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The ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Script | 369

Hello, and welcome to episode 369 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

I’ve often answered questions on this podcast about the best or most effective time management or productivity system, but I don’t think I’ve answered a question about the best practices before.

A practice is something you do each day. It’s just what you do. You don’t need to think about it. It’s automatic. And there is something that the most productive people I’ve come across do each day, that I find people struggling with their management of time don’t do.

In many ways, becoming more productive and better at managing time is a two-fold practice. It’s the strict control of your calendar and being intentional about what you do each day.

Yet to get to those practices each day, takes a change in attitude and the squashing of some pre-conceived ideas.

And that is what we’ll be looking at in today’s episode.

Before we get to the question, just a quick heads up. The European time zone friendly Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming next weekend. Sunday the 18th and 25th May.

If you want to finally have a time management and productivity system that works for you, and have an opportunity to work with me and a group of like-minded people, then join us next Sunday. I will put the link for further information into 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 Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, what do you consider to be the best daily habits for living a productive life?

Hi Mark, thank you for your question.

This is something that has always fascinated me about the way people work. What is it that the most productive people do that unproductive people don’t do.

Surprisingly it’s not work longer hours. That’s usually the domain of unproductive people.

What the most productive people do is to have a few daily rituals that are followed every day.

Let’s start with the easiest one. Have a solid morning routine. It’s your morning routine that sets you up for the day.

Cast your mind back to a day in your past when you overslept and had to rush out the door to get to work. How productive were you that day? Probably not very. You will have been in a reactive state all day, treating anything and everything as urgent.

The “secret” is to use your morning routine to put you in a proactive state. That means looking at your calendar for your appointments for the day and identifying what you must get done that day.

Then mentally mapping out when you will do your work.

For instance, today I have seven hours of meetings. That does not leave me much time to write this podcast script. Yet, when I began my day, I looked at where my appointments were, saw I had an hour mid morning free and a further hour in the afternoon between 4 and 5 pm.

Two hours is enough to get the bulk of this script written. Now all I have to do is resist all demands on my time today so I can get this script written. That’s the challenge. Resisting demands.

Resisting demands on my time today is reasonably easy. Seven hours of meetings is about my limit anyway. So if someone requests an additional meeting, it’ll be quite easy to tell them I am fully booked today and I can offer them an alternative day and time.

And that’s a mindset shift I would recommend to you. Know where your limits are and to be comfortable offering alternative days and times. If the person demanding your time insists and is in a more senior position to you (does that really happen today?), then you can decide which of your other meetings you could postpone.

If your day is full of meetings, make sure you task list reflects that. What I see a lot of people doing is having a day full of meetings and a full task list. Yeah, right. That’s not going to happen.

For most of us the confirmed, committed meetings will be the priority. Tasks will not be. So, on days when you have a lot of meetings, reduce your task list. That will immediately remove anxiety and give you more focus for your meetings.

Next up, is to not use the excuse of a busy day to not do your communications.

Email and messages build up very quickly. Just one day neglecting these means tomorrow you will need double the time to get back in control.

The goal here is to protect time each day for dealing with your actionable emails and messages. If all you have is thirty minutes, take it. It’s surprising how much you can do in thirty minutes. That’s a lot better than having to try and find two or three hours the next day to get on top of an out-of-control inbox.

Email and messages are the things that are apt to throw you off a well planned day. Yet, it’s surprisingly easy to get on top of these if you were to make it a daily practice to spend thirty minutes or more dealing with your actionable emails.

The next tip I’ve picked up from super-productive people is to group similar tasks together. This technique has a few different names. Batching and chunking are two of them.

What you are doing is grouping similar tasks together and working on them as one task. For instance, if you have a lot of messages to respond to, you would call that your communication time and do them all at once.

This is quite easy with email as you can stay within one app to do the work. You can do this with writing proposals. If you have five or six proposals to write, then schedule time for writing proposals. Don’t look at each individual proposal as a single task. See the activity of writing proposals as one task.

This way you are working with time. You could set aside an hour or two for doing your proposals and after your allocated time is up, move on to the next category.

For example, a sales person, may decide that between 9:30 and 11:00 am, they will do their follow-ups and prospecting, then from 11:30 am do their appointments for the day.

Sure, there may be days when a customer can only see you early in the day, and you can move your follow-up and prospecting time to a little later in the day, but what you want to be doing is trying to set up a structure to you day. It just makes your life that little bit easier.

The problem with most to-do lists is that they are just that— a list of random things that may or may not need to be done today. If you were to allocate time for doing different types of work, you’re going to be pretty much up to date with most things.

It’s unlikely you will be able to avoid backlogs completely. But if you are consistently doing your important work, nothing is going to get out of control.

I think of this very much like running an airport. You’ve got flights taking off and landing all day. Yet, in the air traffic control centre, you can only land one plane at a time. This means around all commercial airports you will see what is called a holding pattern. This is where planes are circling waiting to be given permission to land.

Once a plane is given that permission, it comes into land.

Well, you are like that airport. You can only work one piece of work at a time. Everything else waiting for your attention needs to be held in a holding pattern.

And like an airport, aircraft in difficulties or running low on fuel will take priority over others. You too, will have little emergencies and urgencies, and you can decide which piece of work has the priority while you are working on the category you are currently working on.

This is why ultimately your calendar is your most important productivity tool. That’s directing your day. It tells you where you need to be at what time. It also tells you where you have time for doing your tasks.

If you leave things open, it’s likely to be stolen by low value stuff or other people. Making it a practice to plan your day using your calendar, ensures that you have the time to do what needs to be done and if you don’t do it, there’s only one person to blame—you.

Never ignore your calendar. Reschedule, by all means, but never ignore it. It’s your calendar that will ensure you know when to leave to pick your son up from school, and what time that appointment with an important client is.

The final part is to know what your non-negotiables are. These are the things you will never miss. For example, three things I will never miss are writing my journal each morning, taking my dog for a walk and my thirty minutes of exercise each day.

Start with your personal life. What are you non-negotiables there? Then look at your professional life. What are you non-negotiables at work.

For example, with the exception of my calls days, I will ensure I spend at least two hours working content each day. If you were a designer or engineer, that could be spending a minimum of two hours designing or engineering.

Ensuring you have a few hours each day dedicated to doing the work you were hired to do, will put you ahead of most of your colleagues.

When you have non-negotiables, you find planning your day is easy. I know Louis needs his walk, I know also that when I wake up, after making my coffee, I’ll be sitting down to write my journal. I don’t need to think about these things. The only thing I need to decide is where Louis and I will go today. We try to go somewhere different each day.

I also find towards the end of the afternoon, I begin thinking about what exercise I will do today. There’s no question about whether I will exercise or not. Exercise is a non-negotiable. All I need to decide is what I will do in my thirty minutes.

Non-negotiables can be anything that is important to you. I’ve had clients who would never miss their meditation session, or go to the Synagogue, or temple in the early morning. Others won’t miss their Saturday morning family breakfast.

The key here is to identify what your non-negotiables are and then do them.

I hope that has helped, Mark. 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 May 04, 2025

Breaking the Backlog Cycle: Never Get Behind Again

Sunday May 04, 2025

Backlogs. We all have them. But, how do you clear them and then prevent them from happening again? That’s what we’re looking at today.

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Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Script | 367

Hello, and welcome to episode 368 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.

Organising your work, creating lists of things to do, and managing your projects in your notes are all good common-sense productivity practices. However, none of these are going to be helpful if you have huge backlogs of admin, messages, and emails creating what I call a low-level anxiety buzz.

You’re going to be stressed and distracted and in no place to be at your very best.

What’s more, this can become a chronic problem if those backlogs are growing. This is when critical things are going to get missed.

I’m often surprised to get an email from someone asking me if they can have a discount code for an early-bird discount that expired three or four weeks previously. I mean, come on. If it’s taking you three to four weeks to get to an email—even if you consider it to be a low-value email—there’s a serious problem in your system. (Or more likely, you don’t have a system at all.)

So this week, I want to share with you a few ideas that can help you regain control of these backlogs and, more importantly, prevent them from happening again.

So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Wyatt. Wyatt asks, hi Carl, how would you help someone who is backlogged beyond belief. I’ve got over 3,000 emails in my inbox, and my team are still waiting for me to finish their appraisals from last year! I feel so stuck. Please help.

