Showing you ways to get control of your time through tested techniques that will give you more time to do the things you want to do.
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6 days ago
6 days ago
This week, why it’s important to know what kind of person you are.
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Script | 350
Hello, and welcome to episode 350 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
WOW! 350 episodes. I never thought this podcast would still be going strong after six years. Thank you to all of you for following me and this podcast and to everyone who has sent in questions. Please keep them coming in—they are the fuel of this podcast.
So, back to this episode.
One way to destroy your efforts to become better organised and more productive is to fight against yourself. This can manifest itself when you are a deadline-driven person trying to be a carefully planned out person.
Let me give you an example: if you struggle to find the motivation to begin a project because the deadline is six months away, yet you pressure yourself to start now. You’ll likely find yourself losing interest and giving up after a few weeks.
Then you beat yourself up.
But, perhaps you’re not doing anything wrong; you’re just trying to do something you are not wired to do.
That’s why it’s important to know what kind of person you are and to figure and what works and what doesn’t.
Okay, before we go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Matthew. Matthew asks, Hi Carl, What do you recommend to someone who finds it difficult to get motivated unless there the deadline is right on top of them?
Ho Matthew. Thank you for your question.
I’ve witnessed something like this very close to home.
My wife struggles to start work on a project or a task until the deadline is right in front of her. She then pulls out all the stops pulling all nighters if necessary. Yet, she always meets her deadlines.
In the twenty + years I’ve known her, I cannot recall a time she missed a deadline. Ever.
My mother, on the other-hand is the complete opposite. She will begin getting her holiday items together sever months before she travels. I know, when we travel to visit my family over the Christmas holidays, he will be wanting to plan her next trip to Korea with me. Six months before she’s likely to travel. She even gets her suitcase ready.
It would be fruitless to encourage my wife to be more like my mother or vice versa.
My mother hates stress—it gives her a headache. My wife doesn’t see the point in over preparing.
Yet, we shouldn’t be looking at the methods, instead look at the results. Neither my wife nor my mother miss deadlines. They have different approaches, but still achieve the same results.
Some of my coaching clients wake up very early 4:30 - 5:30 am and like to plan their day before they finish their morning routines end. Others find it more beneficial to plan the day the evening before. Yet, as long as you begin your day with a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished that day, does it really matter when you do your daily planning?
I recommend if you are an early bird, do your planning in the morning. If you are more of a night owl, do it the evening before. What matters is you plan the day. The benefits of having a clear idea of what you want to get accomplished that day, far outweighs the timing of your planning.
I have clients who see Ali Abdaal’s productivity recommendations and wonder how he gets any work done with so many tools being used to organise something as simple as what to do and when. Yet, I have other clients who love using the tools Ali recommends.
There’s no right or wrong way to do this as long as you are getting the results you want.
In your case, Matthew, the productivity tool that you should master is your calendar. If you are motivated by deadlines, you will need to be very clear about when you deadlines are. Having your deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section and in a colour you cannot fail to see will ensure you know when your deadlines are.
All my project deadlines are in my calendar in red. These are hard deadlines and when I am planning my week, all I need to do is look ahead two or three weeks to see what’s coming up.
You may also find it helpful to have a Master Projects list in your notes app so when you are planning the week you have a central place where all the information you need is. On your Master Projects list you can have the deadlines, and what needs to happen next. That way you can judge how much work is still required to meet your deadline.
That’s something I’ve learned from my wife. While on the surface she looks a disorganised mess, underneath that disguise is someone who’s looking at the calendar on her phone every evening to see what’s coming up over the next few days.
Last Monday, while we were sitting on the sofa, my wife reminded me that Louis had a grooming appointment on Thursday and she wanted to check I was sill okay to take him.
And there I was thinking she was scrolling social media, yet, she was looking at her calendar for the week to see if she needed to to do something.
Did she need to know about that last week? No.
I did, though. My system’s different from hers. Yet both our systems produced the same result. Louis arrived for his grooming appointment on time.
However despite having very different methods for getting our work done, there are some principles that will never change. Writing your commitments down somewhere you trust is critical.
While my wife does not use any kind of task manager, she does use, and trusts, her calendar. And I’ve seen this with many other people who don’t use a task manager—they still use something they trust.
A former boss of mine, would have his secretary print out his Outlook calendar for the week each Monday morning. He would then fold that calendar up into his pocket diary.
Throughout the week, he would add to-dos and appointments to that printed calendar as required and on Friday afternoon update his Outlook calendar so the up-to-date version would be ready for him the following Monday morning.
Again, he never forgot anything as far as I could tell. It was an unorthodox system, but it worked.
This is why it can be dangerous to copy other people’s systems. They are not you.
Earlier, I published my latest Todoist setup on YouTube. I do this twice a year, and I suspect I do it more for me than for anyone else. I have been doing this since around 2019, so now I have five years of set-ups I can refer back to and see my evolution.
The biggest change came in May 2020 when I launched the Time Sector System. That was a result of struggling to make Getting Things Done work for me in the digital age. I remember walking to the gym one day and being hit be a sudden realisation that really the only thing that mattered was “when” I would do a task, not what I needed to do.
It doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have time to do it. What matters is what you do when you do have time.
This realisation solved so many struggles for me. It caused me to limit the number of meetings I was available for each week, and if I could not restrict my meetings, then I had to restrict the number of tasks I was trying to do.
Perhaps I am more aware of the limits time imposes on us than others, or others knew all this before I became aware of it. Either way, it helped me to begin working to my strengths rather than fighting against them.
This also applies to when you are at your most focused. Most people will find they are at their most focused in the mornings but not everyone is.
Some people will find they are at their best in the evenings. This is one reason why flexible working times work for some and not for others.
If you are more a night owl, working for a company that allows you to work to your own schedule will help you thrive. Working for a company that keeps strict 9 till 5 hours will create all sorts of difficulties for you.
Doist, the parent company of Todoist, works flexible hours. Because they are a 100% remote company, their team is spread throughout the world. They have people on the west coast of America, and people here in Korea. That’s a seventeen hour time difference. Insisting everyone worked a 9 till 5 day would not work.
Doist has an unenviable staff turnover level. I believe over the last ten years only four or five people have left the company. That’s incredible for a company that employs over one hundred people.
I’ve discovered more on this with my pen and paper experiment this year—well, it began as an experiment. It’s hard to call it an experiment now.
Returning to pen and paper has helped me to rediscover the art of thinking and the importance of slowing down from time to time.
Digital tools are great, they make storing and finding documents easy. They all help manage quick notes and ideas. Paper, though is different, there’s no batteries and if you grab an A4 pad of paper, and a Bic ball pen, and disappear to a cafe, you could spend all day there and never have to worry about recharging your device. That bit ball pen will draw a 3 kilometre (about 2 miles) line before it runs out. And of course, there’s no notifications or beeps and buzzes.
Yet, pen and paper doesn’t work for everyone. There’s a lot of people who do love them, there’s also a lot of people who hate them. And that’s fine.
So, Matthew, look at how you prefer to work. If you need deadlines to motivate you, the only thing that matters is you meet your deadlines. If that causes you to have to work later than you want to, perhaps you could create a false deadline. You could say this piece of work must be finished tomorrow by 5PM so I can hand it in the next day.
False deadlines are great. I generally have most of my projects finish at the end of the month, so my “fake” end of the month is the 25th. This gives me around a week before the real deadline hits and ensures I am not scrambling to finish things late into the night.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Matthew. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Sunday Dec 08, 2024
Sunday Dec 08, 2024
This week, the question is on how to reduce the time it takes to complete a solid weekly planning session.
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Script | 349
Hello, and welcome to episode 349 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One issue that frequently comes up in my YouTube video comments and email messages is the subject of weekly planning and it taking too long.
It’s taken me a while to see how this might be happening, but a recent coaching call pointed me in the right direction.
The issue is the difference between what David Allen calls the Weekly Review and planning a week.
The Getting Things Done Weekly Review is, about looking backwards. You spend a lot of time looking at what you have done on individual projects.
