Your Time, Your Way

This week, I have a very special guest. Former UK Special Forces soldier Simon Jeffries. Simon talks about mindset, self, discipline, goal setting and project planning. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Links to Simon’s Websites: The Natural Edge (Sign up for his newsletter here) Simon’s Instagram Simon’s LinkedIn Page 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

This week, are you being realistic about what you can get done each day? Most people are not. 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 266 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 266 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Most people'ss problems with time management and productivity are not actually problems with time management and productivity. The problem lies with being over-ambitious about what you can get done each day. I’m reminded of common phrases such as “biting off more than you can chew”, and my favourite “your eyes being bigger than your stomach”. It seems to be almost human nature to think we can do a lot more than we really can. Let’s get realistic here.You are not going to be able to attend seven hours of meetings, respond to 120 emails and complete fifty tasks from your task manager today. If that’s what your calendar, task manager and email is telling you, you’ve just deluded yourself and it means your system is broken—even before you’ve started the day. It’s time to get real about what you are capable of doing each day. We can do a surprising amount of work in a day, but we need to be strategic and, more importantly, aware of our human qualities. Work to our strengths, rather trying to slog it out. So, without any further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Kirsten. Kirsten asks, Hi Carl, than you for all that you do. It has been a huge help in my life. I was wondering how you cope with all the work you have to do each day. I don’t just mean work work, but all the personal tasks that need to be done as well. I find I never have enough time to finish everything I’m supposed to do. How do you keep your workload manageable? Hi Kirsten, than you for your question. This is an issue I’ve spent many years struggling with. I used to believe I’d wake up each morning feeling refreshed, energetic and focused on what needed to be done. I’d get straight onto my tasks, be ready for my appointments and end the day with plenty of energy to attack my personal tasks. The reality is very different. There are days I wake up feeling refreshed and energetic, there are also days when I wake up feeling tired. And focused?—hahaha, that’s a very rare occurrence. It’s that old belief we have where we say, I don’t feel great today so I’ll skip exercise today and do it tomorrow instead. Sure, it gives you an adequate excuse for today, but tomorrow comes and you’re desperately searching for another excuse not to exercise. We generally have very unrealistic ideas about how tomorrow will be different. It won’t be, unless you get real about what is required to get the things done that you want to get done. And this is where we need to know what our limitations are. How much can you do each day, realistically? To give you an example from my own experience. I know I can do three fifty-minute coaching calls in one session. I learned that the hard way. In the beginning I would schedule four or five calls one after another (with a ten minute gap between calls). After the third call, my voice was beginning to go and I was getting mentally and physically tired. I could do four, but the fourth one was a struggle. Now, I limit my call sessions to no more than three calls. That leaves me with sufficient energy to make sure my notes on each call are correct, and I am still capable of doing the other work I need to do that day. I would love to be able to do four or five calls straight, but realistically, doing so would leave me exhausted and unable to do the rest of the work that needed to be done that day. Often we don’t have much control over the meetings we are expected to attend each day, yet I strongly advise that you find a way to be less available. You can do this by scheduling meetings with yourself on your calendar. Other people cannot see what you have scheduled, all they see is you are not available at that time. This means you can schedule focused work sessions if you wish, or just block the time out so you can get away from your desk for twenty minutes or so and get some movement in. That movement will give your brain a rest and leave you feeling ready for the next session. And that’s another tip I would give you. Break your day down into sessions of work. While it might seem counter-intuitive to step away from doing work for twenty minutes or so between sessions, but it recharges your brain re

Podcast 265 This week, why not consistently doing a weekly planning session is destroying your productivity. 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 265 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 265 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This episode is for the 95% or so of you who are using a task manager and a calendar and not doing a weekly planning session. The truth is, if you’re collecting all this stuff and then not planning out when you will do anything about it, you’re heading for a catastrophic failure. It’s why so many people are constantly switching apps—it forces you to actually do some planning and organising, but it also stops you from doing any work. All this stuff we are collecting is information. Information we want to be reminded of, perhaps do something with or delegate it. Yet, if you are not doing any kind of planning, most of this information will get lost inside your task manager or notes app and you’ve just created a horrendous list of stuff you’ve made no decisions about. They often say information is power. This is not strictly true. Information is only powerful if you act on it. We all know how to lose weight, and we also know it is dangerous to be overweight for your long-term health. Yet statistics show that 60% of the US adult population is dangerously overweight. So there’s clearly a large number of people not acting on the information they have. However, once you do become consistent with your weekly planning (and daily planning to an extent), you will see some incredible results. The first thing you will notice is how relaxed you’ve become. Knowing you have the week planned, that nothing has fallen through the cracks and you’re ready to get started leaves you without any worries or anxieties. You’ll wonder how you ever survived without it. Anyway, enough of me going on about weekly planning, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Amy. Amy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve taken your Time Sector course and it’s completely changed my life. I feel so much more in control of what I am doing each day. The one area I really struggle with, though, is the reviews. I try so hard to sit down at the weekend for an hour to go through everything but keep avoiding it. Do you have any tips or tricks to help me become better at these? Hi Ally, thank you for your question. I suspect a lot of the difficulties with motivating ourselves to do the weekly planning sessions is because we’ve come to think it’s going to take at least an hour. The truth is, if you are consistently doing these sessions, you will soon find it takes you less than thirty minutes. Mine, for instance, takes around twenty minutes for the most part, although I do often do a longer one on the last Saturday of the month. Let’s first look at the timing of your weekly planning session. I did quite a bit of experimenting with the best time to do this. Turned out, Sunday nights was the worst time to do it. You spent all weekend worrying about all the things you think you needed to do next week and it felt like Sunday night was the beginning of your working week. Plus, it can be very hard to motivate yourself to get up and go to a quiet room to do some planning when you are fully relaxed. Friday afternoons looked promising, but I found I was tired and just wanted to get home. I found the best time to do the weekly planning session was actually Saturday morning. The reason for this was I had no excuses. It’s the first thing you do on Saturday morning and generally, you can wake up a little later and you feel well rested. Plus, the week is still fresh in your mind so it’s less likely you will forget anything. The biggest benefit, though, is once you’ve done it, you can relax and enjoy your weekend. Your brain isn’t going to throw up anything that you may have forgotten and you feel a lot less stressed and in control. So the first tip I would suggest is do your weekly planning first thing Saturday morning. Next what do you include in your weekly planning? Well, the first thing to do is to clear your inboxes. Hopefully, your email inbox is relatively clear already, but here I mean your task manager’s and notes’ inbox. What you are doing is organising everything you’ve collected and deciding when you are going to do the tasks. Once your inboxes are clear, you look at your This Week folder to see what’s left over and decide a) if

Podcast 264 This week, The question is all about implementing the Time Sector System using a paper-based method. 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 264 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 264 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. There’s something special about pen and paper. The feel of the pen moving on paper and the simplicity of collecting notes, ideas and even marking off tasks feels better than tapping your mouse or trackpad on a task. Sadly, technology has made task and appointment management extremely convenient. It’s fast and easy to add and check off tasks and it’s far easier to carry a phone than to always having to make sure you carry a notebook with you. While I love technology and the convenience it brings with it, I do miss being able to slow things down and handwrite notes, ideas and lists of things I want to do and it seems many other people also prefer the more naturalness of using pen and paper to manage their lives. So, wit that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Max. Max asks; Hi Carl, The problem for me lies in the tools. Before coming across your work, I used a paper notebook and generally followed the Bullet Journal methodology. I have found that I do not enjoy using digital tools for organising, note-taking and general brainstorming. Something about moving a pen across paper just works for me. How would you implement your Time Sector system with a paper notebook and a pen? Hi Max, thank you for your question. One of the benefits of using a digital system is that all your repeatable routines and areas of focus tasks automatically show up in your list of tasks to do today. These will need to be manually transferred to your today list when you do your planning with a paper based system. The good news here is, if you do a daily planning session, you can pull your recurring tasks from your routines and areas of focus lists and add them to your list of tasks for tomorrow. This gives you the opportunity to decide whether you can do those tasks for tomorrow. This would likely mean you will be copying five or six tasks each day from a master list to your daily list. Personally, I like this as it forces you to deliberately consider what you will do today. However, to make this more concrete, so you don’t miss anything, I would create a page divided into seven boxes. Each box represents a day of the week, and you can add your recurring tasks in there. For monthly and yearly recurring tasks, I would put them on your calendar. As you are only doing this with your monthly and yearly recurring tasks, it won’t overwhelm your calendar. Okay, aside from that, the Time Sector System works very well through a paper based system. In all task management systems whether they are digital or not, the most important list is your today list. The key with this list is it is curated, relevant and up to date will all the excess removed. This is one of the disadvantages of the digital system. Because it is so easy to add a date to a task and then “forget” about it—the date and forget problem—we add random dates to tasks and then our daily lists become swamped before we even start the day. The paper based system avoids this because for you to create a daily list you manually need to add tasks to it. So, what about the folders? Well here I would create a This Week list every eight pages in your notebook. (Or 14 pages if you have two pages representing a day) You can then add tasks you want to do that week to those pages. These lists would take care of your Next Week lists so you would not need to create a Next Week list. For the This Month list, That I would add to the beginning of each month. These are tasks you know need to be done sometime this month, but are not entirely sure when you will do them. This is a list you can review each week and bring forward any tasks to the appropriate list. Long-term and on hold lists would be kept either at the beginning of your notebook or at the end. You can decide where that list is best kept in your notebook. One of the downsides to running an analogue system is you need to set up each notebook you use. This is the same with a bullet journal as well as a non-digital GTD system—something I did when I first began using the GTD method years ago. You will need to set up the pages each time you start a new notebook. The good news here, is t

Podcast 263. This week, we are looking at the humble task manager and at how to get the most out of it by getting back to basics. 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 263 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 263 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. Since even before the Ivy Lee Method was first used in 1918, listing out your tasks for the day has been a common way to manage all the things you have to do. Externalising what needs to be done, is a tried and tested method for managing what we do each day. When you combine a well managed task manager with a calendar, you have a very powerful way to get your work done and to have time for rest each day. Now, as usual we humans are incredibly destructive. For some weird reason we seem to hate simplicity and love to over complicate things until they are destroyed. A classic apocryphal story that illustrates this is during the space race, both NASA and the Russians were having difficulty finding a writing implement that worked in a zero gravity environment. The traditional pen needs gravity to work and when you take gravity out, the pen will no longer work. NASA spent millions of dollars researching this. Yet the Russians spent nothing and solved the problem. The Russian space agency gave their astronauts pencils. Pencils don’t need gravity. This week’s question touches on this problem of over-complexity and I will give you some ways to get things back to a more simple footing so you can focus more on doing your work and spend less time organising your 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 Thomas. Thomas asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently been watching a lot of YouTube videos on using task managers. I like the idea of keeping all my tasks in one place, but it’s so confusing. There’s so many different ways to use a to-do list I just cannot figure out which is the best one. Do you have any recommendations? Hi Thomas, thank you for your question and yes, you are right; it is very confusing. The problem here is everyone will have a different way to manage their work. This is in part because we are all different (which is a good thing), and we all do different types of work. While you might have a generic job title such as a doctor or dentist within those generic titles there are a multitude of different disciplines. Another problem is we now have many more options than using a piece of paper and a pen to write out what needs to be done today. Now the task manager has been digitalised, developers can add features to differentiate themselves from other developers building task managers. It a combination of these two factor that has inevitably led to things becoming overly complicated. But let’s just push back the complexity and look at what a task manager needs to do. A task manager needs three areas: An area to collect things, an area to store things and an area that tells you what needs to be done today. Anything else that adds to that is just adding complexity. Now task manager developers can easily create something with those three areas that works well. Unfortunately, for us, that would be boring and so we now have flags, tags and filters (and a whole lot more in many cases) Now these can be useful, but they are definitely not essential. So, how can you make a task manager work effectively? Well, understanding the three areas would be a good start. Let’s look at these individually. First you need to be collecting all your commitments, tasks and anything else you need to do in your inbox. It’s no good collecting some and leaving others in your head. This is not something you can do half-heartedly. Either you go all in or don’t bother at all. Your head is the worst place to remember what needs to be done. It’s not designed to store information. It’s designed to recognise patterns. We use all our senses to do that. Sight, taste, smell, touch and sound are our primary pattern recognition senses and the ones used every day. We would immediately think something is wrong if we go outside when there’s a blue sky and the sun is shining, but when we do step outside we get wet. There’s an interrupt in the pattern and our brain alerts us to something not being right and our fight or flight reaction will engage. That’s where our brains work incredibly well. If someone gives us a random series of numbers that do not fit a pattern (s

This week’s question is all about building success into your life and why to do it, you need to become boring. 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 262 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 262 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. It’s strange how themes crop up and then suddenly I see the theme everywhere. This week, that theme has been all about how to turn something into a success and why so many people fail. It’s sad that the media only show the fruits of success—showcasing expensive houses, exotic holidays and flashy cars. That may be the results of living a successful life, but it is not how you become successful. The way success is trailed would make anyone feel that only a lucky few can ever be successful, yet that is simply not true at all. Success has nothing to do with where you were born, what school or university you went to, whether you have wealthy parents or were lucky enough to win the lottery. Success has nothing to do with genetics or background. Whether you succeed or not depends entirely on the choices you make and how you define success. When I see so called instagram influencers living it up on expensive looking yachts or standing at the steps of a private jet, I turn off. I do not see that as success—that’s showing off. Success should be measured by you and what you achieve and ultimately what you contribute to this amazing world. So, before we get to this week’s question, just pause for a minute an ask yourself what you would have to achieve in order for you to consider yourself a success? That could be to complete a full course marathon, to raise your children to be respectful of others or it could be to solve a global problem. However you define success, that needs to be your starting point. If you don’t know what that is, you will have no information on which to build a strategy. Okay, enough of my rambling introduction, let me know hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Roger. Roger asks: Hi Carl, I recently took your PACT course, and was curious to know if you still follow those ideas and whether you would add anything to the cours e today. Hi Roger, than you for your question. Okay, before we start, I should explain to those who don’t know, I have a free course in my Learning Centre called PACT. PACT stands for; Patience, Action, Consistency and Time. It’s a course that gives you a framework to achieving success at anything. In the course, I used building a blog, podcast or YouTube channel as examples, but you could apply to principles to anything and you will be successful. I’m willing to guarantee that. However, one thing I know is 95% of the people who set out to succeed at something will fail. Why is that? It’s because to become successful at anything you need to become boring. You will also likely have to ditch quite a few of your friends and stop seeing some of your family members as well. It’s this sacrifice that most people are unwilling to make. Now, if you have read Napoleon Hill’s brilliant book Think And Grow Rich, you will know about “Burning Desire”. It’s this burning desire that Napoleon Hill discovered was the common denominator among the thousands of highly successful people he interviewed for the book. They knew exactly what they wanted to achieve and set about single-mindedly to achieve it. The excluded everything from their lives that distracted them from achieving that success. One example, Napoleon Hill gave was Edwin Barns’ single-minded determination to work with (not for) Thomas Edison. Edwin Barns’ gave up everything he had, boarded a freight train and traveled to see Thomas Edison. He started out cleaning Edison’s offices. Never complained and just worked his way up. Never forgetting his desire to work with Thomas Edison. After five years of hard work, he got his chance and took it. Barns promised Edison he could sell the Edison Dictating Machine, a machine Edison was having difficulty in selling. Barns never lost that burning desire and became a fabled rags to riches story. Barns’ story epitomises how to become successful at whatever you want to be successful at. The problem, for most people, is you need to make sacrifices and sadly, most people are not willing to do that today and instead will reach for all the excuses they can find—the excuses that successful people abandoned years ago. In many ways, becoming successful is all a

This week’s question is all about getting the most out of your calendar. The most powerful tool in your productivity toolbox, yet surprisingly the least spoken about. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 261 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 261 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 humble calendar has been around for a very long time. And there are many iterations too. There are seasonal calendars still used by many farmers to the little electronic calendars on our phones. It always strikes me as odd that when you do a search for productivity apps, all you get are task managers and notes apps. Yet, if you don’t take control of your calendar, you will always be running out of time, missing meetings and chasing the elusive goal of being “finished”. It’s your calendar that will never lie to you. It gives you the twenty-four hours you have each day and you get to design how you use those twenty-four hours. In my opinion, your calendar beats all other productivity tools and apps because it’s the only tool you have that will tell you where you need to be, when and with whom. Now, just before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, I just want to give you a heads up that there are still a few places left for February’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop. Beginning on Friday 3rd February, and for the following three Fridays, I will be doing a ninety minute workshop that takes you through the process of building your very own productivity system—a system that works for you. We will start with the calendar, then go on your task manager and managing your communications—email and messages and end by bringing everything together. This is a wonderful opportunity to join a group of likeminded people who together will help you to overcome any obstacles you may have and to bring in some solid practices that will serve you over the years to come. The focus of this workshop is on you. I want you to bring your productivity and time management issues so we get real life experiences and to develop methods and processes to ease these issues so they no longer create a bottleneck or obstacle to taking control of your time and you life. I hope you can join me. I’m so excited to being able to help you and others build their Ultimate Productivity System. Full details for this event are in the show notes. Okay, now 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 Lisa. Lisa asks, Hi Carl, I’ve see a few of your videos on how you use your calendar, and was wondering if you have any tips for someone who works in a typical office and struggles to find time to get on and do my regular work in between a lot of meetings and interruptions. Hi Lisa, than you for your question. I think we need to address the elephant in the room first. Allowing your calendar to show you are more available than you really are. For many of you working in an office environment where your boss and colleagues can see your calendar—or at least when you have availability—it can be hell trying to organise your day. When your boss or colleague is attempting to set up a meeting, they are not concerned with how much work you have to do, they just want to schedule a meeting and ultimately the day and time will be set according to when everyone is available. This means if your calendar is showing you free at 9:30 am or 1:30pm (a common free time for most people) that’s when meetings are likely to be arranged. Now the problem here is 9:30am is the best time to get down to some focused work. You’re much more likely to be fresh and alert at that time and less susceptible to distractions. My advice to anyone who wants to get better at their time management is to block 9:00am to 11:00am for their most important work of the day. Equally, if you get outside at lunchtime for twenty to thirty minutes, you are going be fresh again when you return—well perhaps not if you’ve had a high carbohydrate lunch—but for most people, the early afternoon can result in another good focused session. These times should be protected at all costs. Of course, you may not always have control here—some departmental meetings are set for early Monday morning and later Friday afternoons, but you can still block time out on a Tuesday to Thursday for focused work. Just giving yourself a few hours each week for focu

