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

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

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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The Ultimate Productivity Workshop

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Script | 360

Hello, and welcome to episode 360 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.

We hear a lot about self-discipline and how we should develop our discipline to achieve our goals or become more productive. But is this true?

Self-discipline is hard—more so these days with all the instant gratification distractions—and anything that is hard is going to be tough to do consistently. Whether you are trying to accomplish a goal or become better organised, if you rely on self-discipline to get you through there’s going to be a good chance you will fail.

There are some people who thrive on self-discipline. The most famous being David Goggins—he’s a tough cookie. Pain, discipline and a never die mindset are what he appears to live for. But, people with that mindset are rare and you don’t need it.

There is a better way. It’s not easy—nothing worthwhile ever is—but with practice, a little determination, persistence, and consistency, you soon find you don’t need discipline to achieve these things.

Now, before we get to the question, Here’s a little reminder about this week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop.

If you have not yet registered, you can still do so, there’s a link in the show notes or you can visit my website—carlpullein.com— to register.

The workshop will cover how to transition from an unsustainable task-based productivity system to a more sustainable time-based one. I will show you how to manage your work, how to time block effectively and how to prioritise your work so you know you are always working on the right things at the right time.

For those of you already registered, I will be sending out the first workbook in the next day or two so keep an eye out for that. I will also include the joining instructions.

If you want a less hectic and overwhelming life, then this workshop is a must. It’s your chance to create a time management and productivity system that works for you.

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips on getting better with self-discipline? I’ve never been very good at being disciplined but as I get older, I feel I need to do better at this.

Hi Ryan, Thank you for your question.

I’ve always found the concept of “living a disciplined life” interesting. You see, the word discipline suggests “punishment” of some kind. When we’re at school if we do something wrong, we are “disciplined”. That was my first introduction to the word. (Or perhaps my parents disciplining me for whatever reason.)

And yet, when we talk about living a “disciplined life” it’s often spoken of in positive terms. Yet, there’s that underlying sense that it’s bad.

I recently wrote about Charles Aznavour, the prolific French singer/songwriter. Aznavour wrote over a 1,000 songs and recorded many more. He lived until he was 94, exercised every day and was still touring when he passed away in 2018.

In interviews he was frequently asked about his productivity and how he created such a disciplined life. Yet Aznavour never thought he was disciplined.

He woke early every day, and spent his mornings writing songs. For him it wasn’t discipline, it was his passion, his purpose. He couldn’t wait to get started each day. And on those rare days he wasn’t in the mood to write, he still wrote.

Why? He didn’t need to. He wrote because that was what he did. It was a habit.

Have you ever tried starting your day without your morning coffee or not brushing your teeth? How did you feel? Probably uncomfortable and little self-conscious.

You don’t need discipline to brush your teeth or make your coffee in the morning do you? It’s just what you do.

And there is where you will find the answer to living with a little more discipline. Don’t think of it as discipline. It isn’t. It’s just what you do.

Take planning your day at the end of the day.

Last night, I spent three hours in a recording studio recording the audiobook of Your Time Your Way. That was after a full day recording and editing videos. I was exhausted. My voice was ragged. Yet, after getting home, I got my Franklin Planner (Yes, I’m still using it), sat on the sofa and planned today.

There was no discipline involved. I also had a great excuse. I’d been on the go since 8:30 am and it was 11:45 pm. I could easily have skipped it. Yet I didn’t.

Why? Because that is what I do in the evening. I give myself five to ten minutes to plan the day.

I love the quote from Jim Rohn: “each day you get to choose between two pains. The pain of regret or the pain of discipline”.

I know what happens if I don’t plan the day—the next day starts out of control. I have no focus and anything loud and “urgent” becomes the priority—even when it isn’t a priority.

Most people’s problems with time management and productivity is because they skip the five to ten minutes planning the day. If you don’t have a plan for the day, you will end up on someone else’s plan and they don’t care about how you feel—a bit harsh, I know, but it’s true.

For most things you don’t need discipline. It’s a choice. Do you scroll social media or read a book? Do you sit on the sofa watching TV or go out for a walk? Do you eat a chocolate bar or a banana? That’s nothing to do with discipline. It’s a choice.

Reading a book is easy. Get a physical book, not an ebook, and place it on the coffee table near your favourite armchair or sofa. Then give yourself ten minutes each day to sit and read it. If you place a bookmark in the book, you can see the bookmark gradually falling to the bottom (the end of the book).

And as the book is on your coffee table, you will see it every time you sit down.

More often than not, you will read more than ten minutes.

