Your Time, Your Way

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

This week’s question is about how to balance your work life with your professional life. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 218 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 218 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. I’m sure you heard of Work/Life Balance and how this is the goal for living a balanced life. Well, is it? Does trying to balance your personal and work life really give you a balanced life? You see, if you place hard barriers between your personal and professional life you create an unnatural barrier to living life on your terms. If you are up against a tight deadline and you have a very important meeting the next day, what will you be thinking about as you sit on the sofa with your family in the evening? You won’t be thinking about your family. Your mind is going to be on that important meeting that begins in ten hours time. But because you have a hard rule that states after 6 PM you do not do work, you are now causing yourself a lot of unnecessary stress. The better thing for you to do is to excuse yourself for the evening, go to a quiet room and prepare for your meeting. You’ll feel a lot better, be much more in tune with your needs and you can make it up to your family the next day by taking them out for dinner somewhere nice. A lot of our time management and productivity problems come from trying to box ourselves in when if you give yourself greater freedom, you’d be a lot happier, less stressed and considerably less overwhelmed. Now before we get to this week’s question, if you would like to receive all my weekly content, including this podcast as well as my blog posts and YouTube videos in one place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It’s completely free and each week you get a productivity tip plus get to see what I am reading and watching. This newsletter is a great productivity and time management resource for your weekend reading. The link to join the newsletter is in the show notes. Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks: hi Carl, what do you think of work/life balance? I’m really struggling with this. I have two teenage boys and a full-time job. I worry that I am not able to spend enough time with my boys. Do you have any tips on having a better work/life balance? Hi Anna, thank you for your question. There is a lot written about work/life balance and it certainly used to be possible. Back in the day when we worked shifts in a factory where the only action we needed to take was to put widgets on devices, it was easy to leave work behind when we clocked out for the day. We were not coming up with solutions to problems that came up throughout the day. But for most of us, we do not work that way anymore. That kind of work has been farmed out to machines and robots. We’ve moved into an age where our physical labours are less in demand and our mental abilities have become the in-demand skill. The great thing about using our physical skills and labour is we can turn off at the end of the day. The only thing we need to worry about is where do we need to be tomorrow. Being employed for our mental skills makes it a lot harder to turn off at the end of the day. You can still be working on a client’s problems while driving home from the office. It’s much harder to turn off at the end of the day. We also live in a very connected world. I have clients who live in California and manage teams in Asia and Europe. There’s a seventeen hour time difference between Seoul and San Francisco. How do you do one on one team meetings with that time difference and maintain a work/life balance? The solution is in something called work/life integration. Rather than seeing our work and personal life are two entirely different things, we combine the two. Now, anyone who runs their own business will likely already be living a work/life integrated life. It’s a necessary part of building a business. As a business owner, you can’t simply turn off at the end of the workday. You will be constantly coming up with ideas, dealing with customers at all times of the day and having to do admin and other such tasks late into the evening. So how does work/life integration work? Well, the first step is to see your day as a whole rather split into work and home. This means if one of your boys is playing in a school rugby match on a Wednesday afternoon and he

This week’s episode is a question that came about because of my recently updated Time Sector System course. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time Sector System Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 217 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 217 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. So, many of you already know that my productivity system is called The Time Sector System. This system is based on managing my work by when I want to do it rather than by project. Around three or four years ago, I discovered that when I managed my tasks by project, I was spending too much time organising and reviewing and not enough time doing the work. It was leaving me with a lot of work that needed rescheduling at the end of the day. Not a good place to be when you want to feel you are becoming better at managing your time. Too much rescheduling and you lose confidence in your system. That’s when it dawned on me that, really, the most important part of any system is having the time to do the work, not how you organise your files and projects. That was my light-bulb moment. Now, I do get a lot of questions about this system. It goes against the grain of many of the more popular systems out there and naturally I get a lot of questions about it. So, I have selected one of those questions to answer this week. So. Without further ado. Let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Eric. Eric asks, Carl, You used to write and talk a lot about GTD but I notice you no longer use it. Why is that and what do you use instead? Thank you Eric for your question. Let’s start by dealing with the elephant in the room. Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen. This is the standard text by which all productivity and time management systems are judged today. There’s nothing wrong with GTD, as it is called. It’s a solid workable system. However, there are two issues with GTD that caused me problems. The first is this is a book that was first published in 2001 and its concepts are based on what David Allen taught in companies as a productivity and time management trainer in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, I remember working in the early 1990s and in those distant days it did matter where you were and what tools you had with you. If you wanted to respond to your mail, you needed to be in a place where your mail was because, for most people, there was no such thing as email. And even in the late 1990s, when email became more prevalent, you needed to be at a computer set up for your email. If you were lucky enough to have a personal email account, you needed to be at home with your “personal computer” in order to reply. For your work email, you needed to be at your office and sitting in front of your work desktop computer. So, for a simple task such as responding to your mail, you had to be in a specific physical location (home or office) and be in front of your computer (the tool). The second issue I was struggling with was how the digital task managers were created. For some reason, task managers were set up by project, not context as it should be in a GTD system. For those not familiar with GTD, in GTD your task lists are organised by context. This means you create lists based on a tool, such as a computer, a phone or car. Place, such as your office or home or person, such as your boss, spouse or colleague. The idea is you choose what to do based on where you are, with which tool or person. Now, when I went digital, I fell into the trap of believing the most effective way to manage my tasks was to organise everything by project and to use tags or labels for my contexts. Big mistake. In GTD, a project is defined as anything requiring two or more steps. This meant, theoretically, arranging for my car to go in for a service was a project or even arranging to have my haircut (I did once have hair that needed cutting). So you can imagine how many projects you end up having on your list. David Allen mentions that an average person is going to have between seventy and a hundred and fifty open projects. That’s a lot of projects for an individual like you and me to manage. Now the glue that makes GTD work is the weekly review. This is where you sit down at the end of the week to go through all your projects to make sure everything is up-to-date and current. Well, for me, by the time I switched to using the Time Sector System my weekly review was taking almost two hours to complete each week. Yes! Two hours. No, I don’t know

