then a Franklin Planner, from around 1993, that managed my life until 2009, when I went all in digitally. This meant that my core beliefs about how I managed my time and did my work were centred around my calendar and what I had time for. Now, the way I use my calendar is for three critical things. The first, unsurprisingly, is for my appointments. All my appointments, whether manually added by myself or ones that come from my coaching programme’s scheduling service, are automatically added to my calendar. Now, a quick word about my scheduling service. I have complete control over what is scheduled here. I set the times I am available, and only people who have the link can schedule appointments. This has been a big time saver for me because most of my clients are based in the US or Europe. That means there is a significant time difference between where I am and where they are. Instead of going back and forth negotiating a suitable time, my clients can pick and choose based on what’s convenient for them without having to waste time sending countless emails. Once they have selected a time, I get a notification, and the time is blocked out in my calendar. However, the advantage of using a scheduling service is you give yourself greater control over your day. For example, if you want to protect your mornings for focused work, you can set your available times for between 1 pm and 4 pm each day. Doing that would mean over a five-day period, you would be available for fifteen hours. For most of you, I am sure that would be enough time for all your meetings and appointments. The great thing about scheduling services is your boss, clients, and colleagues enjoy the flexibility and not only do you save time for yourself, but you also save time for everyone else. All they need do is go to your scheduling service, select a time that suits them, and the appointment will then be pushed to your calendar. Job done with no input from you at all. The two services I know are Acuity, the one I use because it’s built into my website and Calendly. I believe Calendly has a free option if you want to test it out first. The second item that goes onto my calendar is date-specific events. These are things like bills to pay, public holidays or if my wife is going to be away. Now, a lot of my bill payments are set up as auto

Have you ever wondered what one thing you could change that would have a significant impact on your productivity and time management? In this episode, I’m going to share with you that one thing. 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 Hello, and welcome to episode 296 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. I’ve spent a lot of time reading, watching and studying time management and productivity strategies and practices. And while a lot of what I’ve read rarely works in the real world, there are many that do and most of these are time tested and have been around for a long time. For example, use a calendar. People have carried around calendars for decades—well before the digital age. It’s logical when you think about it. Have a single source that tells you where you need to be and when and make sure you carry that with you everywhere you go. Of course, being humans and having a natural instinct to over-complicate things, digital calendars are now trying to do everything for us and as a result they have become less helpful. Cramming your day full of appointments and tasks you don’t really need to do, has made the calendar a place few people enjoy going to anymore. What’s worse is delegating responsibility for your time to other people by allowing them to schedule appointments for you. Gee why did it go so wrong? There is one time management and productivity practice that technology has so far been unable to influence. It’s the one skill that the most productive people have mastered above everything else and if you are not skilled and confident enough to do it, you will never be productive and worse, ever be successful in your work. However, before we get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, Hi Carl, I’ve always wanted to ask you what you consider to be the critical skill needed to be good at managing time and being productive? Hi Greg, thank you for your question. That’s something I’ve spent years trying to figure out, and there is one skill I have noticed in all incredibly productive people that very few people seem to possess. That’s the ability to make decisions quickly. You see, if you want to be more productive and less overwhelmed by what you have to do, quickly (and confidently) deciding what to work on right now is the only thing you can do. Naturally, executing on that decision is the next important thing, but you first need to make a decision about what you will do right now. Writing this script at this moment was a decision I made twenty minutes ago, and writing it was the execution of that decision. There are a multiple other things I could be doing right now—walking my dog, going to the gym, taking a nap, responding to my email etc. But I made the decision to sit down and write this script. It’s got to be done sometime, right? Why not now? (Although asking for an excuse why you should not be doing something is probably the wrong question to ask) The time it took me to make that decision and begin writing was perhaps three seconds. And that is how productive people become productive. They make a decision and execute immediately. What will hold you back and prevent you from being productive is being unable to make a decision about what to do now. So, if you asked what skill you could develop that would radically improve your time management and productivity skills, I would say become better at making decisions. But it is a bit more than that. You see, making decisions is something you will already be able to do. Even the most indecisive people make decisions. What time you rolled out of bed this morning was a decision, what you ate for breakfast was a decision. We are making decisions all the time. However, the skill you need to develop is the skill of confidently making decisions. Writing this script was a confident decision. I have around twenty actionable emails sitting in my Action This Day folder, I have four unread messages in my messaging app and fifteen tasks to do in my task manager. But I am writing this right now. That’s because I am confident that writing this is the best use of my time, currently. Everything else I have to do today can wait. Most of it will get done, some of it won’t and I am comfortable with that. That’s the state you want to be training yourself to be in. And I use the work “training” intentionally. Your brain has a natural tendency to over

This week, what’s holding you back from becoming better at managing your time and ultimately being more productive? 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 Hello, and welcome to episode 295 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. A lot of getting better with your time management and being more productive is finding ways to do your work more effectively and quicker. I was reminded of that last weekend when the McLaren Formula One team broke the world record for a pit stop. They managed to change four tired in 1.8 seconds. Think about that for a moment. In the time it takes you to pick up your coffee cup, take a sip and put it back on the table, the McLaren pitstop crew will have taken four tires off and put four new ones on. How did they do that? Well, it’s more than just practising. Of course, practising will play a large part in it, but it will start with someone breaking down the process and looking for better and faster ways to do each part. Now, how much of the work you do is similar in nature? My guess is it will be 80 to 90%. You may not think so, but if you are a salesperson, there is a process to selling. If you are a doctor, there is a process for diagnosing a patient, and if you are a designer, there will be a process you follow to create your designs. Now, each customer, patient and design will be different, but how you begin and do your work will be the same steps. It’s here where you will discover ways to do your work more efficiently, and that leads to you having more time for other things and giving you a wealth of information you can use to make your processes better and faster. That’s how McLaren broke the world pitstop record, and it’s how you can save yourself a lot more time. Now, before I get into the details, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, hi Carl, I’ve been following you for a long time now, and I’ve always wanted to ask you, how do you become more efficient at getting your work done? Hi Ryan, Thank you for your question. One of the things I’ve always found fascinating is observing how skilled, productive people get their work done. That could be an author, a bricklayer or a Formula One Mechanic. There’s an art to doing our work; it’s how we become better and how we master the skills we have. I feel so fortunate that I have been able to work for large and small companies. To watch brilliant people do their work. I remember working in a very fancy restaurant many years ago as the bar manager, and each day, I got to see one of the UK’s top chefs do his work. The food he created was exquisite, and how he created it was simply brilliant. I got to see how he chose ingredients, how he experimented with ideas and how he designed the food he served to customers. It was an obsessive attention to detail, breaking down the ingredients, creating the recipes and workflows to cooking the food and ensuring the standards were always maintained. Three or four times a year, he would change the menus, and the process (there’s that word again) of changing the menus was followed each time. He learned the process from his mentor, and he passed it on to the chefs he was mentoring. One thing I noticed was none of them ever considered it as a project. It was simply a process. When the season began to change, there was a week when the kitchen team disappeared in the afternoons and tested, experimented and appeared to have a lot of fun. It was hard work; these chefs were starting early and finishing late, but at the end of the week, there was a finished new menu. Today, I will consume as many videos and articles as I can find on how successful people do their work. These people are successful because of what they do, and I want to know how they do it. How did they learn their skills, and more importantly, what do they do each day to master their skills? So, Ryan, a lot of my ideas have come from other people. One thing that stands out about highly efficient people is they are incredibly strict about how they use their time. They say “no” far more than “yes”, and rather than accept a meeting request, will challenge the host to justify their presence (even if it’s their boss) Most people will not do that. They are afraid to challenge and question. There seems to be a preference to complain rather than take action. This is about knowing the value of your time. This was probably the hardest

This week’s question is all about managing the unknown “urgencies” that will come up each day. 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 Hello, and welcome to episode 294 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. How often are your planned days destroyed by something you never even considered when you began your day? It’s likely to be frequent. That’s just the nature of life. It’s always been that way, and it always will be that way. It’s something we need to work with, though, and to develop ways to overcome the worst effects of these unknowns. That’s one of the reasons why the Time Sector System can be so powerful. If you set things up—knowing what your areas of focus and core work are, then you have a built-in prioritisation method that will help you to sort the important urgencies from the less important ones. I have to be honest. I have never worked in a job where everything was predictable. There has never been a day where nothing unexpected happened. Take today as an example. When I began the day, I had four hours of meetings booked in the morning and three hours in the evening. By the time I had completed my morning routines, half of those morning meetings had been cancelled. So, with all that explained, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Alex. Alex asks, Hi Carl, I like the idea of the Time Sector System, but the bit I am not sure about is how you deal with all the unknown tasks that need to be done in a given week. What do you do with those tasks? Hi Alex, thank you for your question. This has always been an issue for people since the first humans evolved many hundreds of thousands of years ago. After a night’s rest, we would wake up with the plan to find food. If, during the night, you were surrounded by some hungry predators, your focus at that moment was no longer on finding food but on finding safety. Your survival instincts kicked in and overrode your hunger instincts. Today, while things are no longer as black and white, we are still facing similar dilemmas. Now, instead of a choice between food and safety, we are faced with a choice between writing the report that needs to be finished tomorrow or dealing with our boss’s demand for an update on a project you are working on. Or, as in the case of a client of mine attending a meeting or dealing with a flat tire she just discovered. It’s very rare for your day to go according to plan, yet I would still recommend you make a plan. Making a plan is less about what you intend to do and more about setting the direction for the day. For example, one of my tasks today is to write this podcast script. It would be fantastic if I were able to finish it in a single day, but the chances of that happening are slim. However, if I can make a start on it and get, say, 30 or 40% of it written before the day’s end, that would be good enough. I would be happy with the outcome. The Time Sector system is about setting yourself realistic expectations about what can be accomplished in the week. It’s about identifying what is really important and being able to recognise when something that appears important is not really important at all. Once you know what is important, you very quickly learn what is not and can either ignore it or delegate it. Let’s imagine you have decided that anything your boss asks you to do on top of the work you are employed to do is urgent and important; then what you have decided is to allow yourself to be overwhelmed and stressed. There’s a limit to what you can do each day and week. If you prioritise the unknown over the known, you’ve just set yourself up for a very stressful life. The Time Sector System teaches you to quickly identify what is important so that when something does come across your desk (or through Teams or email), you can identify whether it needs your attention right now or can wait until another day. I saw that someone had written on a discussion board that the Time Sector System doesn’t work because it does not allow for sudden tasks coming in. That’s not an accurate assessment of what the Time Sector System is. What is an accurate description is you prioritise the important so that when something new does come in, you can make a qualified decision based on what you have identified as being important that week. Right now, my accountant is drawing up my annual accounts. Each day, she sends me requests for further informat