Hi Wyatt. Thank you for your question.

Sorry to hear you feel swamped. I know it can be a horrible place to be.

Before we begin, let me explain the three types of backlogs we all have to deal with.

The first is the growing backlog. This one is the worst because it’s getting bigger and unless you take action immediately, it’s going to overwhelm you. These kinds of backlogs will always be your priority.

The next type of backlog is the static backlog. It’s not growing, but it’s there and it’s on your mind. It needs to be dealt with, but the urgency isn’t as big as a growing backlog.

And then there’s the shrinking backlog. These are the best because if they are shrinking, they’ll soon disappear altogether.

Now, one of the most common areas of our work that backlogs is our email. The last statistics I saw show that on average, people are getting 90+ emails a day.

If you need an average of 30 seconds to deal with each email—which I know is low—that’s around forty-five minutes to deal with them.

Do you have forty-five minutes today to deal with your email?

Remember, that’s a small amount of time for each email. It’s likely you’ll need more than thirty seconds for most of those mails.

Now the good news. If you’re starting with a backlog of over 3,000 emails, many of those emails will no longer require a response. The moment’s passed.

What I would suggest is you take any emails older than a month, and move then to a folder called “Old In-box”. While my instinct it to tell you to delete them, I’ve never come across anyone courageous enough to do it.

Although, if you think about it. Deleting them gives you a perfect excuse if someone follows you up—“sorry, I don’t seem to be able to find your email. Could you resend it?”

Doing this means you’ve cut your list by a large margin. What’s left can be processed.

Email is a two step process. Just like we used to do with regular letters. Open your post box, take out the mail and sort it between letters you need to read or respond to and throw away or file anything you don’t need to act on.

And by the way, nobody left their mail in the mail box. Why do we do that with email?

With email, it’s the same process. Clear your inbox. As you clear ask yourself two questions:

What is it?

What do I need to do with it?

If you need to read or reply to an email, then move it to a folder called “Action This Day”. If you don’t need to do anything with it, either delete or archive it.

This is the processing stage. All you are doing is processing. You are not replying or reading. That comes later. This means, with practice, you’ll be able to process an individual email in a second or two—ten tops.

Now, towards the end of the day, set aside some time for clearing your actionable emails. Try to do this as late in the day as possible. This prevents what is called email ping pong.

If you reply in the morning, you’re going to get a reply in the afternoon. If you reply in the afternoon, even if you do get a reply, you can leave it until tomorrow to respond. Genius, yes?

There are two additional things here.

The first is to reverse the order of the mails in your action this day folder. This puts the oldest at the top. If you’re responding to your mails once a day, you want to be working from the oldest first.

That way, no one will be waiting more than 24 hours or so for a reply from you.

The second is to follow this process every day.

I require around forty-five minutes a day for dealing with my actionable email. If I skip a day, then tomorrow I will need ninety minutes. I don’t have ninety minutes to spend on emails. If I do skip a day, I’ve got a backlog building. Not good.

So, it’s an everyday thing if you want to prevent your email from becoming backlogged.

And remember that one is greater than zero. In other words, if you don’t have a great deal of time available today, still do some of your actionable mail. That keeps you in touch with what’s going on in your mail box and it’s surprising how much you can get done in twenty minutes.

Now, let’s move on to your appraisals.

You mention that your team is still waiting for their appraisals from last year. That suggests it’s an annual event rather than a quarterly event. Either way, the same principle works.

For this kind of task, you need to be scheduling time for doing it. Often, with staff appraisals, you need a week to hold one-to-ones with your team before you can write anything. So, if you begin the appraisals in October, I would suggest you go into your calendar now and set up those appointments.

I know we are a good four months away from October, but by getting them in your calendar now, it’s one less task to deal with and you’re not going to be going back and forth trying to get these appointments scheduled into one week. You’ll end up wasting time negotiating the best time. Do it now.

Then, schedule the third week in October to write your appraisals. Depending on how long, on average, this work takes, you could block a whole day—or two if you need it—to spend writing appraisals.

Getting it on your calendar means you are less likely to allow anything else to take that time away.

To deal with last year’s appraisals, it’s the same process. If you have not completed the one-to-ones, schedule those for next week. Make it a non-negotiable part of your week.

Then go into your calendar and block time out for writing the appraisals.

For things like this there’s an element of intentionality. Things don’t get done until you intentionally set aside time to do it and then get started.

Agin, this is two steps. First set aside time—that’s the easy bit—then sit down and do it—that’s the hard part.

Yet, as long as you begin, once you’re in the flow and you know nothing else is coming up to tear you away from doing the work, you will get it done.

Clearing backlogs is one thing. Preventing backlogs from occurring is another.

Email is a good example, if you are not following the process every day, a backlog will occur. This is not something you can wish away. It doesn’t go away. It’s the same with Teams and Slack messages.

If you’re getting a lot of notifications from these channels of communication, you’re not going to get a lot done if you’re responding to these messages moment they come in. It will exhaust you because of the constant cognitive load switching.

I find dealing with messages is best done between sessions of work.

Let me explain. We know about the sleep cycle—where you sleep in cycles of 90 minutes. Well, it turns out you are also awake in 90-minute cycles.

What this means is you can focus on a piece of work for around 90 minutes. After which your brain will tire, and you will need a distraction. That could be a toilet break, or the desire to get up and refresh your coffee or water.

This is your brain telling you that you need a break.

Now, if you use that to your advantage, you could schedule your focused work sessions around 90-minute blocks. For example, your first, and most important block, could be set for 9:30 to 11:00 am. Then you make sure you have a 30-minute gap before you allow anything else that requires a degree of focus.

In that thirty minutes, you could get up and go to the bathroom, refresh your water and deal with your messages. The longest anyone will be waiting for your response would be 90 minutes.

No demanding boss or client can complain at that. I know, I’ve dealt with some very bad, demanding bosses and clients in my time. They can be trained.

If you were to stick with these ideas and processes, I can promise you that you will get a lot more important work done, reduce your backlogs and feel a lot less exhausted at the end of the day.

You’re in effect working with your brain instead of against it.

Preventing backlogs really comes down to how you structure your day. Most people are not doing that. They have no structure, so they are working on the latest and loudest thing. The problem is that the latest and loudest thing is often not the most important thing.

However, if you set aside time each day for dealing with your communications—say an hour and respect that time—and perhaps a further thirty minutes for dealing with your admin—another area that can become backlogged—you will prevent backlogs from happening.

If you run your day by the seat of your trousers, then, yes, you will have huge, growing backlogs. Responding to your email is rarely urgent, so it gets left behind on busy days. And that means you require double the amount of time tomorrow. And what happens if tomorrow is a busy day?

I hope that has helped, Wyatt. 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 Apr 27, 2025

Beyond the Chaos: Building a Low-Maintenance Productivity System

Sunday Apr 27, 2025

Where would you start if you were to completely redesign your productivity and time management system? That’s what I’m looking at this week.

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Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Script | 367

Hello, and welcome to episode 367 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One of the things that can hold you back from creating a solid time management and productivity system is the legacy of your old habits and systems.

It could be you have always done things a particular way, which may have worked well in the past, but no longer does. Yet, the hold of the familiar keeps you wedded to that old habit.

Or, your company may have adopted a new system or piece of software that has a number of possibilities that you haven’t explored yet. And, of course, the elephant in the room where you have so many tools it’s paralysing you when it comes to deciding what to use.

So, how would you go about doing an overhaul on your system so it’s simple, easy and does not require a lot of maintenance to keep working?

That’s the topic of this week’s question 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 Lindsay. Lindsay asks, hi Carl, I recently took your new Time Sector System course and I love it. The trouble I am having is I have so much stuff all over the place, I don’t know where to start to rebuild my system. Do you have any tips that may help?

Hi Lindsay, thank you for your question.

There’s a great YouTube video, where David Allen, author of Getting Things Done spends a day with Linda Geerdink, a Dutch journalist showing her how to get her life organised. (I’ll put the video in the show notes)

It’s quite emotional at times as Linda has never had any kind of system in the past and has lived her professional and personal life by the seat of her pants.

David Allen comes across as being a little cruel at times, yet, I can understand where he is coming from. Sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind in order to help someone get to where they want to be.