Ultimately, those people you think are living a “disciplined life” just have certain habits. Getting up early and writing a journal is a habit. It doesn’t need discipline if it’s a habit.

My wife writes her journal every evening before she goes to bed. She uses Day One, the digital journal, and writes on her laptop. She sits on the sofa, opens her laptop and writes. Some days she’ll only write for five minutes. Other days she’ll write of over an hour. For her she sees it as winding down at the end of the day. Absolutely no discipline is involved.

It would be strange not seeing her on the sofa writing a journal.

Yet for many sitting down to write a journal requires discipline. Ask my wife if writing her journal requires discipline and she’ll laugh at you.

You don’t need discipline if you have the right habits.

How do you develop habits. Well, firstly I would recommend you read James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It’s a brilliant book.

Secondly, identify the habit you want to develop. I always suggest your morning routines are a good place to e to start. These are the easiest kind of habits to develop. What would you like to do first thing in the morning?

You may want to read, meditate, exercise or write a journal. Pick one thing.

For example, if you choose to write a journal, start by making yourself your favourite morning drink, then sit down somewhere comfortable and begin writing. Give yourself five to ten minutes to write.

You can help yourself by putting your journal next to your kettle or coffee maker before you go to bed. That way when you wake up, turn on the kettle you see your journal there waiting for you.

Something James Clear mentions in Atomic Habits is to reduce the friction. This is akin to those who wish to exercise in the morning, putting out their exercise clothes next to their bed before going to bed. It reduces the friction of choosing what to wear. I think of this as minimising the risk of finding an excuse.

These are all great tips. Yet, the disciplined life that Charles Aznavour lived didn’t need tricks. It appeared disciplined, yet it was just how he lived his life. And that’s the goal here; to build daily habits that are effortless because that is what you do.

Most people eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time? Why? It’s because that’s what they do. When I commuted to the office, I would catch the 8:05 bus each morning. I knew what time to leave the house because I knew how long it would take to walk to the bus stop. It was simply what I did.

I should give you one little tip I’ve used in the past. If, say, I want to read a book each evening but find myself watching TV instead, what I will do is tell myself I must read for ten minutes before rewarding myself with turning on the TV.

The advantage of this little trick is you still get to do the thing you want to do—watch TV—but you also get to do the other thing you struggle doing. Eventually, it just becomes a habit. Watching TV without reading becomes uncomfortable.

So there you go, Ryan. It’s not really about being disciplined. It’s more about choosing what you want to do and carrying it through.

Your calendar can help you there. Remember the saying, what goes on your calendar gets done. With this, the key is if you don’t or cannot do something you must remove it from your calendar. That act of moving it from your calendar reminds you about you haven’t done. It acts a good incentive.

If, for example, you schedule going for a walk after lunch, but keep skipping it, because you are removing it every day, you will begin asking yourself what’s wrong and re-assess things. Perhaps you will be more consistent if you go for your walk in the morning or evening.

I hope that has helped, Ryan. Think about what you want to do, when you want to do it and do it. Sooner rather later it will be just what you do.

Don’t forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The first session is on Friday evening, it will be something you will never regret.

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

Sunday Mar 02, 2025

Beyond Project Thinking: How to Get Things Done

Sunday Mar 02, 2025

In this week’s episode, what’s the best way to manage projects?

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Script | 359

Hello, and welcome to episode 359 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.

From time to time, something comes along that sounds great when first described but then turns nasty.

In the productivity world, that something is Getting Things Done and in particular the definition of what a project is.

This is not the fault of David Allen, Getting Things Done’s author; this is how his description of a project has been horribly misinterpreted.

At its essence, Getting Things Done is about categorising your work into contexts. That could be work you can do on your computer or phone. In your office or at home. It is, and never was about “projects”. Projects, at best, are a sideshow. A simple way to organise your work. Nothing more.

Yet for some reason, a few early readers misunderstood GTD, wrote about it and now there’s a whole generation of people believing anything that involves two steps or more is a project and must be organised as such.

And there, is the source of overwhelm, time wasted to organising stuff instead of doing stuff and huge backlogs of things to do.

Before we get to the heart of today’s podcast, it’s important that I clear this misunderstanding up.

If you ever bought one the fantastic GTD setup guides that was, and may still be, sold on the GTD website, you will notice that whatever task manager you are using, you set up the lists, folders or projects (depending on which task manager you are using) as contexts. Those contexts usually related to people, places or things. For example, your home, or office. Your computer, printer or car. Or your partner, boss or colleagues.

You then dropped any task related to these contexts into its appropriate context.

Your projects were organised in a file folder system that you kept in a filing cabinet. Current projects—the things you were working on this week or month—were kept on or near your desk for quick access.