Given that in GTD, anything requiring two or more steps is a project and that by following that definition, you are going to have between, and I quote from the Getting Things Done book, thirty and hundred and fifty projects at any one time, is it any wonder weekly reviews take so long.
This is why I do not call my planning session a weekly review. Instead, I am planning the week, not reviewing my work. The word “review”, at least to me, suggests looking at something that happened in the past.
Yet, planning is about looking ahead. What’s happened has happened. What matters is what you do in the following seven days, and that will be contingent on appointments and commitments you have in those seven days.
So, without further ado, let me turn you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling with doing my weekly plan. I’ve taken your advice to do it on a Saturday morning, but it still takes me almost two hours. Are there any secrets to getting it down to less than an hour?
Hi Greg, thank you for your question.
The question I would start with is, “Are you planning the week or looking back at the week just gone?
If you are following the Time Sector System, one routine task I recommend is to give yourself ten minutes before you close out the day to process your task manager’s inbox.
Processing your inbox is about asking three questions:
What is it?
What do I need to do?
When will I do it?
The second question, What do I need to do? May give you the answer, nothing. In that case, you can delete the task altogether.
When you do a task, will depend on its urgency. It may be something that doesn’t need to be done this week, in which case you can move it directly to your next week, this month or next month folder.
If it does need to be done this week, when will you do it this week? You then add the date.
Doing this routine task everyday, means when you sit down to do your weekly planning on Saturday morning, you only need look at your next week and this month folders and move anything to your This Week folder if you must or want to do it in the next seven days.
In my experience, that only takes ten minutes.
Now what about all those projects?
Well, if you are still trying to manage you projects in a task manager, good luck. Weekly planning is going to take a long time. You will have to go through each project and make sure nothing has been missed. That’s going to take a long time if you have between thirty and 150 projects.
However, if you manage your projects in your notes app, then these won’t need reviewing. Every time you touch a project you update the project note. You can, if you wish, move the next task to your task manager, although if you create tasks that tell you to work on a given project, you should not need to do that.
I don’t define a project in the same way as David Allen does. A project for me is something that will take at least three months to complete and will have a lot of tasks to complete.
In the Getting Things Done world. My upcoming trip to Europe is a project. Yet, for me, it’s a single task. Book flights. Once that task has been done, I will know exactly what needs to happen next. Do I need to book a hotel? This year, no, but I will need to book bus tickets once I arrive in Dublin. So the next action is to book the bus tickets.
The thing is, I didn’t know if I needed to book a hotel or a bus ticket because that depended on what time we arrived at Dublin airport. And I didn’t know that until I had booked the flights.
I do have a note in my notes app called “Ireland 2024” and in there, I have my packing list and a list of things I want to purchase while there. I also save my flight tickets and anything else I may need.
Another way to look at it is if you were a HR manager, and a colleague asked you to hire a new team member, that would not necessarily be a project. As a HR manager, hiring people is a part of what you do. It’s probable you will be hiring many different team members, and managing the process of hiring is just a part of your core work.
Yet if you were tasked to overhaul the payroll system or to organise the seamless move of all employees to a new location, given that you wouldn’t ordinarily do that kind of work, they would be projects.
When would you review those projects? Perhaps when you know you have a management meeting coming up, or you have a one to one with your boss.
But, reviewing is not planning. Reviewing is a task by itself.
Planning is about deciding what you will do. A weekly plan is about setting yourself objectives for the week. Daily planning is setting objectives for the day.
Last night, as I planned today, I made writing this script an objective. Once I knew that I would be writing this script, I checked my calendar for my committed events for today, and mentally decided when I would write it.
It did not mean I had to go through all my previous scripts or review the list of questions I keep. That was a task I set on for Saturday afternoon—decide what topics I will create content around next week.
When I was writing Your Time, Your Way, it was obvious what needed to be done each week—set aside one or two hours a day to write the book. How much reviewing was needed for that? Zilch, nada, zero. To complete that project required me to sit down and write the book five days a week.
Every two weeks I had a meeting with my publisher. These were usually Friday evenings for me. This meant I had a task on Friday to review what I had written over the previous two weeks and to add any questions I had for the publisher.
Often my publisher would ask me to do something. Perhaps he wanted me to send him a profile picture, approve the cover designs, or update the chapter list. During the meeting I added those tasks to the meeting note and afterwards, transferred the tasks to my task list.
This meant, when I did my weekly planning, I did not need to go and review the whole project. What needed to be done was already in my Next Week list. All I needed to do was to decide when I would get the information requested together and send it.
The reason planning the week takes so long is likely because you are not planning, you’re reviewing and cleaning up.
Cleaning up your task list, your notes or anything else is not planning. It’s cleaning up. That’s a completely different category of task.
If you’re spending five or ten minutes at the end of the day clearing your task manager’s inbox, deciding what something is, what you need to do, and when you will do it, you won’t have very much cleaning up to do at the end of the week.
When the special forces plan a mission, they start with the objective—take that hill—they then set about working out how they will get to the top of the hill. They don’t waste time looking at what they did or didn’t do this week or how they got to where they are.
They focus their attention on getting from where they are now to where they need to be.
And that’s the approach you want to take when planning your week. You have seven days to accomplish a set number of objectives. The question is what do you need to do to get there?
And just like the special forces, your plan will break—it always does. It’s at that point you pause, look at where you are, and figure out what needs to happen for you to reach your target.
And for us, that’s what we do when we do the daily planning.
I should have written half of that report by now, but I haven’t started yet. What do I need to do in the remaining 48 hours to complete the report by the deadline. Perhaps I need to cancel two meetings tomorrow, so I can use that time to write and get myself back on track?
It’s not going through the project again, and finding excuses for not accomplishing your task. You’re behind, what do you need to do to get back on track? That’s planning.
If you are putting deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section, when you are planning the week, you can quickly see what deadlines you have coming up over the next two or three weeks and that can guide you towards what you should be working on.
If you use task start and due dates in your task manager, then, of course your weekly planning is going to take you longer. You will need to review all your tasks to ensure you haven’t missed anything. Good luck with that approach.
So, when do you review you projects? Personally, I review my projects when I work on them. I have a master projects list table on my notes app that shows me all my projects, their deadlines and what needs to happen next.
Every time I finish working on a project, I update that table with what I did and what I need to do next.
Going back to writing Your Time, Your Way, there was very little updating required. I had five two-hour writing blocks in my calendar each week for writing the book. The next action was easy—continue writing my book.
Now, if a project becomes a complete mess and you don’t know where you are or what needs to happen next, the task is to review the project. That will then help you to get it back on track. But that’s not part of the weekly planning. That’s just a task you need to do, and you may add it as a task to do next week.
Another question, I get asked is what about follow-ups and waiting for’s?
Again, that’s not part of your weekly planning. That’s a separate task. Personally, I check my follow-ups folders once a week or when I am working on a project and I can see I am waiting for something. It’s certainly not part of my weekly planning.
So, if when you sit down to set out your weekly plan, you are also reviewing all your tasks and projects, yes, it’s going to take you a long time. But you are not planning. You’re reviewing.
If you’ve read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or any time management book prior to 2001, none of them had you reviewing “open loops” and “projects”. That’s regressive and means you waste a lot of time focused on the past.
These books—books that helped millions of people—focused planning on what you will do next week, this month, quarter or year. They were forward thinking. That’s what planning the day and week is all about.
What will you accomplish next week? What needs to be done? And when will you do it? That’s it.
And if you are consistent with this, you will find weekly planning will take you between thirty and forty minutes.
I hope that helps, Greg. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Sunday Dec 01, 2024
Sunday Dec 01, 2024
This week, I’m going to show you how to design your “perfect” day.
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Script | 348
Hello, and welcome to episode 348 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
What would a perfect day look like for you? I’m not talking about drinking sangria in a park, feeding animals in the zoo, and later, a movie.
I’m talking about how a typical day would go.
- What time would you like to wake up?
- What would you enjoy doing for the first hour of your day?
- What would you like to do in the evenings?
- And what time would you like to go to bed?