This week’s question is about all those little secrets I’ve discovered over the years that make getting work done on time, every time, easy. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 259 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 260 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Over the years, I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks that have adopted have helped me to fine-tune my system and greatly improve my overall effectiveness and productivity. This week’s question asked me directly about some of my lesser-known secrets. It was an interesting question because many of the things I do each day I’ve absorbed into my system and never really think about it anymore. It’s a little like learning to drive a car. At first, you have to consciously remember to put the key in the ignition, or to put your foot on the brake and press the start button; after a while, those steps are done unconsciously. And BOOM! I’ve just given you the first tip, and I haven’t even revealed the question. The secret to mastering productivity or anything else is repetition. However, before I explain that a little more, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Craig. Craig asks, Hi Carl, I’ve followed you for a while now, and I have always wondered, beyond what you share through your YouTube and blog if there are any other little nuggets you use every day that you haven’t revealed in some form or another? Hi Craig, good question. I’ve never thought of that before. I’m sure there are things I do do every day that I do unconsciously that help my overall productivity. You set me quite a challenge here. Well, let me return to what I was saying in the introduction. “The mother of mastery is repetition”. The more you do something, the better and faster you will get at it. Take, for example, the humble weekly planning session. When you first do one, it will take you a long time. There are a lot of things you need to go through for the first time, and you will have to consciously think about what you are looking at and will likely read through everything. Over time though, you learn what needs looking at and what can be skipped. If you come from a GTD background, you will feel you must go through all your open projects. And again, if you are a GTDer, pretty much everything you want to do will be a project—the anything involving two or more steps being a project idea. That means you are going to have to go through hundreds of projects each and every week. Good luck with that one, my friends. Now a more pragmatic way of doing your weekly planning session is to look through only your active projects. And here, you really only need to ask yourself what needs to happen next and when do I need to do it. This dramatically reduces the amount of time you need for a weekly planning session, and as you get consistent with it, i.e. you do one every week, you know exactly what needs looking at. It just becomes natural. You know where to start, and that triggers everything else. Incidentally linked to your weekly planning session is timing. When should you do yours? Now, over the years, I’ve tried all sorts of different times. I discovered the worst time to do your weekly planning is Sunday night. Yes, I know many of will be shouting at whatever device you are listening to this on. But bear with me. Doing your weekly planning on a Sunday night is akin to leaving your exercise until the evening. You are going to be inconsistent. Your willpower is at its lowest in the evening, and worse, you will have pretty much forgotten a lot of what happened in the week just gone by. The best time for a weekly planning session is first thing Saturday morning. Hear me out. Firstly, you’re doing it in the morning and therefore, your willpower is at its highest. It’s also a time where you likely do not have wake up early for work and you can wake up refreshed. Next, no matter what you are doing on a Saturday morning, there’s no excuses. If you need to set off early for an adventure day, you can wake up thirty or forty minutes earlier and get it done. AND… The icing on the cake… getting your weekly planning done first thing Saturday morning, leaves you worry free for the rest of weekend knowing that you’ve got the week ahead planned and you can now relax and enjoy the weekend. Next tip. Turn everything you do repeatedly into a process. What I mean here

This week’s question is on how to reduce the number of tasks in your task manager. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 259 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 259 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. We’ve all face this problem. Getting tasks into our task manager, adding dates and then discovering that we have far too many tasks to complete on a given day. It’s problematic because we feel once a date is added, it must be done on that day. The truth is, most of the tasks on your list for today do not need to be done today. They could be done tomorrow or the day after, and nothing would go disastrously wrong. Yet, the task being on your list today leaves you feeling it has to be done today. In many ways, this is a symptom of becoming better organised and more productive. It’s not the disaster many feel it is, just a growing pain and one that, with a little strategic thinking, can be overcome. So, today, that’s what I will do. I will share with you a number of tips and methods that will help you to overcome this feeling of overwhelm and the need to do everything on your list each day. And that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Philip. Philip asks; Hi Carl, I’m having a big problem with my daily tasks. No matter how hard I try, I never complete my tasks for the day, and it causes me to feel deflated and disillusioned. I keep trying different task managers, and that does help for a week or two, but after that, I find myself in the same problem. How do you stay on top of your tasks every day? Hi Philip, thank you for your great question. And don’t worry. You are definitely not alone with this problem. The first thing to understand is if you are following the Time Sector System, the focus is not necessarily on what you do each day; the focus is on what you get accomplished in the week. This is why the most important folder you have in the Time Sector System is the This Week folder. This is where you put all the tasks you want to complete this week. All the other folders are just holding pens for tasks you have not yet decided when you will do. And that’s okay. When you stop focusing on daily task numbers and instead focus on what you will accomplish in the week, if you get to the end of Monday and you still have several tasks to complete, you can relax and simply reschedule the remaining tasks for another day in the week. Now, there will inevitably be tasks that need to be done on a given day. For those tasks, you use the 2+8 prioritisation method—where two of your ten most important tasks must be completed that day. (Even if you have to pull an all-nighter to do it—which hopefully doesn’t ever happen, but that’s the mindset you want to have) You can utilise the power of time blocking and block out sufficient time to make sure you get those two tasks completed for the day. For instance, this week, on Tuesday, I had a two-hour block of time for writing. On my task list, I had this podcast script to write as a priority task. Hence, I wrote this script in that two-hour block of time. When I did my planning for the day on Monday evening, I saw the task, and I saw I had a writing time block. I made writing the script a priority task and went to bed knowing I had sufficient time to write the script. Linked to this, there are a couple of things you can do that will help to reduce your daily task list numbers. The first is to theme your days. This is an idea from Mike Vardy of the Producivityist podcast. Mike calls it Time Crafting, and essentially, you theme each day. For example, you may have Monday and Tuesday for client and customer work. Wednesday for follow-ups and chases, Thursdays for project work and Friday for admin. Knowing what your core work is will help you design this effectively. If you don’t know what your core work is, you will fall into the trap of firefighting—where you are always reacting to what is thrown at you rather than being more proactive and focusing your time and attention on what you are employed to do. Once you set your theme for the day, when you do your weekly planning session, you can move tasks that relate to each theme to its day. For instance, all your admin tasks can be scheduled for your admin day, your client matters can be scheduled for your client work days, and any project tasks can be done on project days. Th

This week, it’s all about building a morning routine that leaves you focused and energised. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 258 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 258 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Something I have noticed about productive and successful people is they all have a morning routine that helps them to focus and energise themselves for the day ahead. Whether these people are sport stars, business executives or a stay at home parent, each days begins the same way—with time spent on themselves. And that is the key to an empowering morning routine—it’s the time spent working on yourself in a way that leaves you feeling focused and ready for the day ahead. This week’s question is all about morning routines: what to include and more importantly, how to be consistent with them. 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 Jules. Jules asks, Hi Carl, I like to idea of having a morning routine, but I’ve never been able to make anything stick. Do you have any tips or tricks for being consistent with things like morning routines? Hi Jules, thank you for your question. The one thing I have learned about morning routines (and end of day routines) is to make them stick you need to ensure that the activities you do are activities you enjoy doing. For many people it would be nice to start the day with exercise, but if you live in a country where the weather is somewhat unpredictable, waking up and heading out for a walk in torrential rain, is not necessarily the best start to the day. Another mistake I see is to copy someone else’s routines. For example, Robin Sharma, advocates waking up at 5 AM and spending the first 20 minutes of your day with exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of study. That works for Robin and indeed works for many others who follow the 5 AM Club (as it is called), but for others—such as myself—waking up at 5 AM is impractical as I often work late and need seven hours sleep. Indra Nooyi, former PepsiCo CEO wakes up at 4AM to read books and her email. For me, if I were to wake up at 4 AM to read books I’d find myself falling back to sleep very quickly. Other people’s morning routines are not going to work for you. You need to find your own way. But the question is how do you do that? Well, the first step is to decide how much time you want to spend on your morning routines. Too much time, for instance, will either mean you have to awake up too early, or delay the start of your day leaving you with too much pressure to get things done. The ideal amount of time is no more than sixty minutes. Sixty minutes is enough time to do most things and means you are not going to interfere significantly with your sleep. For the record, my morning routine takes around 45 minutes. The next step is to decide what you want to do in your morning routines. Now, the thing here is whatever you do it must be something you really enjoy doing. You are not going to be consistent with these if you do not wake up and look forward to starting your routine. So, what would you enjoy doing in a morning? Some things you may want to consider are: Meditating Some light exercise Writing a journal Reading Going for a morning walk (preferably with a dog—that’ll put a smile on your face) Taking an ice bath (not my cup of tea) Choose activities that leave you feeling happy and energised. You may want to experiment here for a few weeks. I’ve found some things look exciting on paper, but in a morning when you try doing them they just don’t fit right. For instance, a few years ago I tried meditation for fifteen minutes. I really didn’t enjoy it, so I ditched meditating. Once you have a few activities the next step is to find your trigger. This comes from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. The idea is you use a trigger activity that is easy to begin your routines. For example, my trigger is putting the kettle on. This has been the first thing I have done each morning for years. The turning on of the kettle to make my morning coffee starts my morning routine. While I wait for the kettle to boil, I begin my stretching routine. These are a series of stretching exercises I picked up from Brian Bradley of the Egoscue Method. Once the kettle has boiled I brew my morning coffee and while that is brewing, I drink a glass of lemon water. The grea

In our final episode of the year, we’re looking at how to improve the productivity of a team. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 258 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 258 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 year or so, I’ve received a number of questions related to helping a team improve their overall productivity. Now, this is a difficult question to answer because each individual team member will be motivated by different things and each person will have a unique approach to getting their work done. Motivation is a key part to individual productivity. If you are not motivated by your work and you see it only as a way to pay the bills, more fulfilling motives such as ownership of a project or task, developing your skills and helping people solve problems don’t feature in an individual’s mindset. That said, it is possible to build a highly productive team that has clear outcomes each day and week and at the same time builds ownership, camaraderie and a strong team work ethic. And that is what we will be looking at today. So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Tony. Tony asks, Hi Carl, I manage a team of eight people and we are responsible to sales and the initial after sales programme following delivery of out product. The problem I am having is keeping my team focused on what we are trying to accomplish. They often get distracted by low value tasks that means we often fall behind on our plan. Do you have any advice on helping teams be more focused? Hi Tony, thank you for your question. As I mentioned in the introduction, working with a team of people has its own challenges when it comes to productivity but there are a few things you can do that will enhance you teams overall productivity. The first is clear communication. Often what happens within a team is there is poor communication on the results that the team is expected to accomplish. At the beginning of a year or a quarter, team leaders are usually reluctant to talk about what the team’s targets are. Managers are quite happy to discuss individual targets with employees, but rarely talk about the group target. The problem here is you encourage team members to focus on their individual targets and the team’s. What you want to be doing is ensuring that the team as a whole knows the target so that they can work together to achieve that team goal. I remember when I was selling cars in the early 1990s, there were three of us in the new car sales team, plus a sales manager. Claire, Bob and myself. Claire was an outstanding sales person. She was focused, aggressive (in a positive way) and could pull sales out of nowhere. Bob on the other hand was slower. He was patient and gentler, yet he had an enormous amount of experience and consistently brought ink the sales. Me? I was somewhere in the middle. Each month out team’s target was to sell 35 cars. Now, traditionally, that number would be divided between the three of us equally, but while Claire rarely missed her targets, Bob and myself struggled to hit the target. Yet, our sales manager, David, realised that the important target was the 35 cars. Not that his three sales people sold twelve cars each per month. If we had focused on the individual numbers, Claire would have slowed down in the forth week of the month, while Bob and I would be slow at the beginning of the month. On the white board in David’s office, there was only two numbers. The target (35) and the number of cars we had sold that month. This way, we were encouraged to work as a team. It also meant that if Claire’s more aggressive approach was not working with a particular customer, David would ask Bob or myself to step in and close the sale. Equally, if a slow burn approach appeared not to be working, we would ask Claire to step in and close the sale. We had a regular morning meeting at 8:30am and in that meeting we discussed what we had on as potential sales, and we set objectives for the day. The communication was clear and we set about our day with clear objectives to accomplish that day. That team was the best team I ever worked in in terms of productivity. As far as I recall we never missed our targets, and we won a lot of awards for the best new car sales team within the group. The success of that team was down to simple communication and a shared

This week, what could you change about your system to get it ready for 2023? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 257 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 257 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. There’s something about an end of year that turns our minds towards cleaning things up, making changes and planning. Yet when you think about it, these things can be done at any time in the year. Cleaning your task manager of tasks that have been sitting around for over a year, reviewing how we manage our tasks and making plans can all be done anytime. All we need to do is make that decision. That said, the end of year often does give us some extra time to do these things. Emails reduce a little, and most people’s attention turn towards the upcoming year. And certainly if you live in the west, Christmas week does take us away from our work and spending time with family and friends. I find this presents opportunities to clean up my notes for the year, delete tasks I’ve added, not done and are just sitting around in my task manager cluttering things up. This week’s question is on this very subject. What can we do to change things, reenergise tired processes and fix things that haven’t worked well throughout the year. So, without further discourse, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jan. Jan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve seen you mention your end of year clean up in your blog posts in the past but I’ve never seen or heard you describe what you do. Could you explain your process for cleaning things up? Hi Jan, thank you for your question. My end of year clean up has become a bit of a ritual for me now. It’s something I enjoy doing because I am not working in the sense of creating content, instead I am doing a lot of sitting around and TV watching, not something I do at anything other time of the year. It’s relaxing and my mind isn’t “on” in the sense of thinking what to create next. So, where do I start? The first step for me is to do a review of all the apps I am using. The goal here is to eliminate apps I am not using. That means evaluating the usefulness of the apps I have on my computer, phone and iPad. Through the year I will test a few apps to see what everyone is talking about. In the past, I’ve had apps like Notion, Obsidian, Things 3 and OneNote on my computer and as they didn’t make the cut, so to speak, I deleted them. This year, I will be happily removing all the COVID apps I installed, I noticed these were still hanging around on a “just in case” basis. But as Korea is no longer doing test and trace and we can travel without the need for a PCR test, I can remove these. I should point out if you do this exercise, once you’ve cleared all these apps, your computer, phone and tablets feel faster. I’m sure there’s no difference, but it does feel faster. Next is to go into my workhorse apps and clean them up. I usually start with Todoist because this is the easiest one to clean up. With the Time Sector System, the folder you want to be paying attention to is your Long-term and on-hold folder. This folder can easily become a dumping ground and the end of the year is a good time to go in there and delete tasks you know you’re not going to be doing. For tasks that have been sitting in there for a while but you feel you will still likely want to do them, you can move them out of your task manager and create a project note or add them to a list of tasks you want to do in the future but require further planning out, again in your notes. Then it’s time to go into my notes. Now for me, this year is going to be a difficult one. This is the year I will be making a decision on whether to relegate Evernote to being a storage app and go all in on Apple Notes. Now, the reason for this change of approach with Evernote is because Evernote is going in a direction that will not support how I use notes. That’s not a criticism of Evernote, I feel Evernote is doing brilliantly. However for me, I want my notes app to be simple with as few features as possible. When an app has too many features, the temptation to play around with formatting, colours and setups is too much for me. I spend more time playing than doing and that does nothing for my productivity. Apple Notes, on the other hand, is simple, has great search features and works across all my devices. The test size is readable (while Ev

Podcast 256 This week, we’re looking at the overwhelming number of so-called “projects” people create and why it’s these that contribute to overwhelm and a lot of wasted time. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 256 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 256 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 read David Allen’s seminal book, Getting Things Done, around fifteen years ago, and it helped me to transform away from a manual Franklin Planner that had served me well for the previous 17 years to a fully digital productivity system. In Getting Things Done, David Allen defines a project as anything requiring two or more steps to complete. He also mentioned that most people have between thirty and a hundred projects at any one time. Now, if you are following a correct interpretation of GTD (as Getting Things Done is called), that would not pose a problem because projects are kept in file folders in a filing cabinet near your desk and your task manager is organised by context—meaning your lists are based around a place such as your workplace, home or hardware store, a tool such as your computer or phone or a person, such as your partner, boss or colleagues. Unfortunately, when apps began to appear, many app developers misread or misinterpreted the GTD concept and built their apps around project lists instead of contexts. It could also have been a concern for intellectual property rights. But either way, this has led to people organising their task list managers by project and not context. And it is this that has caused so much to go wrong for so many people. This week’s question is on this very subject and why managing your task manager by your projects is overwhelming and very ineffective. 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 Lara. Lara asks, hi Carl, Last year I read the Getting Things Done book and have really struggled to get it to work for me. I have nearly 80 projects in my task manager, and I feel I am spending too much time keeping everything organised. I never seem to be able to decide what to work on, and everything feels important. Do you have any suggestions on spending less time managing work and more time doing the work? Hi Lara, thank you for your question. So, as I mentioned in the opening, the problem here is you are managing your projects in the wrong place. Task managers are there to manage your tasks, not your projects. If you want to manage projects with software, you would be better off purchasing dedicated project management software. However, those apps can be very expensive and have been designed for corporations and large teams working on a single project. Apps like Monday.com and Wrike are examples of accessible project managers. However, apps like these are designed for teams of people working together on a single project and will not solve your problem of being able to spend more time doing your work and less time organising it. Now, you did not mention if you wanted to continue using the GTD model or not, but if you want to get things better organised, the first step would be to remove your projects from your task manager and replace your lists with something you can better manage. Now, I use the Time Sector System to manage my tasks. This means my task manager is organised by when I will do the task. There are five time sectors: This week, next week, this month, next month and long-term and on hold. This means when a task comes into my task manager, the only thing I need to decide is when I will do the task. If it needs doing this week, it will be added to my This Week folder; if it does need doing this week, I will distribute it accordingly. In the GTD world, you need to set up your task manager by your different contexts. These can be anything, but they do need to work for you. While in the GTD book, David Allen gives us examples of @office, @computer, @phone and @home etc, these are a bit out of date today. We can do email from a computer, tablet or phone, and many of us work in a hybrid way in that we do a lot of work working from home. Now, I’ve seen some people organise their work by energy level: for instance, high energy would be for big tasks that require quite a bit of time, low energy would be for easy tasks that can be done at any time. The great thing about GTD is you can choose your own contexts