This week, I’m answering a question about the fundamentals and why it’s important to master the basics before worrying about everything else. 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 Hello, and welcome to episode 293 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Last week, in my newsletter, I wrote about the lessons I learned from rushing about looking for quick fixes and hacks to improve my productivity. In many ways, I was lucky I was doing this in the 1990s before the plethora of digital tools were available, yet the mistakes I made back then are the same mistakes I see so many people making today. There’s a lot to say about the advantages of hindsight and experience. It does help you to avoid mistakes made in the past and gives you a level of knowledge that helps you to assess new ideas through a framework of experience. What works and what does not work. For example, I’ve learned the more complexity and levels a task management system has the less likely you will use it effectively in the future. It’s exciting a fun to play with in the beginning, but once it comes face to face with a busy day or week, it breaks down, you stop using it and you then lose trust in it. Anyway, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jono. Jono asks, hi Carl, I see you often talk about keeping things simple, and I was wondering what you consider to be a simple system. I try to keep mine simple, but it is so hard to do so with so many new tools coming out each month. A little help here would be appreciated. Hi Jono, thank you for your question. To answer your question for me a simple system is one that works in the background so you can focus on your work without feeling overwhelmed, stressed out or swamped. The trouble is to get to that level, you will need to go through a few gates and that means initially things will not feel simple. Take the first stage of getting something into your system, the collecting stage. If you’ve never used a task manager before, one of the most difficult habits to build is to collect everything that comes across your desk into an inbox. If you’ve spent a large part of your life trying to remember to do something and never writing it down, doing the opposite will feel unnatural. I remember when I turned to a completely digital system and pulling out my phone every time I remembered to do something felt very unnatural. Having a laptop or later an iPad in a meeting felt uncomfortable. Today, almost everyone is in a meeting with a laptop or iPad, but twelve years ago, it was not common at all. There was a fear that people felt you were doing your email or responding to Facebook massages while in the meeting. It was uncomfortable. And that is where one of the initial problems lie. Changing an old behaviour. However, the good news is it only take a few weeks for it to become natural. It’s funny today, when my wife asks me to do something and I don’t immediately pull out my phone, my wife will stop and say: are you going to write it down? Not only has my behaviour changed, so has hers. She knows if I put it into my phone I will not forget. If I don’t, I will forget. However, that means the way you collect stuff needs to be fast and easy. Back in the days when I travelled around the city visiting clients, I used the subway and bus system. I carried a bag (I hate backpacks, they destroy the cut of your suit—which weirdly I no longer wear) This meant I needed to be able to collect ideas and tasks while moving from one train to another or walking through a subway station. I developed a test I called the changing train test. The test was could I collect a task into my task manager while I was changing trains? If I needed to stop walking, it failed the test. This was one of the many reasons why Todoist became my task manager of choice. It was simple and fast to get stuff into it. The introduction of Siri in 2014 really helped. I was able dictate my tasks to my phone and later, when Siri developed, I was able to set it up with Apple’s Shortcuts to make collecting even faster. So the first test for me is to ensure collecting is optimised to be fast and require as few button taps or pushes to get get something into my system. Today, it’s all about getting things into my system using my laptop computer as that is where I am mostly when doing my work. I no longer visit clients. The principles, thoug

Are you planning, playing and fiddling, or are you doing? That’s what I am looking at in this week’s episode. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The All-New Time And Life Mastery Course 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 Episode 292 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 292 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. The area of time management and productivity is like many areas in that there is a lot of planning, thinking, tools and systems to play with and much more that is anything but doing. Yet of all the different areas, time management and productivity is the one that is meant to focus on execution and getting stuff done. Sadly, over the last twenty years or so, certainly since the digital explosion began around the mid-1990s, the focus seems to have moved away from doing the work and more towards organising the work. Now a limited amount of organising is important, after all, knowing where something is does help you to be more productive. But, moving something from one area to another is not being productive. It’s just moving stuff around. It’s not doing the work. A document that needs to be finished, needs to be opened and finished. Moving it from one folder to another will not write the document. All it does is moves it from one place to another. That’s not being productive. That’s procrastination. And it’s on this subject that this week’s question is about. How to focus less on the minors and more on the majors—the activities that get the work done. And so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, hi Carl, I recently took your COD course and I am struggling to meet the target of only spending 20 minutes a day on organising and planning my day. I find I need a lot more than twenty minutes. Is there a reason why this is important? Hi Caroline, thank you for your question. The twenty-minute rule, so to speak, is not necessarily a strict number, it more a way to help people understand that planning and organising, if not checked, will become a dangerous form of procrastination. We often use the excuse of something needing more time for planning or thinking about to avoid doing the work. If you think about it, how long does it take to decide something? The answer is no time. You either do it or you don’t. Now that does not mean some things need researching, but researching is different from thinking about and planning. To give you an example. One of my bigger projects this year was to redesign my website. It’s been on my list since January the first, and I’ve used the excuse all year that I need to think more and plan what to put there and what to remove. Yet, really, I already know those answers and I could very easily have written them out in around ten minutes. That extra thinking time was just an excuse to avoid doing the many hours of work that I know is involved in redesigning a website. In the end, I decided to just get it started. I opened up a Keynote document, planned out the design, asked my wife to choose three complimentary colours (she’s better with colours than I am) and mapped everything out. That took one hour (I felt a fool—not only did it only take an hour, I really enjoyed it.) The next evening, I sat down and cleaned up my website—removing old pages and cleaning up all the others and implemented the typeface and colour changes. That was two hours of pure joy (really, silly me. There I was procrastinating on the project most of the year and it turned into a very enjoyable project). A couple of days later the hard lift work had been done and all I was left with was the tidying up. Project completed in just over a week. There really was no excuse. It turned out easier than I imagined, it was fun and it was completed in less than ten days. Looking back now I feel such a fool. I procrastinated most of the year because I thought it would be long, difficult and boring and it turned out to be the opposite of that. How many projects do you have lying around sitting there in your projects list with nothing happening? Why? What’s stopping you from starting the project? Try this little experiment. Pick one of those projects you feel needs more thinking and planning, open up your notes and write out what you think needs to be done to get it started—the very first thing. You do do not need to worry about the second task or the third. Just focus your attention on the very next task to get it started and do that task. That is doing. The issue with t

When does a task become an event, and when does an event become a task? 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 The All-New Time And Life Mastery Course 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 Episode 291 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 291 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Last week, in my YouTube video, I shared how to get the most out of Todoist’s latest new feature, task duration. This feature allows you to add a duration time to your task so you can estimate how much time you will need. As I explained in the video, this is not a feature I personally would use but I know a lot of people have been requesting this for some time. This sparked a lot of comments on the subject of Todoist introducing a calendar so people can drag and drop tasks onto a calendar and I know this type of feature appeals to a lot of people. However, there are problems with this approach to task management and this week’s question asks me to explain why this would be a problem. So, I decided to oblige and explain why this is something you do not want to be doing. 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 Steve. Steve asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say in the past that you should not be putting tasks on your calendar and events onto you to-do list. Could you explain your thinking behind that approach? Hi Steve, thank you for your question. In the early days of Mac OS 10, in the early 2000s, Apple brought tasks into their calendar app and they lived on the right hand side of the calendar. It seemed logical. Here was a list of all your appointments and on the right hand side there was a list of all the things you needed to do that day. It soon became apparent that this was not working. You see tasks and appointments are two very different things. An appointment is a commitment to another person or persons that you will be in a specific place at a specific time. That could be a meeting room, a place or in front of your computer with either Zoom or Teams open. A task on the other hand is something you decide needs doing but can be done at any time. You might find you have twenty minutes while waiting for a doctors appointment and you could call the people you need to call or send out those emails you need to send. In my case, I might have a blog post to write but it doesn’t matter whether I write it in the morning, afternoon or evening. The only thing that matters is I write it. I could decide to postpone it until tomorrow because I have too many appointments today and that would be fine. I am not letting anyone down. The way I look at it is, my calendar is there to tell me what I have committed to and with whom. My task manager tells me what I need to do when I have some free time. Now, time does not accept a vacuum. We cannot do nothing, ever. If you think about it laying on the sofa mindlessly scrolling through news or social media feeds is doing something. Similarly, taking an afternoon nap is still doing something. You are always doing something whether you are consciously aware of it or not. Now, one of the most important things you can do if you want to be on top of your work is to maintain flexibility. Flexibility means you can direct your attention where it needs to be when it needs to be there. If you cram your calendar full of tasks, you immediately lose that flexibility. It also means if one or two of your meetings overrun, you get held up in a traffic jam or something goes wrong with your company’s CRM system, your carefully curated tasks and appointments are destroyed. Now that in itself is not really a disaster, you can reschedule all those tasks, but now you’ve just added another step. Instead of being able to pick the tasks you are able to do in the moment—responding to your messages while being stuck in a traffic jam, for instance, you begin to panic about how much time you are losing and all the work you will now have to reschedule on your calendar. This also means you calendar loses it’s power. If you schedule tasks to be done at say, 2pm but you are running behind so you ignore those tasks, what’s the point of your calendar? You took the time to put those tasks there but you just ignore them, what’s the point? Because you are human, you need flexibility. You want to be able to choose the right work for the way you are feeling and what’s on your mind at that moment. Then there is the human factor. You are not a machine. W

Do you have any big tasks or projects that just need a few days of focused work to get completed but you keep putting off? Yep, I think we all have some of those. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The All-New Time And Life Mastery Course 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 Episode 290 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 290 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. One of the best things you can do is to structure your day so you get your core work and routines done almost automatically. This is the most important work you have to do each day and week. But that can often create a Parkinson’s Law situation—where activity fills the time available, which means you don’t have time to work on those unique, one-off projects. This then leads to those one-off projects being postponed and delayed particularly if there are no hard deadlines for them. This week’s question is on how to find the time for additional projects when you already have your core work and routines set up and getting done every day. Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, I would just like to let you know that the all encompassing Time and Live Mastery course, my biggest and best course has just been completely re-recorded. This course covers everything from discovering what you want out of life to turning what you want into a pathway to accomplishing it. As the headline for the course says: How to create the life you want to live and find the time to live it. The course includes lessons on COD (Collect, Organise and Do) and building your own Time Sector System. It also also includes the Vision Roadmap, how achieve your goals and so much more. If you only want one course, a course you can return to over and over again, this is the one for you. You also get incredible bonuses. Free access to my Mini Course Library AND every few months I will be doing a FREE live session where you can ask any questions you have to me directly. This course will change your life. It will give you a direction and focus and the tools you need in order to achieve the things you want to achieve. Full details of the course are in the show notes. Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jen. Jen asks, hi Carl, I took your Time Sector System Course recently and it’s working exceptionally well for me. The only problem I have is getting one off projects completed. I am doing my core work each week, but that leaves me with little time to do some of my projects. Do you have any suggestions on how to include working on these projects? Hi Jen, thank you for your question. With the Time Sector System it’s about first making sure you have sufficient time for your critical work each day. If you’re not doing that, everything falls apart because you end up neglecting clients or missing important deadlines for work you are employed to do. It’s often easier to make sure you have the time for that first before moving on to finding time for unique, one-off projects. However, if you are employing time blocking into your system, you can dedicate an afternoon or a morning one of two times per week for project work. I do this on a Tuesday, for example. On Tuesdays, I have a couple of morning calls that finish at 9:00am, and I keep the rest of the day free for project work. I avoid scheduling meetings after 9:00am on a Tuesday. It’s only one day a week, and that leaves me plenty of spaces the rest of the week for meetings. However, one of the beneficial things about the Time Sector System is the automation it builds into your week. You are doing the critical tasks at the same time each day or week which means you develop highly efficient processes for doing this work. For example, I track my subscriber and sales data each day. I have a spreadsheet that I enter this data on and when I first began doing this it would take me around an hour. Today, I can collect all the data and enter it into my spreadsheet in around fifteen minutes. Over the years I have refined and polished my process for collecting and entering this data. The same goes with managing email. I used to waste so much time checking and responding to emails. Today, it’s ten to fifteen minutes in the morning clearing my inbox and around forty minutes in the afternoon replying to the actionable mails. It’s not something I even think or worry about anymore. So, if you are new to the Time Sector System, as with anything new, it takes time to bed in and become automatic. I le