These questions are all part of what I call designing your perfect week. It’s an exercise that helps you to bring some structure into your day. Once implemented, this reduces the number of decisions you need to make each day and makes planning less demanding and a lot faster.
Not taking control of your calendar means others will take control of it. If not your boss or customers, it’ll be your family and friends. This leaves you being pushed and pulled all over the place.
When you wake up in the morning, you have no idea what will happen or where you will end up. More dangerously, you will have no idea whether you can get your work done, and inevitably, you’ll find yourself with huge backlogs and a lot of accumulated stress.
Not a great place to be if you want to be better organised and more productive.
So, let me show you how you can regain control of your calendar and start putting what you want first.
This means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Megan. Megan asks, hi Carl, I’ve tried designing a “perfect” week but found I don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do. Do you have any tips to fit everything in?
Hi Megan, thank you for your question.
That you have discovered you don’t have enough time for everything you want to do is part of why I recommend people do the Perfect Week calendar exercise. The purpose is to help you see what you do and don’t have time for.
But first, how do you set up the Perfect Week calendar?
First, open up your calendar—it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar. What you are going to do is create a new calendar and call it “Perfect Week”.
I recommend you do this on a larger screen. It is possible to do it on a phone, but you won’t see the bigger picture of the week. A laptop or tablet works better when you do this.
Now, begin with your personal life. How much sleep do you want? What time will you go to bed? Block those times in first. For instance, if, in your perfect world, you go to bed at 11:00 pm and want seven hours of sleep, then you would block 11:00 pm to 6:30 am. (Allow yourself thirty minutes to fall asleep).
Now, how long do you want for your morning routine? Perhaps you want the first hour of your day dedicated to you. To exercise, read, plan, meditate and/or write a journal. All you need to do in your perfect week calendar is block the time you want for these activities on your calendar. Call it your Morning routine time. (The details of what you do in that time can be added as a checklist in your notes later.)
Next look at the evening. What would you like to do?
Be careful here; you may wish to block time out for family and friends. When you do this, you are involving other people, and they will have a different agenda to you.
You could, for instance, protect 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm for family time, but be flexible. Your teenage daughter will unlikely want to spend much time with you. Your partner, on the other hand, may wish you to sit with them and talk or watch their favourite TV show.
Consider “family time” as being flexible. If no one wants to spend time with you, be available. Perhaps you could read in the same room as your family or do some chores around the house.
Next, what would you like to do later in the evening before you go to bed? Put that on your calendar.
Many of my clients enjoy playing a musical instrument, others use that time for self-study and some go out for an evening walk. Whatever you want to do, put it on your calendar.
Now, your work.
A couple of questions you can ask here are: how much time do you need to do focused work? Work that if you are consistent with will prevent backlogs and ensure you meet your deadlines.
And how much time will you allow per week for meetings?
Limiting your available meeting time is a great way to control time.
Imagine you work a forty-hour week and you want three hours a day for focused work; that would leave you with twenty-five hours each week for everything else.
If you were to limit the time you were available for meetings to fifteen hours a week, that would leave you with ten hours for all the unexpected demands that inevitably pop up. Would that be sufficient time?
Play around with these numbers and see if you can find a happy balance.
With the meeting limit once you have filled the limit for that week, you only offer meeting times for the following week.
As this is your perfect week, you can fix times when you are available and when you are not.
Once you have completed your perfect week, does that look like a week you would be happy living?
One adjustment I made to mine was on a Monday. My calls begin early—well, early for me—meaning I need to wake up at 6:15. That’s much earlier than usual. I discovered I was not able to work effectively after around 11:00 am. So, I added a ninety-minute nap window from 11:00 am. That worked perfectly for me.
Now, once you have created your perfect week, turn on your other calendars. Where do things align? You will probably find some activities already aligned, but some will be wildly out
Your mission now—should you choose to accept it—is to align your real calendar with your perfect week one.
This mission will not happen instantly; aligning things may take several months, but it gives you a purpose and goal.
What happens if, after doing this exercise, you discover there are not enough hours in the week to do everything you want to do?
Most people find this after completing this exercise.
It is worth remembering you do not have to do everything all at once.
You could take a course on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and go to your Pilates class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. Perhaps you could do your weekly planning on a Saturday morning instead of a Sunday evening.
This is about completing a puzzle. How do you fit everything into your 168 hours a week?
You can also consider making things seasonal. In the winter months, you do one activity, and in the summer, you do another type of activity. After all, the weather is generally nicer in the summer, and the days are longer.
You may even wish to use the Spring as the cleaning-up season. I do.
Designing the perfect week calendar is not about locking you into a strict structure every week. Its purpose is to help you become realistic about what you can and cannot do each day. It’s from here that you can design the kind of life you want to live.
Over the five or six years since I first did the Perfect Week exercise, I have modified it many times. For example, when I did it the first time, I had this rather ambitious idea: I would go to bed at 11:00 pm and wake up at 6:00.
That didn’t last very long. Many of my coaching calls happen late at night, and I often don’t finish until after midnight. Now, I go to bed at 1:30 am and wake up at 8:30 am (except for Mondays). That has worked for me for over a year now.
I’ve also learned that while I’ve always believed that I am a night owl, I am more focused and creative in the mornings. This led to me protecting 9:30 to 11:30 am five days a week for my focused work.
One thing you don’t want to do, Megan, is to try and squeeze everything in. That will leave you feeling exhausted. Always remember you are a living, breathing human being, not a machine.
You need breaks, you do need to stop and enjoy nature and the environment you live in. It gives your mind a rest, and it elevates your creativity and fulfilment by giving you something different to look at other than a screen.
While I am very structured, I like it that way—I still keep my afternoons free for activities I want to do in the moment. Taking my dog, Louis for his walk, doing the grocery shopping and reading, for example. Whatever needs my attention, the afternoons are when I can do it.
Learning those things was a result of doing the Perfect Week exercise.
David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, often says, “You can do anything, but you cannot do everything”, and I’ve found that’s true. That means the question becomes, what will you do?
I would also say that the end of the year is a perfect time to do this exercise. The start of a new year gives you a motivation to try things and develop the kind of week you want to live.
Thank you, Megan, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Sunday Nov 24, 2024
Sunday Nov 24, 2024
This week, why you should not be copying other people’s systems.
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Script | 347
Hello, and welcome to episode 347 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There is a lot of advice on managing your to-dos, organising your notes and controlling your calendar. And it can be tempting to copy whatever you have seen, believing if it worked for someone else, it must work for you.
Well, not so fast.
One thing I’ve learned from coaching hundreds of people is that no individual is the same. We think differently, have different jobs, and have different family lives and interests.
One example is Tiago Forte’s PARA method. It’s a great way to organise your notes, and many people swear by it. However, it never worked for me. I’m a goal-orientated person. Goals motivate me. I also define Areas of Focus differently from how Tiago defines an area.
This is why I settled on GAPRA (Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive.)
This does not mean that PARA does not work. It works, for some people. Similarly, I have coaching clients who find GAPRA works better. It all depends on how you think, like to organise things and do your work.
So, what can you do with so much conflicting advice? How can you find the methods for you? Well, before I get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, hi Carl. I’ve been a life-long follower of productivity systems and have struggled to find a system that works for me. How would you advise someone to find a way that works for them?
Hi Frank, thank you for your question.
Around 20 years ago, I began my career as an English teacher in Korea.
I had come from working a typical 9 til 5 office job and suddenly I was on the other side of the world, working from 6:30 am to 12:00 pm and 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. It was tough.
I’m not a natural morning person—never have been—so waking up at 5:00 am was a shock to my system.
It wasn’t long before I began taking naps. I would get home at 12:30, and go straight back to bed for two hours.
For the next ten years, that’s what I continued to do.
I had learned about the power of taking naps from none other than Winston Churchill. He believed that if you took a solid 90 minute nap every afternoon you would be able to get at least a day and half’s worth of work done in a day.
He wasn’t wrong. By taking an afternoon nap I found I was full of energy when teaching in the evening and was able to spend an hour preparing for my next day’s classes when I got home in the evening.
Yet, I knew Churchill took his naps between 3:30 pm and 5:00 pm. That didn’t work for me. So I adapted it to work better for me.