This week’s question is about deciding what to work on and prioritising You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 216 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 216 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. We’ve covered prioritising before in this podcast and it is an important part of being more productive and ensuring that what you are working on is meaningful and moves the right things forward. However, for those of you who have created a good solid system, you are likely struggling with deciding what to work on. If you are collecting a lot of inputs—tasks, events and ideas—at some point you will have to make a decision about what to do about those collected inputs and, more importantly, when you will do something about them. And those decisions can be very difficult. So, that is what we will be exploring in this week’s podcast. Don’t forget, if you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Not only do you get a summary and link to my weekly blog post, YouTube videos and this podcast, you also get a free productivity or goal-setting lesson each week. And best of all… This newsletter is completely free. All you need do is click the link in the show notes enter your details and you’re in. Doesn’t get any simpler than that. Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Shelly. Shelly asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the work you produce each week, I have a question about choosing which tasks to work on. I usually begin the day with around thirty tasks in my to-do list and I never complete them all. I feel guilty about rescheduling a lot of tasks. How do you choose which tasks to work on each day? Hi Shelly, thank you for your question. This is a great question because it touches on a hidden aspect of productivity and time management. All productivity and time management systems focus on collecting and organising stuff. Writing everything down and then organising it in a way that means something to us. What often gets forgotten is finding the time to complete these tasks we collect. And, more importantly, deciding which is important and which is not. How do you do that? Well, time sensitivity is one way. Due dates and deadlines are great motivators for getting things done. If you have a deadline for something, you are going to be more likely to complete it. This becomes even more important if the deadline was given to your by your boss or someone in authority over you. Your life would be easier if you spent a little time each week doing your taxes—organising your receipts and income and expenditure—rather than leaving a year's worth until a few weeks (or days) before the tax assessment deadline. But, hey, when I don’t have to submit my tax information for ten months, why would I spend an hour every weekend pulling together everything I spent and earned this week? There’s no imminent deadline, so there’s no urgency and therefore it’s not a priority. So we leave it until a week or two before it’s due and now it’s not an hour, we are talking days if not a whole week doing work on submitting taxes. If you want to stop the tyranny of tax assessment time, then do a little each week (or month) to keep it organised. It’s not about making it a priority, it’s about making it something you do regularly. A bigger problem you will be facing each day Shelly, is a phenomenon called “over-choice”. Basically, what this means is when we are faced with a lot of options to choose from, we find it very difficult to decide. We become overwhelmed and anxious about whether we are making the right decision or not. If you were to wake up tomorrow morning and have one item to do. You would do it. No matter how big or difficult the task was. You would do it. First of all you would be focused and secondly, there’s no decision to make. You are doing that one thing. So you get on and do it. But we don’t do that do we? We see how easy it is to add things to our task managers and then, so we don’t forget something, we add a random date to a task that roughly equates to when we think it needs doing. Unfortunately, this strategy leads to tasks coming up on our daily lists that don’t actually need to be done that day but clutter up your today’s task list. When you look at that list in the morning, you have far too many decisions to make. We try a