This week, we’re looking at new year goals and what we can do to improve our chances of success. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 255 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 255 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 published a video on planning 2023 on my YouTube channel. In that video, I encouraged viewers to create a note in their notes app and to begin a two-month brainstorming period where they looked at a few areas of their lives and thought about what they would like to change. These areas were around what they would like to change about themselves, their work and their lifestyles. Plus a couple of questions about goals and bucket lists. The idea here is to open you up so you can go deeper than your usual new year's resolutions and to give you time to think about the person you want to become. Well, that two month brainstorming period is coming to an end and it’s time to start looking at what you can do in 2023 that will move things forward on the areas you would like to make changes and in this week’s podcast, a break from the normal format, I will take you through the process of building a plan for 2023 that will be achievable, fun and more importantly will be the catalyst for the changes you will need to turn these ideas into reality. So, this week, the Mystery Podcast Voice will be having a break, and we’ll get straight into the answer. So, if you did the annual planning exercise, you will hopefully have quite a lot of ideas written down on your planning sheet. Now, don’t worry if you haven’t done the annual planning exercise; there’s still a little time left for you to do it. So, the four main questions on the planning sheet are: What would I like to change about myself? What would I like to change about my lifestyle? What would I like to change about the way I work? What can I do to challenge myself? Each of these questions is designed to get you to explore a different part of your life, from you as an individual to the way you work. The final question on challenging yourself is there to help prevent you from stagnating and getting stuck inside the dangerous comfort zone. If you have completed this exercise over the last six to eight weeks, you will, by now, have quite a list. The problem is you will not be able to complete all of these ideas in twelve months. The trick now is to look at your list as a whole and look for a pattern. Often you will find in the part about making changes to yourself that there will be some areas you have not been happy with for a while. Your time management might be bad, or you may not be happy with the state of your health. To give you an example, last year, I wanted to improve the quantity and quality of my sleep—which was not healthy. This led me to look at my day as a whole and to see why I was not getting sufficient sleep. I had too many early starts and late finishes. I could see from my calendar that this was not sustainable, so I created a few rules. Now, I must be finished at my computer by 11pm and be in bed by 11:30pm. I also changed my morning start from 6:00am to 7:30am. I also made a point to read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, which is a fantastic book and learned a lot more about ensuring I had a better quality of sleep each night. I have not been perfectly consistent with this, but I have made a lot of progress and will continue to refine this going into 2023. And this is something you will discover. It’s unlikely you will be able to change something perfectly—most things we are working towards will always be works in progress—but the act of starting and building in new routines and habits will lead you towards where you want to be. When it comes to the lifestyle question, what we are looking at here is the way we are living our lives. Three years ago, at the end of 2019, I realised I had got stuck in a rut in where we were living. A few years earlier, my wife and I had decided we wanted to move to the east coast and away from the noisy and poor air quality of the big city, but we were doing nothing about it. I saw that our reliance on the public transport system was great if we wanted to stay living in the big city, but was the reason we were ‘trapped’ there. We decided that the best way to break this would be to get a car. And that became our goal in 2020. This meant I needed to get serious about saving money, and that is what I did from the star

This week, we’re looking at the unsexy part of becoming more productive and better with our time management. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 254 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 254 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Now, most people in the time management and productivity field, such as myself, will generally talk about systems, routines and applications. And while these do have an important place in the helping us be more productive, there are three other parts to the productivity equation rarely talked about and often overlooked. What are those? They are Sleep, exercise and diet. For many people, these three elements are elephants in their otherwise well-ordered life. You know, deep down, if you are not getting sufficient sleep, not getting outside and moving, and eating highly processed and unnatural foods, you are destroying your ability to focus, concentrate and ultimately that effects your overall output. (Not to mention what these will do to your long-term health) And I am not just talking about work output. If you are constantly tired and unable to concentrate, that’s going to have negative effects on your family life. You will be too tired for quality time with your kids and partner, and that poor diet and lack of sleep will adversely affect your mood when you do have time for your family life. We have a lot to look at here so, 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 so busy at work this year that when I get home all I want to do is crash on the sofa and do nothing. I end up watching TV or watching YouTube videos until very late and then not getting enough sleep. I know I should spend some time planning my day and doing some exercise, but I just don’t have the energy. How do you fit in time for exercise and planning? Hi Ryan, thank you for your question. This is a problem I know many people face. Planning the day at the end of the day when you're tired and just want to do nothing because you are exhausted. It’s not going to be something high on your list of priorities. Let’s be honest, we can all operate a reasonably productive day without doing daily planning. For most people, this is how they have operated for years without any immediate adverse effects. However, a question I would ask is without following a few simple daily practices, how are things turning out? If you are stressed out, anxious and exhausted at the end of your working day, is that a good thing? Is that how you want to feel at the end the of the day? So, what can we do? Well, this is what I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. While new systems and apps are exciting, and the sexy part of productivity and time management, these things will only go so far. No new app or system will change the work you still have to do. Just because a task is in Things 3 instead of Todoist, won’t change the fact that the task still needs doing. No app is going to plan the day for you—even with machine learning or artificial intelligence. Only you, as an individual knows what’s important to you. I find it interesting that Outlook Calendar’s AI will fill your blank times with work, never tell you to call your partner, or go for a walk. Now, I’ve been studying productivity and time management long enough to know that it’s never the case of not having time. You have time. You have more than enough time to fit everything in. The real reason you “feel” you don’t have time is you have not prioritised what’s important to you. But, let’s step back a little and look at the three absolute basics of being more productive. Let’s start with sleep. When you get sufficient amount sleep, you are more awake, more creative and focused. Those three on their own will give you a far more productive day than being half asleep, and distracted. I did a little experiment earlier this year. I spent a week surviving on four and half hours sleep each day. That week was a complete disaster for my overall productivity. Work that I was normally able to easily get done in a week, was a struggle. In fact, I had to give up trying to do some of the work I wanted to do. By the end of that week, I had a backlog. I NEVER have backlogs. I was too tired to clear my actionable email each day. I became irritable towards the end of the week, and I started craving sugary snacks after only two

This week, we’re looking at building balance into our lives, and I explain why we look at the whole idea of balance the wrong way. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 253 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 253 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. We frequently hear about balancing our lives. Terms like “work/life balance” are bandied around as if it’s something we can achieve. The trouble is, building balanced days and weeks is an elusive goal. There’s simply too much we want to build into our days: Seven to eight hours sleep, quality time with our family, exercise, eight to nine hours of work and time for eating, resting, TV and hobbies. Add all that up and it’s more than twenty-four hours. This week’s question is about how we can build a more balanced life and there is a way, but first we need to dispose of the traditional thinking about what a balanced life is and embrace a different approach. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question from from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl, I work a full time job, have two young kids, a husband and a lot of hobbies I want to pursue. The trouble I have is I cannot fit everything I want to do into my schedule. I’ve tried your perfect week idea, but I find I run out of time. Are there any other ways I can try to have a more balanced, less stressful life? Hi Annie, thank you for your question. I was very much in the same boat as you a few years ago. I was trying to build a business, work a full time job, exercise every day and spend quality time with my family and it was impossible. Whenever there was a public holiday, I wanted to work on my own business, but there were family responsibilities that could not be ignored and my regular work days were lengthening. I found myself working well past midnight, and having to wake up at 6 AM to get to my first classes. It was around then I realised that there will always be periods of time when we need to get our heads down and do our work. But these intense periods of work do not last. Take starting a business as an example. If you decide to start your own business, the first thing to get thrown out of the window is the idea of working nine til’ five. That’s a corporate office life concept that does not work when you start your own business. Starting your own business requires a 24/7 commitment. If you’re not working on your business, your brain will be solving problems and coming up with fresh ideas. It’s constant and doesn’t stop. However, that’s when you are in the startup phase. Once you have your business up and running, things slow somewhat. You develop processes for doing your work and you soon start to get your time back. When I first began my YouTube channel, it took me pretty much all day on a Friday to record and edit my videos. Today, I can do the recording and editing in less than three hours. I developed processes. I learned how to use Adobe’s Premiere Pro video editing software and I have systems in place to ensure everything is uploaded quickly and efficiently. What we need to do is to look at time and balance over a longer period. You are not going to balance individual days, everyday. You may be able to balance occasional days, but to do that you would have to almost micro-manage your day, and there are so many things that could torpedo your plans, trying to do this too often will just result in stress and anxiety. For example, Annie, if you are trying to juggle your work, your family, hobbies and other things in your life, you could look at your whole week. Accepting on, say, Tuesday and Thursday you will be focused on work, but you could also make Wednesday and Friday family nights and Mondays could be used for your hobbies. For this to work, you would need to be doing a weekly planning session. It would be during this planning time where you block activities on your calendar for the following week. Having a plan like this then allows you to plan at a deeper level at what you will do. For instance, one of your children may have a swimming lesson on Wednesday evenings. You could block out Wednesday evenings to go to the swimming pool and perhaps add going out for dinner with your kids afterwards. That’s spending quality time with your kids. If you know, you will have time on a Thursday for catching up on work, you would be much more relaxed and present wi

This week, we’re looking at how to stop overthinking and over-complicating our lives. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 252 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 252 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 biggest drains on our productivity is over-thinking things. It’s this overthinking that usually leads to overcomplicating our task managers, notes apps and work in general. However, there are a few things we can do that will eliminate the need to think too much about things. One of those, I’ve written and spoken about a lot, and that is in the way we write our tasks. If you write tasks in a haphazard way, you will end with tasks such as a website address with no idea what you need to do, or a single name with no indication what you need to do with that name. Whenever you write a task, you need to have an actionable verb telling you precisely what needs to be done. For instance: “look at this website for design ideas” or “call Jenny about next week’s meeting”. It’s a simple trick that adds, perhaps, a few seconds to writing out the task, but it will save to a lot more than a few seconds when it comes to deciding when you will do the task. It’s surprising how much time we lose when we need to think about what to do and how to do it. It’s when we do that that we discover multiple different ways to do something, and if we are not motivated enough to get whatever needs doing done, we use the excuse to “think about it” as a way to delay doing the task. So, before we get into the depth of this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Leon. Leon asks, Hi Carl, I’ve been following you for a long time now, and I understand how to set up my system. The problem I have is I feel I waste so much time trying to decide what to do and how to do it. I collect everything in my inbox but then never do most of the things I put there. How do you manage all your tasks? Hi Leon, thank you for your question. When you say, “I waste so much time trying to decide what do and how to do it” I presume that this will be a symptom of how your write your tasks and not being clear on where your priorities are. If we leave writing your tasks out for the moment and look at the decision part, this should be almost automatic. When you know where your priorities are, there will always be a natural hierarchy for the tasks that you do. For instance, if you were a salesperson when at work, your priorities would always be those tasks that risk you gaining a sale. Everything else, no matter how loud the task is—colleagues or bosses screaming at you for an activity report, for example—are not priorities. I know it’s hard to ignore your boss. But if you needed to call your boss about your activity report or a customer asking for further information, your customer is the priority and there shouldn’t even be a debate about it. Remember, you’re a salesperson. Your job is to sell. So, of the two calls; calling your boss or calling the customer, which one is likely to result in a sale? A doctor would never leave a seriously ill patient to answer a question from a manager. Doctors are trained to identify where their priorities are. You need to train yourself to know instinctively where your priorities are. And therein lies the secret to simplifying your work. When you know what your objective is, all you need work out is the fastest way to get from where you are now to where you want to be. Now, it would be very rare for you arrive at a project or task you haven’t done before, or done something similar. A manager having to hire or fire someone will have done that before. The difference is the role you are recruiting for or the person you are firing. However, there will already be a process to achieve these results. Over time you want to be fine-tuning your processes. I understand when you do something for the first time it’s likely to take longer, but as you are doing it you are learning how to do it, and you can fine-tune your process as you go along. The key is the keep focused on your outcome. What are you trying to achieve? Imagine you need to hire a new designer for your design team. Your company will likely already have a recruiting process, and if not, someone within your organisation will have hired someone at some time. Find out how they did it. Open your notes app, and write out a checklist

How best to organise all your files, documents and articles? 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 Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 251 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 251 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Over the years, we have seen a lot of wonderful ways to organise our stuff. Elaborate notebook and tag structures in Evernote, Complex folders on our computers organising every facet of our lives. And all that’s great. It’s a fantastic way to get things organised and gives us the motivation to clear out our stuff—which is no bad thing. We do collect too much stuff anyway. However, are all these wonderful organisation methods the best use of our time? You see, getting all our stuff organised is a great idea, but that’s a one-time task that may take a few days or even weeks, but long-term we have to maintain this new structure and therein lies two problems. The first is it will take time for you to develop the natural muscle memory to move stuff to their rightful place, and in my experience, most people have enough on their plates as it is. And secondly, the deeper the organisation structure you build the longer it will take to move the stuff you collect in the future—which will mean you won’t do it. After all, you likely don’t have a great deal of free time as it is, so adding a new process that takes time is not going to solve any problems. So what can we do? Well there are a few things you can do and that is what we will look at this week. However, before we do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks: Hi Carl, I am a professor at a large hospital and I not only have patients to see, I also teach. On top of that, I need to stay up to date with the latest research. This means I have a lot of papers to read, review and study. I really struggle to keep all these things organised and wondered if you have any tips and tricks that might help. Hi Janine, thank you for your question. This is the dilemma that has been creeping up on us over the last ten to fifteen years. More and more digital stuff has been replacing what typically would have been paper. I remember in the late 1990s, I had a filing cabinet in my study that held all the important papers and documents I needed to keep. My car and house insurance, a file folder for gas, electric and water bills as well as bank and credit card statements oh, and a place to keep my running magazines and Law Society Gazette. And because if I didn’t file these papers away almost immediately, they would be left sitting on the dining table, there was a constant reminder that these papers and documents needed to be filed. Today, most of these documents are now online or in digital format. I don’t get bank or credit card statements through the post anymore. They are all digital. I no longer have a filing cabinet in my office. I am now largely paperless—save for documents such as my passport, residency permit papers and such like. I can keep all these important documents in a single drawer in my office. However, the problem isn’t really just about these important documents. The problem now is we receive so much more digital clutter than we ever received paper. Largely because it is so much cheaper and easier to send out a digital document than a paper one, we get exponentially more digital stuff. So, how do we manage all this stuff. First I would recommend you establish some basic rules. Don’t put files and documents in your notes app. Over time, this will slow down your notes app. It’s far better to put receipts, documents—such as your medical and teaching documents—into dedicated folders in the cloud. Now it doesn’t matter whether you use Google Drive, Microsoft OneNote, Dropbox or iCloud. What matters is how you structure your folders. My structure is based around the work I do. For instance, I have a folder for my Online courses, YouTube, and Company documentation, which includes my receipts. Inside those folders the relevant parts are added as sub-folders. For example, inside my company folder, I have all the company registration documents, invoices I need to keep for my accountant, salaries and other such administrative documents. These are inside appropriately titled folders. For you, Janine, you would structure your folders as Medical and Teaching and then inside of those folders y

This week’s podcast answers the question: where do goals fit into a task manager? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 250 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 250 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. We are told that setting goals for yourself is important, and, yes, I would agree with that. But the question is, once you have set yourself some goals, where do the activities you need to perform come in? If you are already close to your limit in terms of what you can do each day, how will you find time to add more stuff? Now I think of goals as milestones on the road of a much longer journey. The destination of that journey is the same for all of us: death. Sorry to be so melodramatic, but that is true. Nobody gets out of life alive. It’s a very predictable end. The good news here is that we all have a degree of flexibility and freedom to choose what road we take. The difficulty we face is there is so much choice. So many paths we could take and trying to decide which path to follow is scary. Which is why it is all too easy to make no choice and just follow the ebbs and flows that life throws at us—which unless you are extremely lucky is not going to lead to a fulfilled and happy life. So, this week, I will share with you ways you can build your goals into your daily life so they become less of a task to be completed each day and more of just something you do, because that is who you are and what you do. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Adrian. Adrian asks; Hi Carl, I recently saw that you opened a new course on goal setting. I would love to have some goals, but I just don’t have the time to fit them in. I’m sure I’m not alone with this dilemma. Do you have any tips on fitting goals into an already busy life? Hi Adrian, thank you for your question. You are right to be concerned about adding more stuff you an already busy day, but there is a difference with tasks or activities related to our goals. Goals are not something you do, and once complete or accomplished; you stop doing. A goal’s purpose is the create change. Once that change has happened, you don’t want to be returning to where you were before you started the goal. That would not be a clever move. I remember in my twenties, many of my friends (and myself, I have to admit) would hit the gym in the spring and try to lose our ‘winter weight’ ready for the summer holidays so we could strut confidently up and down the beach. Once the summer was over, we’d pile the weight back on. Looking back now, I can see how ridiculous this form of yoyo dieting and exercise was. Now I am older (and allegedly wiser), getting into shape should not be something you do for a particular time of the year; it should be an ongoing thing. Keeping your weight down and exercising regularly is a necessity if you want to enjoy a robust, healthy life. So, today, I am careful about what I eat—no refined carbohydrates and plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. I also exercise pretty much every day, whether that is a session in the gym, a run or a gentle walk with my dog. It no longer feels like a task. Spending an hour on exercise is an investment in my future. It’s built into my daily schedule, and I use it as a break from sitting at my desk all day doing work. I see exercise as something that assists my productivity rather than as something that needs to be done. The same applies to financial goals. If you’ve read Dave Ramsey’s book; Total Money Makeover, he gives you five strategies to build a safe and healthy financial plan for you and your family. None of those strategies involves a lot of work. For instance, paying down your debts is a single action each month. Once you get paid, you use a percentage of your salary to pay down one of your debts. Equally, a second strategy is to build an emergency fund that would cover your expenses for a given amount of time if you were to lose your job. For something like this, it’s simply putting a little money aside each month into a savings account. That would be around five minutes a month (or less if you were to automate the payment) The goal here, for example, maybe to clear all your debts over the next three years. That’s a simple task. You send money to the debt each month until it is clear. You have a timeline (three years), and you have an action (send money somewhere). H