Likewise, back in 2016 or so, I read Robin Sharma’s brilliant 5 AM Club book. I was sold. I thought, okay, let’s give this a try.
For those of you not familiar with the 5 AM Club, this is where you wake up at 5:00 AM and do twenty minutes of exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of learning. It’s solid way to begin your day.
Yet, I had a problem. I’ve never been comfortable exercising in the morning. So, I adapted it. I did twenty minutes journal writing, then ten minutes planning the day and finally studied Korean for thirty minutes.
And it worked. I was consistent for around eighteen months and I loved it.
But then I hit a problem. My coaching business began taking off and I was doing coaching calls late at night—sometimes not finishing until midnight. This meant I was trying to survive on four or five hours of sleep. Not a good thing if you want to be productive.
It then occurred to me, the “secret” to the 5 am club is not waking up at 5 am. It’s what you do immediately on waking up that matters.
Today, I wake up around 8:00 am, and start my day with a solid set of morning routines that include journal writing, some stretches and learning my email inbox. It works perfect for me. It sets me up for mostly productive days.
And that’s the key point. Whatever you learn about productivity, time management and living life doesn’t have to be followed exactly as described. We all live different lives and it can be modified to better work for you.
However, there are a few caveats here.
The first is you will not be able to break basic principles.
For instance, if you want a solid way to manage your life, you will need to collect stuff into a trusted place and not rely on your head to remember things. You will then need to spend a little time organising what you collected and finally, you need to do the work.
Yet, how you collect things and where you collect them is entirely up to you. You could use a pencil and notebook, or a sophisticated task management system. Both work.
Another principle I see people trying to break is scheduling far more than the number of hours in the day will allow.
You get 24 hours a day. That’s not going to change. The only variable you have is what you do in the time you have.
This is not as simple as you may think. Sure, it’s easy to schedule seven hours of sleep, an hour for a gym session, four hours for deep work, another three hours for spending with your family and an hour for dealing with your communications and further hour for learning.
All that looks great on a calendar. But what if you didn’t sleep well, you woke up with the start of a heavy cold and had a fight with your teenage daughter?
Yep, that’s real life hitting you in the face.
Now, hopefully that’s not going to happen to you every day, but events will always get in the way of your perfectly planned day.
It’s rare to see any kind of time management or productivity system building in buffer time. Yet, buffer time—time you keep free for the unexpected—is critical if you are to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
One way you can approach the day is to treat it as a puzzle:
Here are the twenty-four hours you have. That’s your constraint. Here’s a list of things you need to do or attend in those twenty-fours hours, now how are you going to fit everything in?
Now, it could be that I am weird, but I love solving this puzzle every day. I love it so much I do it the day before.
First, I look at my confirmed appointments—these are the fixed stakes in the ground. They help to give my day a little structure.
Then, I look at my tasks for that day. Where can I fit these in?
It’s important to know your own natural biorhythms here. When are most likely to be focused? Perhaps you find focusing on deep work in the morning easier than trying to do in the afternoon. If that’s the case, then try to protect two hours in the morning for dedicated focused work.
I should say at this point, every productive person I’ve come across does this. They protect time each day for their most important work. Authors, CEOs, top salespeople, the most successful lawyers and Olympic athletes.
The difference is no matter where they are in the command chain, they are ruthless about protecting time each day for their critical work.
Unproductive, stressed out and exhausted people don’t do this. They don’t protect time. Instead, they have a false belief that they have to be available all the time for their customers and bosses. Well, good luck with that approach. It doesn’t work, never has, and never will.
I remember a sales training session I was on, and the trainer was a former top salesperson—I believe he was formerly the number one car salesperson in the country.
He told us, we could call him at any time if we needed help. But, not before 11 am. He would not answer his phone before 11 am.
When asked why, he explained he needed those two hours in the morning to do his follow ups, and contact his customers who were due to change their car in the next three months and make sure he had appointments scheduled for the rest of the day.
I suspect this was why he was the number one salesperson. He understood how to solve the daily puzzle.
Another area that can disrupt you overall productivity is the tools you use.
There are a lot of fantastic time management and productivity tools available to us today. Many promise the impossible, but ultimately, it will always come down to how you solve the daily puzzle. In that respect, no tool will help you beyond a calendar and a list of tasks that need to be done.
I get questions every day from people asking me if it’s possible to do this or that thing. What they are really asking me is “how do I complicate things?”
Let’s be clear, all you need to know each day is what appointments you have and when and what your critical must do tasks for the day are.
Once you know this and you know you have sufficient time to complete everything, you’re good to go.
The more organising you do, the more lists you create and the more tools you use, the less time you have to get on and do the work.
I mentioned Tiago Forte’s PARA method earlier, and I remember the popularity of this when Tiago launched his book on the subject. There was a frenzy and YouTube lit u with people doing videos on how to set up this notes app or that one with the PARA method.
I could see immediately why it was so popular. It was another way to reorganise things. It gave people something to play with. In other words it gave people an excuse not to do their work.
PARA is great, but it’s not going to make you more productive or better at managing time. I use Evernote and it’s a complete mess. When I need something, I use Evernote’s powerful search.
Whether I’m looking for a client note, a reference to an idea I had several years ago or my book notes from a book I’ve read on Kindle, all I need do is type a keyword, a date range or person’s name and in less than a second I have the information in front of me.
I could spend hours each week keeping my notes up to date, summarised and organised, or I can rely on search and give me those hours to get my work done. I know what I choose.
Over the last three or four months, Todoist has introduced a calendar and start and due dates. I use neither. They don’t help me get my work done and both of those features just add more complexity to what should be a simple list.
You don’t need to use all the features an app has. Use the ones that help you to focus on your work and leave alone the ones that add more organising work.
I hope that has helped, Frank. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Sunday Nov 17, 2024
Sunday Nov 17, 2024
This week, I have a special episode for you.
A second interview with Dr Kourosh Dini.
In this episode, we talk about rationalisation and how to change our approach to many of the false beliefs that come from it.
We also discussed pens and paper and a little more about managing ADHD.
Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work.
Newsletter:
https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/
Waves of Focus
https://wavesoffocus.com/
on SMART goals
https://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/
Sunday Nov 10, 2024
Sunday Nov 10, 2024
Is it possible to expand time? Literally, no. But there is a way to find more time if you’re willing to use these techniques.
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Script | 345
Hello, and welcome to episode 345 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Common phrases you will hear are “I don’t have time” or “I wish I had more time”, and yet you already have all the time you need.
The problem is not time, the problem is often the amount of things we want to do in the time we have.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, life was simple. Find food and water, make babies and stay safe. Neglecting either of those three things would result in some serious issues—the biggest of which would be death.
Given that human evolution is slow, we are not best suited to deal with hundreds of emails and messages, requests from bosses, finding child care, commuting to and from work and all the other modern-day accessories we’ve chosen to add to our lives.
We cannot expand time, yet if we are unwilling to reduce what we want to do, we will feel overwhelmed and that more modern ailment, the fear of missing out, or FOMO.
However, there are a few techniques you can use that will give you enough time for the things you want to do if you are willing to try them.
But before I get to how, allow me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Giles. Giles asks, Hi Carl, I’ve done your “perfect week” exercise and realise that my problem is I want to do too much. There isn’t enough time in the day. Do you have any tips on fitting in hobbies and still get enough sleep?
Hi Giles, thank you for your question.
The good thing is you’ve discovered that no matter what you want to do or feel you must do, you will always be limited by the amount of time available.
And, now that you’ve done the Perfect Week calendar exercise, you can see what you have left after taking care of your work and family obligations.
One of the first realisations about finding time was when I learned of Ian Fleming’s writing routine.
Ian Fleming wrote a new book each year from 1952 to his death in 1964. He never missed a year, even in the year he had his first heart attack in 1961.
In the early years, Fleming worked For The Sunday Times as their foreign editor, yet he negotiated a two-month vacation each January and February. During those two months, he would fly off to his Jamaican home, Goldeneye and almost from the first day, would begin writing the next book from 9:30 to 12:30.