This week, I am sharing a few ideas you can use to get some time back for the things you want time for. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin 7 Tricks That Save Me 16.3 Hours Per Week Email Mastery Course 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 Episode 289 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 289 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Do you ever wish you had more time each day? Not necessarily time for more work, but just time to do what you want. Many years ago, this is how I felt. I wished there was more time for doing the things I wanted. I looked at my heroes from the past—being able to come home from a hard day in the factory physically exhausting themselves, to spend the evenings in a garden shed inventing the future. People like Frank Whittle (inventor of the jet engine) and James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner. I often wondered how they were able to do it. It then dawned on me that we are not able to make more time; that is fixed. People like Frank Whittle, James Dyson, Marie Curie and others had the same amount of time you and I do. However, what these people did was decide what they would and would not do with their time so they could maximise what they had doing the things they loved doing. Is that not possible for you? Could you decide what you will and will not do with your time? Are you currently doing some things that may not be conducive to what you really want to do? Well, this week’s question had me thinking more about this, and the results of that thinking are all in this podcast. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Patrick. Patricks asks, Hi Carl, I’ve often wondered if you have any tips on making better use of your time. Is there anything you do that saves you time each day or week? Hi Patrick, thank you for your question. I must confess that your question was the inspiration behind the video I posted on YouTube last week on how I can save around 16 hours each week following a few simple practices. Now, I should point out that some of what I will talk about here may not work for you, how they work for me, but that does not mean they definitely won’t work for you. You can modify them so that do work. All I ask is you keep an open mind and see how you could adopt them into your life. First up. Always have a plan for the day. I know; I have spoken about this a lot. But it just saves you so much time. It stops you from being dragged off doing unimportant things and keeps you focused on what needs to be done. Now, I am not suggesting you plan out every minute of the day; that would be impractical and never works. Instead, what I am suggesting you plan out what must be done. The things that need to be done and tasks that will prevent bigger problems in the future. When you start the day, know what you will do and when you will do it. For example, today, I had a few calls this morning, so I kept my morning free for calls. This afternoon, this script was to be written. Now, it did not matter when precisely I would write this script; all I decided was I would write this script before taking my dog out for his walk. Beyond that, the only thing that was planned was an hour for responding to my emails and messages and more calls this evening. The problem you will have when you don’t have a plan is your day will be hijacked by fake urgencies and emergencies from other people. Fake because you will grab onto anything to avoid having nothing to do. Having a plan focuses you and ensures that what you do is relevant to your goals, projects and areas of focus. All this saves you time because what you do each day is moving the right things forward so they get done on time and without a lot of fuss. And you are not wasting time trying to decide what to do. The next tip is to reduce the number of channels you are contactable through. I found it amusing a few years ago when everyone was getting excited about apps like WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams and Facebook Messenger. At the time, I could not understand what all the fuss was about because we already had email, and text messaging was great. You could see what would happen when groups in these new apps were created. Instead of a conversation with one person, there were going to be conversations with numerous people, which meant a message thread would be constantly updating; to catch up with what was going on, you had to scroll back and read through everything. WOW! The time wasting that happens

Are you still creating projects out of the work you regularly do? If so, you might be causing yourself more work than you really need. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course 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 Episode 288 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 288 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. This week, I have an interesting question about why projects are bad, and processes are good. It’s something I discovered around five years ago, yet never realised I had switched away from creating projects for any multi-step job I had to do. When I look at what I do, for instance, writing a blog post is a process. I sit down at my desk, open my writing software and begin writing. Once the first draft is written around one hour later, I leave it for twenty-four hours before again sitting down and editing it. Once the edit is complete, I design the image and post the blog post. Job done. I have similar processes for my YouTube videos, this podcast and the newsletters I write. What I discovered around five years ago is if I treat everything that involved two or more steps as a project, it changed how I felt about the work. I felt there was a need to plan things out, create a list of tasks and choose a start date. All steps that are rendered obsolete when you have a process. With processes, all you need to know is when you are going to get on and do the work. Because you have a process, you already know what needs to be done, and you can get on and do it without the need for excessive planning and preparation. But it can be difficult to alter your way of thinking from project to process-based thinking, and that is what this week’s question is all about. 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 Linda. Linda asks, Hi Carl, I found your recent newsletter on projects versus processes interesting, but I am struggling to work out how to turn my work into projects. I work with clients, and they each have unique needs, which means I need to treat each one as a project. Do you have any advice that will help me to find the processes? Hi Linda, thank you for your question. Working with clients can be challenging when it comes to following a process. Each client likely needs individual attention, and each task related to the client could be unique. However, looking at it that way does create confusion. Fortunately, Your processes will begin from the moment of your first contact with your client. What do you do at the first contact with a client? For example, with my coaching clients, the process begins once I receive a completed questionnaire from the client. That questionnaire is placed in a special folder in my email until the first call. Twenty minutes before that call, I retrieve the questionnaire, copy and paste it into a new client note and then archive the original email. That begins the process. After that, things can go in multiple directions. But during all my coaching calls, I keep notes; if there is anything specific I need to do for the client, I will add it to the note. After the call, the note is flagged until I write my feedback, which I do as a chunk. I have a one-hour block each day for writing feedback, so I will see what I have committed myself to when I write the client’s feedback. I can then decide what needs to be done to complete that commitment. Building processes is not about having a single process. It’s about creating multiple processes for the work you regularly do. Now that may sound very complex or difficult, yet if you stop for a moment and think about it, you are already using processes for almost everything you do. I noticed when I wash my dishes after breakfast or dinner; I wash things in exactly the same way. I don’t stand there, trying to decide what to wash first. I begin with my bowl and then my cutlery, and then my glass. It’s the same when I prepare to go to bed. I brush my teeth and turn off all the lights before getting into bed. It’s the same process each day. The great thing about processes is they become automatic. You don’t think about each step involved in brushing your teeth. You just do it. And the same applies to your work processes. I don’t think about what to do when I have a new client. There’s a process I follow. Now, processes do not work for everything. A process is used for anything you may repeat frequently. It’s unlikely you will redecorate your bedroom frequently. Doing a job like that will be a project

Are you confused with all the time management and productivity advice floating around? I know I was, and all this information can and does cause inaction. This week I will show a way through the deluge of information. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course 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 Episode 287 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 286 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. When I began my journey into the digital time management and productivity world in 2009, there was a lot of information on how to use the new technology emerging with smart phones. This evolution (or maybe revolution) in the world of productivity was exciting and blogs and podcasts were full of information on turning your digital devices into productivity powerhouses that promised to automate the work we were doing. The trouble is, back then, as now, much of that information was contradictory. Common ones are things like don’t check mail in the morning, (silly advice) and micro-manage your calendar (more silly advice). The reality is when it comes to productivity and managing your time it’s important to find a way that works for you. It’s about knowing when you are at your most focused and when you are easily distracted. Trying to squeeze yourself into the way other people work is not going to work for you and the way you work. 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 Michael. Michael asks: hi Carl, over the last year or so I’ve become so overwhelmed with my work and life. I was given more responsibilities at work and at the same time my wife gave birth to twin daughters that need a lot of attention. I began reading and watching content on getting better organised and being more productive and have just become so confused. Everyone is giving different advice. How would you build better habits and routines that would make you more productive? Hi Michael, great question. In many ways, I am lucky because my journey into becoming better at managing time and being more productive began in the late 1980s / early 90s. There were no blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels then. All we had were books and the occasional article in magazines and newspapers. This meant, while there were still contradictions, it also slowed us down and allowed us time to test ideas and concepts and give them enough time before attempting to try something else. And that is often the first big mistake people make. Not giving a concept or idea long enough to work. Change is hard. Changing behaviour is even harder and takes time. You are not going to get a new concept working in 24 hours, a week or even two or three months. You need to give anything new at least six months. You need to learn to use the system, develop the habits and muscle memory. And that means if you change an app, you put yourself under a moratorium for six months. You do not change it for six months. This has two benefits. It gives you time to really learn how to use the app and it causes you to hesitate before changing something. If you know that by changing your task manager means you are stuck with whatever you change to for six months, you will question yourself about whether the time and energy cost is worth it. Now watching and learning from others is actually a good idea. But, it’s not about copying their system and tools, it means seeing how they overcome similar problems to you. Not all people talking about productivity and time management have the same issues as you. I remember four or five years ago, I liked how Thomas Frank did his videos, but what he was teaching was how to manage time as a student. I was not a student, however, there were some ideas Thomas gave me about managing information that I did incorporate into my own file management system. I learned a lot of my time management concepts from people like Hyrum Smith, Stephen Covey, Brain Tracy, Jim Rohn, David Allen and Tony Robbins. These are the pioneers of modern day time management and productivity and you only need to look at the results they have achieved individually to see their systems and methods work. A lot of what you see on YouTube, for example, are videos on how other people manage their work and they make it look slick, efficient and beautiful. But that’s not always a system. That’s video editing. With the power of video editing you can make anything look fantastic. It does not mean it works in the real world. I saw a comment on one of my videos r