This week, it’s all about multiple projects and tasks—all in one day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 249 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 249 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 do you manage running a new business, or even running your own department with multiple things happening each day and projects that need to be got off the ground, or maintained. It a real challenge and leave you feeling exhausted, and more importantly, stressed out about what you may or may not have done. This is one of the many reasons why getting yourself organised and being consistent with your daily and weekly planning is so important. It’s this planning that gives you an edge. It elevates you above the fray and keeps you focused on the bigger picture. Without a plan for the week, you will inevitably get sucked into the daily churn of low and high important tasks. It will feel endless and it doesn’t lead to a great outcome. Sure, you may have a reasonably successful business or department, but you, as an individual, will be exhausted, tired and stressed out and that leads to poor decision making and mistakes. Now, before we get into the question, I just wanted to give you a heads up that I have just launched my latest mini-course. The Goal Setting course will give you a blueprint to build the life you want to live by developing the vision of what you want, and then using goals to make sure you are moving along the right pathway. It’s an exciting course that will inspire you to grow, develop and start making the changes you need to make to become the person you want to be. Full details of this mini-course will be in the show notes. Now, on with this show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Cara. Cara asks: Hi Carl, I run a growing start up business and have found managing multiple tasks and projects each day is a real pain point. How would you suggest we manage multi-tasking to keep the business running and developing new projects? Hi Cara, thank you for your question. Now, we better first deal with the concept of “multi-tasking”. Straight up, don’t ever do it. Or rather try to do it. It’s impossible, never works and only leads to mistakes which will need correcting later. Slow down. There is more than enough time each day to work on the important things. You don’t have to do everything in one day. I know our minds are telling us it has to be done today, but really? Does it? When you step back, take a breath and look at what you have on your list of things to do, you will see that many of those tasks don’t really need to be done today. It might be nice to be able to do them, but it would not be the end of your business if you rescheduled the less important tasks to later in the week. Now, there’s a good reason for rescheduling less important things to later in the week and that is most of these will not need doing anyway. They are what I call “reactive” tasks. Tasks that seem important right now, but with a little time resolve themselves and can be discarded. I’m reminded of a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who would put aside his letters and memos for ten days before reading them. What he found was 90% of the issues resolved themselves and the remaining 10% was where he needed to put his attention. Now, in today’s world things move a lot faster than they did in the 1980s, but the principle still remains, most of what comes into our inboxes will resolve themselves, there is no need to rush. You can put aside most issues for twenty-four to forty-eight hours without any problems. When you do come to them, it’s likely many of them will have resolved themselves. I’m always surprised at how many emails I get asking a question, only to find an hour later the same person writes to tell me they’ve resolved the issue. That taught me to slow down and not rush into a response. Of course, there are some issues that do need dealing with straight away. But most don’t. Learn to slow down. You will thank yourself for that later. Now, I mentioned in the opening about the importance of planning. Planning is the key to staying on top of everything being thrown at you. You need some time each day and week to step back and evaluate what is important. What needs to get done about all else. For instance, last week, my priority was to launch

This week, we’re looking at why you don’t need to worry if you cannot complete your planned tasks each day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 248 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 248 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 feel you have to complete your daily task list every day? How do you feel if you don’t manage to complete your list of tasks? Most people become disillusioned when they end the day with several tasks left, and that can lead to a rabbit hole of app and system switching—which is never the solution. Quite often, what will happen is those tasks that didn’t get done today will be automatically pushed off to tomorrow, which, rather than solving the problem, only exasperates it because now you have more tasks to do tomorrow on top of the inevitable disruptions, emergencies and distractions. So, this week, I will hopefully give you some strategies and tips to eliminate this problem and give you the confidence to accept sometimes you will not be able to complete your tasks, and that’s okay. 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 Simon. Simon asks: Hi Carl, for many years, I have used a task list—from using a paper planner in the early 2000s to now being digital. One problem I have always faced is not being able to complete all my tasks. I always end the day with tasks still on my list. Do you have the same problem, and if so, how do you manage it? Hi Simon, thank you for your question. Firstly, let me say it’s perfectly normal to end most days with tasks uncompleted. You are not a machine—you are a human being, and we have a tendency to overestimate what we can do in a day. Added to that, there are always going to be disruptions, emergencies and things going wrong that you cannot plan for. When these disruptions and emergencies arise, we just need to deal with them as best we can, and that means some things you had planned for the day will have to be missed. That’s a normal day for most of us. Disruptions, emergencies and things going wrong. Welcome to the real world. The solution is not to change your system or apps. The solution is coming to terms with these disruptions and emergencies. Now, if we dig a little deeper, our daily task list will be a mix of three types of tasks: Tasks that must be done, Tasks that should be done and tasks that can be rescheduled if necessary—these are what I would describe as the hope to do tasks. If you look at your task list for today, you will see this mix. Now, the strategy is to be very clear about what must be done. These tasks are your top priority for the day, and where possible, you should start your day with these tasks—before disruptions and emergencies occur. I know that is not always possible, and when it is not possible—perhaps you have an early morning meeting or you are travelling somewhere, you need to schedule the time in your calendar, so you know you have the time to do it. Now when these emergencies and disruptions do occur, you need to accept them—embrace them, if you like—analyse what you have control over, and if you do have some control, make a decision on what you will do. Often, if you just step back for a minute and analyse the emergency or disruption, you will find there is an easy solution. Panicking will not help you. The only way to deal with these is to stop. Look at the emergency or disruption, and decide what you can do about it. That might be a telephone call, or it could be delegating the problem to someone better suited to sorting the problem out. Sometimes the emergency is so big you have to drop everything and just deal with that emergency. This happened to me a year ago. I was woken at 7 AM, and the emergency was staring me in the face. In that moment, I realised I had to deal with the emergency in front of me, and that was an easy decision to make. I had a lot of work planned for that day. My task list was carefully curated, and when I went to bed, I knew exactly how I would start the day. That emergency stopped that. It was an easy decision to make. Later in the day, when I had a few minutes, I went into my task list and checked my tasks—looking for the must-dos. Fortunately, there were no “must-do” tasks. I cancelled appointments for the following day as I knew I would not be able to make those appointments and completely ignored my email

What elements do you need to have productive days consistently? That’s the question I’m exploring this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 247 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 247 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. One part of the productivity mix that rarely gets talked about is personal maintenance. By that I don’t mean the organising, structuring, apps or systems, but the deeper maintenance areas that are generally neglected, yet in the end have a bigger impact on your productivity than anything else. For instance, how effective are you when you don’t get enough sleep? I know from my own personal experience if I get less than six hours sleep, my productivity is terrible. I generally can do an hour or two of focused work in the morning, but after that I find it difficult to focus, I often have to take a nap and my mood and energy levels are low. That’s certainly not a great place to be if have a lot of deadlines to meet. This week’s question is about the non-obvious productivity essentials that when in balance, helps you to stay organised, focused and calm no matter what is thrown at you. So, with that said, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jenna. Jenna asks, Hi Carl, I’ve read a lot of your blog posts and I understand the importance of using a task manager, a calendar and notes, but I often find myself wondering if there is something deeper or bigger that is also important for being productive. Is there something I am missing? Hi Jenna, thank you for your question. Yes, you are right. There is a deeper, more personal part to being more productive than just using task managers and calendars. The task managers and notes apps you choose to use is the sexy part of productivity, yet really when it comes to measuring your effectiveness, the tools you use will have very little effect. What will have an effect are less sexy, so don’t get talked about enough. Let me begin with sleep as I have already mentioned that. We know that getting a good night’s sleep leaves you feeling great. You have more energy through the day, you can focus better and your mood is positive. According to Matthew Walker, a renown sleep scientist and author of the book: Why We Sleep, get less than six hours sleep and all sorts of problems will manifest themselves. For instance, a lack of sleep effects your appetite. Your body will tell you you are hungry when in reality you are not. This will lead you to snack, and more likely snack on the wrong kind of foods—donuts, bread, cookies and other sugar rich foods. Not only does a lack of sleep contribute to weight gain, but because of the types of foods we crave when suffering from a lack of sleep, we get the post meal slump, which leaves us feeling tired and unfocused. Then in the evening, when you should be spending some quality time with the people you care about, your mood is not great. You’re tired, have a serious lack of energy and will be uncommunicative. Over time, this will put a strain on your relationships which in turn will result in you being focused on the problems that causes instead of the work that needs to be done. Now, how much sleep you need at a personal level will be different from other people. I know from my own experiments, I need around six and a half to seven hours, other people need closer to eight. To find out how much sleep you need, you can do a simple experiment. For seven days, sleep with no alarm. Let yourself wake up naturally. This might not be possible when you are working, but it is a great experiment to do when you are on holiday or taking a vacation. Make a note of how many hours sleep you got, and then average it out once you have seven straight days of data. That will give you your daily sleep requirement. Once you know your sleep requirement, build that into your daily schedule. For example, I generally need to wake up around 7 AM, and I like to read in bed before going to sleep, so my bedtime is 11:30pm. This way, I can read for thirty to forty minutes before going to sleep. Your sleep time needs to be protected. It’s huge part of being effective every day, so compromise of what you each day, but never compromise of getting your sleep requirement each day. Next up is physical exercise. Now, we are not talking about going to a gym every day or running every morning. Of cour

So, you’ve created a fantastic system for keeping yourself organised and on top of everything being thrown at you, and you’re happy with the apps you have that support you. Now, how do you stay consistent using your system? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 246 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 246 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. A common issue I come across with becoming better organised and more productive is staying consistent using the system you have developed. The fun part of becoming more productive and better managing your time is the setting up of a system, choosing the apps you are going to use and getting stuff into that system. The hard part is staying consistent with it over time. The problem is once the excitement of creating something new is over, you still have to do the work and the work has to be done day after day. That’s the boring part and it’s then that most people’s systems break down. This week’s question is all about this and I hope my answer will shed some light on another part of a strong, supporting system that often hides in the shadows but needs to be developed so your system disappears into the background and a process of doing your work comes to the foreground. That means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, Hi Carl, for years I’ve been searching for a productivity system that I can stick with, but I have never been able to stay with any system. I’ve tried them all from GTD to your Time Sector System. It’s always exciting at first believing this time I have the right one, only to find after two or three months I’m a disorganised mess again. Am I missing something? Hi Greg, thank you for your question. I don’t think you are missing anything essential, but you may be missing one element. That element is a process. Let me explain. Your productivity system is only a system. It’s a place to collect things you need to pay attention to. Things like email and messages that require replies, tasks that come your way and meeting requests that need to be put on your calendar. However, a productivity system is just that, a system. Once you have that in place you need to develop the processes that allow your system to work and it’s the process that is boring. It’s just something you do day after day. However, while at first following a process can be boring, over time it disappears into the background and becomes more of a habit you no longer need to think about. A task comes to mind, and you collect it into your task manager. A meeting request drops into your inbox and you check your calendar to make sure you have the time to attend the meeting. These actions are done automatically without thinking. Unfortunately, to get to that point, you have to go through boredom. It’s boring to look at the same list every day and check off the tasks. It’s boring to sit down for ten minutes at the end of the day and plan the next and it’s boring to review the same projects week after week in a weekly planning session. Once the excitement of a new system and set of apps disappear, you’re left with having to do the work and that’s not fun. I’m reminded of a story Simon Jefferies, a former British Special Forces soldier talked about when he was going for selection to the special forces. The first part of that selection process is two weeks in the Welsh mountains in the UK where every day you are given a map reference point, which you have to memorise, a heavy backpack and told to get there within a certain amount of time. The problem is, you don’t know how long you have to get there. Oh, and each day the weight of your backpack is steadily increased. Simon talked about simply focusing on the process. Waking up at 4:30 AM, preparing his feet, putting his boots on and doing the climb. When he finished, he made sure he ate a meal that would aid recovery, sorted his feet out, washed and dried his socks and got to sleep as quickly as he could. His goal was to pass selection and he knew if he followed a process every day and focused on getting through the day, he would achieve his goal. It was boring, but it helped him through the relentless pain, tiredness and boredom of climbing up mountains every day. Most people quit—to give you an example, around 200 people start selection every year, and by the end of that first two weeks,

What do you need to pay attention to if you are to build yourself a solid, sustainable productivity system? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 245 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 245 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. I am usually asked to help someone when their productivity and or time management has collapsed. This usually happens because, since the day they started their first job, they have been able to breeze through their work, relying on their boss or customers to tell them what to do. I know when I started my work life, for the best part of the first ten years, there was also someone in the background telling me what I needed to do next and holding me accountable. Inevitably, there comes a time when you will be given responsibility for your own work. You’re given more freedom to decide what to do with your time and you too now need to guide new members of the company and tell them what needs to happen next. It’s at this point if you do not have a system to manage your work, projects and responsibilities that things begin to crack and fall apart. So, this week, I am looking at what you can o to avoid this from happening and to help you transition from where you are today to the next level—whatever that may be—be that promotion to management or starting your own business. So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Riccardo. Riccardo asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently been promoted, and I’ve found myself drowning in work. I am having to take a lot of work home and working late into the night and at weekends. Do you have any tips on managing a sudden increase in workload? Hi Riccardo, thank you for your question and congratulations on your recent promotion. One of the most important things you can do to be prepared for increasing workloads is to have a ‘how can I do it better mindset’. When I learned the power of this simple question, a lot of positive changes happened for me. To give you one example, many years ago, not long after I became a teacher, I was assigned what was called a free talking class. This class took a topical news article, which we read out in class, then discussed it. Having one of these classes a week was manageable, but when I had to prepare fief articles for the week, what was originally an hour of preparation turned into six hours. I had to find a suitable article, highlight difficult words and phrases and create three to five questions to get the students talking. Spending six hours on a Sunday looking for and preparing articles was not my idea of using my time on a Sunday well. So, I asked the question: how can I do this better? I soon found I could spend the week collecting articles into a read list as I was reading the news each day—this was something I did every day anyway. If I came across an article that might be suitable for my free talking classes, I could save the article (I had to use my browser’s bookmarks for this back then—no easy-to-use read later services then) and all I needed to do on a Sunday was to prepare the document. I managed to reduce those six hours down to ninety minutes. It’s a simple yet powerful question we can all use with tasks and jobs that we feel are taking too much time—How can I do it better? If you are ever feeling overloaded and stretched to your limit, it usually means the processes you have in place are too complex, or you haven’t fine-tuned them, so they work seamlessly. One of the reasons so few people ever become consistent with daily and weekly planning is because the first few times you do it, it takes a long time. It would not be unusual for your first weekly planning session to take two hours or more. Likewise, your daily planning will likely take thirty-plus minutes when you first begin doing it. However, those first few are important because as you are doing them, you learn what needs looking at and what doesn’t. In David Allen’s Getting Things Done Book, he advocates reviewing all your projects each week. Yet, most of your projects don’t need reviewing so frequently. I have about twelve projects left for this year. To follow the GTD standard, I’d be reviewing projects that are not moving forward right now. That’s a waste of time. I know these projects are not moving forward, nothing needs to be done on them for the next two to three months, so I don’t review t

Podcast 244 Becoming more productive and being better at managing your time is not about the hustle culture or squeezing every spare minute out of the day. It needs to be more human than that. That is what we’re looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 244 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 244 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Productivity has a bad name. Many believe it’s about maximising your time doing work, so your company can squeeze the most value out of you without having to pay you more. But becoming more productive and better at managing your time is and should never have been, about companies exploiting their workforce. Personal productivity is about building balance into our lives. A life where we can earn a reasonable income and have time to spend with the people we care about without becoming overwhelmed, stressed or burnt out. But how can we do that with all the demands on our time? Well, that’s what we will be looking at in this week’s episode. Which means, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ann. Ann asks, Hi Carl, how do I convince my team that becoming more productive is to help them, not just the company? Every time I try to teach them to be more productive or be better with their time, they don’t want to know. Hi Ann, thank you for your question. This is one of the sad things about the work of time management and productivity. For a lot of people, they think it’s all corporate mumbo-jumbo and is designed to “exploit the workers”. Now, perhaps in the early days of mass manufacturing, that was the case. Hungry, ambitious factory owners wanted to squeeze every last drop of energy from their workers so they could maximise their profits from their endeavours. However, we’ve come a long way since then. Today, we are much more aware of the need for adequate rest. Indeed many countries have laws protecting workers from exploitative bosses. The European Union countries have what is called the Working Time Directive which sets limits on the number of hours workers can be asked to work in a week. In recent years, we’ve had the hustle culture trend—where if you want to build your own business you need to be pushing 100 hours+ each week. This has been widely advertised by the likes of Elon Musk and Gary Vaynerchuk as a good thing. Well, is it? To me that depends. In the early days of starting my own business, the business was my total focus. I was working up to eighteen hours a day because I was working two jobs. I had my regular teaching work and in my spare time I was developing my online business. The thing is I never felt exhausted or close to burn out because I was loving every minute. I couldn’t wait to start the day and I never wanted the day to end. Sleep, back then was an inconvenience to me. But that kind of working is not sustainable in the long-term. And that’s the key to this. There will be times when you need to pull out all the stops and work long hours. But that should never be the default position. Very much like when we lived an agrarian life. The years went in seasons. The spring time was for planting, the summer was for nurturing and protecting our crops. The autumn was the harvesting of those crops and winter was for relaxation and maintenance. Spring and autumn were our busiest times. During those periods we were working from daybreak to sunset, likely seven days a week. In the summer and winter, we worked less hours. Now the way I see productivity and time management is by getting to grip with how we are using our time, we can build balanced and sustainable lives. We have time for our relationships, to take care of our health and to develop our knowledge and skills while working a full-time job. It’s not just about our work. Work is a part of our lives, but it is only a part of our lives. When you think about it, the average person works forty-hours a week, yet a week has 168 hours. That’s roughly a quarter of our week. What do we do with the other three quarters? Becoming better at managing your time and ultimately more productive allows you to complete all your work tasks within those forty hours, so you can enjoy the other 126 hours. That may mean ensuring you get at least seven hours sleep each evening. Taking some time out for exercise to protect your health and for spending quality ti

