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

Script | 382

Hello, and welcome to episode 382 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.

It’s always fascinated me how so many people see the attainment of a “work-life balance” as their goal in life. Yet, that balance is easily achieved if you know what is important to you, are clear about your core work activities, and take control of your calendar.

I’m reading Dominic Sandbrook’s brilliant book State of Emergency: The Way We Were, Britain 1970 to 1974.

In Britain in the early 1970s, the economy was in dire straits. The labour unions were fighting the employers and the government, inflation was rising uncontrollably and unemployment was becoming a serious problem. Nothing the government tried worked and often made things worse.

Yet, despite all these travails, people got on with their lives. They went to work, came home had dinner with their families or dropped into the pub to meet up with friends. At weekends kids went out to the cinema, or hung out on the high street with their friends.

Parents would potter around their gardens or attempt DIY projects at home.

Balance was a given. Work happened at work. Home life happened at home. There were clear boundaries.

Today, it’s easy to find people being nostalgic for those halcyon days, yet they weren’t all great. There were frequent power cuts (power outages), droughts, and the incessant strikes meant often people couldn’t get to work, or their workplace was closed because of the strikes.

Having a work life balance shouldn’t be a goal. It should be the way you life your life. There’s a time for work, and a time for your hobbies and family. Not in a strict sense, but in a flexible way.

This week’s question is about ho to achieve that with the minimal amount of effort and fuss.

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

This week’s question comes from Isabelle. Isabelle asks, Hi Carl, I’m having a lot of trouble trying to balance my professional and personal life. I never seem to have time to meet my friends, and often skip going to the gym because I have to finish my work late in the evenings. What do you recommend someone do to regain some work/life balance?

Hi Isabelle. Thank you for your question.

One of the most effective ways to start this is to create what I call a “perfect” week calendar. This is where you create a new blank calendar and sketch out what you would like time for each week.

Begin with your personal life. How many times do you want to go to the gym, how much sleep do you want each night, and how much time you want to spend with family and friends?

Add these to your calendar.

Then sketch out how you would like to divide up your work time. How many meetings per week, how much time can you spend on admin and communications each day and time for doing deeper, focused work.

Once you have done this, you will get to see if what you want time for each week is realistic. I’ve found most people who do this exercise discover that they are trying to do the impossible.

You only have 168 hours a week. And you do not have to do everything you want to do in those 168 hours.

Before coming to Korea, I used to go to watch Leeds Rhinos Rugby League team every home game. In those days, those games were usually held on a Friday night.

This meant, every other Friday, I’d make sure I left work on time, got home, changed, had a quick dinner, then went to pick up my friends and off we went.

After the game we’d call into the local pub for a few beers before going home.

During the season, we made it a non-negotiable event. It would have been unheard of for any of us to miss a Friday night game.

If I had urgent work to finish, I would rather go back into the office on Saturday morning to finish it off than miss a game.

That was the mindset. Those games and meeting up with friends were non-negotiable.

And that is the first lesson here. If there is something you want to do, then make it non-negotiable.

Of all the productivity and time management tools available, the only one that will tell you if you have time to do something is your calendar.

Task managers and notes apps can collect a lot of stuff. Ideas, things to do, future projects, meeting notes. The list is infinite.

Yet, the time you have is not infinite. It’s limited. Each day has 24 hours, each week has 168 hours.

Part of the reason many feel there is no balance in their lives is they’ve allowed task managers to become their primary time management tool.

If you look at your task manager, it’s just a list of things you either have to do or would like to do. There’s no time frame. Some of the things on there will be important and time sensitive. However, a lot won’t be. And when you scroll through the list, all you see are things to do.

It numbs the mind and makes you feel you have no time to rest.

The difference between today and the 1970s is what we are prioritising.

Because in the 1970s the only productivity or time management tools we had were desk or pocket diaries and notebooks, the only tool we looked at when asked to do something was our diaries.

This meant we would instantly see a conflict and would be able to say “No, sorry I cannot do that on that day”.

Today, when we are asked to do something we add to our task manager-after all, it’s easier to add it there than to open up our calendar app, and look at what we are committed to.

If you have on your calendar a regular aerobics class on a Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. And you’re asked to attend a meeting at 4:30 p.m. You’d more likely say you cannot attend that meeting if all you had is your calendar to look at.