What fascinated me about this video is the utter chaos the start of the process of building a system can be. When you gather everything you may or may not need to do into one central place, it can seem daunting.

And when that involves papers, documents and digital stuff, it can feel like you are drowning in an ocean of stuff that must be done.

But, it doesn’t have to be that way.

So, where would I start if I was to rebuild my system?

I would suggest watching that David Allen video. It starts in Dutch, but when David is introduced to the video, it continues in English.

What David gets Linda to do is exactly right. Gather everything you have into a central place. Today, that’s going to be largely digital stuff.

If you have notes in several notes apps, pick one and go through the process of bringing everything together into one. Which notes app you choose doesn’t really matter too much, although I would choose one that is simple to use. The more complex a notes app is, the more time you will need to maintain it in the future. (Which is not a very productive way to go about it)

The good thing about notes is they are rarely urgent. Notes are support materials for meetings, projects and ideas. Most notes apps will allow you to get a URL link so you can link the important notes to tasks in your task manager.

Now with you task manager, again, if you have a few of these laying around, again, pick one—a simple one, and move any tasks from the apps you discard into the one you’ve chosen’s inbox.

Then process your inbox. Use the three questions:

What is it?

What do I need to do?

When will I do it?

And then move the task to the appropriate folder.

Now, I know all this may take a long time. Often it can take a few days. The best way to do this is to take a day or two off and dedicate those days to getting your system sorted out. It can be fun, no really, it can be.

Just be careful when you do this. We can become quite nostalgic when doing this and keep stopping to read through old notes. Now’s not the time to do this. If you do find yourself doing this create a folder called “nostalgia” and drop them in there. You can then go back to that folder when you’re finished.

One tip here is to think elimination not accumulation. In other words focus on deleting as much as you can. Notes can be archived, sometimes your old ideas can spark fresh ideas. With your task manager, though, be ruthless and delete as much as you can.

Your notes can hold as much as you like. You task manager needs to be clean and tight. The less in there the more effective it will be.

I’ve stressed the importance of keeping things simple and this is something you want to be thinking about as you process what you have in your inboxes.

Complexity is the enemy of productivity. It slows you down by adding what I call an administrative cost. That’s the cost in time it takes to maintain your system.

This is why the Time Sector System is powerful. It narrows down you options to when you will do something. After all, it doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have the time to do it, does it?

Moving forward, you want to be quite strict about what you schedule to do this week. It’s quite easy, when planning your week, to think that’s it. But it isn’t. Once the week begins, new stuff will be coming in daily, and some of that will need to be done this week. You do need to keep some space—white space as I’ve heard it called—for these tasks and appointments.

Now, what about the future? How can you prevent chaos from returning in the future and to put yourself in a position where you are in control and know what you are doing and when?

First accept your human limitations.

You and I have two limitations. We can only work on one thing at a time and the number of hours we have each day.

These are human limitations and there nothing we can do to change them.

Then there is the need to sleep—although you may be able to pull an all nighter occasionally if you must, which I hope you don’t need to do, ever—and eat. Both of which take time.

This means, the place to start would be your calendar. How much time do you need for your personal needs. That would be family and social time, sleep, exercise and anything else you want time for.

You don’t want to be worrying about work at this point.

Your work has a fixed time—usually Monday to Friday, so you can deal with that later.

The benefit to starting with your personal life is it will help you to establish some boundaries between your personal and professional life.

Once you have your calendar of personal activities set up, and I would set these to recur in your calendar. You can always move things around when you do your weekly planning. By setting them up as recurring events, you’re much more likely to stick to them.

Now look at your work.

First where are your fixed meetings? Get them on your calendar.

After that, how much time do you need, on average, to do your core work. That’s the work you’re employed to do.

When I was a teacher, my teaching schedule was fixed. Yet, I also needed to schedule time for class preparation and my admin duties.

When I worked as a lawyer, I required more time to work on the cases, so I made sure I had five hours a day for just working on the cases—that involved preparing court documents, requesting documents from the Land Registry and responding to letters from other lawyers.

That meant I had only three hours available for appointments.

There was no point in me believing I could fit in five hours of meetings and spend five hours on my cases—which I genuinely needed to do in order to keep my head above water—I wasn’t being paid enough to work ten hours a day and sacrifice my social life and my exercise time.

Now, I did allow a little more flexibility at the end of a month, but on the whole I strictly controlled my calendar to ensure I was not trying to do the impossible.

And, for those of you who believe you cannot get control of your calendar, when I worked in a law firm, I never got fired and received my annual bonus for exemplary work each year, and I was the most junior or juniors in my time in the law office. You can do this—control your time. You’re evaluated on your work, not how many meetings you attend.

This is why I always recommend you start with getting control of your calendar. It’s your calendar that controls one of your limitations—available time.

Now, the other limitation, only being able to work on one thing at a time, means you can group similar tasks together and focus your efforts on clearing that list. For example, if you allocate an hour a day for dealing with your communications, you’re not worrying about how many emails you have to respond to, you don’t need to.

All you need to do is begin with the oldest message and do as many as you can until your hour is up. If you consistently follow that process, you’ll rarely have any communication backlogs.

It’s not about the number of emails and messages you have to respond to, it’s about how much time you have available to respond to them. Do them all at the same time and that way you won’t be jumping around inside multiple different apps trying to find what to do.

It’s the same with your admin and project tasks. It’s never about how many you have to do at anyone time. It’s about how much time you have available to do them.

If you’re work is largely project based, make sure you have sufficient time scheduled on your calendar for working on your project tasks each week. If you’re role is mainly admin tasks—for example you’re in customer support, then how much time, on average, do you need to do your work without the build up of backlogs each week?

If you’re focused on how much you have to do, you will always feel overwhelmed. If you focus on how much time you have available for working on different types of work, you’ll be a lot less overwhelmed and you will be getting your work done.

This also eliminates the impossible challenge of trying to estimate how long a task will take. Nobody can do that with any degree of accuracy. This comes back to you being a human being. Some days you’ll be on fire and churn through a lot of work. Other days you’ll be feeling exhausted and find everything you do is like trying to run through treacle.

I hope that has helped, Lindsay. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

Sunday Apr 20, 2025

How To Be Productive And Organised.

Sunday Apr 20, 2025

This week, what does it take to be organised and productive?

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Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Script | 366

Hello, and welcome to episode 366 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One thing you will discover if you begin reading around the subject of time management and productivity is the importance of planning your week and day.

Every successful person i have come across, or read about, never fails to plan their days and week. Every person who is struggling, and not achieving their goals are not.

Instead, they find excuses. “I’m too tired”, “I don’t have time”, “I have more important things to do”, etc, etc.

Yet, there’s more to it than that. It’s not just about having a plan for the day and being clear about what needs to be done. it’s also about protecting time for the important, but not urgent work, and knowing when to say no, when to push and when to pull back and take some rest.

In essence, it’s about understanding yourself and knowing your limits. So with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Tammy. Tammy asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to understand what I need to do to become more organised and productive. I know it’s holding me back, but there’s so much conflicting advice out there that I am confused. Can you help?

Hi Tammy, thank you for your question.

As I just alluded to, the best place to begin is to understand yourself.

This means knowing when you are at your most focused, when you are prone to distractions and how much sleep you need.

The chances are, if you stop and step back, you will already know this information. Perhaps you find yourself being able to get quite a lot of work done in the morning, but struggle in the afternoons. Or, you may come alive around 3 pm and can get a lot of work done then.

This knowledge, allows you to better structure your days. You can avoid meetings, where possible, at the times you are at your most focused, and rely on human connection to keep your energy levels up by holding meetings when you are less focused—there’s something about human interaction that raises our energy levels.

You can also ensure you are getting enough sleep, and that means being consistent when you wake up. As I recently learned, it’s not the time you go to bed that matters, it’s waking up at roughly the same time each day as that starts your 24 hour sleep/wake cycle.

If you mess around with your sleep/wake cycle, you will feel dreadful, and that destroys your productivity.

Once you have the basics locked in, you can then move on to structuring your days.

A couple of years ago, I wrote quite extensively about some famous authors. This was inspired by the book Daily Rituals by Mason Curry. In that book, Mason Curry wrote about incredibly productive people and how they got their work done.