What’s the easiest way to become more productive and better manage your time? That’s what we are considering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 243 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 243 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. I have a confession to make. I cyber stalk very productive people. In particular, I stalk authors who publish books every year without fail, content creators who never fail to publish a podcast, blog post or YouTube video every week (or more frequently in some cases) and business leaders who manage multinational companies and still have a private life. I’ve also had an interest in the people in the companies I’ve worked with who were the top managers or salespeople. I am fascinated with how they do it. How are they so productive with the work they do? The truth is, they all share something in common and this week’s question relates to this commonality. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Martine. Martine asks: Hi Carl, you’ve mentioned in a few of your blog posts and videos that you get a lot of inspiration from highly productive people. What I want to know is, are there any special habits or tricks these people use that most people don’t? Hi Martine, Thank you for your question. You are right; there are a few tricks these people follow that the vast majority don’t. I suspect that the reason most people don’t follow these tricks are multifaceted, and they are not easy to follow. First, there is an inherent human characteristic that will always prevent you from becoming more productive, and that is the need to be liked. We have this need to some degree or another. The so-called “culture wars” are a great example of this. People are queuing up to be a part of their chosen tribe, and social media has given them a voice. They want to be liked by their tribe so much, that they will say increasingly wild things. Left or right, there seems to be a rush to be the most outraged because someone had the audacity to disagree with something their tribe believes “passionately” about. Yet, what makes humans so great is our diverse opinions. It’s fascinating to learn why someone believes the things they do. Learning about those beliefs and thoughts behind those beliefs has helped the human race to progress at an incredible speed. However, this desire to be liked means we will sacrifice our dreams and goals and the things that are important to us, so we can be a part of the crowd. I saw this a lot when I first arrived in Korea twenty years ago. I was told that family was very important to Korean people. Yet, when I arrived here, I discovered that the majority of married office workers thought nothing about staying late in the office because their boss and co-workers were staying. Nobody would leave the office until the boss left. It caused me to stop and question how could their family be so important when they put being in the office until 10 or 11pm as a higher importance than getting home to be with their family. Over time I was educated. These office workers (mainly men in those days), felt that earning their salary and getting promoted and ultimately getting more money was their way of taking care of their family. Nobody questioned this thinking back then. Now, I should caveat this. This is generally no longer the case. The younger generations who have now come through into the workforce don’t do this in most cases. But in some small to medium-sized companies, that sentiment is still living and breathing. It was another example of being a part of the tribe. The time was an extension of their family. Now the most productive people I’ve met do not subscribe to this mentality. They are driven, focused and know precisely what they want out of the day. A few months back, I watched an interview with Sylvester Stallone. While most of us see Sylvester Stallone as an action hero actor, he’s also a prolific writer. Every day, he’s working on writing a script. The thing that stood out for me about him was each day, he will spend four hours writing—with his phone switched off, and he’ll spend ninety minutes to two hours exercising. That six hours a day is taken up with the things he loves doing. After that, he’ll eat with his family and socialise. But nothing gets in the way of the two things that are important to him. J

How complex is your system? How complex do you need it to be? That’s what we’ll be looking at today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 242 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 242 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. So, a couple of weeks ago, I published a video on how I have my whole system set up. In that video, I shared how I bring all the apps I use together to get my work done. I was rather surprised that a few people felt that my system was too complex. I didn’t understand why at first, and then it dawned on me. Of course, it looks complex. It was put together on a slide, and everything looks complex when it is broken down into small pieces and laid out in a diagram. The truth is, it’s not complicated at all. It works beautifully, and I get everything I need into my system in seconds. There are no obstacles; I just know what to do when I need to add a task or collect an idea. But, to someone not familiar with the way everything works, it will understandably appear complicated. I’m sure if you broke down your system, I would feel yours was overly complex. However, it’s nothing to do with how many apps you use, it’s how you use your apps that matter, and that’s what we are going to explore in this week’s episode. So without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Stuart. Stuart asks: hi Carl. I saw your video on how you have your system set up, and I felt that you have a very complex system. How do you manage all those apps and still get your work done? Thank you, Stuart, for your question. Now, this is an interesting one, and it’s certainly a good example of why we should not be copying other people’s systems. What works for me is unlikely to work for you. You see, everyone’s way of working will be different. Not only do we do different jobs, but we also have different expectations put upon us. However, the questions are how do you know what to do and when do you do the work? As long as you know that, it really doesn’t matter how many apps or processes you have in the background. What matters is you are getting your important work done. I noticed from some of the comments on the video that some people see Ulysses, my writing app, as a note-taking app. I suppose Ulysses could be used as a note-taking app, but it wasn’t designed to be a note-taking app. It was and always has been a writing app. I’ve been using Ulysses for writing my blog posts, these scripts and all my newsletters for well over six years now, and in that time, I have everything I have written. That includes 250 thousand plus words of blog posts and over five hundred newsletters. There will be over a million words written in there, and naturally, there’s very little I don’t know about Ulysses. A big part of my work is writing, I will write around 10,000 words a week, and I want a dedicated writing tool that will allow me to get on and write in a distraction-free environment with an app that has never let me down. Ulysses does that for me. And that’s really the whole point of choosing apps that work for you and the work that you do. I’m reminded of an analogy I wrote a few years ago: a carpenter doesn’t use a Swiss Army knife to build a table. They could do it, but a carpenter will always use the right tools for the job. Another thing you need to take into consideration when choosing apps is how you will be using them. Theoretically, I could use Apple’s Pages or Google Docs for writing my blog posts and newsletters. And if I only used a laptop for writing, that certainly would be a consideration. But I don’t always write using my laptop. There are a lot of times when I am in a coffee shop waiting for my wife, and I find I have thirty minutes or so. Now, I could sit there and scroll through social media, or I can open up Ulysses and continue writing the blog post I started on my laptop that morning. Ulysses on my phone is brilliantly simple. No menus, no distractions. Just the written words and a keyboard. I remember when I did some extensive testing of Notion a couple of years ago. Notion was great on my computer but was a nightmare on my phone. This made it unworkable for the way I did my work. Now for those who largely do their work on a laptop, Notion works fantastically. For those like me who need a lot more flexibility in devices, it wasn’t good enough. So when it comes

This week, we’re looking at David Allen’s quote: “what does doing look like?” You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 241 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 241 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. In his book; Getting Things Done, David Allen uses the term: “What does doing look like?”. Now for those of you who have read the book, this quote probably washed over you in the excitement of learning about contexts, next action, ticklers and someday maybes. However, these five words connect perfectly to a common issue many people face. We know we need to do something, and we have a reasonable idea of what the finished something is, but we are not clear on what we need to do in order to accomplish it. This results in tasks that are unclear or seemingly too large to do, and we end up stalling and postponing the task. So, this week, we’re going to look at this and see where we can get some clarity. And that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Joseph. Joseph asks, Hi Carl, I find I am avoiding doing a lot of my tasks because I am not sure what exactly I need to do. I might have a task to contact someone about something, but when I sit down to do it, my mind is blank, and I procrastinate and then don’t do it. How do you make your tasks doable? Hi Joseph, thank you for your question. That’s a good question, and it reminded me of David Allen's quote about knowing what doing looks like. Essentially this means when you write a task, you need to be very clear about what action needs to be taken in order to complete the task. I see this problem a lot when people are working on listing out their core work. One of a manager’s core tasks would be to manage a team of people. But what does managing a team of people actually mean at the task level? You will see this also with a project manager’s role. “To facilitate successful conclusions to projects and to report progress to the responsible director”. Great, but what exactly does that mean at a task level? This is an important area for all of us when it comes to getting our work done. If we are not clear about what our roles are within the company at a task level, we will find our most important work is neglected, and that can lead to all sorts of problems with our career. The first step to breaking these tasks down into simple, actionable steps is to look for the verbs. For instance, if you manage a team of, say, ten people, perhaps one of your roles would be to have regular meetings with your team members to see how they are getting on and to make sure they are clear about their responsibilities. Now there are two ways of doing this. The first is to have regular recurring tasks that say: “set up a meeting with Joanne” or “set up a meeting with Joe”. These tasks are clear, and it’s obvious what you need to do. Alternatively, you could arrange to meet with Joanne on the first Tuesday of every month and Joe on the second Tuesday. And spread out meetings with your other team members throughout the month. Fix these meetings in your calendar, and you have clear tasks. To write a blog post, I have four tasks. Plan this week’s blog post, write this week’s blog post, edit this week’s blog post and finally, post this week’s blog post. These tasks are spread out over three days. I’ve been doing this every week for seven years, and I know precisely what needs to happen with each task. The planning takes around twenty minutes; writing will take an hour, editing thirty minutes and posting fifteen. Each task is clear, and that means I never procrastinate. When I plan my day, I will see the task, and all I need to decide is when in the day I will do those tasks. And that’s an important part of making sure your tasks are clear—when a task is clear, you can anticipate the total amount of time required to complete the task without guessing, which will help you with your time management. But how do you know what doing looks like? This involves thinking about what you have to do. “Contact important customers”, might sound like a well-written task, but how will you contact your important customers? Email, telephone, text message? And who are you contacting? Where’s the list of names? Without establishing these two simple parts to the task, you will procrastinate when you see the task on your list. The verb you use is “email

Do you find you frequently run our of time but rarely run out of tasks? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s episode. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 240 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 240 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. I’ve been coaching people for around five years now and in that time one problem comes up again and again. That is there does not appear to be enough hours in the day to get everything done. Well, the truth is, there is enough time—there’s always enough time—the problem is on the other side of the equation; tasks and appointments. If you fill your tasks manager up with an unrealistic number of tasks when you have several meetings on the same day, the problem is not enough time, the problem is you are not prioritising correctly. For most of us, appointments—whether they are business meetings or personal appointments—are the priority. They are on our calendar, confirmed and someone else is relying on you to turn up and be present. Tasks, on the other hand, while they may need doing, are less of a priority. Tasks can be done at anytime in the day be that the morning, afternoon or in the evening. Problems start to happen when you have five or six appointments for the day and a task list with 40 Plus tasks. There’s no way you are going to find the time to do all those tasks. So what do you do? So, with that in mind, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Bryan. Bryan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed the Time Sector System for over a year now and it’s transformed my productivity. However, one problem I continually face is I rarely complete all my tasks for the day. I generally have between two and five meetings each day which take up a lot of time. This means when I get to my tasks for the day, I feel overwhelmed. Is this normal or have I missed something along to way? Hi Bryan, thank you for your question. Don’t worry, it’s unlikely you are doing anything wrong. Part of the problem is the world we live in today. So much to do, so little time to do it. However, that said, if you do find yourself rarely completing your tasks for the day, there are a few things you can do to sharpen up your prioritising that will help. When it comes to your tasks, the strategy I advocate is begin with your areas of focus. These are the eight areas we all share that mean something to us. Things like our family and relationships, health and fitness and self-development. Once you have established what each of these eight areas mean to you, and you know what tasks need performing to keep them in balance, you will know where your priorities for the day are. Areas of focus are also important because it is these that will give you your goals. Meaningful goals you set will all come from your areas of focus. Imagine you have become aware that your savings are not where you want them to be. This will come from your finances area and you can decide what savings goal to set for the next twelve months. Or it could be you notice your waistline has expanded a little over the years and you want to do something about it. You could set the goal to lose a few pounds over the next six months. Now, you don’t necessarily need to have an actionable task from each of your eight areas. For example, the spirituality area of focus may mean you just need to attend a spiritual retreat once or twice a year, or you go to the Synagogue or Mosque every morning. These are not tasks, these are things you just do. They become a part of who you are. You routine if you like. When I look at my areas of focus, I have around five or six tasks each week that come from these. Exercise for example, is not a task, it is an event on my calendar. I make time each day for some form of exercise. It’s a non-negotiable part of my day. Once you have established what your areas of focus are, the tasks and events are in your task manager and calendar, you can then look at everything else. Work is where most of out daily tasks will come from during the week and it’s here were you need to get smart. Start with what you are employed to do. Are you employed to sell product, teach, manage a team or create designs? What is the core work involved here so you are hitting your targets? For example, I have a few clients who’s core work is to manage clients. Their role is to develop relationships with clie

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on how living a disciplined life brings an abundance of benefits. This week’s question was inspired by just that blog post. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 239 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 239 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. So, what is living a disciplined life? Well, it’s not living a regimented life—that’s a kind of life that is very restrictive and doesn’t allow any flexibility. A disciplined life is a life lived with a few core tenets that provide the building blocks for a healthy, productive day. As Jim Rohn said, “Success is a few simple disciplines practised every day.” This is very much in contrast to living an undisciplined life where anything goes and can, over time, lead to the destruction of careers, marriages, health and dreams. The great thing about living a disciplined life is you feel great about yourself. It builds self-confidence and self-respect and is the foundation to living a successful life because those little things you do every day move you closer to living the life you dream of living. So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Cindy. Cindy asks, Hi Carl, a few weeks ago, I read your article on living a disciplined life, and it got me wondering about what would you consider being the right sort of things to bring to a disciplined life. A few pointers in the right direction would really help me. Hi Cindy, thank you for your question and for reading my article. The great thing about building a disciplined life is that we have a blank canvas on which to draw up what we want to focus on. In many ways, this will start from knowing what your long-term, life goals are and what your areas of focus. If you have taken the time to establish what you want from life and what is important to you in terms of your career, relationships, finances, health and lifestyle expectations, creating a disciplined life around these will give you a fantastic platform on which to build. For example, if your long-term goal is to build a beach house so you have a place to go for long holidays, then you will need to be disciplined about your finances. To build (or buy) a beach house, requires money. Leaving this to chance is not going to work. Sure, you may buy lottery tickets every week, but the chances of you winning a sufficient amount to purchase a beachside property are very slim. You will need to be deliberate with your savings. How much you spend today, will have an impact on your future goal. You will have to become a saver instead of a spender. Now imagine you have a long-term goal to travel the world when you retire. Aside from the money, you will need, you will also need your health. If you let your health go now, when you retire, you will find many of the places you want to visit will be inaccessible to you. For instance, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to see the sun rise over the African savanna or visiting the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, both of which require a reasonable level of health and fitness to access. I don’t know any people whose long-term goal is to spend their final years in and out of hospital waiting for the next heart attack or stroke. Statistics from the American Heart Association state that almost half of American adults have some form of cardiovascular disease. This figure is probably similar for most other western countries. People need to take notice of these statistics. Cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer in the developed world today. But it’s not that you are shortening your life expectancy that’s the real problem here. The biggest problem is most people have dreams and goals that they are waiting for—living an active retirement, being able to walk their daughter down the aisle or being able to play games with their grandchildren. If you are not disciplined about what you eat and how you exercise, none of those dreams will happen. Living a disciplined life is about getting the basics right and being consistent with them. Having a healthy eating habit that ensures you get the right nutrition and doing some form of exercise every day. A thirty-minute walk each day would be enough. If you can do more, then the better. I think the biggest problem with the word exercise today is we associate it with running or going to the gym. That’s just a modern concep

Why set goals? After all, most people fail to achieve them and for those lucky few that do, what then? What do you do after you’ve achieved your goal? Find out in this week’s episode. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 238 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 238 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. It always surprises me that many topics come round in cycles, and suddenly I am inundated with questions and queries about that topic. And that’s what happened with this week’s question. I got a podcast question and then a few emails about the subject, and then it came up in two of my coaching sessions. Now I suspect the goals question has come up because of the realisation we’ve just gone past the halfway point of the year, and when we look at the list of things we wanted to do this year—our goals and projects—we discover we are way off achieving the things we wanted to do, and our goals appear on our radar again. So, why do we set goals? What’s the point? With a statistic that claims only 8% of you will achieve your goals, it suggests even attempting to go after a goal is going to result in disappointment for 92% of you. Well, this statistic hides the real purpose of a goal—it’s not about achieving the goal; it’s about what you have to change about yourself to achieve that goal. And that is what we are going to look at in a little more detail today. So, I guess that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Liam. Liam asks, hi Carl, I recently went through my goals for 2022 after your recommendation in your weekly newsletter, and I realised I am miles away from achieving them. If I am being honest, I haven’t really done much about them at all. What can I do to stay focused on my goals? I do this every year, and it’s really frustrating. Hi Liam, thank you for your question and please don’t worry. You are certainly not alone. Most people will find themselves in the same position as you are right now. Okay, first, let’s look at what a goal is for. Setting goals gives you a roadmap—a direction, if you like—to help you grow and flourish as a human being. Without a goal or a set of goals, we drift. We will be pulled and pushed towards what everyone else wants for us, and that’s never usually what we desire or want. Without that direction, you are setting yourself up for a very disappointing life. I remember reading Bronnie Ware’s book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying several years ago, and it scared me. I realised I was heading in the same direction as many of the people in that book. Who knows when we will leave this world? All we do know is there will come a time for us to depart. So the only question we need to ask is what would I like to do with my short life? And that’s the key here. What do you want? If you don’t have an answer to that question, you will drift through life and become another dead being, having achieved nothing and done nothing. Sorry to be so dramatic. I hope that scares you, it should do. It scares me. So now we’ve dealt with the morbid part; let’s look at the bright side. Having a few long-term goals gives you a sense of purpose and a pathway to follow. You can change that pathway at any time if you feel you no longer want to pursue the direction you were going, but at least you have a direction, and you are growing and developing while you are on that path. If I look back at my early life, I wanted to be a police officer, a Royal Marine, a vet and a physiotherapist—these were all goals I had while I was at school. However, like all teenagers, I changed my mind and went in a different direction. But each one of those occupations were goals at one time or another that I abandoned. But the abandonment was not in vain. I learned what it takes to become a police officer and a marine. I also learned a little about animals and human physiology. Now, as I am older, my goals are more refined and more long-term, but I still have them. My goals don’t change much. Indeed, they haven’t changed much at all over the last ten years. I wanted to build a business—which I’ve now done, and now I want to grow that business. One change I have had to make about myself in the last ten years is to change my mindset from an employee one to a business owner. That was a lot more difficult than I expected, but it has been a wonderful journey. And t