This week’s question is about finding new goals when you have achieved many of your life’s gals already. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 215 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 215 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Now, we often hear about how to achieve goals, what habits to develop and change our lives. But what do you do when you have achieved many of your long-term goals and what remains no longer inspire you? Not much is written or spoken about that. It’s as if the assumption is people struggle to achieve goals. Well, that’s not entirely true. It is hard to achieve goals, that as it should be. But it doesn’t mean we don’t achieve them. We do. So. I’m going to tackle that question this week. Now before we get to the question, if you would like to receive all my weekly published content in one single place, then subscribe to my newsletter. Not only will you get links to my content, you also get a FREE productivity tip plus notice of any special offers before anyone else. It’s free and if you want to grow your skills in productivity, time management and goal setting (and achievement) then go ahead and subscribe today. The link to sign up is in the show notes. Okay. It’s time to hand you over to the Mystery podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question is from Tim. Tim asks: Hi Carl, I have been fortunate in that I have achieved many of my life's goals. Those that I haven't achieved . . . well, they're just not attractive to me anymore. The problem is I now feel lost without having some goals. How do I find new goals? Hi Tim, thank you for the question. One thing humans need is to be continually growing. That does not necessarily mean physically grow, but grow mentally. When we stop growing, we can feel depressed and down and lost. What keeps us moving forward is something to achieve. That could be a certain lifestyle, a new knowledge or even a business. No matter what it is, our minds (and bodies) need exercising and that exercise is how we grow. When we are young, fresh from school, it’s likely we will have a lot of ideas and ambitions. We are a little naive then, and we think we are immortal and can achieve anything. Then life punches us in the face and we realise that all the things we’ve dreamed about accomplishing is not as easy to achieve as we first thought. Apparently, statically, 97% of people will stop at this point and just accept life as it is and give up their dreams and ambitions. It’s easier to blame life and our circumstances than to stand out and be different and go after our dreams—the things that other people around us say are crazy or impossible to do. The three percent who do go after their dreams and goals and accepts that their life is 100% their responsibility, are the ones who are goal driven, focused and never stop growing their skills and abilities. But there comes a natural point where most of those goals and dreams have been achieved. Then what? What do you do then? I remember, the first time I completed a marathon. It was amazing. The sense of accomplishment was incredible. There was this smile on my face. I felt I could achieve anything. Those feelings lasted all of about an hour. After that I began thinking now what? You see, achieving your goals will not give you a lifetime of fulfilment. That sense of pride and fulfilment doesn’t last. A goal, as Damon Cart talked about in this podcast a few weeks ago, is just a stepping stone to something much bigger. And I mean much much bigger. The real question to ask yourself is what do I want out of life? Who, or what do I need to become to accomplish that? Now, one place you are likely to find the answers to these questions is in your areas of focus. These are the eight areas of life that are important to us. Some are obvious such as health, family and friends and finances. But the other five are just as important. Your career or business, your spirituality, your self development, lifestyle and life’s purpose will all come into the mix at some point. I’ve recently finished reading a new biography of Ian Fleming, my writing hero. For those who don’t know, Ian Fleming was the creator and writer of the James Bond novels. Throughout the 1950s, Ian Fleming achieved everything he desired. He attained all his goals. At the start of the decade he built his dream home in Jamaica, he married the woman he loved and he published “a spy novel to end all spy novels” when he published Cas

This week, it’s all about how to stop overthinking and just get on with the work. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 214 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 214 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Do you occasionally find yourself paralysed by decisions? Having too many choices and not knowing where to begin? I think a lot of us find ourselves in this situation and it can have negative effects on our overall productivity. One of the things I have conditioned myself to be able to do is to quickly decide what needs to be done and where something should go. This takes quite a lot of practice but can be speeded up with a few simple questions. Now before we get to the question, I want to give you a heads up about my weekly newsletter. If you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. This newsletter goes out every Friday and contains my YouTube videos, blog posts and podcast all in one convenient email. In addition to my content, I share with you a couple of articles of interest from other people as well as some of the videos I have been watching that week. AND, I also share with you a short essay on a productivity or time management tip that I am sure will help you to develop your out systems. The link to my weekly newsletter is in the show notes. Okay let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks: Hi Carl, I follow the Time Sector System and it has really helped me to process my inbox much faster. However, I do still find myself not being able to decide where to put a task. How do you process your inbox so fast? Thank you Alan for the question. One of the reasons I developed the Time Sector System was because I found myself wasting so much time trying to decide where a task went. When I managed my tasks by project I would have twenty to thirty open projects in my projects list and while tasks related to specific projects were quite easy to process, there were a lot of tasks that didn’t neatly fit into a project. Then I had to decide whether a new task was a project or not—based on the principle that anything requiring two or more steps was a project—if it did require two or more steps, I created another project to add to my already overwhelming project list. It was crazy! I found myself spending so much time deciding what something was and precious little time doing whatever that something was. And don’t get me started on the time it took to review so many projects each week. That’s how the Time Sector System was born. It came about because of frustration and when I analysed what was important about a task, I realised the only important factor was when I was going to do it, not what project it was associated with. Basically, I removed a step—a step that was taking up a lot of time each day and week. Now the only decision I need make when I get a new task is when am I going to do it. There are no more grey areas because I’m not thinking about how many steps are required. All I am deciding is when I am going to do it. My thoughts and ideas about a project are kept in my notes app. If I want to add information, ideas or a checklist of things to do on a project, I can jot them down in the project note and not worry about dates, labels or anything else you need to think about when you manage projects from a to-do list. Many of the old style task management systems require you to make a lot of decisions, and as we now know, our ability to make decisions each day is limited. As the day goes on, our capacity to make good quality decisions diminishes. And, as most people are processing inboxes at the end of the day, it’s at that time when our ability to make decisions is at its lowest. This is why we struggle in this area. We get caught up in overthinking a simple decision: What to do next. So what about those decisions I alluded to earlier? Well when you are processing your inbox—whether that is your task manager’s or email inbox, the first question to ask yourself is: What is it? If you are processing your email, there are many different types of email. There’s spam that got through your spam filter—of course you delete these immediately. Then there are those emails you were CC’d on, but you have no action to take personally and there are emails that do require you to take some action. I’ve found this one question can eliminat