One person, not featured in the book, I wrote about was author Jeffrey Archer. He writes a book every year, and he has his year structured to allow him to take care of writing the new book, promoting the book he wrote the previous year and dealing with his publishers, book cover designers and much more.

Archer also loves cricket. So his year is structured so he can reduce his workload in the summer when the cricket season is on.

This works brilliantly. Jeffrey Archer is consistent. Everyone who works with him knows he will be in Majorca between 27th December and the beginning of March writing his next book. They also know he will be available for meetings, promotions and events between March and June. From July to October, Archer is less available, and from October he’s happy to do book tours, interviews and anything else his publisher needs him to do.

It’s simple, consistent and makes working with Jeffrey Archer easy.

Now, I know it’s unlikely you are a multi-million selling author. It’s likely you work in a place where there are multiple demands coming at you each day from bosses, customers and colleagues.

Demands such as wanting to know how you’re getting on with this or that. If you dig a little deeper, though, most of these demands are because people don’t trust that you remember that you committed to doing something for them.

What’s the most common reason you chase someone up? It’s most likely because you’re worried they’ve forgotten they said they would do something for you.

Why is that? The most common reason is because most of the people we work with are inconsistent. And, yes, sometimes things fall through the cracks and get forgotten and we need to chase them up.

So, if you want less interruptions, which equals more time to do your work, be more consistent.

Consistent with your focus work times. Don’t throw your hands up in the air and say “I cannot do that in my job”. You can. You just have to figure out how to communicate your focus work times.

As I was taught, if someone else can do it, so can you. If an airline pilot or surgeon can do their focused work without allowing distractions, so can you. Find the way. What do you have to do to resist interruptions?

So how do you become consistent? You put in place a structure for your day and for your week.

How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications each day? Most people tell me if they could have an hour daily dedicated to responding to messages and emails they would be on top of it. So schedule it.

The alternative is not good, is it? If you don’t spend an hour on your messages today, how much time will you need tomorrow? If you skip tomorrow as well, now, how much time will you need? I’m sure you can find one hour a day, but to find three? That’s verging on the impossible.

If you were responsible for sending out proposals to clients, how much time would you need for proposal writing to prevent a backlog?

You won’t be accurate with your times; you don’t have to be. You are using averages. If you get five proposals to write each day, and each proposal takes around thirty minutes to write, that means to prevent backlogs from appearing you need about two-and-a-half hours each day.

The only way you will be able to take care of your responsibility to send out the proposals would be to schedule two-and-a-half hours each day for doing the work. How else will you do it?

Now look at that from your colleagues’s perspective? If they know you are consistent and are getting the proposals out on time, how likely will they be chasing and interrupting you?

That’s what consistency does. It builds trust with your colleagues. They know once they send you a proposal to write, it will be done. So, they don’t bother you asking if you’ve done it, yet.

My favourite all-time rugby player is Ellery Hanley. He was the greatest player of his generation. What made him so special? You could guarantee that if you made a break, he would always be right next to you, backing you up. This is what made him so good.

Sure he was tough, as all rugby players generally are. He was also fit and strong. But what made him so good was he consistently backed up his players. You knew if you broke your opponent’s line, Ellery Hanley would be right there with you to take the ball and score.

Let’s say you are that person responsible for writing proposals. You need two-and-a-half hours each day for proposal writing and an hour for your communications. That’s just three-and-a-half hours you need to protect each day for your important work.

That still leaves you with four to five hours for anything else you may be required for. Is that impossible?

The final part to this is to plan your week and your day.

Planning the week is about looking at what you have to do and deciding what you will work on the following week. This will be influenced by your deadlines and what you have promised to others.

It will also be influenced by your personal life and your commitments there. If you have kids, they will have a big influence on your weekly plans too.

On a daily level, how many and when are your appointments for the day? what are your must do tasks? Must do tasks are non-negotiable. They must be done. Now, this means you do not want to have too many of these. I generally advise people to have no more than two.

By not allowing more than two must do tasks for the day, you are forced to prioritise. Prioritising is a learned skill. The more you practice it, the better, and faster, you will get at it.

I would also advise using a simple set of tools. A calendar, naturally, and a task manager. If you don’t have a task manager now, choose one that’s built into the devices you use. That would mean Apple Reminders if you use Apple tools, or Microsoft ToDo if you use a Windows system.

Once you have these tools—a calendar and a task manager, learn to use the tools. I see a lot of people regularly switching their tools in an erroneous belief that they will find the “perfect” tool. They won’t the “perfect tool” does not exist.

The real secret is not the tools. It’s how you run your day.

Make sure you plan each day, you are consistent doing the work you are employed to do and you get enough sleep.

Just those simple basic practices will improve your overall productivity. I can promise you it works every time.

Thank you, Tammy 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 Apr 13, 2025

How to Build A Productive Team

Sunday Apr 13, 2025

This week, how to manage your team (and your boss) productively

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Script | 365

Hello, and welcome to episode 365 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

I work a lot with managers and business leaders, where a part of their job is to manage teams of people. This kind of work can be quite different from a self-employed graphic designer, for example, whose main work each day is designing.

There’s an interesting interplay going on in a team environment. Managers need information from their people. To get that information, they need to stop their team from doing their work. Then there is the team who need less distraction in order to get their work done to the highest quality and on time.

In my experience, the most productive teams are the ones who have found a happy balance between the manager’s need for information and the team’s need to work undisturbed.

So, the question is, how do you find that balance and if you are a member of a team with a boss who is interrupting you a little too much how do you retrain your boss?

Two questions from one wonderful listener who has sent in a question.

And with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips and ideas for managing a team productively (I manage a team of eight) and how to manage a boss who is disorganised and never remembers what she’s asked us to do. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Hi Sam, thank you for your question.

It sounds like you’re caught in the middle of a productivity nightmare. A boss who has no idea how to get the most out of their team and as a consequence you are unable to help your team work productively.

Let’s start with the easier of the two. Managing a team.

To help you get to the right place, we need to step back a little. A manager’s role is to support their team. To provide them with clear instructions and the right tools, and then to keep out of the way and let them get on and do what they were employed to do.

At a strategic level that means clear communication—what do you want, how do you want it and when do you want it delivered?

And then to step back and let them get on and do it.

Let me give you an example of this in play.

I record my YouTube videos on a Wednesday. I then create the timeline of the video in Adobe Premiere Pro and send everything to my video editor to do the animations, clean things up and get it ready for publication.

In a Google Doc, I write out what I want—where I want split screen effects and other animations. I also add the date I need the finished video for.

That’s communication part.

I then step back and let my video editor get on and do her thing. I don’t care how she does the animations or what tools she uses—she likes to use something called CapCut, for example. Once I hand it over to my video editor, the task is in her hands and as long as she gets the edited video back to me by the deadline. I’m happy.

If she has any questions, we use a messaging service called Twist—similar to Microsoft Teams and Slack but a lot less distracting—she will message me.

And that’s the support part.

It’s simple, effective and allows my video editor the time and space to get on and do the work without me constantly chasing her.

Now there is another element going on here. I trust my video editor. She’s never let me down and on those rare occasions when she thinks she will be late, she will message me immediately and inform me.

If you don’t trust your team, who’s at fault?

If you want to build a productive team, you must trust your team. It’s that trust that enables you to leave your team alone to get on and do the work you employ them to do. Constantly interrupting them for updates destroys their productivity.

It’s the same if you ask them to fill out activity reports and update statuses on complex software systems.

I’ve worked with companies that required their sales teams to maintain a Salesforce CRM system. This meant many of them stop selling on Friday afternoons to update these complex systems which often took them two or three hours.

When I was in sales, I found the best time to sell was Friday afternoons. People are more willing to close out a sale before the end of the week. Yet, in that company, they were missing out on so much business because management wanted their sales teams to update overly complex information management systems.

Every person you work with is a different person. Trying to shoehorn people into your system can be counterproductive to the overall productivity of the team.

As a manager, it’s your responsibility to find out the best way to support you team members so they can work in the most effective and efficient way. That way you avoid stress building up in the team which will undermine any efforts to improve the team’s productivity.