In those folders you kept all the details of the project. Notes, documents, outlines, etc. Perhaps you also had a checklist of what needed to happen next.

Today, you can use your digital note app for that purpose.

The key thing about GTD was it was task context driven—ie, you could only do something if you were in the right place, with the right tool and with the right people. It was never about projects.

So, now you have the background, I think it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, How do you best manage projects using your task manager, notes app, and calendar together?

Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question.

I think the first place to start is to avoid looking for a way to treat any new input as a project. Most things are not.

Theoretically, this podcast is a project. I need to choose the question, write the script, set up the studio, record the podcast, edit it, then publish it and hand it over to the my marketing manager for sharing on social media.

That’s seven steps. Well within the definition of a GTD project. Yet, if I were to treat each podcast episode as a project, I’d waste hours just organising it.

A podcast episode is something I do every week. It’s not a project. It’s just part of my work.

Usually, on Thursday I will write the script. That means I go into my list of questions which is in a single note in Evernote, select a question, then begin writing the script.

Then on Sunday morning, after my coaching calls have finished, I set up my little studio, and record the podcast. Once recorded, I edit it and then publish it.

The only tasks on my task manager are a task on Thursday that reminds me I need to write my script and a task on Sunday that reminds me to record the podcast. Two tasks. That’s it.

I don’t need a project folder for any of this.

There is one other thing I do that relates to your question, Benjamin. I have a two hour writing block on my calendar on a Thursday for writing the script and a two hour block on Sunday for recording it.

So, there in essence you have all three tools working together.

I have a single note in my notes app with the title “podcast questions”. That makes it easy to search for.
My task manager reminds me when I need to write the script and record the podcast.
My calendar protects enough time each week to ensure I get each part of the process completed.

If you want to simplify things I would suggest looking at how you define a project.

In my eyes, a project is something unique, something you either have not done before or rarely ever do. Typical projects would be:

Moving house

Buying a new car

Planning a vacation

Setting up a new payroll system

Starting a business

Finding a new job

Doing the work you are employed to do is not a project—well not unless you are a project manager.

An advertising agency isn’t going to treat each new client as a “project”. An advertising agency creates advertising campaigns every day.

The graphic designer has a list of designs they are working on and when they begin their day they only need to choose which campaign they will work on that day.

Designing is their job.

The same goes for the copywriter. When they begin their day they choose which campaign to work on and that is dictated by when the next client meeting is.

What is the work you are employed to do?

A teacher doesn’t treat each new class as a project. They have a process or system for preparing their materials and when the teaching time begins they teach.

It’s possible that a lot of your work does require a place to keep meeting notes, plans and links to documents you may be working on. That’s what your notes app is for.

Your notes app has replaced the filing cabinet today. Filing cabinets were static—they never moved. Your digital notes app can go with you wherever you go.

If you do have any projects, that is where the information and resources go.

All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you should be working on today.

You may have tasks like:

Work on new payroll system project

Finish proposal for Universal Exports

Follow up Mr Oddjob at Auric Enterprises

Clear Action This Day folder

Your calendar tells you if your task list for the day is realistic. If you have six hours of meetings today and you plan to work on your payroll project and finish the proposal for Universal Exports, you’re likely being a little ambitious.

You calendar tells you if you have time to do the things you’d like to do that day.

You can go further, though and use your calendar to protect time for doing your key work.

If, for example, you want to (or need to) spend two hours working on the Universal Exports proposal, then you can block time on your calendar for doing that work. There might be some time sensitivity involved there. Getting the proposal to Universal Exports might be the most important thing you need to do that day. That would be flagged in your task manager as a non-negotiable task that day.

The daily and weekly planning is where I would decide what I will be working on that day or week.

The planning sessions are where you can step back and look at the bigger landscape of what you have to do and decide where you will put your time that day.

Right now, I do have a project. I am in the process of recording the audiobook version of Your Time Your Way. This is not something I can sit down a real off as a single task.

I need to book the recording studio and sound engineer and my voice will only last for around 3 hours before I begin sounding like an out of tune frog.

The only thing I need in my system each week is when I need to be at the recording studio. Currently that is Wednesday nights at 7:30. We record until 10:30 pm. I don’t need a task for any of that. That’s on my calendar.

The next day, the sound engineer sends me the recordings and I go through them to make sure everything sounds right. I have a task in my task manager that pops up each Thursday reminding me to review that previous day’s recordings.

I have a project folder for the Your Time, Your Way book. That contains all my notes, meeting notes and any information I may need. Right now, though, I don’t need to reference that. I just need to turn up at the recording studio on Wednesday nights, record the audiobook and review the recordings the next day.