Do you feel overwhelmed by all the things you have to do? Well, this week’s podcast is just for you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course 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 Episode 286 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 286 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. The number one reason someone comes to me for help is because they feel stressed out and overwhelmed by everything they have to do. They have thousands of emails sitting in their inbox, hundreds of Slack or Teams messages asking for things and a long list of to-dos that never seems to shrink. It’s enough to make anyone scream out of sheer desperation. The good news is it’s not impossible to regain some control. The bad news is you will need to stop and step back a little. And often it’s that stopping and stepping back that people find most difficult. When you face an impossible situation, the temptation is to keep digging. The problem is what got into the situation you are trying to dig your way out of is precisely what you are continuing to do. Digging. You need to stop digging so you can look up and see what you are trying to accomplish and restart with a clearer direction. This week, I’m going to give you a roadmap you can follow to get yourself out of this hole so you are working towards a less overwhelming and clearer place. And that means, it’s time for me now to h and you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Enrique. (엔리캐), Enrique asks, hi Carl, I really need your help. I feel so overwhelmed and stressed because my list of tasks keep getting longer and longer and I never seem to be making it smaller. It feels for every five tasks I do, fifteen new ones get added. My boss is always sending me messages and asking for updates so I never have time to do any focused work. How can I stop all this from happening? Hi Enrique, thank you for your question. Firstly, fear not, there is a solution to this for you but you will need to do something a little uncomfortable. I need you to stop for a day or two. When anyone gets into a situation where far more is coming in than going out, continuing to do what you are currently doing is not going to solve the problem. The only way you will solve a problem like this is to stop and draw a line under it all, while you fix the underlying problem. If you don’t stop, you have no chance to break the vicious circle that has grown. You have to break the circle and to do that you need to press pause. Now, once you have stopped, you need to first look at the foundations of your system. Tasks and emails are different things so let’s look at your tasks first. How are you collecting, organising and doing your work—the principles of COD. Collecting everything is important, but it does not necessarily mean everything you collect needs to be done immediately or at all. A lot of what you collect can be done later. Quite a few of the tasks you collect may even be deleted because on reflection you realise you either do not have the time or resources to complete them or they do not need doing at all. Do not be afraid to delete these. If they are important, they will come back. The delete key is your friend. Organising is how you organise all the things you have decided do need to be done. There are only two questions here: what exactly needs to be done and when are you going to do it? When you do it will depend on a two factors. Deadlines and available time. Now, here you will come up again the time V Activity conundrum, where the time side of the equation is fixed and there is nothing you can do to change that—that’s the natural laws of time and physics. But, you do have complete control over the activity side. The activities you do in the time you have available. Now as an aside here, how long does a task take? For quite a few tasks it’ll be likely you will not know before you begin the task. And therein lies the answer… “before you begin the task”. Let’s say your boss asks you to prepare a report on a recent sales campaign you delivered. If you write in your task manager “Write report on recent sales campaign”, it will stress you. Unless you regularly write sales campaign reports you won’t know how it will take you and your brain will tell you “It’s going to take a long time”. That now means every time you see that task in your task list, you will convince yourself you have no time to write it today, so it gets rescheduled for tomorrow. You will not know how long this task will take until you

Podcast 285 This week, it’s all about what should and should not go on your To-Do list. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop 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 Episode 285 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 285 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Do you have too many tasks in your task manager? It’s one thing committing to using one, it’s an entirely different thing ensuring the right kind of tasks are on your list. Get this part wrong and you are going to soon find yourself overwhelmed. I regularly see a common type of task on a to-do list that really should not be there, and I see quite a lot of tasks on a calendar that should be on a to-do list. I know, it sounds confusing, but once you learn this strategy, you will soon find your task list reduces and you feel a lot less anxious and overwhelmed. Now, before we get to the question and answer, let me just inform you that on Friday (that’s the 4th August for those of you in the US) My next Ultimate Productivity Workshop begins. That’s a 90 minute live workshop via Zoom where over the four Fridays of August, we cover how to get the most out of your calendar and task manager as well how to better manage your email and messages and finally in the fourth week, we cover planning. As part of this workshop you have access to my Mini-Course set—that’s four of my most popular mini-courses—AND you get to download the workshop itself so you can keep it for later reference (and also if you are unable to attend one or more sessions) Places are limited now, but there are a few still available. If you want to take your own time management and productivity to the next level, then get yourself signed up now and I’ll see you on Friday. More details on the workshop plus how to register are in the show notes. Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Grace. Grace asks, Hi Carl, I began using Microsoft’s ToDo app last March and at first it really helped. But now, I find it’s become so overwhelming. I hate going in there because it reminds me how much I still have to do. Do you have any tips on making my ToDo better? Hi Grace, thank you for your question. This is something that happens to so many people. There’s the initial excitement of being able to put all the things we feel we have to do into a simple app, and to add dates to when we will do these tasks. And because at first we rarely put too much in there, our daily lists are not too bad. They are doable and if we do reschedule something, it doesn’t feel too bad because we got at least 80% of what was on the list done. It’s a great feeling, yes? However, over time, we add more and more stuff. We start to add things we don’t want to forget about such as an upcoming event, anniversary or birthday. We then start to fiddle with the projects area and start adding more and more and more. And eventually, we find ourself with an endless list of projects with a lot of unclear tasks telling to do something we cannot remember why we needed to do them in the first place. We also begin adding random dates to tasks in a vain attempt to prevent us from forgetting something. Of course, when those task appear on our today list we just reschedule them again because we’re now trying to keep our heads above the water and as these tasks are not urgent or they don’t have a clear deadline, they can be sacrificed today. And that, just kicks the problem down the road. Eventually, what most people do is blame the tool because that’s much easier than blaming the real culprit, and they go back to YouTube and watch their favourite YouTubers and see what they are reviewing now. And lo and behold, these people are talking about the latest new app that promises to make you more productive, more relaxed and do the work for you. So, it’s switch time and the the cycle is complete and ready to be repeated. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In my podcast from a couple of weeks ago, I talked about what David Allen taught me over a lunch we had back in 2016. That was the forget the tools and focus on developing your system. You see the problem is never the tools. You could very easily create your own digital task manager using Google Sheets, Excel of Apple Numbers. Sure, there’d be a bit of setting up work and some fine tuning, but it’s certainly doable and I know a lot of people who have done this perfectly fine. The problem is with your system and more specifically what you are collect

Is what you want to get accomplished this week realistic, or are you setting yourself up for disappointment? 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 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 Episode 284 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 284 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. What do you want to get accomplished this week? What are the “big rocks” you want to deal with so you end the week knowing you have got what needed to be done, done? If you don’t know, your week is already destroyed. It’s destroyed because if you don’t know what you want to get completed that week, then someone else will tell you what to do. And that means you are working on other people’s agenda and benevolently helping them to achieve their goals. But where does that leave you? When it comes to promotion opportunities who’s going to get the promotion? You who are running around dealing with everyone else’s issues and work and as a consequence not getting much done. Or the person who is getting their tasks completed on time and consistently moving things forward each week? Ultimately, all this comes down to making a decision. Will you spend thirty minutes or so at the end of the week looking ahead and establishing some objectives for the following week or not? Only you can make that decision or find an excuse. Either way, on this issue, only you can make that choice. And so, this naturally leads to me handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I know weekly planning is important, and I try to do it, but when I get to the end of the week, I am just so relieved the week is over and the last thing I want to do is think about the next week. I know this is impacting my career prospects and was wondering if there is something I can do that will motivate me to do something about planning the week. Hi Julie, thank you for your question. Firstly Julie, this is an area I know so many people struggle with. I think everyone knows the advantages and importance of having some kind of plan for the week, yet it can be hard to motivate ourselves to spend a little time looking ahead and deciding what needs to get done the following week. However, before we can get to the planning stage there is something very important that needs addressing. That is asking yourself what can you realistically get done the following week. I suspect most people don’t do, or stop doing a weekly plan, because they very rarely, if ever, accomplish anything they plan anyway. If you spent an hour or two (and yes, some people do waste that much time planning the week) and then never get close to completing that plan, what’s the point? Why bother in the first place? This is why you do not want to be spending hours and hours on a weekly plan. It’s a waste of time. You see, there are far too many unknowns. You have no idea how many emails you will get on Tuesday morning, let alone what your boss with ask you to do via WhatsApp or Slack on Monday afternoon. In a way, this is the missing piece of planning a week that almost everyone overlooks. All the unknowns that will be thrown at you throughout the week. It’s these that have an enormous impact on what you can and cannot get done in a week. I recently learned that author Jeffrey Archer disappears to Marbella from 27th December to around the first week of February to completely focus on his writing. During those five to six weeks he does nothing else but write. He effectively removes himself from the possibility of distractions in order to get his work done. It’s this that allows him the confidence to know that he will complete his first draft in those few weeks. It’s unlikely you have the luxury to be able to disappear and remove all possibility of distraction to focus on your work, which means you also lose the confidence to know with almost complete certainty what you will be able to accomplish in a given week. But that’s okay because you don’t need to know with absolute confidence what you can accomplish in a week. All you need to know is what you want to get accomplished in a week. Now, this begins with knowing what your core work is—that is the work you are employed to do—the absolute basics. For me, that means writing a blog post, two newsletters. The script for this podcast and recording two YouTube videos. I also have between fifteen and twenty hours of meetings each week and I need around an hour a day to deal with my communications. In tot

This week’s question is all about what is important in your time management and productivity system. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 283 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 283 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. With the constant influx of new productivity tools it can be difficult to settle on a set of tools because you are worried that you might be missing the boat or there could be something out there that is better than what you are using now and could, in theory, make you even better at managing your time and being more productive. But wait, do all these new tools really offer you the opportunity to improve your time management or productivity? Have you considered the time cost penalty of switching and then learning the new way to find what you need and organise everything? The truth is not what you may think and it’s something I learned several years ago. Once I did, my productivity shot through the roof. I was better organised and I quickly discovered I had more time to do the things I loved doing. Which was a bit of a shock. So that brings me to this week’s question, it’s also a question I frequently get on YouTube comments, and I thought it would be a good idea to share my discoveries with you so you can make your own decision. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question come from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I’ve always wondered why you don’t use apps like Notion and Obsidian. I notice a lot productivity YouTubers use these apps, but you seem to stick with the same apps. Is there a reason you don’t check these apps out? Hi Kevin, thank you for your question. To answer your question directly, the reason I don’t switch my apps is because David Allen told me not to. Now, for those of your who don’t know, David Allen wrote the “bible” of time management and productivity: Getting Things Done and he is considered the Godfather of today’s productivity systems. Back in 2016, David visited Korea and I reached out to him and I got to meet him. We had lunch together, and we inevitably talked productivity. The conversation soon got onto tools and I asked him if he really does still use eProductivity—an app that was an offshoot of the old Lotus Notes. He confirmed he did. Now at that time, I was still on my productivity tools journey. I don’t think I stuck with a task manager for longer than three of four months before I was searching around for a new one to “play with”. I was curious, and asked him if he’d ever considered using something else—something that was available on his iPhone or iPad as as well as his computer. (eProductivity was only available on a computer) and he said: Why? I was a bit stuck there, but he added why would he change something that works? Something that he’d learned to use inside out and could pretty much use with his eyes closed. He also pointed out that eProductivity was reliable, it didn’t rely on syncing (which back in 2016 was not particularly reliable for anything) and he couldn’t remember the last time it crashed. As our conversation continued, David elaborated on his system. He carried with him a leather wallet that contained a little note pad and pen. If he thought of something he’d write it down on the notepad and when he got back to his office (or hotel room) he would tear out the notes and add them to his inbox (or traveling inbox if he was on a business trip). Later when he had time he would transfer those notes to eProductivity. This gave him an opportunity to filter out the stuff that didn’t need any action and decide whether something was a note or a task. That process wasn’t something he’d developed overnight. It took twenty years or more. Refining and developing the so called muscle memory to automatically add something to the note pad when anything came up isn’t something you will develop over a few weeks or months. It takes years. But more importantly, the method David Allen had created for himself ensured he was always asking the right questions about something. If you’ve read the Getting things Done book, he writes about these questions. They are: What is it? Is it actionable? If so, what needs to happen? It was during our conversation, I told him of my dilemma at that time which was Todoist or OmniFocus? David answered, “pick one and stick with it.” It was that that revolutionised my productivity. “Pick one and stic