I recently heard Toto Wolf—the CEO and Team Principal of Mercedes Benz’s Formula 1 team talking about how he manages his team. He implemented a policy of no meetings before 10:00 am.

What this does is allows all people to have at least an hour of undisturbed quiet time each day for doing important work.

Now, he’s the leader—the CEO—yet he understands that the managers reporting to him still need time to do their work before spending most of their days in meetings.

I like another leader from the Formula 1’s world, Red Bull’s Christian Horner’s approach. He doesn’t have an engineering degree or understand the complexities of aerodynamics. He has a team of people who are brilliant at that stuff.

He sees his roll as the barrier remover. While he’s the boss, and needs to know what’s going on, he knows he must protect his team from the board of directors’ demands and if any department requires something, it’s his job to find a way to provide it for them.

Productive teams are built from the top. That means the manager must communicate clearly what they want, how they want it and by when. Then step back and let the team get on and do the work.

I remember another company I once worked for. The director was a highly intelligent person in her field. Yet, she had somehow developed a managerial arrogance where she believed she did not need to learn how to use the company’s database because her project managers could tell her what she needed to know when she needed to know something.

This led to her project managers dropping everything to find the information she wanted whenever she asked for it. It created a horrible atmosphere in the company and the team was very unproductive.

She would hold five hour team meetings every Friday, where everyone was expected to attend. This further undermined the teams productivity and they were often late in completing projects which meant project managers had to work late and into the weekend to catch up.

This director’s staff turnover rate was the highest in the company, worldwide, and it was all created by this one individual who did nothing to support her team.

The solution was to go back to the basics. Communicate what you want, clearly and concisely—you don’t need weekly five hour meetings to do that—and then to step back and let your team get on and do their work. The work they were employed to do.

Never, as a manager, believe that your team is there to support you. It’s not. You are there to support them.

Now, if you are not the manager but have a manager who is destroying your productivity what can you do?

This goes to managing expectations.

It’s very easy to fall into line and say yes to your boss whenever they ask you to do something. Yet, doing so is distorting expectations. Saying “yes I will get this task done today as you ask, boss,” will do nothing for your productivity if on the same day you have six hours of meetings and a proposal to get out before 4:30 pm.

You have to stand your ground and inform your boss of your schedule for the day and explain that you will not be able to do it today.

I understand, if you have always said yes to your boss, doing this will be difficult at first, but how will you change anything if you do not challenge your boss’s instructions when you already know what they are asking you to do will be practically impossible?

In effect you need to retrain your boss and set more realistic expectations.

One tip I often share is to challenge deadlines. If your boss asks you to send them something, reply and tell them you will get it to them by the end of the week (or early next week).

The worst thing that will happen is your boss will push back and tell you they need it right now. That’s great because they’ve saved you a decision. You need to do it right now. So do it.

However, in the majority of cases, your boss will accept your timeline. They’re busy too, after all.

However, the critical part of this is you follow through and deliver what they asked for when you said you will do it. If you don’t, you lose trust. You want your boss to trust you. And if, for whatever reason, you find you cannot do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, you must inform them as soon as you know—something my video editor will do.

And incidentally, you should be doing this with your customers and clients too. This can be another area where some preconceived ideas about customers and clients can lead to productivity issues.

Be clear when you are communicating with your customers and clients. Set realistic expectations—and telling them that you will always be available if they ever need you is not a realistic expectation. What happens if you’re giving birth when they call (as happened to one of my clients), or you’re in a meeting with another client?

Tell your customers how best to get in touch with you and that if you cannot respond immediately you will get back to them as soon as you can.

I hope that has helped, Sam. Thank you for your question and thank you for listening.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Sunday Apr 06, 2025

The Fundamental Basics of a Productive Day

Sunday Apr 06, 2025

Podcast 364

What are the solid basics of becoming more productive that anyone can use today? That’s the question I’m answering this week.

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Script | 364

Hello, and welcome to episode 364 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

When I was little, a police officer lived in our village. The police service provided his home, and his job was to look after the local community. Sargeant Morris was my first introduction to the police, and he taught me some valuable lessons—not least about the importance of being a law-abiding citizen.

Yet, a lesson he taught me that I never realised how important it was until later was the power of daily routines. Each morning at 8:00 am, Sergeant Morris would walk up and down the main street in our village, ensuring that the schoolchildren got to school safely.

He was also there when we returned from school at the end of the day. I’m sure there were days he was unable to be there, but all I remember is his presence on the street when I went and came back from school.

He would wear his hi-viz jacket, chat with the parents and children, and make sure we crossed the road at the pedestrian crossing and that the traffic didn’t drive too fast down the street.

I also remember because of his presence, seemingly day and night, crime was almost non-existent in our village.

It was the simple things—things that did not require a lot of effort or knowledge—that made Sergeant Morris a part of my childhood I will never forget.

And that is the same for you and me today. It’s the little things repeated that make the biggest difference to our productivity.

And so, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Mike. Mike asks, hi Carl. What would you say are the basics of becoming more productive?

Hi Mike, thank you for your question.

It’s funny you’ve asked this question as it’s something I have been thinking a lot about recently. What are the absolute basics of being productive?

I would first start with something I wrote extensively about in Your Time, Your Way, and those are the three foundations:

Sleep, exercise, and diet.

How do you feel when you’ve had a bad night’s sleep? Perhaps you only get two or three hours of sleep. How does your day go?

Probably not very well at all. You may be able to get through the morning, but when the afternoon comes around, you’re going to slump.

If that poor sleep continues for a few days, and you’re going to get sick.

Now let’s flip that. How do you feel when you get a solid night’s sleep? What does that do to your productivity?

The difference between the two is huge. On the days you get enough sleep, you’ll focus better and for longer. You’ll make less mistakes and, something rarely talked about, you’ll make better decisions.

That helps you as it ensures that when you decide what to work on next it will more likely be the right thing. When you’re sleep deprived, your decision making abilities sink. You’ll pick up the easy, low-value tasks—because you feel you’re doing something—but it will have little value and the important work will be left until another day.

And then you have a backlog of important stuff to do, stuff that’s probably going To have deadlines which means you put yourself under pressure and a low level of anxiety sets in, distracting you and leaving you feeling exhausted at the end of the day.

Exercise, or as I prefer to call it “movement” is another of those simple productivity enhancers often overlooked.

Sitting at a table staring at a screen all day is not good for you. You know that don’t you? You’re a living, breathing organism that was designed to move.

We know that exercise, and when I say exercise I don’t mean going to a gym or out for a run, I mean some walking, chores around the house or some light stretching in your home or office, helps your thinking and creativity. It also helps to reduce stress and resets your brain after a hard session of focused work.

One of the best things you can do if you’re working from home is to do some of your chores in-between sessions of sit-down work.

For example, do two hours of project work, then stop, and take your laundry to the washing machine or vacuum your living room. Then sit down and do another session of deep work.

You’ll be amazed at how much work you get done with that little tip.

You don’t need to buy expensive standing desks. Just make sure you get up every ninety-minutes to two hours and walk around. Make the bed, tidy up the kids’ toys, wash the dishes, or water your plants.

Firstly you’re getting away from the screen and secondly you’re stirring your energy tanks, elevating your blood flow and engaging your lymph glands, which work to clear your body of harmful bacteria and toxins—which build up alarmingly if you’re not moving.

But the most important part of that movement is it resets your brain so you come back to your work refreshed and focused.

And then there is diet.

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you how you feel after your Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. You eat all that food, then sit down on the sofa and within a few minutes you’re falling asleep.

All those carbohydrates causes your pancreas to go into overdrive producing vast amounts of insulin which in the short term (say twenty-minutes) is a good thing. It’s what comes next that depresses your energy levels—what we call the afternoon slump.

Yet it can be avoided if you keep the carbs to a minimum and choose a healthier option.

The Japanese have a wonderful eating culture called “Hara hachi bu” which translates to “eat until 80% full”. By not over-eating, the Japanese have learned that their energy levels remain reasonably consistent throughout the day, and of course another benefit is you are less likely to gain weight.

And while we’re on the topic of food, I’m not a fan of pre-preparing your meals for the week. You may think this saves you time, but the act of cooking each evening is a great way to give you some movement, and take your mind away from the work you left behind.

That meal break is a great way to reset your brain and if you’re doing it in the evening, you can use it to draw a line under your work for the day and prepare you for family or friends time.