The important thing is not to confuse your core work with projects. Core work is the work you are employed to do. Designers design, teachers teach, managers manage, truck drivers drive a truck.

All you need is a list of tasks you want to complete each day and get on and complete as many as you can. The majority of those tasks will be related to your core work.

A project, on the other hand, is something unique, often outside of your core work, that needs additional time for doing. You may need to utilise your unique skills to complete that project, you may only have a small say in the project. Either way, on a day to day basis, the only thing you need to decide is what your next task is and do that.

This year is the fifth anniversary of the Time Sector System course. I am currently in the process of re-recording and updating that course.

Is it a project or just part of my core work.

I know from experience that if I treat it as a project things will get complicated.

Yet, I’ve create many courses over the years. I know the process.

For an update, it’s to review and update the course outline. Then schedule time on my calendar for recording and editing it. There will be some additional tasks related to marketing, but I am not there yet. I’m recording, so the driver is my calendar.

Hopefully that has helped, Benjamin. The key is to simplify things as much as possible. Try to avoid creating projects and instead ask if there is a process you can follow. Most things you frequently do has a process.

Processes speed everything up.

As the Formula 1 season is about to start, I’m reminded of one of the sports best leaders, Ross Brawn’s comment on running a team.

The new car for the new season is never considered a project. It’s a process. There’s a time to begin work on the new car, there’s a time to test the new car, etc. Yet none of that is considered a project. Aerodynamicists do the aerodynamics. Engineers work on the chassis and engine and the logistics people work on the logistics. It’s what they do every day.

Yet, building a new wind tunnel, or engineering factory, that would be a project. These “projects” are rare and need specialist inputs.

Don’t forget, we’re two weeks away from the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025. This is your opportunity to take a live workshop with me where I help you to create and build your very own productivity system, A system that works for you.

Thank you Benjamin 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 Feb 23, 2025

Where Are You Spending Your Time?

Sunday Feb 23, 2025

Where are you spending most of your time? Are you planning or doing? That’s what we are looking at this week.

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Script | 358

Hello, and welcome to episode 358 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.

Podcaster Chris Williamson has recently caused a bit of a stir in the productivity world with the phrase “the productivity rain dance”. Cal Newport picked this up and it’s something I’ve written and spoken about for many years.

If you are obsessing about productivity tools—apps, techniques and systems—you’re not doing the work. You’re doing the productivity rain dance. It’s organising, planning and searching for new tools in the hope that somehow the work will get done.

It won’t. And while you are wasting all that time planning, and playing, the work continues to pile up.

This week’s question is linked to this in that it’s about tools and organising work and I hope, my answer will help you find the balance between collecting, organising and doing.

Before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question, I’d like to mention that the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025 is coming.

On Fridays 14th and 21st March I invite you to spend two hours with me learning how to create a time management and productivity system that’s focused on doing the work so you have time for the things you want time for.

In the workshop, we will cover getting control of your calendar and task manager . Then in week two, I will show you some simple techniques to get control of, and more importantly, stay in control of your communications—email, Slack/Teams messages AND the all important daily and weekly planning sessions.

Places are limited so, if you would like to develop a personal productivity system that is focused on doing rather than organising and planning, get yourself registered today. The link to register is in the show notes.

Okay, back to this episode. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Alastair. Alastair asks, hi Carl. I recently came across your work and wonder how you avoid getting caught up in the wonderful world of productivity apps. I never seem to able to stick to anything and I know I am wasting time.

Hi Alastair, thank you for sending in your question.

I’m not sure you are necessarily wasting time looking for the right tools. If you are at the start of your productivity journey, finding the right tools is inevitable and yes, it can be confusing. There are so many.

However, there comes a point when you need to stop and settle down with a set of tools.

Those tools are: A calendar, a notes app and a task manager.

The good news is the built in tools that comes with your computer will do. You don’t need expensive subscriptions to so called AI enabled tools or collaborative project management tools.

What are you trying to do when you decide it’s time to get organised and be “productive”?

It’s not about getting more work done. That’s a bit of a misnomer about productivity. It’s about getting the important stuff done and eliminating the less important.

Getting your kids up, dressed, fed and ready for school each morning is important at 7:30 am. Checking email and messages is not. There’s a time and place for those messages, but 7:30 am is not the time.

The world we live in today has made communication incredible fast and easy. Forty years ago, the only forms of communication were letters and telephone calls. (Although some offices had fax machines too).

If you were not next to a telephone, no one could contact you. And if you were not in the office, you didn’t know what surprises were contained in the correspondence waiting for you.