This week, what can you do when the demands of others prevent you from doing your work. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 282 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 282 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Do you have a boss or a customer that expects you to be available 24/7? Perhaps, your boss always wants to know where you are and what you are doing or they rely on you to get them information because they are too lazy, or unable, to look up the information themselves. These demands and distractions are a common intrusion and do prevent you from getting on with your work. It could be you are being invited to meetings you have little to contribute to but feel you must attend because your boss sent the invitation. And on the other side, there are clients and customers who expect you to drop everything in order to serve them. It’s these interferences into our carefully curated schedules that cause a lot of our time management and productivity issues. You are willing, but outside forces prevent you from getting on with your most important work. What can you do? Well, that’s the issue in this week’s question. Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, I’d just like to mention that My Ultimate Productivity Workshop is returning in August. For the four Friday evenings in August I invite you to settle in for a ninety-minute intimate workshop with myself where we cover your calendar, task manager, communications and the daily and weekly planning sessions. In all, this workshop will give you the know-how to build your own, personalised productivity system—a system that will grow with you over many years. And not only that, when you register for the workshop, you get free access to my mini-course bundle as this will be important for getting the most out of the workshop. I hope you can join me, and if you are unable to attend one or more of the sessions, do not fear, you can email me any questions and I will answer them in the session and you can get the recording of the session almost immediately after the session ends. Anyway, back to this week’s podcast question and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from George. George asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried to implement a lot of what you teach but always come up with a problem. My manager expects me to answer her questions immediately and that stops me from being able to focus on my core work or use time blocking. How have you overcome managers like this in the past? Hi George, thank you for your question. You are not alone. This is a pernicious problem I see with a lot of companies these days. And it’s not just micro-managing bosses, but can also be caused by demanding customers and clients who expect you to be available whenever they have a question. Fortunately, I have experienced these types before, and over the years developed a number of strategies to prevent the interruptions and demands. I’m surprised this is still happening. I am frequently reminded that companies these days are more considerate about their employee needs and welfare, yet at the same time, old-fashioned managers who feel they need to know what each of their direct reports are doing and where they are are still employed. If you are a manager who needs to know what their team are doing at all times, then you have a trust issue. Either you are unable to trust your team, or you are employing the wrong people. Either way, the problem is with you. If you want your team to flourish, grow and produce the results you employed them to produce, you need to let them free and get on with it. Trust they will do their part of the work. Now, in your case, George, you have identified the problem, which is a great start. From that start, you can now begin to come up with some ideas that may reduce the interference from your boss. The first step, and the one that has always worked for me, is to have a sit down conversation with your manager. Ask her what she expects of you, where she feels you are not performing and what you can do to change that. Never point the finger at your boss, let her tell you what she expects and where she would like to see improvements. The first things she tells you will not be the real problem. The real problem will be the second and third issues. We all feel uncomfortable criticising other people, so we te

This week’s question is all about breaking tasks down into manageable chunks and how to organise your academic studies. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 281 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 281 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. An area I find most people struggle with is breaking bigger tasks down into manageable chunks. How do you determine something like “write report on Quarter 1 Marketing campaign” when you may not know where to start? While it might be clear what needs to be done, it may not be clear how long something like this would take. In many ways this comes about because we are not prioritising correctly. If your number one task for the day is to complete a report, or write a paper for your professor, why would an email or message become more important. You have no idea what or how many emails and messages you will get each day, you only know you will get some, but email and messages can never be your priority for the day. They don’t move things forward for you. They might help other people, but if your number one priority is the report, why change your plan? Anyway, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Meghan. Meghan asks, Hi Carl, thank you for your recent podcasts on core work. One area I struggle with is knowing how long a task will take. Should I be allocating time for each task or just doing what I can. Additionally, how would a Ph.D student define their core work? Thank you Meghan for your question. Let me begin with the second part of your question first. What is the core work of a Ph.D student? This is going to relate to your chosen topic. What are you studying? The vast majority of your work here is going to be researching, taking notes and perhaps conducting studies. This is primarily likely to involve a lot of reading. So how much reading do you feel you need to do each week? This needs time allocating to and that’s where you calendar comes in. Let’s imagine you want to spend four hours a day reading. How will you break that down? If you were an early bird—someone who likes to start their day early, you may choose 6am to 8am as your reading time. You could then perhaps set aside a further two hours later in the afternoon. That would still leave you with plenty of time for dealing with communications, socialising and meeting with your professor. If you are not an early bird and prefer doing your reading later in the day you can schedule it for late evening, Working on any studies you are conducting or papers you are writing should also be scheduled in your calendar. With these two activities your calendar will tell you your writing and reading blocks and that’s all they say. You task manager and notes will indicate what you will read or write. Now, onto establishing how long a task should take you. That’s going to be very different most of the time. However, it’s not really about how long you should spend doing a task, it’s more about how much time you have available to spend on that task. Let me give you a personal example from this podcast. It takes me around two hours to write the script for this podcast. Some days I can write it faster, other days I may need more time. Every Tuesday morning, I have a two hour writing block in my calendar and for the most part I can get this script written. However, this week, I was only able to schedule an hour on Tuesday morning, which meant the script was only half done. I then needed to find another hour later in the week to finish it off. When looking at my calendar, I discovered that the only time I had available was Saturday evening. Now that raises a question. Do I use time I generally protect for other things, or do I allocate an hour to writing the script? Well, as I need to record and publish the podcast on Sunday afternoon and Sunday morning I have a lot of meetings, the only time I had was Saturday. The decision was made. I could of course have decided not to publish a podcast this week, but I see this podcast as part of my core work and therefore non-negotiable. So, the decision was easy, block an hour off on Saturday evening. The truth is that doesn’t happen very often, so it’s not like I have to regularly write this script in my rest time, but if it must be done, it must be done. Now, for the first part of your question, Meghan. How do you determin

This week, how do you motivate yourself when you are just not in the mood to do any work? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 280 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 280 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. How often do you wake up in the morning with a long list of to-dos and just want to crawl back under your duvet? Or come back from lunch, look at your desk and just go “naw, just not in the mood”? If it’s more times that you would like, you are not alone. If you are a living human being, it’s going to happen. You are going to have good days and bad. It’s perfectly normal and not something you should beat yourself up about. However, sometimes that lack of motivation to do the work, can be untimely. You may have a deadline, an urgent matter to deal with or some preparation for a meeting to complete. What can you do in these circumstances? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s podcast. And so, to get things started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Mohammed, Mohammed asks, Hi Carl, how do you stay so motivated each day? I really struggle with this. When I get up in the morning, I feel demotivated and just don’t want to get up. Do you have any suggestions on how to wake up feeling more motivated? Hi Mohammed, thank you for your question. There are a number ways you can wake up feeling more motivated and energised for the day. One simple trick is to make sure you get enough sleep. We all need between six and eight hours of sleep each night although we differ on the optimum number—for example, I discovered I needed seven hours, twenty minutes, not the six I thought I needed, I’ve learnt if I sleep less than seven hours, I will not have a very productive day and will likely need to take a nap sometime in the early afternoon. You can discover your optimum daily sleep hours by doing a simple test. For one week, sleep with no alarm and track how many hours you sleep. At the end of the seven days, total up the number of hours you slept and divide it by seven. That will give you the number of hours you actually need, rather than guessing the number. Once you know your optimum number of sleep hours, set yourself a going to bed time (thirty minutes before you need to be asleep) and stick to it. I know this may require you to change a few things. If you are in the habit of scrolling social media or watching TV late at night, you may need to adjust the amount of time you spend doing these things. But I can assure you once you dial in your sleep patterns, you will soon find yourself waking up feeling a lot better than you likely do right now. While sleep is not going to affect your motivation, it will ensure you have the energy to get through the day. Now, what about motivation. This has everything to do with your mindset about the work you do. If you see your work purely in monetary terms, you are going to feel demotivated. Money as has been discovered is a poor long-term motivator. Sure if someone offered you a lot of money to do something, it’s probable you will do it as long as it does not conflict with your personal values—after all the saying “everyone has their price” is largely true. But is it the money that motivates you or what you think you could do with the money? As Daniel Pink discovered several years ago, there’s an amount of money you need to earn to live and anything above that figure will not motivate you. Daniel Pink set that amount at around $70,000 per year. Beyond that, because it does not affect your ability to eat, have a roof over your head or the financial ability to take a holiday once or twice a year, money no longer provides an incentive. (Although we think it does) It might be nice to buy an expensive watch or to own a luxury beach-side villa in the Mediterranean, but your needs—food, and shelter are taken care of and material things are not going to motivate you when it comes to getting up in the morning to do your work. I’m currently reading about Robert Maxwell. In case you do not know, Robert Maxwell was the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s. (If you are listening in the US, Maxwell also bought the New York Daily News) Maxwell, it turns out was a crook. He was stealing money from not only his public companies, he also stole his employees pension funds and owed multiple banks many millions of dollars whe

Podcast 279 In this week’s episode, I share with you what happens when everything begins to work as it should. Be prepared; this episode is scary. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 279 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 279 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week’s question comes from a coaching client of mine who has worked with me for a few months and has developed a system and a way of working that has enabled him to get on top of his work, but has also left him feeling anxious and uncomfortable. He told me there’s a sense of missing something, that he should be doing more. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Gary. Gary asks, Hi Carl, my system is working perfectly, but I feel there’s something missing. It’s like I have this feeling I am not doing enough. Is this normal? Hi Gary, thank you for allowing my to share this on my podcast. So why is Gary feeling as if he should be doing more? Well, it’s likely he’s become addicted to the stress caused by feeling overwhelmed and busy. That sense of not being in control, which means each day he felt he was being pulled from one crisis deadline to another without ever feeling he had time to work on what was important or even a chance to take a break. If you think about it for a moment, when you’ve spend a large part of your working life reacting to events, when you finally reverse that and start to anticipate events so they do not overwhelm you, it is going to feel weird at first. It may even frighten you. You stress levels drop—often suddenly—and that can cause anxiety. If your body has become used to dealing with a lot of stress, not having that around is going to be strange and that is why we often feel something’s missing. There is, it’s called stress. It’s gone. In many ways, as you become better organised and more productive, you need to prepare yourself for the withdrawal effects of a reduced amount of cortisol (the stress hormone) surging through your bloodstream. These withdrawal effects are often the reason why so many people unconsciously self-sabotage their efforts. They will do things like change their task manager or notes app. Not because the new app is any better than the ones they used before, but because it gives them a sense of doing something constructive—yet, transferring all your notes and tasks to a new app is not a constructive use of your time. The real question to ask yourself is what can you do with all the extra time you will have once the way you do your work becomes more efficient? This is where you can look at your areas of focus. Only one part is related to your work, yet, depending where you are in life it’s likely that will be the area that is taking up a disproportionate amount of your time. But what else is there in your areas of focus that is not getting the attention it deserves? For example, a lot of people would like to spend more time with their friends and family. Is there anything you can do to be able to spend more time there? Perhaps you could pick your kids up from school or call round to see your parents more often. What about hobbies? I know we don’t talk about these a lot these days, but hobbies are a great way to reduce stress, relax and take your mind off things. Now if you are working in an office environment, how about doing some mentoring? One of the roles leadership involves is mentoring the next generation. Even if you are not a leader, yet, helping your colleagues develop their skills is a great way you can make use of your extra time. The great thing about mentoring is not just what you teach, but also what you learn. Coaching, has not only given me a way to help others, I have also learned an incredible amount from the people I talk to every day. Something you could consider is to work on your education. Now, I am not talking about formal education, but more unusual fields. For instance, advertising and marketing company, Ogilvy’s vice-chairman, Rory Sutherland has spent the last twenty-years or so learning about behavioural psychology. This is the study of why we do what we do and it has not only been a fascination for him, it’s helped him in his work and given him an avenue to develop a side business public speaking and entertaining people with his observations. If you haven’t already watched his TED talk from 2009, I h