So, Mike, if I was asked to give advice on how to improve productivity, those three things would be first piece of advice. Get these three things right, and your productivity will improve massively.

Yet, there are a few other little things you could do, all of which are simple and anyone can do.

The first would be to plan the day the day before. In other words before you finish your work day, you stop for five to ten minutes and decide what the most important things you need to do tomorrow are.

We’re not talking about reviewing all your projects and going through all your tasks on your to-do list.

If you’re reasonably engaged with your work, you will know what’s important. Write these down somewhere where you will see them when you start the next day and start with the item at the top of your list.

You can do this digitally or use a pen and piece of paper. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the list is short—no more than five or six things and that it’s the first thing you see when you start your day.

This does three things for you. The first is it prevents you from procrastinating by giving you a list of tasks to get on with that need to be done. It also avoids you wasting your most focused time trying to decide what to work on and then getting pulled into other people’s urgencies and emergencies.

Thirdly, it allows your subconscious brain to do what it’s good at—mixing your education and experience together to come up with the most effective way to do something.

There is also the fourth benefit, which is you will find you relax more in the evening knowing there’s not likely to be any unwelcome emergencies when you begin the day.

Another one I’ve found helpful is to protect time each day for your communications. Now, this one comes from my life-long love of history—particularly 20th century history.

When I read about some the 20th century’s most iconic people, whether that be Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Agatha Christie, General Eisenhower or Charles De Gaulle, you’’ find that we know so much about what they thought and felt about things because they wrote letters.

It was a habit in the early to mid 20th century for people to spend some time each day writing letters. It’s true they didn’t have the distractions we have today—no TV (or very limited channels), internet or social media so there was time to write.

Today, we don’t protect time for communications, and that’s lead to overwhelming backlogs of emails and messages to respond to. If you were to protect some time each day for your communications, while you may not be able to eliminate your message backlog entirely, you will prevent it from growing out of control.

And we don’t want to be fooling ourselves in to believing people received less communications in those days. That’s not true. They received more. There were telegrams arriving where a telegram boy would wait for you to read the message and then take your reply back to the telegram office.

And on top of that, we had to handwrite our responses, put the letter in an envelope, stick a stamp on it and take it to the post box. It was far more time consuming, yet people did it without complaint.

Sp there you go, Mike. I hope that has given you some ideas. I would strongly recommend focusing on your sleep, movement and diet—it’s there where you’ll find some quick results. The daily planning, and protecting time for communications and admin, will give you results, but will take a little longer to feel the benefits.

Thank you for your question and thank you to your too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

Sunday Mar 30, 2025

Happy 5th Anniversary to The Time Sector System

Sunday Mar 30, 2025

How flexible are you? That’s what we’re looking at this week.

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Script | 363

Hello, and welcome to episode 363 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

You may have heard this week that my Time Sector System is five years old. And to celebrate, I updated the whole course.

Now, before I start to update a course, I go into Evernote and review all the comments I have collected from students and see if there are any common issues or difficulties that I could improve or explain better.

The Time Sector System works. It’s based on timeless principles that have been used by some of the most productive people who have ever lived. As with all solid principles, there needs to be a degree of flexibility to accommodate the different ways we all work and the type of work we do.

The way authors, for example, will protect three to four hours a day for writing might not be practical for a customer support assistant or a manager managing a team of twenty salespeople. Similarly, an architect will work differently from a doctor in an emergency room.

Yet, there are still some timeless principles that work no matter what role you have.

For example, it doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have the time to do it. Makes sense, right?

I could decide to write my next book today. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is finding the time to write the book. I’m not sure how many hours I spent writing Your Time, Your Way, but from the first day I sat down to begin writing the first draft to when it was published in May last year, it was three years and I know every week, I spend at least ten hours on it— so roughly 2,000 hours.

Given that each week only has 168 hours, it would not be possible to write a book in a week.

One of the most productive companies I worked for was an advertising agency in Korea. The manager, Patrick, was smart. He realised that for his team to get the campaigns completed on time, he had to protect the time of his copywriters and graphic designers. They needed quiet, undisturbed time to do their work.

Yet the account managers and social media planners needed to be talking with each other and external companies to arrange space for the billboards, and media companies.

The account managers and planners generally had a meeting with each other each day.

The creative team only had two meetings per week. The Monday planning meeting where they planned out the work to be completed that week and the Friday morning team meeting where everything was discussed.

This meant the creatives (as they were called) had the quiet time to focus on their work.

In the four years I worked with that team, I never recall a time where they missed a deadline or even felt under pressure to complete a campaign. I’m sure there were occasions when they were under pressure—clients can be very demanding—but it was never noticeable.

What made this team so productive was that each person knew the objectives for the week. They knew what needed to be finished and ensured that they had the space and time to get on and complete the work. Patrick, as the boss, protected the time of his team.

He knew if he was constantly asking his creatives for updates, he would be slowing them down. He trusted his team and they trusted him. If they had a difficulty, or discovered that a piece of work would take longer to complete than initially anticipated, they could go to Patrick and tell him.

This comes back to something I learned from Brian Tracy—one of the world’s best self-development teachers—that if you want to be successful at anything, you first need to establish what you need to do to be successful at it.

Once you know that, you can dedicate enough time to doing that and eliminating everything else.

There’s the famous advice that Warren Buffett gives about managing your work. Write down the twenty-five things you feel you should do, then put a star next to the five most important, delete the rest and focus all your time and effort on completing those five.

So, where does flexibility come into this?

Well, if you have an overflowing inbox with emails and messages piling up by the hour, you are constantly interrupted by people asking you questions about this and that, and you have no idea what needs to be completed this week, you lose all flexibility.

There’s too much for your brain to decide what to work on next. You’re overloaded and stress and anxiety will freeze you—slowing you down even further.

Take a copywriter working for Patrick. She knew what needed to be completed that week—it was agreed at the Monday meeting—and she had the freedom and flexibility to get on and do the work in her own way.

And that all came down to knowing from the beginning of the week what was required. Next week wasn’t important. That could be discussed at the Friday meeting.

And that’s one of the strongest concepts of the Time Sector System. Only focus on what needs to be done this week and not worry about next week until you do your weekly planning session at the end of the week.

We need to be flexible enough to modify things for the way we work. One aspect of the Time Sector System I recommend is working with projects.

Task managers, or todo lists, are not the best places to manage projects. Projects are information hubs. There’s likely to be emails, plans, meetings, deadlines and what is called conditional tasks—where something cannot be completed until something else is completed first.

Then there’s likely to be files and documents being worked on which need to be accessed from time to time.

Projects are best managed in your notes apps. Notes apps have greater flexibility to store all this information. You can also create checklists which do not remove completed tasks which makes it easier to quickly see what has been completed and what remains to be done.

I recommend that you add a single task in your task manager saying “Work on project X” and connect that task to your project note. Some people mentioned that this seems cumbersome if the task is simply to follow up with someone.

I agree, and in these situations, I would suggest adding the follow-up task to your task manager.

Be flexible.

Similarly, some projects are simple and easy to do. I have a project right now to get the terrace outside the office ready for the spring. When I come to do that project, the most effective way to complete it would be to schedule an afternoon on my calendar to go outside with the jet washer and get on and do it.

I do not need to create a project note for this. I just need to find some time on my calendar. This “project” doesn’t even need to be on my task list. It’s two or three hours protected on my calendar when it’s not raining.

The principle to work from, is if something needs doing, then it will require time. So the questions is when will you do it?

Once you know what needs to be done, and are clear about what the desired outcome is, and you know when you will do it, the how will largely take care of itself. And it’s how flexibility is your best friend.

Another area where I found people struggle is with the daily planning session. Daily planning is a critical part of being more focused and productive. When you have a plan for the day, you more likely to get the right things done. With no plan, you’ll end up drifting through the day doing this and that and getting caught up in everyone else’s crises and urgencies.

But not accomplishing very much.

Daily planning is five to ten minutes at the end of the day, deciding what you need to do the next day. Doing it the evening before allows you to let go of the day so you can relax and enjoy the evening.

Sounds simple, right?

So why do so many people struggle to do it? Exhaustion. They are exhausted at the end of the day and cannot bring themselves to do it, so it doesn’t get done.