After lunch, he would nap, and then the day’s socialising would begin.
Around 4 pm, he would go back to his writing desk for an hour to review what he had written that morning, and that would be it.
Four hours a day for six weeks. That produced the first draft of his next book.
For the rest of the year, he worked his regular job in London. Dealt with any rewrites and began marketing the book that was being published that year.
If you were to analyse how Ian Fleming managed his time, he wasn’t looking at the day-to-day. He looked at the year as a whole.
He knew he needed six weeks to write a new novel each year, so he made sure those six weeks were blocked out in his diary before the new year began.
That’s just six weeks out of fifty-two.
This is similar to blocking time out for your core work. If you know you need ten hours a week to do your core work, hoping you will find the time is not a sustainable strategy. You won’t, so it will be more a case of hoping you will find the time.
Those ten hours need to be locked in each week.
Ian Fleming would never have written fourteen James Bond novels if he had “hoped” to find the time to do so. He had to find the time and then protect it.
You have 168 hours a week and twenty-four each day. Squeezing everything into those twenty-four hours will be tough—almost impossible. Yet, if you were to schedule for the week, where you have 168 hours, things become possible.
I see many people anxiously trying to find family time every day. It would be nice if you could do that, but you are dealing with other people and your 6 to 9 pm might not be convenient for them.
Instead, you could agree with your family that certain days or evenings are for family time. For instance, my wife and I ensure that Wednesday afternoons and Saturday evenings are protected for family time.
It’s lovely because while it is flexible, there’s no need for us to be trying to schedule time. It’s already protected.
This is all about expanding time. Looking at an individual day is tough; there are a lot of emergencies and unknowns that pop up. However, if you were to establish what you want time for each week (or month), block the time out so you know you have the time to do it, you will always have the flexibility to move things around if things change.
For example, this week, my wife had an exam to do on Wednesday afternoon, so we rescheduled our family day out to Thursday. All I needed to do was to move a few of my other commitments around so I could still get all my work done that week.
You can apply the same principles to your work commitments. If you require ten hours a week to get your core work done—the work you are employed to do, not the work you volunteer to do—you can pre-protect that time on your calendar.
Now, I know many people will object and say they cannot do this because they have to attend meetings.
That’s fine. Let me ask you a question. What will do more to get the project completed? Having a meeting about the project or working on the project?
If the project objectives have been communicated clearly and roles defined, meetings should not be needed.
One of the best ways to regain time is to become less accessible. Most people’s time management problems start by being too accessible. Of course, this will depend on the type of work you do. A salesperson, for instance, should be accessible to their customers. But perhaps not necessarily be as accessible to their admin departments or even their sales manager. If you’re producing the results, I can promise you your sales manager will leave you alone.
When I first began teaching time management and productivity, I was available on all social media channels. I was on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and email. Just to stay on top of all those channels was taking me three hours a day. I don’t have three hours a day to manage all those channels.
So, now I push everyone towards email. I have a process for dealing with email. Over the years, I have refined it to a point where I can handle over a hundred emails in less than an hour.
And the final point to make here, Giles, is you don’t have to do everything now.
Imagine If there’s a period each year when things go a little quiet at work. Perhaps in the summer, it’s quieter than at other times of the year. Maybe July and August is a good time for you to do some of the bigger projects. Then, when you enter the busy times of the year, you can work on the smaller projects.
One way you can do this is to use a tool such as Todoist, Asana, or Trello that allows you to create boards. You can then create four columns and spread out the activities you want to do.
For example, in quarter 1, I focus on my biggest projects of the year; I like to kick off the year with a bang. Q2 is focused more on processes and making them more effective and efficient.
Seeing everything I want to accomplish over the year organised in quarters stops me from becoming anxious about all the things I want to do.
This also gives you a plan for the year, which in turn helps you to be more focused.
Again, you can be flexible here. Feel free to move projects around the year so you are working on the right projects at the right time.
Time can be your friend or enemy. If you don’t harness it, it will be your enemy. If you take control of it, you will find you do have sufficient time for the things you want to do. Perhaps not this week or next, but when you look at things over a quarter or a year, many things become possible.
I know some of you would like to build an exercise programme into your life. Yet the thought of joining a gym, or yoga class puts you off because you have go to the gym, spend an hour exercising, then shower. After all that it will have eaten up two hours of your time.
You don’t have to do all that—certainly not initially. You could do some bodyweight exercises at home or go out for a walk. That won’t take up much of your time. I do twenty minutes every day at home.
As your fitness improves, then you may wish to add a few gym sessions. But that’s not a requirement of being fit and healthy.
I hope that has helped Giles. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too. It just remains for me to wish you a very very productive week.
Sunday Nov 03, 2024
Sunday Nov 03, 2024
Backlogs… A rather bigger part of life that we probably wish wasn’t. Did you know that there are three types of backlog, two of which you don’t really need to worry too much about? Let me explain.
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Script | 344
Hello, and welcome to episode 344 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Let’s be honest: somewhere in our carefully organised lives, backlogs will build. It could be email, the ever-increasing list of house repairs, or the daily admin life generates.
With everything going on in our lives, it would be easy to believe that finding the time to stop these backlogs from growing is impossible.
Yet, when you understand the three types of backlogs, you can develop a process that stops the backlog from growing.
The three types are the growing backlog, the stalled backlog and the shrinking one.
You don’t need to worry about the shrinking backlog. It’s doing what you want it to do—shrinking. That could be getting your receipts together in preparation for doing your taxes. You’re gathering and sorting them, so the backlog is shrinking. This generally happens when the tax submission season is almost upon us.
The stalled backlog is also a little less urgent. It’s not growing, but you need to watch it carefully because this kind of backlog can start snowballing—house or car repairs, for example, often do this.
The most dangerous backlog is the growing one. This often happens with email and admin tasks and can occur when you try to expand your business too fast without adding resources.
Before we go any further, let me first hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janice. Janice asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to get my life organised but don’t have time because I have so many things to do. My email’s a mess, and every weekend, I spend all day cleaning up my home. How do you get on top of things when you are far behind?
Hi Janine, thank you for sending in your question.
This is a tough one. It can feel like we are stuck between wanting to get ourselves organised and realising that we have such a big backlog of stuff to do that it would take several months to break even—so to speak.
The strategy here is to first determine what kind of backlog you’re dealing with. Is it growing, stalled, or shrinking?
If it’s shrinking, keep doing what you are already doing. It’s shrinking, so it’s doing what you want it to do. Don’t stop.
The one that needs immediate attention is the growing one.
Imagine that you have over a few thousand emails in your inbox. It’s making finding important emails slow and cumbersome, and you want to get it cleared.
The challenge is that more emails appear every day, and that number is not fixed. Some days, you may receive 150+ new emails, while other days, perhaps it’s eighty. Either way, until you can achieve a net gain—i.e., processing and clearing more emails than come in—the backlog will continue to grow.
With email, I would first clear out the older emails. There will be a point where you’ve ignored an email for so long that it would be embarrassing to respond to it now. Where is that point?
For me, that’s two weeks. It would be embarrassing for me to respond to any email that’s been sitting around for two weeks or more. You may be more tolerant than I am. You may be happy responding to emails older than a month or two. Where is your limit?
Once you know your limit, take any email older than your limit and move it to a new folder in your email program called “Old inbox”. This way, nothing has been lost, and you can go through that list when you have time. That list will no longer be growing. You’ve put a stop to it.
Now, to prevent the backlog from growing, you will need to clear whatever emails remain in your inbox first, so you start from zero.
Now, here’s where you will need to be cautious of FOMO—the fear of missing out. This can paralyse you because you are fearful that you might be deleting something important. Fear not. Always remember with email if you have been sent something there will be a copy of it somewhere.
If for whatever reason you do need something you’ve deleted, you can reach out to a colleague and get a copy.
One of disadvantages of digitalization is we no longer see things piling up. Back in the day when most of what came across our desks was paper, it was very easy to see backlogs growing. The pile was physical and you could see it. With digital, it’s very easy to go into Ostrich mode. (Although ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand)—this is the out of sight, out of mind theory.