Are you the master or slave of your task manager? In this week’s episode, I’m going to show you how to take control of your tasks. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 278 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 278 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people were busy, much as we are today, yet we never began the day with to-do lists of twenty-plus tasks. That wasn’t the way we used to-do lists. To-do lists were for the essential, must not forget to do tasks. Most desk diaries at that time only had space for around six tasks at the bottom of each day’s column. Ironically, six tasks was the number Ivy Lee recommended when he devised the Ivy Lee method for Bethlehem Steel in 1918. That method worked then and it still works today. So what has happened over the last fifteen years or so? Have our brains diminished somehow? I don’t think so. I suspect the reason why we are struggling now is because we believe everything that must be done should be added to the to-do list, yet does it? How effective would you be if the only things you saw on your list each day were the things that really mattered? I know you would be a lot more focused. That’s what we’ll be looking at this week, so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Michelle. Michelle asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried so many times to use a to-do list and it always begins well, but after a few days, it becomes overwhelming. I know how helpful they are and I wondered if you could break down what should and should not be in a to-do list. Hi Michelle, thank you for your question. Let’s go back to Ivy Lee. While we don’t know why Ivy Lee chose six tasks to add to a to-do list, what we do know is anyone who has used this method almost always complete the six tasks and has enough time at the end of the day to plan the next six. Ivy Lee’s method is simple. At the end of the day, write down, in order of priority, the six tasks you want to complete tomorrow. Leave that piece of paper on your desk so when you arrive back at work in the morning, the first thing you see are those six tasks. Then, you begin at the top and work your way down the list until you have all six crossed out. Think about that for a moment. How confident are you at being able to consistently complete six tasks each day? Let’s imagine for a moment you are a university professor. Today, you have two ninety minute lectures to give from 9:00am. Your lectures will finish at 12:15pm and then you have to arrange some meetings with your Ph.D students, mark some papers, spend a little time writing your own paper, respond to your email, prepare for your lectures tomorrow and exercise. That’s six tasks. Do you have time for anything else? If you work a typical eight or nine hour day, three hours have already gone lecturing, which leaves you with five to six hours to do everything else. Exercise can be done after you finish for the day, but marking papers, writing your own paper and responding to email are not five minute tasks. I would say, if you try and cram anything else into your day, you’ve already lost the day. The key to this Michelle is to understand that time is limited. We do not have an infinite amount of time each day. Sure, you can work eighteen hours a day trying to do everything, but that is not sustainable. You might be able to that for a couple of days, but eventually you will break. You are not a machine and there needs to be balance between work and rest. (Whether you like that or not). But look at the professor’s day, if she were to do the tasks she had set for herself, she would be moving important things forward. She might not be able to finish everything, that’s fine as long as she’s consistently working on the important things. In many ways, we are our own worst enemies. Thinking that everything has to be finished in one day will always lead to overwhelm and in the worst case scenario, burnout. It’s not possible to complete everything at the first try. Sometimes you need to continue with a task on another day. Now, there is something else at play here. How are you writing your tasks? You are not going to do very well at the supermarket if all that was on your list was: food, drink toiletries. Sure you would pick up something, but more than likely you would pick up all the wrong things. Instead, we need to be smart

This week, how do your task manager, calendar and notes fit together in a time management and productivity system? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 277 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 277 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. A frequently asked question is how does everything fit together? By that what is meant, is having three separate productivity tools too much for something as simple as being guided toward what needs to happen next? On the surface it might well look like that. After all, why use three tools when one tool could do it all. Your calendar, could easily manage your appointments and tasks and quite a few task managers have tried this by integrating with the mainstream calendar apps. However, what is missed is the ability to compartmentalise. To be able to quickly see the big picture of your day and then to drill down deeper to the micro level and make decisions about what you can or should be doing with your time at that moment. So, that is what we will be looking at today and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Andy. Andy asks, Hi Carl, I’m struggling to understand why I need to use a to-do list and a calendar. Everyone seems to talk about this but why not keep everything you need to do on your calendar and dispense with using a task manager? Hi Andy, thank you for your question. The truth is you do not need a task manager at all. When I began my time management journey, I used an A4 desk diary that showed a week over two pages. When open on my desk, that diary showed me the whole week at a glance. At the bottom of each day, there was sufficient room to add a few tasks and that is exactly how I used it. Appointments in their allotted time and to-dos written out at the bottom of each day. It worked brilliantly for over fifteen years. However, with that said, digital tools have made somethings a lot easier. For instance the digital to-do list allows us to create recurring tasks—tasks we would frequently forget to do. This way we can off load a lot from our brains into a digital system without feeling anxious about whether we will remember to do something or not. However, why do we need three productivity apps when in theory one could do everything for us? The biggest problem with having everything contained within one app is the overwhelm it will produce. Seeing everything on one page (and I mean everything) will prevent you from quickly seeing what is important and what is not. Generally, in the hierarchy of tools the calendar gives you the overview of your day. It tells you where you need to be at a given time. For example, if you need to collect your kids up from school at 4pm, that would be on your calendar. Similarly, if you have a meeting with an important customer at 1pm, you need to know about that and you need to see it in the context of your whole day. With tasks, you likely have ten to twenty tasks to perform each day. These will include big important tasks, such as preparing for an important meeting with your boss, to smaller, less important tasks such as refuelling your car before an early morning start the next day. Preparing for the meeting and refuelling your car can be done at anytime in the day and in terms of priority, will be less important than being outside your kids’ school gates at the correct time. (I hope) If you were looking at a list of all your appointments and tasks for the day, it’s going to look overwhelming—even on the easiest of days. You will have important and not important tasks all mixed up together and being able to quickly distinguish what you should be doing will be challenging. Instead you can look at your calendar as showing you the big picture of your day. It tells you where you need to be with who and when. It’s a quick reference tool in that you can glance at your calendar and see instantly where you should be next and when. It’s not overwhelming because it only shows you your events and blocks of time where you can do the smaller tasks. Your task manager is the micro-level of your day. It shows you, at a micro-level, what needs to be done. For instance, today, I have a task reminding me to call into my dog’s vet to pick up some anti-tic tablets (it the tic season here in Korea). This task can be done at anytime as the vet’s clinic is a twenty-minute walk from my home. I’m

This week, we’re looking at how to define your core work and how that translates into what you do each day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 276 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 276 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. In the Time Sector Course, I introduce the concept of “core work”. The work you are employed to do or perhaps another way to look at it, the things you are responsible for at work. It’s your core work that you will be evaluated on by your employer, and if you are self-employed it is the work that generates your income. If you were never to define what this part of your work is, you would find yourself caught up in trivialities masquerading as important work. Those petty disagreements between colleagues, most emails and messages and water cooler gossip. However, defining what your core work is one part of the process. There is another, more important part to understanding your core work, which is what this week’s question is all about. This question also came up in a recent workshop I did. Defining your core work is quite different from knowing how that definition operates at a task level. Today, I hope to illuminate this important step for you. 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 Linda. Linda asks, Hi Carl, I am a Senior Vice President for a small pharmaceutical company. I took your Time Sector Course and have got stuck with my core work. I think I know what that is, but I don’t know how that works day to day. Could you help me with this? Hi Linda, Thank you for your question. Let’s start with why it’s important to identify your core work. Most of our time management and productivity issues evolve from having too much to do and not enough time to do it. This creates backlogs and that leads to you feeling overwhelmed and anxious about how much to feel you have to do. Yet, there are different types of tasks we need to do. There are the absolute, the discretionary, and the time wasters. If we do not identify what our absolutes are we end up spending too much time on the discretionary and time wasting tasks. Spending some time identifying your absolute must do tasks means you can then allocate sufficient time to get these done each week. However, in order to identify what these tasks are, we need to know what we are specifically employed to do. For example, if you are a salesperson, you primary roll is to sell your company’s products or services. This means your core work is any activity that will potentially lead to a sale. This could be calling prospects, meeting with existing customers and asking for referrals. Once you know this, you can define what these activities mean at a task level. Calling prospects, for instance, could mean you dedicate one hour each morning to call potential customers and try to arrange appointments. You could also, set aside a hour on a Friday afternoon to contact your existing customers to make appointments to meet with them the following week. A salesperson core work is not filling out activity reports for their sales manager or sitting in sales meetings. None of these activities risk leading to a sale. However, these might be important, to your sales manager, and you will need time to do them, but they should not take priority over your sales related tasks. It’s as Brian Tracy and Jim Rohn preached—majors and minors. Major time is being in front of your customer. Minor time is sitting in an office chatting with your colleagues. Now for you Linda, your roll is a leadership roll. Your core work is likely to be centred around supporting your team so they can do their jobs with as little interruption as possible. Your roll is not to micro-manage your team, your roll is to clear obstacles so they can get on and do their jobs. This will inevitably involve meetings with your team—although not too many so as not to interrupt their work. I’m reminded of how Red Bull Racing’s Team Principle, Christian Horner, organises his work. Christina Horner is not only the Team Principle, he’s also the CEO of the company. In a recent video Red Bull put out we were given an insight into how he divides his time. During a race weekend, he is the Team Principle and will be track-side with the rest of his team. He’s dealing with media responsibilities, leading team briefings and managing race strategy. When he re