And guess what happens the next day? They drift and get caught up in everyone else’s work. And what does that do to them? It leaves them exhausted at the end of the day.

However, some people are early birds and like to wake up early. If you are an early bird, planning in the morning before the day begins works perfectly well.

This is another example of being flexible. Work to the way you work.

I remember when I used to wake up at 5:00 am (I did that for 18 months), and I would plan my day as part of my morning routine. It was only when waking up at 5:00 am became unsustainable after my coaching programme grew and I needed to be doing coaching sessions late into the evening that I stopped and started doing my daily planning in the evening after I finished my coaching sessions.

Different circumstances require different approaches, yet the principles remain. Plan your week so you know what’s important at a higher level, then give yourself five to ten minutes to adjust your plan each day to allow for the unknowns that will inevitably have come in as the week progresses.

Protect time for doing your important work. If you need to prepare a proposal for an important client and you know it will require three to four hours to complete, then protect that time on your calendar and don’t let anyone steal it from you.

If you allow someone steal that time from you and you find yourself under enormous time pressure at the end of the week, whose fault is that?

There was something I once heard Brian Tracy say and that was “take responsibility”. He was talking in terms of your life—take responsibility for your life. You can easily adopt that same approach for your time. Take responsibility for it. Be ruthless, yet flexible when you need to be so you can get your important work done.

I’m reminded of the East Asian saying: “be like bamboo”. It’s strong, yet flexible enough to adapt to the wind, the snow and the rain and still not break. That should be your approach to your management of time. Be strong—say no when necessary—yet be flexible enough to adapt to the conditions.

I hope you found this helpful. Thank you for listening.

Don’t forget, if you want to build a time management system like bamboo, then the new Time Sector System course is now available. The link is in the show notes. And if you are already enrolled, this is a free update for you and it’s waiting for you in your Learning Centre dashboard.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.

Sunday Mar 23, 2025

"Inbox Freedom: Breaking the Chains of Digital Overwhelm

Sunday Mar 23, 2025

This week, I’m exploring where much of our overwhelm comes from and how to sharpen up your inbox processing.

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Script | 362

Hello, and welcome to episode 362 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

How often do you feel overwhelmed? It’s a good question to ask because some of that overwhelm is caused by what has been called “open loops” or in other words stuff to do that has not been looked at to see what is involved.

A lot of this will come from your inboxes. We throw all sorts of things in there without much thought about what needs to be done. With our email and messaging inboxes, we don’t have any control over what arrives in there—that’s out of our control.

The issue here is we have it collected, and that’s often a weight off our minds, but there’s a sense of anxiety because we don’t know for sure what needs to be done and how long it will take us to do it.

If we are not processing what we collected frequently and correctly, then there is a gaping hole in the system that needs filling in. If not, there will be a lot of things that need to be done that gets missed. And that then leads to a distrust in your system which creates its own set of issues.

This week’s question is how to develop the right habits and processes to make sure that our inboxes are cleared and what gets into our system is clear, actionable and with realistic timelines.

So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks, Hi Carl, could you walk us through how to best clear a task manager’s inbox as well as some “best practices” for clearing email and other inboxes?

Hi Stephen, yes I can and thank you for your question.

This is a place that I feel I must tread very carefully. On the one hand I want to encourage you to stop trying to remember everything in your head and to externalise it so you reduce the stress of trying to remember everything.

On the other hand, I also want to encourage you to maintain a clean and tight task management system. By that I mean that your task manager only contains genuine things you either must or should do and anything you think you’d like to do can be put into your notes app.

Email and messaging services are reasonably straightforward.

There’s a two step process. The first is to clear the inboxes. This part is about speed. The faster you can do that the better.

When processing your inboxes here you want to get into the habit of asking the questions: What is it and what do I need to do about it?

An email rom a customer asking for some information about their account, for example, would give you the answers; it’s an email from a customer that requires me to answer a question.

So, it’s actionable and you would then send it to your Action This Day folder for action later in the day.

The temptation is to deal with it immediately. It’s from a customer! I must reply immediately. I get it. I know there’s a sense that anything from a customer must be dealt with instantly.

Unfortunately, doing so will create challenges for you in the long-term. The first is you set an expectation. Instantly replying to a customer means they expect you to reply instantly next time too. And next time may not be as convenient as it is now. You might be at your son’s sports day, or having a romantic lunch with your partner.

It’s not very romantic if you have to pause the conversation while you respond to your customer is it?

The second challenge is it rarely ever is just one. It’s often several emails or messages like that. Each one will likely take you five to ten minutes. Just six of those and you’ve eaten up forty-five minutes of your processing time. What about the six other emails you need to clear from your inbox.

This is how inboxes fill up and become overwhelming. If you have sixty to seventy emails in your inbox you should be able to clear those in around twenty to twenty-five minutes. Stopping and dealing with individual emails because you think it will only take a few minutes to deal with them lengthens the processing time, which means you won’t have time to clear it.

Your customers are in the same place as you. Swamped with stuff to do with a shortage of time to do it. The chances are they’re going to hate you for responding instantly. Now you’ve given them more work to do.

And let’s get real here, if something’s genuinely urgent, they’re not going to email you are they? They’ll call you.

The second part of this process is to set aside time each day for dealing with your actionable messages.

This is where you open up your email’s Action This Day folder and begin with the oldest one and work you way down the list. It’s at this point you will thank yourself for not responding to all those quick and easy emails.

If all you have in your Action This Day folder are emails that require a lot of thinking and work, it’ll be a painful experience. If instead you have a wide variety of emails to deal with you build momentum and and plough through them quickly.

And that’s it. A two step process. Through out the day, between sessions of work, clear your inbox by asking two simple questions: What is it, what do I need to do with it. If you need to reply, read or review something, throw it into your action this day folder.

Then later in the day, settle down and go through your Action This Day folder and clear as many as you can. As long as you are starting with the oldest first, you’ll never be very far behind.

Next up is your tasks inbox.

This is a little different from your messages or email inbox because you control what’s put there. Unlike emails and messages where you have no control. You cannot control who is sending messages to you.

The challenge here is to be ruthless about what gets into your system.

Throughout the day, it’s easy to throw all sorts of things into this inbox. You may have heard someone recommend a book that sounded interesting, so you throw that in there. You may have seen someone with a colourful umbrella and you decide it’s time for you to get yourself one.

Then there are all those ideas about redesigning your kitchen, or cleaning up your notes app or a thought about getting some Christmas cards printed with your name on them--I’m not sure if that’s still a thing.

Your inbox is the gateway to your system, so it’s perfectly fine to throw anything and everything in there. Where you want to be ruthless is what you allow into your system.

Processing your task manager’s inbox again has a few questions.

The first is: what is it? Then, what do you need to do with it?

For example, you may have realised that your passport expires in the next ten months. So you have a task in there that says “renew passport”.

That’s good. But is it enough. I know if I come to a task that says renew passport I’m going to ignore it. Why? Because behind that simple “renew passport” is a lot of stuff I don’t know about.

The last time I renewed my passport was ten years ago. The passport office will undoubtedly changed the system since then. So what’s the real task here?

It’s to find out what I need to renew my passport.

So, I would change the task to “find out what I need to renew my passport” and then decide when I will do that. Do I need to do it this week? Next week? Or perhaps next month?

And that’s the third question, when will I do it?

Once decided, I drop it into its appropriate folder.

You will often have some obvious tasks in there too. It could be something like sending a quote to a prospective customer. So you add a task “send quote to Drax Enterprises into your inbox.

Yet, is it that simple?

This might be a potential big multi-million dollar contract. One you need to discuss with your boss first. So, what is the task? It’s to talk with your boss about what discounts to offer. So you can change the task to “Discuss with boss Drax Enterprises quotation”, add a date you will do it—perhaps tomorrow—and place the task into your This Week folder.

The danger of not rewriting tasks with the real next step is you will ignore the task because you are unclear about what really needs to happen next. When you process your inbox, you have an opportunity to get clear about what needs to happen next.

Once you know that, you will be less likely to skip it.

I know this all sounds complex, but if you step back and look what you are doing, you are asking yourself three simple questions.

What is it? What do I need to do with it? And when will I do it?