Is your time management and productivity system optimised so you are always focused on doing the right things? That’s what we’ll be looking at today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 237 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 237 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. If you are like me, you will be reading, watching and listening to anything on time management and productivity. And there’s a lot of content out there. Now, I must confess, I’ve been consuming this content since I was in middle school and I’ve tried a lot of ideas, systems and structures over the years. In the end you realise there are a few fundamentals that work and many that don’t. Most of the ones that do not work are the things that look great in a blog post or YouTube video, but when put into daily practice involve so much maintenance, doing the work becomes secondary to keeping the work organised—a sure bet that the new idea is not going to work. And so, this week, we’ll be looking at how to optimise our systems so that we are pointed towards the right things every day. It’s also a good time to be doing this because we’ve recently crossed the year’s half-way point and this a great time to be a half-year review. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks, Hi Carl, I want to make my system better but I don’t know where to start. I took your Beginners Guide To Productivity years ago and I love how everything comes together, but sometimes I feel my system has become boated and slow. What do you do to keep things fresh and fast? Thank you, Scott for your question. Good question and it got me thinking. I know it’s very easy to keep adding to our systems once we feel it is working. What we do is add something new, and while that might be a small change when you add, the problems start when those small changes add up. This often begins in adding more and more project folders to our task managers. This is often where things start to go wrong because the more project folders you have in your task manager, the more folders you need to review when you do your weekly planning. This can also happen in our notes app where we add more and more categories and sub-categories. Eventually, it becomes a mess and we do not enjoy going in there to find what we need. Generally, I look at my system as a whole every three months or so. However, there is a key question I use here: what can I eliminate? It’s easy to accumulate plugins, extensions and apps. I do it all the time. I become curious about a new app everyone is talking about and install it on my computer and ‘take it for a test drive’. In 99% of cases I don’t see how it would improve my overall system, but the app sits there on my phone or computer. This three monthly clean out keeps these out of my system and out of temptation’s way. If you are relatively new to this world of productivity and time management, it’s going to be hard to stop looking at these tools. The best advise I can give is by all means go looking and playing, but after three months do a clean out. Remove apps, plugins and extensions you’ve accumulated and no longer use. But let’s start at the beginning. How are you collecting your tasks, ideas and notes? How fast is it? Do you find yourself sometimes resisting to add something because of the effort it takes to get something into your system? How you collect your stuff needs to be easy. Keyboard shortcuts on your computer, and widgets and long presses on your mobile devices. There needs to be as little resistance as possible. I like to think of it as like a Formula 1 racing team always searching for that extra hundredth of a second in speed. This is my approach to my collecting. Speed is key. The problem is we don’t have ideas when we want to have ideas. Ideas come at us at the most inopportune times. I could be in the middle of a run and an idea comes to me, I need to be able to get that idea into my notes app while breathing heavy, sweating and not wearing my glasses. Next up is how you organise everything. Now in the last five years or so, Microsoft, Google and Apple have been helping us here. You may have noticed that we are getting more and more stuff coming at us each day. Newsletters, books and articles we want to read, reports to review and of course messages and emails. It’s a lot of stuff. Where do we put

This week, the question is all about how to simplify your system so there’s less maintenance and more doing. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 236 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 236 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Over the last ten to fifteen years, we’ve been blessed with a lot of fantastic digital applications that have made managing our tasks, goals and notes easy. We can start a note on our mobile phone and finish it off on our computers when we get to our desks. We can add tasks to a task manager while out hiking when we remember we need to do something and it will be there waiting for us on any device we choose to use. However, what started out as a simple idea—use a device we carry with us everywhere to collect tasks, notes and ideas—has now become an ocean of complexity. How do we organise all this stuff? Where do I put this quote I want to keep for a presentation I may have to do in six months' time? What do I do with all my bank statements? And true to form, we humans have come up with increasingly complex ways to manage all this stuff. We now have elaborate digital filing systems—The alphanumeric system we’ve successfully used for hundreds of years isn’t good enough anymore, of course. And the humble task manager that started out simply telling us what we needed to do today, now has thousands of tasks hidden away in project folders often three or four levels deep. What all this complexity does is slow us down. We end up spending more time organising than doing. We waste hours looking for answers to our problems on YouTube or in blogs (or podcasts) and yet, the answer to these problems is staring at us in our face. Reduce the complexity and get back to basics. And that is what I will be looking at in this episode. So, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Eric. Eric asks, hi Carl, last year I decided to get myself organised and to start using my computer and mobile phone to organise my life better. Unfortunately, I really struggle to keep on top of everything. I often can’t find something I’ve saved (I know it’s somewhere) and my task manager has hundreds of projects which take a long time to clean up each week. Is there a better way to manage documents, files and projects? Hi Eric, Thank you for your question. You are certainly not alone with this one. With a lot of my coaching clients, this is one of the first areas we need to sort out. Cleaning up their basic system so that managing it is simplified and the focus can return to accomplishing the work. Let’s start with the task manager. All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you must do today. Everything else is a distraction. This means the only list that matters each day is your today list. The list of tasks you have decided needs to be done today. On a daily basis, everything else is a distraction. If you find yourself having to go into your project folders each day to look for something to do, your system is failing you. Now, this might not be because of the apps you are using, it could be you are not doing a weekly or daily planning session and I have talked a lot about the importance of these in previous episodes. Basically, the weekly planning session is where you look at all your active projects to see what needs doing next week and add a date to when you anticipate doing those tasks. Once you have that done, you can ignore all those project folders. They are just holding pens for tasks you think you need to do at some point in the future, but have not yet decided when they need doing. On a side note, one of the reasons I don’t like having individual project folders in my task manager is because they often fill up with tasks that don’t need doing. You just add these tasks because you don’t want to have an empty project folder. Creating a new online course, for example, could have hundreds of tasks in a project folder in a task manager. But ultimately there are only a few things that need to happen. Write the outline, Record the course Edit the videos Publish the course Tell people about the course. Five tasks. If you look carefully at these tasks, the outline needs around two to four hours, recording the course needs a full day, as does editing the course. Uploading and publishing the course will require around four hours and telling peopl

What do I do with this email? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s episode. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 235 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 235 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Email. Possibly the most revolutionary new form of communication in the business world over the last thirty years. It’s transformed the way businesses communicate with each other and speeded up aspects of our work that in the past took days if not weeks to do before its advent. However, as with all great new things, it can be abused and email has likely been one of the most abused innovations. Now, things that could have waited until the next meeting, are often quickly written down in an email and sent to the other side of the world, with an expectation of an almost instant reply. And that is where many of the issues with email rest. But, another problem for us today is where do you put important emails that do not need a reply, but do need to be kept for informational purposes or just in case? That is what we will be exploring this week. And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks, hi Carl, I get hundreds of emails each day, many of which do not need a reply, I just need to keep them, and I struggle to know where to put them. I don’t trust sending them to the archive, so I have a huge list of folders that are now overwhelming me. Do you have any tips or tricks to better manage email? Great question, Anna, thank you for sending it in. The key to getting on top of email is to understand the basics of what you need. Let me explain: The inbox is for collecting email. It is where all the messages that are sent to your address will come in. It’s the collection point. The archive is for emails that you’ve either dealt with or want to keep for future reference and then there’s the trash for emails you no longer need to keep. Now, on their own, those folders could work in a system. But I feel there’s one folder that bridges the gap between the inbox and the archive and that is a folder for emails you need to take action on. I call this folder the “Action This Day” folder. Any email that requires action from me, will go into that folder. That could be emails I need to reply to, emails I want to read such as newsletters or reference emails with information I want to transfer to a project note. Over the years, I’ve seen some pretty elaborate structures in email with long lists of project folders or folders for bosses and colleagues emails. These are still the most common ways for people to organise their email. It can work—up to a point. It stops working once the folder list becomes so long it takes forever to find a folder to save a mail message. And there lies the “secret” to better managing email—speed. As with most things related to productivity, the less time you spend organising your tools and stuff, the more time you can spend doing the work. All these folders you created, Anna, work if the volume of email you receive is low—less than twenty to thirty mails per day—when you receive over 100 emails a day, this system is going to break. It will slow you down so you spend far too much time organising it instead of dealing with it. A question I would ask you, is why do you not trust archive? The archive is a great place to store your non-actionable, reference mail because it is searchable via sender’s name, keyword, topic or date range. As long as you know at least one of those search terms, you will find anything in seconds. Now if there is a fear you will lose it in archive, always remember, if you receive an email there will be a copy of it somewhere. If you replied with an acknowledgement mail (a thank you for sending that mail) then you also have a copy of it in your sent folder. There’s nothing wrong in asking someone to resend an email they sent you. I am sure people would prefer that to someone simply ignoring their mail. Search within email has come a long way in the last five years. All top email services have excellent search. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail are fast and have multiple ways to find a mail. There are thousands of articles and videos online explaining how to get the most out of search on these services. This is where we can develop our skills and learn how to search our email effectively. Just type a sea

Why does doing your work feel overwhelming and so hard? That’s what we are looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Where We Get The Eisenhower Matrix Wrong The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 234 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 234 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. A lot has changed over the last two hundred years or so when it comes to how and why we work. For most people living two-hundred years ago, there was a purpose to work—to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. Life wasn’t fair, crops were destroyed by drought, floods and wars, but we had a purpose every morning when we woke up. To ensure our family were fed. Today, there are multiple reasons why people work. The truth is, despite everything going on in the world, we are living like emperors and empresses. The vast majority no longer need to worry about where the next meal will come from. For most, their biggest worry now is their mobile running low on battery power. With all this luxury, it can be very hard to find our purpose. We have everything we need. Food, clean, running water and, for most of us, a safe, stable environment in which to go about our lives. Why do we even need to work? Great questions and ones that all come from this week’s question. Speaking of which, I think it’s time now for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jesper. Jesper asks, hi Carl, I recently lost my job and I’ve found myself struggling to find the motivation to construct a system to find another job. Instead I am waking up later each day and instead of working on my CV, I read news and look for new productivity apps. Is there a way to help me be more productive now I don’t have a boss telling me what to do? Hi Jesper, firstly I am sorry to hear of your lost job. I hope you find a new job quickly. Now, let’s deal with how you structure your day when hunting for a job. A myth I need to remove is the myth that you need to spend all day hunting for a new job. One of the benefits of not having to go to an office or place of work is you no longer need to commute and sit in meetings all day. Instead you can concentrate your time. This means you no longer need to be “working” on your job seeking activities eight to ten hours a day. Instead you can do the required work on less than four. This is great when it comes to structuring your day. Now, I don’t know how long you have been working for, but if you have held down a job for the last five or more years, now is a good time to do some deep personal thinking. Many people get a job based on advice given to them by teachers and professors who may know about a student’s academic credentials, but have no knowledge of their individual motivations. It could be that you were good at chemistry while at school and so you were pushed towards a career in science. But that might not be where your motivation is. Your motivation could be entrepreneurial or legal and studying law or business is really what you wanted to do. A loss of a job, while devastating, it’s also a great time to reflect. What was it about your work you enjoyed? What was it you did not enjoy? That’s going to help you to find your own motivation. It’s unlikely it will be the money. Money is a poor motivator in the long-term. People are not motivated by money. People are motivated by what they think money can do for them. What is much more likely when you reflect on your previous job is there will have been parts of that work that excited you, motivated you and gave you a buzz. And there will have been parts of your work that did the opposite. Look at these first. This will give you a starting point for what to look for in a new job. Now, if money is tight, it’s often worth swallowing your pride and going to work in a coffee shop or other job below your skill level, temporarily. You do not want to let money get in the way of choosing the right career or job for you. I remember, I lost my job when I was in my late twenties and was struggling to pay the rent. I wanted to get into law at that time and so I worked in a bar five nights a week so I could pay my rent and have food to eat. It was an unpleasant five months, but it was worth it. Had I let me pride dictate the course of action, I would never have worked in a law firm and instead gone back into selling cars. Who knows, I might still be doing that today, had I not taken that part-

This week’s question is on defeating the habit of procrastination (and I have some rather brutal truths to reveal). You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 233 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 233 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Procrastination ah the bane of all productive wannabes. No matter how motivated you are when you retire for the night to have a productive day the next day, that pernicious procrastinator steals the day, and you find you’ve achieved very little, but you know how everyone of your friends on Instagram are doing, and you can talk about all the funny videos you saw on Tick Tock as if you were a professor of the subject. But what is procrastination, and why do we do it? Those are two questions we need to answer before we can start helping move anyone away from those dark depths to a more brighter, focused and productive light. Now, to kick start things off and before the Mystery Podcast Voice reveals the question, let’s look at the definition of procrastination: “Procrastination is the action of unnecessarily and voluntarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so. “ Now I want to give you another definition. That of self-discipline: “the ability to make yourself do things you know you should do even when you do not want to” Now the way I see procrastination is that it is the near opposite of self-discipline. Yet, no one wants to admit that—particularly procrastinators. The truth is is a little more complex than that, but it is a good starting point because these definitions can give us some clues on how to defeat procrastination. Okay, with that part done, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Len. Let asks, hi Carl, I’ve been in full-time employment for over twenty years now, and I’ve always wanted to be more productive, but I’ve always failed. I’m never doing things that are important, instead I do the unimportant stuff. I think I am what some people call a “serial procrastinator”. Have you any ideas you could share that will help an old procrastinator like me stop? Hi Len, thank you for your question and for being so honest. Firstly, let’s deal with the “I’ve always failed” part of your question. Failure is not a finish line in itself unless you make it so by quitting. Failure is an education. Whenever you fail at anything, you learn something—if nothing else, you learn what doesn’t work so you can start again with a different strategy. Failure has nothing to do with you as a person; failure at anything informs you what skills are missing, so you next time you try to can build those skills and strengths, so you don’t fail again. I remember the first full marathon I attempted. I failed. I dropped out at mile 18. I just couldn’t go another step further. I was devastated. I thought there must be something wrong with me. But a little voice inside me said, this was only my first attempt, and I learned that I needed to set off slower and pace myself better, and I also needed to improve my strength and stamina on hills—you don’t run marathons around an athletics track. You run on streets, and they are rarely flat. With that information, I spent the next six months learning to pace myself properly and did a hill session every week. The next time I entered a marathon, I finished it—with energy to spare! Did I fail? Of course not; I got knocked over, but I learned why and picked myself up and developed my skills and succeeded. Remember, you never fail until you quit. You may get a few setbacks because the strategy you were trying didn’t work, but that is not failure. It’s a setback. Okay, now on to your procrastinating. I’ve seen a lot of clinical reasons why we might procrastinate, and I see many people in the media who will jump on these clinical definitions and tell every who procrastinates that it’s an illness and if you take this new super-drug, you will be cured. Well, I’m sceptical. I’m sure you can alter the chemical make-up of your brain to stop procrastinating and be more focused, but artificially altering your brain’s chemicals isn’t a long-term solution if you ask me. But let’s go back to the definition of procrastination—delaying or postponing something you should be doing despite being aware of the negative consequences. Why are you postponing what you should do? What are you doing i

What is your philosophy for life and work? That’s the question we are exploring this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 232 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 232 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. One of the most influential people in my life has been Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn was active in the 1980s through to the early 2000s and taught personal development through changing people’s philosophy on life and emphasising the importance of taking responsibility for your own life. One of Jim Rohn’s main teaching points was to develop your own philosophy for the way you live your life and do your work. This means having a set of rules for how you will execute your work and be present with your friends and family. For instance, a simple example would be when having a family dinner, you put away your phone and be interested in how your family spent their day. This week’s question is linked to this as it’s a question based on how I manage to stay consistent with my output. I’m nothing special, I just took on board what I learned from Jim Rohn’s books and videos—which most are available on YouTube now—and built a few simple philosophies into my life. It’s not easy to do this and it takes time. But if you do not have a set of philosophies (or rules) that you set for yourself, you will find yourself living your life by other people’s philosophies and rules— which are rarely going to do much for your life. There is always something driving our lives. Either we take control or we allow other people or society in general to control us. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Sean. Sean asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following you for some time now and I’m impressed with how you have consistently uploaded content over many years. How do you do that? Do you have a team of people helping you or is there something else? Hi Sean, thank you for your question. Firstly, I should say that I do not have a team of people working with me. It’s all me. I have toyed with the idea of hiring a team to help me with video editing and social media publishing, but so far, I have not seen the need as I can manage to do my work each week without much stress and certainly without overwhelm. However, I do have a set of ‘rules’, if you like, that I follow that enables me to stay focused on what is important each day. And this is linked to my 2+8 Prioritisation Method (or what I used to call my Golden 10) this is a process by which I determine what needs to be done each day. Several years ago, now, I realised I could not do everything in one day. I’m sure you also have discovered that, and having an open-ended to-do list, left me feeling stressed and overwhelmed. It often felt that as fast as I did my tasks, new tasks would be coming in. There was never a net gain. This had to stop. So, at the end of each day, I began selecting ten tasks that I would work on the next day, two of which were must do’s. Whatever else happened that day, those two “objective” tasks would get done. It was this methodology that transformed my output. Every morning when I began the day I know precisely what needs to be done and what I would like to get done. Ten tasks are my optimum number. If I try to add more, I leave myself with no flexibility to deal with anything urgent that may come up on the day. My rule is, that when I stop and close out the day before I turn off my computer, I will open my task manager and go through the next day’s tasks. I will use the flags to indicate which ten tasks will be my 2+8 for the next day. This is now a non-negotiable rule. And funnily enough, I have been doing this for several years now and it feels very uncomfortable to go to bed not knowing what my ten tasks are for tomorrow. I noticed on a recent trip, that even though I was not working, I still found myself opening my task manager before going to bed to see what needed to be done the next day. To prevent myself from doing work (I was taking a break), I made my objective task to relax and enjoy the day. This is probably the biggest most impactful philosophy or rule I have adopted over the last ten years that has seen a dramatic improvement in my daily and weekly output. Just to give you an example, before I went to bed last night, I made writing this podcast script one of my objectives for the day. When I woke up this morning, I