It was therefore easier to compartmentalise your days. Today, it’s much more difficult because you can be alerted to problems instantly, and those problems can derail your day very quickly.

The challenge therefore is to be able to quickly sift through all the stuff coming at us and to decide what is important and what is not.

When things are coming at us all day, they appear loud and urgent. But urgent is not necessarily important.

If you have a thousand emails backlogged in your email system and your boss is demanding you send in your employee evaluations by the end of the week, your employee evaluations are the more important task. The backlog will have to wait.

And let’s be honest, if someone’s been waiting three months for you to reply to their email they’re not going to be bothered if they have to wait a further week.

If you consider that scenario for a moment, your productivity tools are not going to help you.

The only thing you need to know is that writing your employee evaluations must be done. Shuffling that task around your productivity tools won’t do that for you. You are, in effect, procrastinating.

I like the analogy to the rain dance here. A rain dance is performed to persuade God or the gods to bring rain to water the crops. Yet, the dance doesn’t produce the rain. You can dance as much as you like, you can wear elaborate costumes and involve other people. None of that will give you what you want—water to feed the crops.

You can download as many productivity tools as you like. You can organise your notes in such a way that finding stuff is quick and easy and you can spend hours curating your notes and tasks so they look pretty. Yet, none of that gets the work done.

Doing the work is the only way the work will get done.

So, all you need each day is a list of things you have decided are important and you get done and do them.

For that, you don’t need expensive apps. A single sheet of paper would do that.

I’ve always found it interesting how productive people get their work done. The common thread is they do the work, not organise it.

If you Google Albert Einstein’s desk you will see a mess. Papers and books strewn all over the place. If you search for Jeff Bezos’ desk from the early days of Amazon, you’ll see something very similar.

These guys got a tremendous amount of work done without the need for clean and tidy systems. They got on with doing the work that mattered and cleaned up when they were finished.

Sadly, unproductive people don’t achieve very much so we cannot see their workspaces, but I’ll bet they were beautifully neat and tidy with bookshelves of neatly organised books and papers lined up perfectly on their desks.

A few years ago I got into watching YouTube videos of minimalist desk set ups. (Weirdly, these videos are still popular!). I remember at the time wondering how they ever got any work done. It must have taken hours to keep their workspace so clean.

The key to all of this is knowing what is important and what is not. This is why I recommend doing two exercises before you begin developing any kind of system.

The first is to establish what your areas of focus are. These eight areas around your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness, lifestyle and personal development are important because they define what is important to you as an individual.

The next is to get clear what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do and directly effects your promotional prospects and ultimately your income.

Being quick to answer your phone, respond to a message or email or being on time to every meeting is not your core work. Well, not unless you work in customer support.

Once you know what your areas of focus are and your core work is, you have a pre-defined set of priorities on which to base your decisions about what you should be doing each day.

For example, one of my areas of focus related to my work (career) is to help as many people as I can become more productive and less stressed. To do that, I produce several pieces of content each week.

Creating and publishing that content is always a priority for me.

I don’t need a lot of tools to to do that.

A calendar protects time each week for creating that content—I have twelve hours a week protected for this.

I have a very disorganised list of content ideas in a single note in Evernote—a notes app I’ve been using for almost 16 years now.

And, of course, I have an app for writing and producing that content.

Are there better calendars, notes apps and writing tools out there? Possibly, but how much faster would I be able to create content with those new tools? Probably no faster because using them would be unfamiliar to me.

The tools I use I’ve used for over ten years. I know them inside out and they are boring. And that’s good because I’m not tempted to organise them, or even look for new apps. They do the job I need them to do and I can focus on creating the content.

If you want to become more productive and get the important things done on time every time, the only way you will do that is to do the work. There are no shortcuts and no productivity tool will do it for you. Only you can do that.

If you need to write a report, open up Microsoft Work or Google Docs and write the first paragraph.
If you need to prepare a presentation, open up PowerPoint or Keynote and create the first slide.
If you need to wash your car, go to the car wash centre and wash your car.
If you need to do your taxes, download the documents and write in your name and national insurance number.

Funny how none of those things requires you to add a task into a task manager. You just need to decide when you will do them and do them.

So there you go, Alastair. Focus less on the tools and more on what you need to do to get the job done. You really don’t need elaborate apps, complex organisational structures or a minimalist desk.

You just need time protected to get the work done.

Thank you, Alastair for your question and thank you for listening. Don’t forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop where will cover many of these concepts (and much more).

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

Sunday Feb 16, 2025

Manage Your Time, Not Tasks.

Sunday Feb 16, 2025

This week, why managing your time is better than managing tasks.

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