In this week’s podcast, I answer a question about setting some rules of engagement for yourself. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 275 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 275 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Have you ever stopped to establish some rules by which you do your work and live your life? If not, you could be missing out on something very powerful that helps you to automate what you do and reduce a lot of decision making. A lot of the issues around productivity and better managing our time comes around because everything we do is treated as unique or new. Yet, a lot of what we do each day is not unique. In fact, we are likely repeating the same steps each day, but because we have not established a routine or process for doing these tasks, they feel cumbersome and that leaves us finding excuses for not doing them. That then kicks off a cycle of pain. Take email for example, we let it pile up until eventually we are forced to do something about it, and then we waste a whole day (or in some cases a week) just trying to get on top of it and deal with the backlog. That’s not a very productive way of managing your email. This week’s question is all about how and where to establish some rules of engagement with your work. So, before we get to the answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Matty. Matty asks, Hi Carl, do you have any suggestions for simplifying tasks and work? I find as soon as the week starts, any plans I may have soon so complicated I never know where I should be starting. Thank you, Matty for your question. Interesting you use the words “simplifying tasks and work”, that’s what it’s all about. If we can find a way to simplify the work we do, we become faster at it and it requires a lot less thought—and that’s always a good good thing. So what can we do to make doing our work easier and more automated? Let’s begin with email and other messages we receive at work. This is an area that screams out for a process and some rules. Email is coming at us all the time. It never seems to stop. For many of you, you likely get emails through the night as well. If we were to let it pile up it would become a tedious task trying to find the important mails and messages. So, a process here would help you to automate it. I’ve talked before about setting up an Action this Day folder in your mail for any email that requires some action from you. That could be replying or reading. If you need to take any kind of action, drop it in your action this day folder. Now the process you follow is at some point in the morning you clear your inbox. And that is clear it, not scan it. Delete emails you don’t need and archive emails you think you may need in the future. Anything you need to act on goes into your action this day folder. Then at some point towards the end of the day, you set aside an hour for clearing your action this day folder. Now here’s the thing, email is still an important part of our work communication. I know a lot of companies are using internal messaging systems such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, and because of that you want to include any responses to these messages in this time you have set aside. There may be some messages that need responding to more urgently, and you will likely need to deal with these sooner, but for the most part try to push off responding until your dedicated communication time. If you were to skip your communication time one day, you will find yourself having to double the time you set aside the next day. This is why, it needs to become a rule. No matter what, you will dedicate one hour of your work day for dealing with your communications. If your work involves a lot of email and message interaction, you may need to extend this time, but try it out with one hour first and see how you get on. Now when it comes to setting rules for communicating here’s something that will help your reputation at work. Set some rules for your response time. Now, it’s important not to be overly ambitious. If you regularly have client meetings that take two or three hours, telling everyone you will reply to your messages within an hour is unrealistic. Here’s my set of communication rules: For email I will respond within twenty-four hours. Now if anyone it trying to engage me to use email as a form of instant messaging I will deliber

This week’s episode is all about getting on top of your calendar so you remain in control of your most valuable asset. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 274 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 274 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. Of all the productivity tools you have, your calendar is the one tool that will bring you the biggest benefits. It does this by only telling you the truth. While your task manager and notes are likely to be feature rich and new innovative ways to manipulate your tasks and notes are being launched every week, the humble calendar has remained much the same for hundreds of years. Today, we may be using digital calendars, but the layout and functionality of these digital calendars work the same way as a paper-based calendar. And your calendar is a true leveller. No matter who you are, where you live, your educational background or job title, you still get the same number of hours as everyone else. Theoretically, each day gives you a blank canvas to choose how you will paint it, and your calendar acts very much like your sketchbook. It’s a place where you can design your day, experiment and plan. Your calendar can take care of the basics by reminding you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries. It can also be used to remind you of bill payment dates, concerts you may wish to go to and your kids’ school terms and holidays. But those are the basics. What else can your calendar do for you? Well, that is the topic of this week’s episode. So, with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Rob. Rob asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk about the calendar being the most important part of a time management system, but I’ve always struggled to organise my calendar well. Do you have any tips or tricks to help me get more out of my calendar? Hi Rob, thank you for your question. Your calendar should be the foundation of your whole time management and productivity system. It is only your calendar, yet, of all the potential tools you may use, it is the only one that shows you how much time you have. You can fill up a task manager with hundreds of tasks and if you date them for the same day, your task manager will assume that on that day you want to complete hundreds of tasks. It’s not going to warn you that you don’t have enough time or there are important meetings to attend. It just shows you what you tell it to show you. It has no way to inform you that you are being over-ambitious about what you want to get done on any given day. Your notes is where you store information you may want or need later. It does not have any time management functionality within your system. The only tool you have that will indicate how much time you have is your calendar. It never lies to you. You get twenty-four hours each day and you get to choose where you spend those hours. And that’s the power and beauty of the calendar. Because it gives you a blank canvas, you can use it to design your day. Which means, if you delegate responsibility for your calendar management to other people, you are giving away responsibility of your most valuable asset. Time. So, with that said, how do we take control of our calendar and use it to design our day and week? When I am working with an individual who has no productivity system in place, the first area I encourage them to work on is their calendar. What we aim to do is to get the basics in first. Now, I recommend that you first do an exercise and create a new calendar with your calendar app. I like to call this my “Perfect Day” or Perfect Week” calendar. It is here where you can create a week that covers everything you want time for. Try to do this on a larger screen than your phone—your computer or tablet—because you want to be able t clearly see the whole week in one view. Now, begin with how much sleep you would you like to get? This is not about how much sleep you are currently getting, rather, ho much sleep you want to get. Remember, this is your “perfect week”, so what would be the “perfect” amount of sleep for you. Why would you start with sleep? Well, ask yourself, how do you feel when you don’t get enough sleep? How effective are you through the day? On day’s when you have not got enough sleep, how productive were you? If you want to be at your most effective each day, you need the right amount of sleep. That could be

This week’s question is all about managing your communications and ensuring you have enough time to deal with it every day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 273 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 273 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Last week, I talked about how by turning everything into a project was a sure fire way to become overwhelmed and overstretched. Instead, I suggested you look for the processes for doing your work. If you write articles, create marketing campaigns, deal with clients on a frequent basis, then these are not projects. They are just a part of a process for doing your work. However, there are some parts of our work that are difficult to develop processes for and one of those is handling all the communications you get each day. Prior to 2000—before the current digital age, most communications largely came from mail, telephone or fax. That meant things were relatively easy to manage—there were only three channels of communication and each one gave us a logical timeline for a response. A letter could be responded to within a week or two, a telephone call was instant—if we were near a phone—and a fax could be sat on for a couple of days. There was not sense we had to respond immediately. Today, thing are quite different. Almost all the messages we receive today could be responded to immediately. I remember reading the book: The Man With The Golden Typewriter, a book of letters written by Ian Fleming, and awed by the number of letters beginning with the words: “Please accept my apologies for the delay in my reply. I have just returned from an eight week sabbatical in Jamaica”. That’s two months to reply and nobody would have been angry. It was just the way life was back then. Not necessarily slower, just there were conventions in place and acceptable reasons for not responding in a timely manner. Back to today, how do we manage our communications so they do not become overwhelming and out of control. Well, before we get to that answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks: Hi Carl, I was hoping you have some advice for organising all the messages and emails I get each day. My company uses Microsoft Teams and it’s always alerting me to new messages. And Emails are a joke. It takes me all afternoon just to stay on top of these. Do you have any ideas for handling these? Hi Annie, thank you for sending in your question. It’s a timely question too as I covered communications last week in my productivity workshop and there were a lot of questions about getting on top of these. Let’s deal with email first as this is the easiest to manage. With email we can create a simple process that if followed each day, will get you on top of it and keep you on top of it. There are two parts to managing email: processing and doing. The key is not to mix the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as you can. This means when you open your inbox, the goal is to get to zero. This means you do not want to be stopping to reply to those emails you think will take two minutes or less (they rarely take two minutes—more like five or six minutes) Any actionable email get sent to an Action This Day folder and everything else is either deleted or archived. Now that’s a quick summary, but the essence is get that inbox cleared. The second part of the email management process is to “do email”. This means as late in the day as you feel comfortable with, you go into your actionable email and begin with the oldest one and work your way through the list. Now, you may not be able to clear them all each day, but as long as you begin with the oldest one, you will not have emails hanging around. The key to this method or process is to decide how much time you need on average to clear your action this day folder. To give you a benchmark, I need around forty to forty-five minutes each day to stay on top of my actionable email. What I do is schedule an hour each day for dealing with my communications. I have this scheduled and blocked off in my calendar for between 4:30 and 5:30pm each day. If you want to learn more about this process, I have a free download available on my website under the downloads section where you can get the workflow in its entirety. If you want to go deeper with this, I also have a comprehensive course called “Email Mastery

This week we’re exploring the need for projects and why the way a project has been defined is causing most of your task management problems. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 272 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 272 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. How many projects do you have? 50? 75? More than a hundred? Well, if you are defining a project as “anything you want to do that requires more than one action step”, as many people do, you are going to have a lot of projects. And all those projects need looking at to decide what needs to happen next. When I was researching the reasons why so many people resist doing a weekly planning session, one thing I kept coming up against was the large number of “projects” people told me they had to review, which made doing a weekly review or planning session too long. I began to realise that if our resistance was down to the sheer number of projects we had to review each week, that was something fixable because we have control over the number of projects we have. More interestingly, we also have control over how we define what a project is. If we change the way we define a project to something that fits better with the work we do, we can reduce the number of projects we have and that in turn will reduce the time it takes to complete a planning session. So, before we dive a little deeper into this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Christian. Christian asks: Hi Carl, I’ve always struggled with managing my projects. When I look at my task Manager, I have over 80 projects. These take a very long time to go through each week and I hate doing it. (Which is why I don’t do a weekly planning session) My question is; is it normal to have so many projects? Hi Christian, thank you for your question. I’ve found those who have read and tried to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done, do tend to have a lot of projects. This is a consequence of how David Allen defines a project. That being anything that requires two or more steps. This means, in theory, making an appointment to see your dentist, take your car in for a service or arranging your annual medical check up will all be projects. Yet, if you stop and think about this, if you dedicated thirty minutes on a given day, you could easily make all these arrangements. They certainly don’t need to be projects. Over my working life, I’ve worked in a number of different industries. From hotel management, to car sales, law and teaching. When I look back over these jobs, I cannot remember treating everything as a project. I came into work, and got on with the work. For instance, when I was working in a law office, we had around 150 cases ongoing at any one time. We never treated these cases as projects. They were our work. And our work had a process. When a new case came in, we needed to collect information and there was a checklist on the inside of the case file that we checked off as the information came in. The first step, once the new case was entered into the firms computer system was to request the information we needed. Each day, we were receiving information for many of these cases and we simply printed off the file or, if it came in my regular mail, check the information, put the documents in the case file and checked off the information that had come on the checklist. It was a part of my core work to ensure that the cases due to be completed that month, were monitored and any reasons why a case might not complete on time, were communicated to the client. To manage this, we had a spreadsheet, which either myself or my colleague updated every Friday afternoon and sent it to our client. I remember when I worked for a famous marketing company here in Korea, the copy writers and designers never considered individual campaigns as a project. It was just a part of their daily work. They would come into work, make coffee and then get on with the work they were currently working on. It was almost like a conveyor belt. Once the current piece of work was completed, it was handed on to the next person in the chain and they did their bit. It seems to me, that perhaps what we are doing is confusing our core work with project work. So, what is a project? For me a project is something unique that has a clearly defined deadline that is going to take a reasonably long time to complete