This week, we’re diving deep into prioritisation and learning how to use the Eisenhower Matrix to make it easy. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Where We Get The Eisenhower Matrix Wrong The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 231 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 231 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. One of the most common challenges people face is how to prioritise their work and personal tasks. With so much being thrown at us, not only do we need time to process all that stuff, we need to make sure that we are allocating sufficient time to the tasks that are important. However, that means we need to also make decisions about what is and is not important and that is where the biggest challenge will be. So, this week, I will be answering a question on how to do that effectively. Now, before we get to the question, I would like to give you a heads up that this week, I have launched my summer sale. For this week only you can get 15% off my individual courses, 20% off my coaching programmes and 25% off my bundles. Full details can be found in the show notes. Don’t miss out on this incredible offer. My sales are rare, so this is your chance to build your skills over the summer so you are ready and prepared for whatever the world throws at us next. Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Margarida. Margarida asks, Hi Carl, I recently cam across something called the Eisenhower Matrix. I think I get it, but how does this fit in with how you prioritise your work? Thank you Margarida for your question. I first came across the Eisenhower Matrix when I read The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey a very long time ago. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the Eisenhower Matrix, this is a matrix of four squares that divided between urgent and important, not urgent and important, urgent and not important and not urgent and not important. By the way, if you want to see this matrix, you can head over to my website, carlpullein.com, and my latest blog post has an illustration for you. I’ll also put the link in the show notes for you. The idea is you spend most of your time in the top two squares. The important and urgent and the important and not urgent. Now, as with all systems there are difficulties and the Eisenhower Matrix is no different. The second square (or quadrant 2) the important and not urgent tasks is where you need to be dedicating more of your time. The type of tasks in here are planning tasks, anticipating potential problems, taking care of your health and your relationships and getting some rest and relaxation. Now, I am sure as you listen to those words you know they are important but how often do you prioritise them? The chances are you only prioritise them once they become urgent. A visit to your doctor informs you you are pre-diabetic and urgently need to lose weight and start an exercise programme. This is where a quadrant two task moves into quadrant one (urgent and important). The same can happen if you neglect your relationships, because maintaining relationships is rarely an urgent task, we tell ourselves we’ll deal with a relationship issue later. The problem is “later” is not defined and when something is not defined it slips down our list of priorities. It’s only when you are served with divorce papers that a task like this gains the urgency it needs. One thing I learned a while ago is, if you want these important, not urgent tasks to remain non-urgent you must schedule time for them. This means you schedule planning, exercise and time spent with your nearest and dearest. Ie; blocked out on your calendar. But, here lays another issue, what are your quadrant two tasks? What do you define as a quadrant two task? Most people never sit down and decide what is important to them and what needs to happen to maintain them. Ultimately, actions speak louder than words. And that means if you are to make sure you are taking care of these important areas of your life you need to know what they are and what you need to do to maintain them. For instance, I know my relationship with my wife is important. This means each week, I make sure we have at least one day out together. Often we’ll drive over to my parents in law for dinner, or we’ll take day trip to the beach. One thing I do know though is that day spent together is far too important to miss. We are both busy peo

Podcast 230 This week, we’re looking at how to collect more efficiently and, more importantly, more consistently You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 230 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 230 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. When we first start out building a productivity system for ourselves, one of the first things we need to master is collecting. This is how we get ‘stuff’ into our system that gets processed and organised and ultimately done. If you’re not collecting stuff to put into your system, then you don’t have a system at all. Collecting needs to be fast, with as few steps as possible, and we need to learn to be consistent with it. It’s not the sexy part of building a system; this is the messy bit in the middle that Robin Sharma often talks about. It’s fine-tuning, stepping back and rethinking and more often than not, we have to repeat this process of testing and fine-tuning before we finally have something that works intuitively and consistently. And it’s this bit I shall be explaining in this episode. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Baz. Bad asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently undertaken a project to update my twenty-year-old system to a more modern-day one. Over the last twenty years or so, I’ve always written things down on a notepad I kept on my desk, but now I want to make this digital. Do you have any tips for making this an easy transition? Hi Baz, thank you for your question. One of the first things you are going to need to get used to is typing out your tasks, ideas and anything else you want to collect instead of writing things down, and this can be more difficult than you might imagine. You see, it feels very natural when you are in a meeting or with someone else to pull out a pen and notepad and write something down. People understand you are writing something important down. Unfortunately, because of the bad press our mobile phones, tablets and laptops have today, typing something into one of these devices makes us feel self-conscious. We fear the other person or people think we’re responding to email, checking our Facebook feed or searching for big tractors. (People in the UK will understand that one) The thing is we need to get over that self-consciousness as quickly as possible. I know when I first went digital I needed to explain to people what I was doing with a “hang on while I write that down”. Typing into your phone and writing on a piece of paper is the same thing in this instance. I know it takes some getting used to, but it’s part of the process of going completely digital. To lessen this self-consciousness, we need to make digital collecting as fast as we can. How do you do that? This is where the digital tools we use have a big impact. And this starts with the applications we choose. A mistake people make is to look through YouTube and watch what popular YouTubers are using. Thomas Frank uses Notion, Steve Dotto is a big Evernote user and Matt D’Avella uses Apple Notes. Now the thing to remember, these people are not you. They are content creators who likely rarely have meetings with customers and clients. Their productivity needs will be very different from you. Thomas Frank, Steve Dotto and Matt D’Avella will make extensive use of notes apps to plan out videos and collect future topic ideas. If you are in sales, for example, your digital notes needs will be very different. Perhaps you need to keep details of when you last spoke to a customer, have a list of potential customers and information on the products you sell. Information that is very different to a YouTube content creator. So, before you go out and find a tool based on the recommendations of others, stop and ask yourself what your needs are. The next thing to consider is where you will do most of your collecting. Prior to the pandemic, most of my collecting was done on my phone as I was travelling to see students and clients. Today that has changed. The vast majority of what I collect is collected on my laptop. It’s here where you need to do some thinking. Collecting needs to be fast and intuitive. For me, I have a keyboard shortcut to collect a task. It does not matter where I am on my computer: whether I am in full screen or not, whenever I activate the keyboard shortcut, I get an input box in the middle of my screen where I can type whatever task I

Podcast 229 This week’s question is: what does “Love what you do” really mean? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 229 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 229 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. I received an interesting question the other week about how to love the work that you do. Now, this was sparked from an article I wrote where I pointed out if you really hate the work that you are doing and dread Mondays, then perhaps you need to reconsider your career options. For those of us past the age of 45, you will have likely come to the conclusion that life is not just short, but brutally short. By 45 you’re about halfway through your life and all those goals, ambitions and experiences you said you would do one day suddenly seem to fade into long lost opportunities. And life being so short, why would you want to subject yourself to 35 years of misery spending the majority of your prime years doing something that does not bring you any pleasure or satisfaction. it just does not make any sense. So that brings us back to the question, how do you love what you do? That is what I will try and answer today and hopefully give you some ideas about how to change a career that no longer brings you joy or any satisfaction. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, recently I read an article on your blog that said that if you hate what you do you should change your career. I know that sounds like the obvious answer, but what if you can’t change your job for whatever reason, how can you change the way you think about your job? Hi Phil, thank you for your question (and for reading my blog) Now before we get into the heart of this question, I should point out the two versions of this quote or expression: “love what you do” and “do what you love”. One is possible for all of us, the other is often unrealistic. The unrealistic one is “do what you love”. Now that does not mean it is impossible. I was recently sat next to a pilot on my flight back to Korea and he was telling me he chose to become a pilot because since he was a little boy, he’d been fascinated with all things to do with flying. He was well into his fifties and still loved flying. So, while doing what you love is often unrealistic, it is certainly not impossible. But if what you love doing is sitting on the sofa watching movies every night while eating ice cream, it’s likely you will struggle to find a career that will support you. (Although perhaps becoming a movie critic for a news media company might be a good path to follow.) These days, however, doing what you love does have more doors that can be opened. For instance, when I was teaching English, I did have a number of students whose dream job was to become a travel writer. With sites like Medium and SubStack, there are now opportunities to turn your passion for a particular activity into a side project, that over time could become your full-time work. And of course, YouTube has opened up possibilities for people to record and publish their take on any number of topics. But what about the second one. “Love what you do”? Now this one is an interesting one. I love writing, I also love recording and producing videos. But, I do not like the admin that comes from running my own business. If I were to spend all my working time writing and recording, it would be ‘perfect’. Sadly, life gets in the way. We still have to do admin. I still need to do my expenses and my taxes. I hate doing that kind of work. But it has to be done. Now a question that has helped me in the past with doing the things I do not like doing is “what would happen if I stopped doing the work I did not enjoy?” Well, if I don’t do my expenses and my taxes, it would not be long before the tax authorities would be knocking at my door. There is also the other side to this, in that neglecting an important part of life (admin) would leave me feeling unfulfilled. Part of my personal identity is that I am organised and know what’s going on in my life. So, not doing an essential part of my work would leave me feeling guilty and unhappy with myself. So, I do my expenses, taxes and admin. However, there is something you can do here. Turn doing the work you don’t like into a competition with yourself. For instance, if you hate clearing your email’s inbox, time yourself. See how fast you can process 100 em

Podcast 228 This week, I have a very special episode for you. It’s all about managing email with Francis Wade. The guilty article: Clear Your Email First Thing You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page [Follow Francis here >]

This week, we’re focusing on doing the work instead of organising the work. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 227 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 227 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Most productivity advice, tips and tricks focus on how to organise your work. And while this is important to some degree, it is the least important part of the three areas—collecting, organising and doing. You see, you can have the best organisation structure and still be unproductive. That’s because in order to keep everything organised you spend far too much time organising and adjusting. You might feel good while you are collecting all your files and notes and moving them into an organisational structure, but you won’t be getting anything done. Obsessively organising your stuff is another form of procrastination because it means you are not getting your work done. And that’s what this week’s episode is all about. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jade. Jade asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently finished your From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course, and now I feel organised (I now know where everything is), but I don’t feel productive. How do you keep everything organised and get your work done? Hi Jade, thank you for your question. Congratulations on completing the Disorganised To Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course. I know with that course you now have everything you need to build a great system. And you are now ready to move to the automation part of productivity. You see, when we start doing something new—such as having all our files, documents, notes and everything else organised and in a place where we can find them, it will mean that you will need to consciously think before you do anything. You will need to think about where you will put something and that takes time. However, this is just a part of the learning process. You’re changing old habits for new ones. The key here is to consistently do some organising each day. This will likely involve processing the files and documents on your desktop into their rightful place. It will also entail clearing your inboxes and making sure everything is in its rightful place. When you first start doing this, it will take quite a lot of time. However, if you are consistent with this, you will get faster. Now a lesson I learned years ago when I was in sales. During my induction training with one company, they sent me out with one of their salespeople for a day. That day coincided with the expense reporting day and I vividly remember the salesperson training me pulling up in a car park after lunch and suggested I go for a walk for a couple of hours. She then opened the glove box and out poured what seemed to be hundreds of receipts. She had to transfer those receipts from that glove box onto an expense reporting form. That taught me a valuable lesson. Don’t pile work up. Do a little every day and instead of it taking you two to three hours up close to a deadline, it will take you less than ten minutes to add that day’s receipts to the expense report. To give you another example, many years ago, when I first began using a digital task manager, it could take as much as forty minutes to clear its inbox each day. When you tagged on all the notes I had written, I was spending more than an hour just organising my stuff. However, I stuck to it. Over time, my clearing time dropped. I learned what to collect, what could be added directly to a project note during meetings and what didn’t need looking at every day. Now, I can clear ten to fifteen tasks in my inbox in around five minutes. When it comes to clearing my notes’ inbox, I generally do this once a week. Notes are less urgent, so do not need processing as frequently as tasks do. And if I did collect a note that related to an active project, I could easily add that to the project notebook when I next work on the project. And that’s really what it’s about. Find effective and efficient ways to manage the work that is coming in. Over time, you will also learn what to say “no” to, which will reduce the number of inputs coming into your system. The biggest benefit to getting everything organised is the time saved trying to find stuff. However, your new organisation system is going to take time to become second nature. It’s only then that you will feel the “syst

This week’s question is on the subject of optimisation and process. Two parts of the productivity mix that rarely get talked about. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 226 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 226 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. There’s a lot of information on creating a system or method for better managing your time and being more productive, but how do you improve those systems and methods once you have them in place? More importantly, how do you repair broken systems when they fail? (And they always fail in the early days) Because there’s less information about these situations, a lot of people quit trying or wander off looking for another new system. That’s the wrong way of looking at it. As long as the system you adopt covers the three basics: collecting, organising and doing, then the system can be made to work for you. Your system is a little like when you buy a new mobile phone. When you first get the phone, there are a number of preinstalled apps. If you tried to live your life with these limited apps you wouldn’t get the most out your mobile phone. You need to customise the phone for the kind of lifestyle you have. It’s no good having the English Premier League app installed when your sporting love is rugby and cricket. So we add and remove apps according to taste and that’s the same with your productivity system. You will at some point need to customise it to maximise the effectiveness of your system. That’s what I’ll be talking about in this episode. And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Andrew. Andrew asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried a lot of time management programmes and methods over the years, but I can never find one that works for me. There’s always something missing and a lot of features I’m never likely to use. I am curious how you have made things work for you. Hi Andrew, thank you for your question. The reality is no system, programme, or method will ever work perfectly straight out of the box. You see the difficulty is all these methods are developed for humans and humans are not machines. We all think differently, prioritise different things and work different jobs. And even in our own lives, our priorities will change. In our teenage years is all about getting an education. In our twenties, it’s about learning to handle the responsibilities of being an adult and intimate relationships. And as we get older, there’s likely parenthood, career and eventually retirement to manage. The reality is, a system you developed to manage your education is not going to be as effective when you want it to manage your career and family life. It will have to change and evolve as you change and evolve. Now the mistake I see most people making is thinking that as their priorities change they need to change their whole system and that’s not true. Rather than changing a whole system what really needs to happen is the existing system you use needs to be adjusted. So what does that mean? Well, let’s look at the three parts to a good productivity and time management system. There’s a task manager, a calendar and a notes app. Now the only thing that’s changed here over the last ten to twenty years is we’ve gone from a paper-based system (diaries and notebooks) to a largely digital system. The biggest change there was the separation of our task list and notes. Twenty years ago, we wrote our to-dos in our notebooks (or on PostIts!). Now, for most people, they are two different apps. But, the basics still apply. To ensure we are working on the things that matter we need to be clear about what needs to be done. Whether those tasks are written out on paper or in a digital system doesn’t matter. The same applies for writing out our goals and plans. Whether you write these out on paper or digitally doesn’t change things. You still write them out (externalise them) and review them (hopefully). This means if you are struggling with “systems” it is not likely to be the system itself, it’s more likely something is not working within the three areas (collecting, organising and doing) With collecting, the emphasis is on writing down all your commitments and ideas and not trusting your brain to remember them. That’s simple enough. But, the question here is: are you collecting all your commitments and ideas? Do you sometimes skip this part? Problems he

This week, we’re looking at how to identify your most important thing. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 225 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 225 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s a lot of stuff flying around in our lives that demand attention right here. Right now. Messages from WhatsApp, email and social media that need responses. Colleagues, family and friends as well as clients and bosses ask us to ‘help’ them. Homes and cars that need cleaning, bills to pay, accounts to sort out and consolidate and, of course, summer holidays to plan. The list is endless. And because this ’stuff’ is non-stop and endless, the truly important things in our lives get pushed aside in favour of what’s urgent that masquerades as important. So what can we do about this? Fortunately, there are a number of things we can do that will give us some perspective on things and guide us through the days so that the things that do matter to us, can still take centre stage. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, Hi Carl, thank you for all the valuable content you publish. You’ve really helped me to get a grip on my life. I’ve completed your Areas of Focus Workbook and followed the guidelines. The problem I have is I have so many other things to do for my work and general chores, that I don’t have any time to do the things I want to do for my areas of focus. Is this normal or am I missing something important? Hi Frank, thank you for sending in your question. Now, it sounds like you are in transition. This is quite common when we have spent a lifetime working for other people’s agendas. It’s hard to take back control because we’ve become conditioned to give up all our time for other people. So, when we take some of that available time away and dedicate it to ourselves, we feel guilty and selfish. The truth is, you are not being selfish at all. Now, I’m sure you’ve heard the analogy from the airline safety announcements at the beginning of a flight—put your oxygen mask on first before helping small children—and there’s a good reason for this. You are not going to be able to help anyone if you are unconscious. The rule is you make sure you are fine first so you can then help other people. This is the same with life. If you are breaking down if your health gives out and you have to spend a prolonged period in hospital. Or if you are stressed out, burnt out and depressed, how helpful are you going to be to those around you? If you want to be there for the people that matter in your life, you must take care of your own wellbeing first. What does that mean? Well, in terms of time it doesn’t actually involve a great deal. Let’s begin with the basics. In order for you to keep in touch with your wants and needs, you need some time each day to reflect and think. The best time for this is first thing in the morning. Rather than staying in bed until the very last moment, wake yourself up thirty minutes earlier and make those thirty minutes time dedicated to you. Make yourself a cup or glass of your favourite morning drink, then find a quiet spot for some time alone. Now, what you do in this time is entirely up to you. For me, I like to spend a little time in my journal and write my thoughts and feelings and review my objectives for the day. The key with these thirty minutes is to spend some time with yourself. Treat it as a time to stop, reflect and think about your needs. The act of writing a journal gives you a way to empty your head of things that might be worrying you. Or it might highlight some area of your life you feel is out of balance. Now, in your case, Frank, you have already completed your Areas of Focus workbook so you know what each of the eight areas means to you. This gives you a reference point to refer to that will help you to see where things are going well and where things might not be going quite so well. By completing the workbook, what you have done is to externalise the things that are important to you. This makes it so much easier to see if everything is going well. For instance, health and fitness is quite high up on my list and while my diet and exercise have been very good for a number of years, one area I have neglected is sleep. I haven’t been getting enough and I realised I need to make some changes to my da