When I was working in a law firm in the late 90s, the majority of communications were through letters. Each day I would get in the region of a hundred to hundred and fifty pieces of mail. That needed processing. The advantage was I could see it all in my physical inbox and my goal was the clear that by the end of the day.
With email, the only way to see it is to open my inbox. That makes it easy to ignore it—which surprise surprise creates backlogs.
Admin is another area where backlogs can grow. Like communications, admin will grow each day if you are not dealing with it consistently.
This can be keeping your receipts organised, maintaining your company’s CRM system or, in the medical profession, keeping patient notes up-to-date.
If you are not protecting time for these each day, backlogs will grow.
If you’ve watched the brilliant film, Apollo 13, or read about that incredible story, one thing that will strike you is the astronauts followed checklists and routines to ensure everything was working as it should be.
The cause of the catastrophic explosion on board Apollo 13 was a simple routine task of stirring the oxygen tasks.
Astronauts are highly intelligent people. Yet, they know they cannot rely on remembering to do important routine tasks. They use checklists.
The same goes for pilots, surgeons and the military.
Each have checklists for daily mundane tasks that if not done will result in backlogs or something much worse.
You too can do something similar. Think of a shift at work as having a few key parts to it. Meetings, focused work and then routine work. Your routine work will likely be responding to actionable emails and messages, updating any internal customer management systems and your own admin.
This means estimating how much time you need for each of these activities.
The good thing here is you already have the data. How long, on average does it take you to update your company’s internal client relationship management system? How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications?
You can only work with averages here, but averages are enough. Some days you will get more than your average, yet other days you will get less.
If you’ve never measured how long it takes you, give yourself a week to track how much time you need in these areas. Again, you can only work with averages but that will give you an indication of how much time to protect each day for getting your work done.
One area I find people resisting this change is work they perceive as being more important. Meetings for example, seem to have a disproportionate level of importance. Sure, if you have a meeting with an important client, that will likely be more important than staying on top of your admin. But what about all those internal meetings? Are they really important or are you just showing up to show your face?
I cannot imagine a pilot or surgeon skipping their pre-flight or pre-operation checklist because they have an internal meeting. That would be a firing offense. So why do you do it?
We all will be different here, but I find if I spend an hour a day on my communications and thirty minutes on admin, I will, on the whole, end the week with no backlogs—certainly nothing overwhelming. That’s just ninety minutes a day. Ninety minutes that prevents stress, anxiety and missing something important.
Now, there will be some days when that will not be possible. Days when I am travelling, for instance, often mean it’s difficult to sit down and deal with my communications and admin. However, it’s worth working on the principle that one is greater than zero, so spending twenty minutes on communications and perhaps ten minutes on admin helps to keep things from spiralling out of control.
Yet, perhaps the most important thing is to identify where backlogs occur in your life. That would be the first step.
One area I never thought of was household chores. It’s easy to ignore that pile of washing in the corner of the bathroom until you find you have no clean underwear. Then it becomes an issue.
Now, on Tuesday’s and Saturdays, I do the laundry. It’s only fifteen minutes, but ensures I have a supply of clean clothes at all times. Plus, I can do it in between sessions of work. It gets me away from the screen and is far better for my eyes.
And I hate coming into the office and not having a clean coffee mug. Now, before I leave the office for the day, I will ensure the cups and tea pot are washed and ready for the next day. That’s less than five minutes a day.
One tip on dealing with the stalled backlog. Because it’s stalled you don’t have the same sense of urgency. Yet, it still needs to be dealt with. What you may find works is to identify it when you do your weekly planning and allocate a little extra time the following week to deal with it.
For example, if you have a pile of documents that need to be processed from last month, give yourself thirty minutes or so around you lunch time or mid-afternoon to work on it. Depending on how big it is, you will find that within a week or two that backlog has gone.
I hope that has helped Janine.Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Sunday Oct 27, 2024
Sunday Oct 27, 2024
What can you do to simplify your productivity system to keep you focused on what’s important each day? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script | 343
Hello, and welcome to episode 343 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Oh dear, I seem to have opened up a storm with some people with one of my recent YouTube videos on managing a task manager.
That also resulted in a few questions about keeping a system simple.
The question is, what is a time management and productivity system meant to do for you?
The answer is easy—to inform you of what needs to be done and ensure you are prepared and in the right place at the right time.
When you strip productivity systems down to their basics, as long as your calendar is accurate and tells you where you need to be and when, and you have a way to see what tasks you should be working on today, you have a system that works.
Yet, it can be tempting to want more. A way to organise tasks by your energy levels or to know how many days are left until the deadline is reached, for example.
The problem here is that you have no idea what your energy levels will be, and deadlines change… A lot… and for the most part, they are arbitrarily added, which means you know they are not real deadlines—ah, more fiddling.
While all these extras are nice, there is a danger of becoming dependent on them. That’s when it becomes a slippery slope. They pull you into fiddling with your tools, which prevents you from doing the work you need to do.
Which ultimately means you don’t have time for the things you want time for.
So, this week, a very simple question and for that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Martha. Martha asks, Hi Carl, how would you make productivity simpler?
Hi Martha, thank you for your question.
The first place I would start is to clean up and organise my calendar. It’s your calendar you refer to when you need to know where to be and what you are committed to doing.
This involves removing conflicts. Conflicts occur when your calendar shows two meetings at the same time or your next meeting begins before a previous meeting ends.
You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one. If you have a meeting start before you are able to get there, inform the meeting organiser so they can either accept your late arrival or move the meeting to a more convenient time.
The sooner you do this, the better it is for everyone concerned.
I use a scheduling service for my coaching client appointments. That service will not allow any conflicts to occur and automatically puts in a ten-minute buffer between meetings.
That’s always a good practice to follow. Make sure you have buffer time between meetings. Meetings occasionally overrun, and you need to reset yourself before the next meeting.
The next step is hard for many people. Throughout our working lives we’ve become conditioned to be available at all times for our customers and bosses. And while you should not ignore these people, you are employed to do a specific job.
I know it’s become common for companies to create job titles and job descriptions in the vaguest possible ways but underneath that vagueness, there will be a set of core work activities we are expected to do—what was once called “our duties”.
What are your duties? What do you need to ensure is done on time each day or week? That’s your core work. What does doing your core work look like at a task level?
For example, if you were employed as a construction worker (a vague job title) and were given the responsibility to build the perimeter wall. At a task level, laying bricks would be your core work.
Now within that, they may be other tasks such as ensuring you have a sufficient supply of bricks and cement and that you laid the guide lines to ensure the bricks were laid straight. What do those activities look like at a task level. What do you need to do (and how frequently) to order bricks and cement?
By looking at things from a task level, you put yourself in a better position to estimate how much time you need to complete your work.
For instance, if you find you need to place an order for bricks and cement every Monday morning and it takes you thirty minutes to do that task, you can create a thirty-minute block of time for admin every Monday morning.
If you must place the order before 10:00 AM, then you may decide to create a time block every Monday morning called “ordering” and use that time to order any other supplies you may need that week at that time.
What you need to order can then be held in a note you add to throughout the week so you have everything fully complete the task on Monday morning.
That then leaves you free to focus on building the wall.
Taking the time to establish your core work gives you a way to automate prioritising. Core work always takes priority. It’s what you will be evaluated on if you are employed, and it’s how you earn your living if you are self-employed.
Where your calendar comes in to all this is once you have established your core work, make sure you have time protected for doing that work each week. Core work rarely changes, after all, it’s what you are employed to do. The details will change—I don’t write the same blog post or make the same YouTube video each week—but the work doesn’t change unless your job changes.
And I use the word “protected” deliberately here. If you give up that time for another meeting, or something that’s fleetingly urgent, you will still need to catch up somewhere.
To give you a benchmark, through my coaching programme and when I analyze my own core work, in total most people require between fifteen and twenty-hours a week for their core work.
If you are working an average thirty-five hour week, that still leaves you with fifteen to twenty hours for meetings and voluntary work.