I’ve found that if you apply these questions every time you are in an inbox, it quickly becomes natural.

You also get better at triaging your task manager’s inbox. This helps you to keep your task manager clean and tight. The less you allow in there, the more focused you will be and much less susceptible to picking the easy tasks leaving yourself with only the more time consuming ones later in the day. (Something you want to reverse—remember “Eat The Frog”)

And that’s it, Stephen. Keep things simple, run through the questions and be ruthless about what gets into your task management system.

Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me no to wish you all a very very productive week.

Sunday Mar 16, 2025

The Philosophy Behind The Ground Breaking Time Sector System.

Sunday Mar 16, 2025

This year, the Time Sector System is five years old! For thousands of people it has changed their relationship with tasks and time in so many positive ways. Today’s question concerns the basics of the Time Sector System and its philosophy.

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Script | 361

Hello, and welcome to episode 361 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

I still remember the day that the Time Sector concept came to me. I was walking to the gym one sunny afternoon and was reflecting on my overwhelming task list waiting for me at home. I remember thinking to myself that all these tasks hitting me day after day was not sustainable.

I was organised and knew where everything was, but I felt trapped in a cycle of never-ending tasks and emails. Whenever I feel this way about anything I always tell myself that there must be a better way.

And then it hit me.

I think it was the word “unsustainable”. The number of emails I was getting was never going to reduce. It was going to increase. The amount of work I had to do was equally never going to reduce. At some point I would reach breaking point.

It wasn’t the work itself. It was time. I just didn’t have enough time. That was the clue.

You cannot control the number of tasks, messages, and emails you receive. It’s a random number. Yet, the one constant—a constant not controlled by you or me, but by science, and in particular physics, is time. Time is our constraint.

If I could allocate time for doing the different categories of work I had to do and decide when to do the tasks in those categories, it would not matter how much work I had coming in. Everything would get done in due course.

And that was the seed that sprouted into the Time Sector System five years ago.

So, with the history told, it’s time now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Elaine. Elaine asks, “Hi Carl, I recently came across one of your videos where you talk about the Time Sector System. Could you explain its philosophy and how it differs from other time management systems?”

Hi Elaine,

Thank you for your question.

The thinking behind the Time Sector System is that we are limited not by what we can do—we can do a lot—but by how much time we have to do things.

We need to eat, sleep and move (exercise), at our basic level. On top of that we likely have family commitments, school runs, doctor appointments and friends that need seeing. Then we have our work to do.

The limiting factor is time. It’s fixed. We only get 24 hours a day.

Now you can manipulate time by hiring people to do stuff for you. For example, you may be fortunate to be able to afford a nanny to take care of your kids when you are at work. Or, you may be able to hire an assistant. But no matter how you manipulate time, it’s still only 24 hours.

So the philosophy behind the Time Sector System is, it’s not about what you have to do, it’s about when you will do it. After all, that’s the only thing you have control over.

At a wider level, that means organising your tasks into tasks that need to be done this week, next week, this month, next month or long-term or on hold.

When you divide your tasks up into when you will do them you narrow down the decisions you need to make on a day to day basis. When a new task comes in, you only need three questions:

What is it?

What do I need to do to complete it?

When will I do it?

So, for example, imagine I get a notification from my health insurance provider informing me I need to book myself in for a medical check-up.

What is it? It’s a request for me to make an appointment with the doctor.

What do I need to do? I need to make an appointment with the doctor.

When am I going to do it? That depends.

It depends, in my case, on when is convenient for my wife. We go together to the clinic for our annual check-up. In Korea it’s a six-hour ordeal, some turn it into a family outing. So, before I can make the appointment I need to consult with my wife.

So, back to question 2. What do I need to do? Consult with my wife. So, there’s the task. When do I need to do it? This week would be good because if I don’t it will sink to the bottom of my list/ So. I choose today when I see my wife.

When you are processing your inbox, that’s the process. What is it? What do I need to do? When am I going to do it?

Another example might be I have a project that is due for completion at the end of the month. As I am looking at the project, I know what it is—it’s a project. What do I need to do? I need to talk with my colleague about how she is getting on with the graphics for the landing page. That will give me an estimate on when I can finish the landing page. So, when am I going to do it? I’ll send her a message on Monday, so I can add that task to my This week folder.

It could be that as I return from a business trip, I notice my passport will expire in eight month’s time. Now, I know the government won’t be reminding me that my passport needs renewing, so it’s something I need to do.

What is it: It’s a passport renewal.

What do I need to do? I’m not sure. The last time I renewed my passport was nine years ago. The system’s probably changed since then. What can I do about that? Go to the government’s website and find out the process.

Okay, I need to do some research. When will I do it? I’m busy this week, so I can drop the task: find out how to renew my passport into my next week folder.

I don’t need to add a date to it at this stage because I will be doing a weekly planning session on Saturday and I decide then.

It’s brilliantly simple, and takes next to no time to develop the habit of asking these three questions.

There are a few other little things you can do to make this seamless.

For instance, have separate folders for your routines and critical recurring tasks. Routines are those little things that just need to be done. Watering the house plants, cleaning actionable emails, and basic admin tasks.

Your Recurring Critical tasks are those tasks that come from your Areas of Focus and your core work. I won’t go into the Areas of Focus here. These are your life level tasks such as planning your exercise, staying in touch with family and friends and self improvement.

Your core work tasks are the tasks you are employed to do. At a basic level, these would be things like talking with customers if you’re a salesperson, preparing materials and teaching if you are a teacher, etc.

What you do is pull out the tasks you need to perform each day, week or month, and se them to recur as frequently as they need to.

Another one is when you first adopt the Time Sector System, the temptation will be to throw everything into your This Week and Next Week folders. This results in them filling up which causes overwhelm.

When you first begin using the Time Sector System, you want to be learning what is realistic and what is not. This involves monitoring what you can and cannot get done each week.

For example, I know my limit, when I begin the week, is thirty tasks in my This Week folder. Any more than that and I won’t be completing the excess. This does not include my routines and Recurring Critical Tasks.

If I am to get my most important work done each week, anything more than thirty tasks in my This Week folder and something will break.

It will take you a few weeks to find your limit.

And then it all comes down to your daily planning.

While you can plan the week, you will find that you are picking up tasks that need to be done in the week you are in. Before you end your day, you should look at your calendar for the next day. Look to see how much time you have available to do your tasks.

You’re going to have a very challenging day if you have seven hours of meetings and thirty tasks to complete. Something’s not going to get done.

It’s during the daily Planning Sequence that you plan out a realistic day. Perhaps you can move some meetings, or reduce your task list.

And to finish, you select your two most important tasks, flag them and make sure they are your must-do tasks.

And that’s it.

As I go through this, it sounds complex, but when you are doing it, it is not.

New tasks go through the three questions—what is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? And you can then move those tasks from your inbox to their appropriate folder.

Then, on a daily basis, you check to see how much time you have for tasks, based on how many meetings you have, and create a prioritised, realistic list.

At the end of the week, you get to look at your other folders—next week, this month, next month and long-term and on hold to see what can be brought forward to your this week folder.

The good news is, this approach, helps you to delete tasks that no longer need to be done.

Now what about projects? If they are not in your task manager, where are they?

You manage your projects from your notes app. That could be Apple Notes, Evernote, Notion, OneNote or any kind of notes app that allows you to create links to documents, articles, images and emails.

You notes is a natural place to manage your projects. After all, a project is a big hairy thing that needs managing. You will likely have documents and meeting notes to keep together.

So, keep them together in a notes app. That way, when you’re working on a project you’re not distracted by all the little, easy tasks you could be doing. You can get yourself focused on the project and work from your project notes.

All you then need is a single task in your task manager telling you to work on a specific project. Depending on what tools you are using, you will also likely be able to create a link directly from the task to the project note.

Now the good news. If you are curious about the Time Sector System, I am in the process of updating the online course. It’s the fifth anniversary and it’s a big update. We are in the final editing stage and I hope to get launch the update in the next ten to fourteen days.

I’ve also done a lot of YouTube videos on this—you can see the playlist on my YouTube channel.

Thank you Elaine 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 Mar 09, 2025

Self-Discipline: Is it overrated?

Sunday Mar 09, 2025

Is self-discipline overrated? That’s what we’re looking at this week.

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