This week, why must we do the so-called backend work if we want to be more productive. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 224 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 224 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Last week, I wrote about the importance of the backend work and why you need to take a few days off to isolate yourself and really go through the process. That was inspired by a question I was asked a few weeks ago about what the backend work involves and why it’s important. This week, that question is the one I will be answering. Now before we get into the question and answer, just a heads up that I’ve just released my latest online course. It’s the first of a new series of mini-courses I will be doing this year which takes a single part of time management and productivity and show you, step by step, how you can implement it into your daily life. The first one is on time blocking. Possible the most effective way to get control of your time and to make sure you have time for doing the things you want to do. Ultimately, everything we want to do will involve some time, which means we need to have complete control over our time. That’s what this course will teach you to do. Full details of this fantastic course are in the show notes and you can sign up for it right there. Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Liz. Liz asks: Hi Carl, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about things like areas of focus and north stars, but I’m not sure what they really mean. All I want is a way to get control of the crazy amount of work I have to do. Is there any reason why I should be worrying about these things? Hi Liz, thank you for your question. It sounds like what you are asking is why are things like establishing your goals and the important things in your life a necessity. Now the important things in your life come from areas (or roles) that can often be neglected if all we are focused on is finishing our work or hitting deadlines. It’s not healthy to be stressed out and anxious about the work we have to do and to let other, more important, areas of our life go neglected. Now, I admit, with my coaching programme, the first thing I need to do with a new client is to get on top of any backlog or outstanding work that is hanging over a client. But if I am to help a person become better organised and more productive in the long-term so they have time for things like their family, relationships, health and fitness and enjoying life, I need to move to establishing what their long-term goals are and what is important to them. You see, when you build your life on a foundation of long-term goals and areas of focus, you feel less stressed, more in touch with yourself and fulfilled. It means that these areas and goals become the priority in your life as a whole and work, and the associated workload, is just dealt with. It’s when work becomes the central part of our lives that things will ultimately break down. You’ll burn out and you will feel exhausted. But, more importantly, when you know what your long-term goals and areas of focus are, you give yourself a “why”. Why are you doing what you are doing? Most people go into a job and see it as a way to get some money to pay for groceries, mortgages and going out. That’s a very depressing way to see your work. Your work needs to have some meaning, some other reason why you are doing it. It could be part of your long-term goal—to become a leader within your organisation, or it could be you want to help people improve their lives. In my case, the reason I turn up every day is because I see it as a vehicle to help people. Helping people gives me a huge buzz. It excites me and leaves me feeling energised and fulfilled. That’s my why and I see my work as part of my life’s purpose area of focus. Life would be horrible if I was reacting to my to-do list every day. That way my to-do list would fill up with everyone else’s long-term goals and areas of focus and I would find myself being pulled in all sorts of different directions and those directions would not necessarily leave me feeling happy or fulfilled. So the backend work is what puts you in control. So, what’s involved in the backend work? Well, the first place to start is to ask yourself what you would like to be doing in ten or twenty years' time? That c

How do you plan out your projects? Not just your professional ones, but your personal ones too. That’s what we will be exploring in this week’s episode. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 223 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 223 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. In the world of productivity and time management, we often talk about tasks and projects and how best to organise these. There is also the added complication for those of you who are self-employed and have a greater degree of freedom in what you work on. How do you choose your next project? Sure, sometimes that may be obvious, but often it’s not. So this week, we’re going to look at how to impose self-assigned deadlines and stick with them and also how to manage projects within the Time Sector System. Now, before we start, I just want to give you a heads up that I launched a brand new course over the weekend called The Time Blocking Course. This is the first of a series of mini-courses I will be doing over the year that takes a single concept—such as time blocking—and teach you how you can build these valuable productivity skills into your own life. Full details of this fantastic course are in the show notes. Okay, time to have you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks: Hi Carl, I am a music producer and I have several projects on the go although non have deadlines but I’d like to start using some. Do you have any tips on sicking to self-made deadlines and working on multiple projects whilst using the Time Sector system? All of my projects (music or life) don’t really have deadlines but was wondering if you can help? Hi Tom, thank you for your question. One additional question you asked about was project objectives or outcomes. Now, this is one of the most important starting points. As Robbin Sharma says: Projects (or goals) are exciting at the beginning, messy in the middle and beautiful at the end. The biggest problem with most projects is never the start or the end, it’s the middle bit. Yes, it’s messy, but it’s also where the hard work is. And it’s boring, difficult and often hell. When you have a clear objective or outcome for the project, it gives you the motivation to keep going when things get very difficult. The outcome is the vision of what things will look like when you finish the project and it’s that vision that keeps you going when things become boring, hell and difficult. As Winston Churchill said, “When you’re going through hell, keep going”. And to do that you need motivation. And of course, a clear objective will tell you when you have finished the project. But… There is another part here. Why are you doing the project? Without your why you will lose motivation. It’s the real motivation behind success at any project or goal. Your why could be anything, the important thing is that your why means something to you. For instance, in music, you could have the ultimate goal of winning a Grammy the reason why you are working on this particular project is it will add to your body of music that will get you noticed. Now, what about self-imposed deadlines. These can be very difficult to observe because there’s a lack of accountability. There’s no one chasing you or waiting for you to finish the project. This means you can very easily let deadlines slip which does nothing for your focus. I am in a similar position to you, Tom I have a number of projects I want to complete this year, but as there are no clients directly involved in these projects the onus is on me to stick to a planned completion schedule. Now, the way I have found to make this work is to divide the year up in quarters on a chart or in a spreadsheet and set them as columns. If you include a “to be assigned” column that gives you five columns to create. Then, to add all your projects to one of the quarter columns. Now, that’s the easy bit. The difficult part is creating the right balance. You will not get very far if you put all your projects in the first two quarters. You will have far too many projects. The trick is to understand how many projects you can realistically do each quarter. When I began this year, I knew that a realistic goal for me was to complete two big projects each quarter. This was based on experience and although it would stretch me, it would mean I will have to work a project every week, but as long as I was working on on

This week’s question is about time blocking effectively. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 222 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 222 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Have you ever tried time blocking? I suspect many of you have tried; probably with mixed results. Now for those of you who don’t know about time blocking, time blocking is where you block out increments of time on your calendar for doing work without being interrupted. It prevents other people from scheduling you in meetings and it gives you a sense that you have enough time to do your work each day. Does time blocking work? Yes. It does work, but it only works if you build flexibility into it. There’s a lot of conflicting advice around time blocking. Possibly the worst piece of advice is to block out every minute of the day for your activities. I’ve never met anyone who has been able to successfully do that. There are just far too many things that could go wrong when you micromanage your time in that way. Firstly, meetings rarely start and finish on time, traffic jams can cause you delays and then there are all the potential tech issues. Time blocking only works if you first know what you need to do and secondly you build in flexibility. Then you only need to add in a little discipline and your productivity AND time management skyrockets. Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, If you don’t know already, I have a YouTube channel that is full of advice, tips and tricks on time management, goal setting and productivity. So, if you are looking for a place to help you improve your time management and so much more, then head over and take a look. I am sure there will be something that will help you. Plus, you can get all my YouTube videos, PLUS blog post and this podcast in one convenient place by joining my weekly newsletter. You can join with the link in the show notes. Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ally. Ally asks; Hi Carl, I’ve heard you occasionally talk about time blocking and I think I know what it means. Do you have any tips or tricks for time blocking effectively? Hi Ally, thank you for your question. You’re right I have spoken about time blocking and for me it is a big part of why I can consistently write blog posts, do this podcast and produce YouTube videos every week while at the same time running a full time coaching and teaching business. However, to get the most out of time blocking is does involve a bit more than simply blocking time out each day on your calendar. You need to know that what you are doing during your blocked time is important and moving the right things forward. Let me explain. I’ve seen advice such as block out time for doing focused work each day. Now on the surface that makes sense. After all, if you dedicate two or three hours a day for doing important work without interruptions, you will get a lot done right? Well, yes and no. You see, if you don’t know what you are going to do in those two or three hours before you start, you are going to waste a lot of time trying to decide what to do. If you want your time blocked sessions to be productive, you need to know precisely what you will do before you start. And that means doing some forward planning—something most people are terrible at.—I struggle to persuade people to give themselves ten minutes at the end of a day to plan the next. If they also need to plan what to do in a three-hour focused time block as well it’s not going to be likely. I should point out that daily and weekly planning is the secret weapon of all highly productive people. These are the people who know what needs to be done and when. They are rarely if ever stressed and you will never find them overwhelmed. It’s impossible to be overwhelmed when you know what you have to do and you know when you will do it. And if a crisis happens, you absorb it like water does with a rock and quickly get back on track. Anyway, I digress. The first thing you need to know is what is important to you. And that really does mean what is important to you—not your company or your clients. What’s important in your life? How important is spending time with your family? Exercise? Taking a walk in nature? Meditation? These all need time. Time is not something you can magically pull out of a hat on demand. If you want to do something you must allocate time for it. If that’

This week’s podcast is about identifying your purpose—possibly the most difficult area of focus to define. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 221 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 221 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. One of the parts of life I talk about is areas of focus and there are eight areas we all share. These are: Family and relationships. Lifestyle and life experiences Career/business Finances Self-development Health and fitness Spirituality And life’s purpose Many of these areas are easy to define and establish what they mean to us. However, most people struggle with their life’s purpose. Now, I suspect this is because we think our life’s purpose needs to be something grandiose and world-changing when in reality life’s purpose is nothing more than helping other people and contributing in some way to our society and that can take form in multiple different ways. So, this week, I am exploring how you can establish and develop your life purpose so you can work on bringing balance to all eight of these areas. Now, before we get to this week’s question, have you joined my free weekly newsletter yet? This is a weekly newsletter that comes out every Friday and brings you all the content I produced that week including my YouTube videos, podcasts and blog post as well what I have been reading and watching from others. Additionally, you get a weekly productivity or goal setting tip. It's tremendous value and will give you something more constructive to read and watch over the weekend. All you need to do is use the link in the show notes to join. Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jamie. Jamie asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently been working through your Areas Of Focus Workbook and have most of the areas worked out. The one I am struggling with, though, is life’s purpose. I really don’t know what my life purpose is. Could you give me some ideas about what I should be writing here? Hi Jamie, thank you for the question and for downloading and working through the workbook. Before I begin, I should mention, if you want to get a copy of the Areas of Focus Workbook. You can download it for free from my downloads centre on my website. Okay, as I mentioned in the opening, we all have eight areas of focus. We all have them, the only thing is what these areas mean to us will be different and how important they will be. For me, health and fitness is higher up than finances. For others, their self-development could be high up and spirituality low down. For the most part, these will be easy to define. Family and relationships, for instance, is likely to be the easiest to define and, as Jamie mentions, life’s purpose is very difficult. So, what does life’s purpose mean? Now, this may be different for many of you, but the way I see life’s purpose is in contributing back to society. It’s in giving and helping. Now, let me ask you a question; how do you feel when you have helped someone out of a difficult situation? I know I feel great. I get a buzz from helping people. When I was in my early twenties, I did not really think about how I felt about it, but now, as I look back through my life I realise the most fulfilling moments in my personal and professional life are those moments when I have helped someone or contributed to a worthwhile cause. There is something special about using your skills and knowledge to help someone in need. This is why I don’t really believe anyone should retire. Sure, by all means, leave your job, take some time out for yourself, but if you really want to be happy, you should use the knowledge and skills you developed over your professional life to help your community. You could write about your experiences, help out at a community centre or go to a local college and teach. If you have taken care of your financial area of focus, your life will no longer be about earning a living, now your life should be about giving back to society. Let me explain using my own life experience. When I was in my twenties I did not really know what I wanted to do. I tried all sorts of jobs, from hotel management to car sales. And while I liked all those jobs, they really were just ways to earn a bit of money so I could go out clubbing with my friends on a weekend. I hated Monday mornings and I remember sitting in my living room on a Sunday night dreading going back to work. I lived for the w

This week, we’re entering into the realm of personal identity and how successful and productive people think and I explain why this is important. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script Hello and welcome to episode 220 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. When you think about it, being better organised and more productive is quite straightforward. Knowing what needs to be done, by when and how doesn’t require a lot of effort or special skills. It just requires application and a little self-discipline. But if it is that simple, why do so few people do it? Well, that’s what we will be answering this week and I hope I will be able to give you some tips that will help you not only improve your overall productivity but improve other areas of your life. Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, just a reminder if you want to get all the content I produce each week in one place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It’s full of useful tips, plus you get a weekly essay with tricks and ideas you can use to improve and optimise your own system. It’s free and it comes out every Friday—perfect for your weekend reading. All you need do is sign up using the link in the show notes. Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Caleb. Caleb asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the videos you have put out. I have watched most of them. I want to be more organised, but I’ve never been that kind of person. Ever since I was at school I’ve always been messy and I’m always late for appointments and I can never stick to a productivity system (and I’ve tried them all). Am I a hopeless case or is there something I am missing? Hi Caleb, thank you for your question. I certainly don’t think you are a “hopeless case”. Nobody is. I believe that if one person can be organised and productive, so can anyone else. To me, the interesting thing is why can one person keep everything organised and another person can’t? One thing, it is not mechanics. There’s nothing difficult about looking at a to-do list and a calendar at the end of a day and deciding what you will do the next day—you don’t need special skills to do that. All you need is ten minutes and everyone can find a spare ten minutes. Similarly, there’s nothing difficult about moving files to their rightful folders, processing email or clearing a to-do list’s inbox. You don’t need a special talent or a PhD for any of that. Just a mixture of time and a little discipline. The problem most people experience is often in their own identity. Let me explain: I see from the way you wrote your question, Caleb, that you use the phrase “I’ve never been that kind of person” and “I’ve always been messy and late for appointments and I can never stick to a productivity system”. If that is what you believe, Caleb, then that is what will be true… In your mind. This means that if you ever arrived early to an appointment you would feel uncomfortable. You would sense something is wrong. And when that happens, you will self-sabotage yourself and ensure you are late for your next appointment. Another thing that will happen is you will not tidy something up or keep your folders organised because you believe that you are not that kind of person. You in effect give yourself permission to not be organised and so you are not. Let’s be honest here; we are all born untidy and disorganised. When I was little I never put my toys away, I didn’t make my bed and I never understood why I had to be ready to go to playschool at 8:30 in the morning. No matter how much my mother shouted at me, it just never occurred to me to put my toys away or get ready for playschool. Over time, I learned how to put my toys away. I learned that if I did not want to lose things—my favourite toys for instance—it was a good idea to put them in a safe place after I finished playing with them (the amount of times I took my toy tractors Starsky and Hutch car to bed with me is laughable now). Putting things away so you can find them again the next day is a learned skill. You learn, if things are where they are supposed to be, it makes your life that little bit easier. So, if a child can learn to be tidy, so can an adult. It’s also about saying the right things to yourself. In your case, Caleb, it’s going to be about changing your identity. Instead of saying things like “I’m always late for appointments” you need to change th

Podcast 219 This week’s question is about the tyranny of the to-do list. Something I’m confident we’ve all felt at times. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 219 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 219 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Have you ever felt your to-do list is controlling your life and not allowing you the freedom to get on and do the things you want to do? I think we’ve all felt this before and it can be demoralising. The feeling our to-do list is running our lives and we cannot escape. This week, my goal is to change that and to show you that rather than your to-do list controlling your life, it is you who ultimately is in control. But first, if you want a convenient place to receive all the content I produce each week, sign up for my weekly newsletter. It’s full of useful tips, plus you get a weekly essay with tricks and ideas you can use to improve and optimise your own system. It’s free and it comes out every Friday—perfect for your weekend reading. All you need do is sign up using the link in the show notes. Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Adam. Adam asks: Hi Carl, I started using Todoist about a year ago when I saw one of your YouTube videos and I loved it. But recently, I feel my life is trapped by all the tasks I have to do each day. It’s becoming difficult to motivate myself to look at my list and I am always rescheduling tasks. How do you keep your list from becoming demotivating? Hi Adam, thank you for your question. I know how you feel. I’ve been through that forest many times and it can be disheartening to feel trapped by becoming better organised. I’ve recently felt it since we moved house and I got a new office and studio. I want to keep my workplace clean and tidy and everything in its place. The trouble is, to maintain that, it feels I am always cleaning and tidying up. However, I’ve learned strategies to overcome that. The first is to treat cleaning and tidying as a way to step away from my desk. What I do, is between sessions of sit down work—like preparing this podcast script—I will get up and wipe down the kitchen surfaces, or I might pull out the vacuum cleaner and vacuum the studio. These tasks don’t take very long to do on their own, so they are a great way to keep me moving through the day and consistently done, they keep my office and studio clean and tidy. When it comes to your task manager this can be a bit more difficult. Part of the problem most people face is in the enthusiasm for building a productivity system. When we start we enthusiastically put all tasks into our task managers. It does not matter whether they are important or not, we just throw everything in there and we then process these into the system. Now, when you first start, this is an important part. We need to develop the habit of automatically putting our commitments, event and ideas into our system. If we never develop that habit, we fall at the first hurdle. Not getting stuff into our systems, means we never learn to trust the system we create and if you don’t trust your system, it will never work. However, once you are in the habit of dropping all your tasks, commitments and events into your system, you need to become very protective of what actually gets processed into your system. I treat my inbox for both notes and tasks as a filter. Nothing moves from there until I have made a considered decision about whether I need to do something or not. I would say, around 60 per cent of what I add to my inbox gets deleted later in the day when I process my inbox because either I have completed the task or I decide I don’t have the time or resources to do the task. One thing I can assure you, is if you delete something that later becomes important, you will find out and you can add it back in. It’s better to add less and delete more. You can always add something later if it becomes important, but if an unimportant task gets into your system, it can be very hard to find it and remove it later. Who has time to go through all your tasks cleaning them out? Better to spend a few extra minutes making decisions about tasks before they get into your system. However, I should stress, if you are new to using a to-do list, focus on developing the habit of adding everything to your to-do list or notes first. Once it’s automatic to pull out your phone or open your to-do list when some