There will be other “duties”. Managing your communications and daily admin, for example. If you were to protect ninety-minutes a day for these activities, that still leaves you with seven to fourteen hours a week for all the unknowns.
This is why your calendar is the most powerful tool in your productivity toolbox.
What about task lists? These are still helpful. Apple probably called their to-do list the best way—Reminders. Ultimately, if you have established what your core work is, and protected sufficient time on your calendar to get that work done, your task list is there to remind you of the things you want to complete that day.
You tasks will fall into three categories. The must dos. These must be done at some point in the day. If you promised to call a customer back today, then you must do it. You promised.
Then there are the should do tasks. These are the tasks that while don’t necessarily need to be done today, getting them done will ease the pressure on the rest of the week. Most tasks fall into this category.
If you were to give yourself twenty must do tasks today, and you are already committed to five hours of meetings, you won’t be going to bed tonight. You “must do” those tasks. So when you choose your must dos make sure you limit them to two or three tops.
And finally there are the could do tasks. These are context based tasks. For instance if you have to visit a customer in the east of the city and that’s where the pet supermarket is, you could call in after you meeting to buy dog food for your dog. Buying the dog food would be a category three task—it’s context based.
Now all this only works if you are consistently doing your daily and weekly planning sessions. Failure to do these will mean you miss opportunities to do your category three tasks and you will be unclear when deadlines are due.
The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to stop and look at the bigger picture of what’s going on in your life. Perhaps you’re attending your cousin’s wedding next month and you need to buy an outfit. If you’re not doing a weekly planning session it would be easy to miss that commitment and that will leave you rushing to buy something a few days before.
The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to reset and ensure you are doing the right things at the right time.
The daily planning session is simply checking your calendar for your appointments and comparing that with your scheduled tasks for tomorrow. Do you have a doable day? If you have five or six hours of meetings or are scheduled to attend a training session, having twenty to thirty tasks on your task list for the day would mean you have an impossible day.
It’s better to learn that when you can do something about it. You could reduce your task list or if you need to do something important, you may need to reschedule a meeting. The person you’re meeting will appreciate that and it demonstrates how organised you are. Win win in my view.
And that’s it. Focus on making sure your calendar is up to date and accurate—that’s the driver of your day.
Your core work and appointments Come first, then tasks. If you need time to complete a particularly important or urgent task, make sure you protect the time on your calendar.
And to make sure it all works, do your daily and weekly planning sessions consistently. And on the daily planning, I don’t know how anyone could start their day not know what they want to accomplish that day. Knowing gives you energy and a determination to get it done.
I hope that has helped, Martha. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Sunday Oct 20, 2024
Sunday Oct 20, 2024
Did you know that your calendar is the only productivity tool that can protect you from burning out and overcommitting yourself and, if used correctly, help you bring balance into your life? No? Well, let me explain in this week’s podcast.
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Script | 342
Hello, and welcome to episode 342 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Professor Barry Schwartz explains how too many choices can slow us down, create confusion and reduce sales.
You can see this in recent times with the explosion in new productivity apps. Thirty years ago, the only tools you had to manage your time and your work were diaries.
There was a lot of different styles to choose from, but the price point of these diaries helped to make choosing a diary reasonably simple.
Many companies gave away diaries as gifts to customers, some issued all their staff with one, while some people would go out an buy their own—I was one of those.
Yet because a diary can only show you the same thing—your twenty-four hours or seven days—people were much more focused on the doing part, and less on collecting and organising. And let’s be honest, if all you have is a diary, there not a lot of organising you can do.
While we now have digital calendars, task managers and notes apps, really only two things have changed. The speed at which we can collect information and the increase in the number of potential tools we can use to help our productivity.
Unfortunately, that increase in productivity tools has caused a lot of confusion. Many people confuse events—something that happens at a specific time on a given date—and tasks—something that can be done at any time.
When that happens, the only outcome is going to be overwhelm and a lot of rescheduling. Not a very productive way to go about your day.
This week’s question goes to the heart of this issue. So, without further a do, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weeks’ question.
This week’s question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, hi Carl, I’m very interested in your ideas around how to use a calendar versus using a to-do list. Could you explain your thinking around this?
Hi Jeff, I certainly can.
In Your Time, Your Way, I mentioned when I visit companies I notice that those people who began their careers in the early to mid 1990s are generally more organised than their younger colleagues.
Of course that’s not a scientific observation, but I wonder if that’s down to how large corporations in the 1990s often sent their staff on time management training courses. You don’t hear of those courses much today.
It’s also likely that those who began in the 1990s developed solid time management practices and have not changed their approach much over the years. I’m sure they’ve switched over the a digital calendar, but a lot still carry round note books.
I remember seeing an interview with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, in around 2015. He was interviewed in his then office, and while there was an iMac on his desk and a MacBook Pro on a table behind him, there was also a notebook and pen. This was after the Apple Pencil had come out, which, in theory, meant he no longer needed to carry a notebook and pen.
Tim Cook will have begun his career in the mid to late 80s, and while at IBM, he will have been sent on a time management course—I do believe, IBM worked with the Franklin Quest organisation back then—which meant he will have gone through his career with a solid knowledge of time management principles.
So, that’s a little background. Now, how do we use our calendars today so we are operating at our most productive each day?
Well, first we need to know to difference between a task or to-do and an event.
A task or to-do is something you can do at anytime. For example, if you need to respond to a question from a client via email, you could do that at 9:15 am or 2:35 pm. There’s no fixed time. Similarly, if you want to finish off a report for your boss, you could do that at 10:00 am or 3:20 pm.
As long as you finish the report today—your plan, it doesn’t really matter when in the day you finish the report.
And event on the other hand is time specific. If you have a meeting with your boss at 10:00 am in your boss’s office. You’d better be there at 10:00 am.
If it takes you thirty-five minutes to get to your office, that means you will need to leave your home around 9:15 am to be sure you will be at your boss’s office by 10:00 am.
A wise person would block 9:15 am 10:00 am for travel time as well as the meeting time on their calendar.
That’s basics.
Now, given that your calendar is about specifics, and your task manager is about options, we can better manage all the stuff coming at us.
Your calendar can be used as a very powerful tool if you trust it. By trusting your calendar, I mean that you don’t ignore it. That you check it each morning to see what you are committed to and if you cannot do something, you will reschedule it.
One way to get the most out of your calendar is to use a method called time blocking. Time blocking does not mean you block every hour of your day, what it means is if you need two hours to work on that report, you would block the time out on your calendar.
You can become very tactical here too.
One way is to establish when you are at your most focused. Most people will either be early birds or night owls. According to author Daniel Pink, only around 3% of the population are at the most focused in the afternoons.
If say you are more focused in the morning, you can block two-hours out between 9:30 and 11:30 am for “focused work”.
This means, that each morning between 9:30 and 11:30, nobody can schedule appointments with you. Your calendar is blocked for doing your most important tasks.
Knowing that you have this time protected does a lot for your stress levels. You know you have two uninterrupted hours for getting on with your work.
And often, having two uninterrupted hours for doing critical work is all you need to stay on top of your projects.
Unless you are nomadic, it’s likely that being able to block the same time each day for focused work will be difficult. There will always be a need for flexibility. Yet, if you were only able to protect two-hours three times a week, you would still have six hours of uninterrupted time each week.
Imagine what you could do in those six hours.
I protect two hours each morning for writing on a Monday and Tuesday, and the four hours is enough for me to get all my writing done for the week. Occasionally, I will need to move things around, but for the most part, those times are fixed and that gives me the confidence that I have sufficient time each week to get my committed writing projects complete.
What all this means is your calendar is the hub for everything you do. It will tell you if you have enough time for doing your work, and where you need to be on any given day.
If you need to collect your daughter from School on Thursday at 4:00 pm, that will be on your calendar. If it takes you thirty minutes to get to your daughter’s school, you would block time from 3:30 pm to collect her.
This also means you would be unwise to schedule a meeting after 3:00 pm (meetings have a habit of overrunning). You would not be focused in the meeting, you’ll be clock watching and stressed.
Instead, you could use the thirty-minutes to respond to your communications, or even plan the next day.