Are the old ways still the best ways? That’s what I explore 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 The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 271 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 271 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Have you ever wondered how people managed their work before we had computers on every desk and a smartphone in every pocket? I mean, how was it possible to manage our email when the only place we could read and respond to email was at our desks in our place of work? How did we know when we had a meeting when the only way to add a meeting to our calendar was to pull out our diaries and handwrite the meeting into it? Well, it may come as a surprise to many of you, but people did manage. In fact, I would go as far as to say people managed a lot better than they do today. Not using a digital system meant that it was far easier to compartmentalise our work. For instance, responding to letters—the things we used to communicate before email—meant we needed to be in the office. If we were not in the office, we could not respond to the letter. This meant if an important, so called urgent, letter arrived on a Saturday morning, it would not be read until Monday morning and a response would not be going out until, at the earliest, Monday evening. So, in theory, if an urgent letter was sent on Friday afternoon, you would not be getting your reply until Tuesday morning, at the earliest. And, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. Yet, things got done. Deadlines were met and there was just as much stress around as there is today. I was lucky, I began my working life just as the workplace was transitioning to the digital systems we use today. This meant I had the opportunity to see both sides. The analogue, the midway (where it was half analogue, half digital) and digital. What I’ve learned is that there are advantages in both types of system and when you combine the best of the analogue systems with the best of the digital systems you can build yourself a robust, reliable time management and productivity system. So, before we continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from David. Hi Carl, When I was working in the mid-1990s, we did not have computers or smartphones but we did have a system for managing our appointments and tasks. Do you think technology today has helped us or made managing our time harder? Hi David, thank you for your question. You are right in observing that people managed just fine before computers, smartphones and iPads came onto the scene. In fact, while people still became overwhelmed, there was a better sense of time than there is today. Because we had to manually write out the things we had to do, rather than enter them into an app, we were much more conscious about what we were committing ourselves to. Today, your task manager will take thousands, if not millions of tasks, and while that may sound fantastic, it does create a problem. The problem being: when will do do all these tasks? The reality is, we cannot and never will be able to do everything. There is just too much we would like to do and a limited amount of time to do it in. When I was teaching English, I enjoyed the session where we looked at the words time and money. The two nouns share the exact same verbs. For instance, spend time on something, spend money on something. Or we can save money or save time. But not only do these two words share the same verbs, they can also be thought of as the same thing. If we choose to spend money on a new iPad, that means we have less money to spend on other things. So, if you have $3,000 in your bank account and you choose to spend $1,000 on an iPad Pro with a keyboard and Apple Pencil, then you are going to have $2,000 left to spend on other things. Let’s say your rent to mortgage is $1,000 and household expenses come to $800.00, then you only have $200 to spend on other things. With time, we all get 166 hours a week. We are usually committed to spending 40 hours at work, perhaps we need to spend 2 hours a day commuting to and from work (that’s ten hours) and there’s sleeping, eating and keeping ourselves clean. If you decide to pay less rent or mortgage pretty soon you will have a debt that needs to be paid and if you don’t pay it, you’ll lose your home. If you choose to skip your sleep for a few days, you’ll make yourself sick and won’t

Podcast 270 Do you feel you have balance in your day? If not, this episode is for you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 270 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 270 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, if you’re listening to this podcast, the chances are you have an interest in managing your time and being more productive. And that’s a great interest to have, but the real question is why? Why do you want to better manage your time? Is it because you feel you have too much to do or it seems all you ever do is work work work? The real reason why anyone would want to better manage their time is because they want more balance in their lives. After all, we have a lot of lives to manage. At a basic level, we have our professional and personal lives, but inside those, we may have different roles. We could be a mother, a daughter, a sister. We may have interests such as painting or sketching. At a professional level, we could be a manager of people, an accountant, a salesperson or a project manager—it’s likely you are all of these. You need to manage your team, allocate your department’s budget and make sure your projects are moving forward. The realities of life today is that there will always be something you have to do. It can be difficult to bring any kind of balance into our lives. Yet, it may be difficult, but it’s certainly not impossible if you focus on what’s important to you. That, nicely leads me to this week's question, 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 Mary-Anne. Mary Anne asks: Hi Carl, I know you and many other people in the time management world talk a lot about planning the day and week, but I find it’s impossible. I have two teenage daughters, a full-time career, and I have to take care of my father, who needs full-time care. I find it impossible to get any balance. There are just too many demands on me. What would you say to someone who is really struggling to find some kind of balance in their day? Hi Mary Anne, thank you for your question. That’s a great question, and I know it can be very hard to organise everything when other people are involved. The good news is, somehow you are managing everything. It might feel like you are juggling a lot of balls each day, but it does appear from your question that you are not dropping any. Now, we must return to the fact that time is fixed. You only have 24 hours a day. What that means is the only control you have is what you do in those twenty-four hours. Before we can move on, though, we need to look at out areas of focus. The eight areas that are important to all us. These range from our family and relationships to our career and self development. Now these eight areas will change in importance as we go through life. When we are in our twenties, it’s likely our education (self development) and career are near the top of our list. As we settle down into adulthood, finances and lifestyle become more important. As we age, family and friends become more and more of a priority and our career drops down the list. Your areas of focus are dynamic. As we go through the different stages of life they change in importance. Now, looking at what you wrote, Mary-Anne, it seems your family and relationships and career are at the top of your list. Knowing that, means when you sit down to plan your week, you begin with these two areas. If you need to attend to your father two or three times a day, then that’s what you need to do. It becomes a non-negotiable part of your day. Your teenage daughters may be able to help you here, or maybe not, either way, as teenagers, they will likely have some independence—may even demand some independence. Encouraging them to take on more responsibility for their lives, will not only help you it will also help them. With you career, you need to establish what your core work is. The work you are employed to do. This does not mean the results; for example, if you have to make $20,000 in sales each week, that’s the outcome, the result you want. Your core work is the activity that will produce that result. That could be you need to make ten calls to prospective customers and have three appointments on your calendar each day. Making those calls and setting up those appointments are your core work activities. These need to be your priority each day you are at wor

Why bother with a weekly plan when a single crisis can destroy the whole week? That’s what I’ll be answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 269 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 269 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” There are numerous variations to this quote, one of my favourites is allegedly by Mike Tyson; “Everyone Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth”. Now, it would be easy to take these quotes at face value and decide that there’s no point in planning the week when the chances are some crisis or another will come up on Monday morning rendering any plan you may have useless. Well, that’s not strictly true. A plan’s purpose is to guide you through the week. It’s designed to keep you focused on what’s important and prevent you from being pulled off track by these crises that will inevitably crop up. There’s always something unexpected. That could be your colleague calling in sick, an important meeting being cancelled or postponed or a catastrophic problem with one of your customers. However, having a plan means no matter what is thrown at you, you still have a road map that will guide you through the week. There’s still an objective and it’s that that ensures that while you may not be able to get everything done that you set out to accomplish, you at least get some of it done. So, today I will outline why, despite the chances of you being pulled away from your plan, it’s still important to have a plan. And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Matthew, Matthew asks; Hi Carl, I know you always stress how important it is to do the weekly planning, but I find every time I do one, by Tuesday afternoon that plan is useless because so many issues and problems come up and I have to deal with them and forget my plan. Do you have any insights why and how planning can stop this from happening? Hi Matthew, thank you for your question. Sometimes when we talk about doing a weekly plan or weekly review many people miss its main purpose. A plan for the week is not to give you a step by step micromanaged plan for the week. It’s to give you a set of objectives to achieve that will take you from what you are today to where you want to be at the end of the week. Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say I need to get a 5,000 word report written next week. Now, logically, I would divide that work up into writing 1,000 words each day next week. That’s a plan. It’s a project broken down into smaller a steps. But what happens if something comes up on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm that requires all my time and attention. I may even have to go off site and visit an important customer on Wednesday to fix the problem. Now, my carefully laid plan of writing 1,000 words each day has been destroyed. I’m not going to be able to write anything on Wednesday and Tuesday, because of the crisis, I was only able to write 500 words. Now, the week is only half way done and I’m 1,500 words behind. Now, here’s the thing, the objective was not to write 1,000 words per day. The objective was to complete the 5,000 word report by the end of the week. The plan was to write 1,000 words, that’s now gone, but the objective still remains the same. All I need do now, when I get back on Wednesday after resolving the issue, is to readjust my plan. Okay, I cannot finish it by writing 1,000 words on Thursday and Friday, but I can if I write 1,750 words per day. I will still accomplish my objective and all I needed to do was to adjust my plan. Now, it’s likely you will need to also adjust your timings. Perhaps you allocated an hour each day to writing the report, you now need to increase that time to ninety minutes per day, but finding an extra thirty minutes each day for two days is not a huge dilemma. Making adjustments to your plan is far better than giving up altogether and getting stressed out. That’s not going to solve anything. Work the problem in front of you, don’t make things worse by worrying about things you cannot do anything about right now. This why we need to build two things into our days. The first is some buffer time. For me, I like to give myself at least thirty minutes between sessions of work where possible. Sometimes, that’s not always going to be possible, say when I have bac

How confident are you setting up a project and delivering it on time every time? If you struggle in this areas, then this podcast is for you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 268 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 268 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. Completing our personal projects is something we all frequently find difficult. This is largely because there’s usually nobody holding us accountable and we don’r have access to the same resources our companies will have. However, it does not have to be difficult if we follow a simple formula. I’ve spent many years studying how NASA went from a seemingly impossible challenge to successfully landing Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969. When that project was first floated by President Kennedy in May 1961, NASA lacked the knowledge of whether humans could survive in space, they were struggling to get a rocket off the ground, and the nobody had left the confines of Earth’s orbit. Yet, eight years later, Neil Armstrong spoke those infamous words: “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind”. Now it’s true that NASA did not have to worry about resources, Congress gave them the money to make this happen. But it was not all about the money. Sure, that helped, but the technology still needed to be invented, scientists had to work out how to get a spaceship out of Earths orbit and into the Moon’s orbit and they needed to know if humans could survive in space and if so, how. I’ve always been a believer in finding the success stories and then breaking them down to their component parts to understand how the success happened. It’s why I know there is no such things as an overnight success, there’s much more to completing a project than being in the right place at the right time. And with the Moon landings, everything is there to show you the roadmap towards completing a project—or a goal for that matter—all we need to do is break it down. And that is what we will do in this episode. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jonathan. Jonathan asks, Hi Carl, one thing I really struggle with is working on my personal projects. I have some home improvement projects that I’ve had on my list for years and I just never seem to get around to doing them. Do you have any tips on getting these projects done? Hi Jonathan, thank you for your question. Firstly I must start by saying this is something very common and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this, Jonathan. The good news this is an opportunity to develop skills. Now, let’s begin with what I talked about a moment ago with the clarifying sentence. I used to talk about this as the clarifying statement, but somehow the word “statement” invited people to write line after line of words defining what the project was. No. That’s not what you are trying to achieve here. What you are looking for is a simple sentence that gives clarity on what you want to accomplish with the project. Going back to the John F Kennedy sentence setting the parameters of the Moon landing project when he stood before Congress and announced that the US; "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Twenty-six words that set NASA on a course that captivated the world. Those words were clear, contained a deadline and left no-one in doubt about what was to be achieved. Now, Kennedy was no scientist. He was a student of government and international affairs. Certainly nothing that gave him a deep knowledge of the science and engineering feats required to land and walk on the moon. But that didn’t matter, Kennedy was the leader, not the implementer. There was a reservoir of talented, motivated scientists and engineers ready to take up the “challenge” and turn Kennedy’s project outcome into a reality. Now, depending on the size of the project you are attempting to do, Jonathan, you may need to reach out for the skills you do not process. For instance, one of your home improvement projects could be to build a conservatory onto the side of your house. Now, unless you are a builder, you are not going to have the know-how or skills to build the conservatory—you are going to need to hire outside help. A builder and an electrician are likely to be your first requirements. Plus, you may need to hire an architect to draw up th