You calendar should also be the first thing you look at when you plan your day. Whatever’s on your calendar is fixed. You’re committed to it.
If you see you have six or seven hours of meetings today, how much time will you have for your tasks? Not much.
If you begin the day, with six hours of meetings and a task list of thirty or more tasks, your day’s broken before it’s begun. You won’t be able to do everything on your task list and attend all those meetings.
Either you cancel meetings or your remove some of the tasks, leaving only the critical ones.
Today, for example, I have five hours of meetings and my to-do list has five tasks. It’s still going to be a busy day, but it’s doable… Just. I suspect already, that one or two of those tasks will be pushed off to another day.
I don’t care. The most important parts of my day are the confirmed appointments.
If I find myself with some critical tasks that must be done, then I will have to find time on my calendar to do them. I’m comfortable rescheduling meetings if necessary to complete an important piece of work. You should be too.
Your calendar is never going to lie to you. It only shows the 24 hours you get each day. How you use those hours is largely up to you. If you open up your calendar to everyone, there’s no point in complaining you don’t have time. You do have time. By allowing other people to schedule meetings with you without first consulting you, you are allowing g them to steal your time.
If you need time for exercise, to be at your son’s school concert or to finish any important piece of work, it’s on you to protect that time on your calendar.
Your task manager and notes app will not help you here. You can throw a hundred tasks into your task manager and date them for tomorrow And tomorrow you will have a hundred tasks to complete.
You task manager will never tell you that you don’t have time to do all those tasks. Only you calendar will do that.
So there you go, Jeff. That’s how to use a calendar. It’s your connection with the real world. It never lies to you and it’s a tool you need to be in control of.
Thank you for your question, Jeff, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very very productive week.
Sunday Oct 06, 2024
Sunday Oct 06, 2024
Is there a gulf between what you want and where you are? That’s what we are looking at today.
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Script | 341
Hello, and welcome to episode 341 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Many time management and pro ductivity problems result from a disconnect between one’s goals and what one is prepared to sacrifice to achieve them.
If you want to spend more time with your family yet are not prepared to say no to working beyond your regular working hours, there is a disconnect.
If you want to lose twenty pounds yet are not willing to cut back on sugary treats and exercise a little, there is a disconnect.
And, if you want to be more productive yet are unwilling to protect time on your calendar for doing the work you want to productively do, there is a disconnect.
It is sad to watch people desperately scramble for any excuse for not doing the things they say they want to do. It’s easy to find excuses, but much harder to be honest with yourself and accept that whatever you say is important to you is not important at all.
As the saying goes, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”.
Worthwhile goals take time. Often, you will need to learn new skills, gain experience and build endurance. There will be setbacks and sacrifices to be made. And, of course, time to be found.
That’s all part of what makes achieving goals exciting. If it were easy to achieve your goals, you would feel empty and unfulfilled and likely not bother trying to improve yourself.
It’s an interesting topic, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Suzie. Suzie asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to find the time to do everything I want to do. I’ve done your Perfect Week exercise but never seem to be able to fit everything into my week. My Perfect week looks great; my real week is a mess. Is there anything else I can do to fit more into my week?
Hi Suzie,
Thank you for your question.
This is something I come across a lot in my coaching programme. An ambitious person discovers there are not enough hours in the day to do everything they want to do.
Often, it’s someone who works a full-time job from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, who wants to exercise for an hour every day and start their own side business in the evening.
Now, all of that is possible, but it won’t be if you also want to spend time with your family, go out every weekend with your friends and watch episodes of your favourite TV show each evening.
As David Allen says, you can do anything you want, but you cannot do everything.
One of the first things you can do is to begin with the basics. How much time do you need to sleep and eat? Typically, people require between six and eight hours of sleep each day.
If you sacrifice sleeping time, what’s going to happen? You’ll first become tired and easily distracted; if you continue not getting enough sleep, you will become sick. How will that help you do the things you want to do?
So, get the basics right first. For any human to operate at their optimum level, they need the right amount of sleep, healthy food and some exercise each day.
Lack of sleep, poor-quality food, and sitting around all day will destroy your energy levels, mess with your emotions, and result in you not getting very much done. Get those three things right first.
The next step is to look at your calendar. Where can you protect time for doing what is most important to you? This will depend on what it is you want to do.
For instance, if you want to start building your own business, you may only be able to do this in the evenings after work. Perhaps, if you are more of a morning person, the only time available might be early in the morning.
Author John Grisham used to write his books before going to work in the morning. He’d wake up at 4:30 and write for two hours before getting ready for work.
However, it comes down to how much you are willing to sacrifice to pursue your goals. If waking up at 4:30 AM is not something you are willing to do to work on your business dream, that’s fine. Nobody will judge you. That’s simply a choice you have made.
There’s very little I would wake up at 4:30 AM for.
This isn’t just about our dreams and goals. Perhaps you want to be a great parent—who doesn’t? What does being a great parent look like?
Maybe you decide to have a family meal every evening at 7:00 pm, where you talk with your kids about their day and what they learned is important. Doing this is not impossible.
Yet, if you also value your career and rarely make it home before 7:00 PM, what are you elevating above being a great parent?
These are hard truths we are often afraid to address. Yet, if you want to live the life you want, you need to face them. What is more important, your relationship with your children or your career?
Again, there’s no judgment here, and the choices you make are entirely yours to make. But some choices need to be made to have that feeling of fulfilment.
The work vs family dilemma has always been fascinating to me.
Often, when you look deeply at it, it’s not really about the work itself; it’s the fear of being unpopular at work. Saying no to colleagues asking for help with their work so you can finish a project you’re working on risks being unpopular.
We worry about what our colleagues will think of us if we refuse to help them with their work. So we say yes to helping them, which means we need more time to finish our work.
And because time is fixed, that means the extra time we need to finish our work must come from the time we would ordinarily spend with our family. And after all, our family will understand, won’t they? Won’t they?
Another one is the importance of taking care of your health today to live an active and healthy retirement. When we’re in our thirties and forties, most people don’t worry about this at all. We prioritise our careers and social life above our long-term health.
Yet, if you were to visit a doctor and they told you that if you don’t change your diet and get some exercise, you will be dead in six months, the chances are you will make significant changes. Suddenly, your career and social life become less important than your health.
If you were to think about it for a few minutes, getting a little exercise and being more mindful about your diet is not difficult. It’s a choice you can make today.
All of this is why spending some time looking at your areas of focus and deciding what is important to you as a person is critical. Without knowing what is important to you, you will drift from one thing to the next.
This means defining what family and relationships mean to you. How does that fit with your career goals, finances, lifestyle, life experiences, and purpose?
These are important questions, and if you were to spend time defining what they mean to you, knowing where to spend your time will naturally follow.
What are you willing to sacrifice to live life on your terms?
Is the risk of upsetting your boss by not responding to her text message immediately worth it to spend undisturbed time with your family? Or is serving your customer professionally worth risking being late to a meeting with your colleagues and becoming unpopular?
When you know what your areas of focus mean to you, these choices are easy to make. You, in effect, make the decisions before they need to be made.
The upside to this is you gain respect. Not just respect for you and your values but also for your time.
The real danger is wanting more than you are willing to sacrifice for.
Building a business takes a lot of time and effort - are you willing to sacrifice time with your friends and family to build that business?
To stay organized and on top of your work, you have to say no to many people. Are you willing to say no to new things to keep up with the work you are paid to do?
To spend more time with your family, you need to reduce your work time. Is that a sacrifice you are willing to make?
Being more productive is never about doing more. It’s about knowing what is important to you and spending the appropriate time needed there. It means you must be comfortable saying no and not worrying about being unpopular or occasionally upsetting people.
After all, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time. You can only please some of the people some of the time.”
So, Suzie, before you go back to your “perfect week” calendar, spend some time with your areas of focus and prioritise what is important to you right now. Define what each of those areas means to you.
Once you have done that, return to your perfect week calendar and ensure you have enough time for the things you most value in your life.
I promise you that if you do that, you will feel more fulfilled, more focused, and much more productive.
I hope that has helped. Thank you so much for sending in your question and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.