Today, we don’t do that. We say “yes, okay” then later realise we’’ll struggle to get to our class.

I remember when I was at university, my finish time at work was 5:30 p.m. and my lectures began at 6:00 p.m. There was no way I would accept a meeting request on a Tuesday or Thursday after 3:30 p.m.

It took me twenty minutes to get to my university from the office.

Attending university was a non-negotiable for me. Meetings with colleagues could be arranged either earlier in the day or the next.

This is why you cannot afford to leave things to chance if you want to bring balance into your life. If something is important to you, you need to be intentional about it.

But there’s another important consideration and that is flexibility. Balance is about being flexible.

Most nights, I finish my coaching calls around 11:00 p.m. Now it would be very tempting for me to quit and flop down in front of the TV and mindlessly watch something. Yet, reading real books is something I get a great deal of pleasure from. So, before I consider turning on the TV, I grab my book, go through to the living room and read for twenty minutes or so.

It’s wonderfully relaxing—much more so than trying to find something to watch TV.

Yet, if there is something I do want to watch on TV, I’ll skip the book and watch the TV show.

There are sometimes when for one reason or another, I have not cleared my actionable email. If all I have is the hour after my calls finish to do it, then I’ll spend thirty minutes or so clearing as many emails as I can.

Doing my email late is far better than having to try and find additional time the next day.

On Wednesday this week, my wife asked me if I would go with her and her parents on a little trip to the mountains that afternoon.

I had not planned for it, but said if I could have the morning to record my YouTube videos and get my Learning Note out, I would love to go.

I knew I would have to edit the videos when I got back that evening, but spending time with my family was important. So, that’s what I did.

We had a lovely afternoon in the mountains and I got my videos edited.

As I sat down to read my book on Wednesday night, I had a little smile on my face because the day had been fantastic, and all my important work had been done.

Creating balance in life is not about adding more and more stuff to do in a task manager. It’s about how you are allocating your time each day.

What is important to you? That’s what goes on your calendar. There’s a time when you can sit down at your desk and do work. But there’s also time when you need to stop, relax and spend time with the people you care about, or do your exercise, play with your kids or walk your dog.

Everything you want to do requires time. Yet, time is the one thing in your life that is limited.

You can accept thousands of tasks, and have hundreds of ideas to do things but none of those will happen if you do not have the time to do them.

That’s why I advocate managing your work by when you will do it, rather than managing endless lists of tasks. When you focus more on your available time to do stuff, you begin eliminating more of the low-value stuff and begin to appreciate your time more.

There are thousands of things you could do, perhaps would like to do someday. None of that matters today. What matters today is you get the important things done. And choosing those are is entirely within your power.

Yes, you can go to the gym, you can also have a movie night with your friends or family. They are important (think family and relationships and health and fitness areas of focus).

Yet, if you have an important interview tomorrow and feel a couple of hours this evening spent preparing would be a better use of your time, then ask if you can postpone the movie night to tomorrow.

Tonight is not zero hour. You can move things around to better fit with your priorities for today.

And that neatly brings us back to the daily and weekly planning.

Weekly planning is about the big picture. The big things you want to get accomplished. If you decide that you will go to the gym three times this week, schedule it.

If you see that a good use of your time would be to work on that big project where the deadline is approaching, schedule time for working on it.

The daily planning is about making the necessary adjustments to deal with the things that you were unaware of when you did the weekly planning. The client with a crisis, your disorganised boss that forgot to tell you about her impending deadline, or your son coming down with a heavy cold.

It all starts and ends with your calendar. That worked perfectly well for hundreds of years, it still works today.

Task managers and notes apps support you. Your calendar is where you get to see what you’re committed to and tells you if you have time to take on more, or whether taking a few days break would be more beneficial for you.

I hope that helps, Isabelle. Thank you again for sending in your question.

And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Sunday Aug 17, 2025

Hobby-Less and Stressed: Why We Need Real Activities Again

Sunday Aug 17, 2025

"Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall, and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings."

There, Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello reminds us to focus on the magic in front of us.

What are you doing to switch off, and if you cannot do so, how can you do it? That’s why we’re looking at this week.

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

Script | 381

Hello, and welcome to episode 381 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 completely switch yourself off from tasks, projects, emails and messages?

And not just professional emails and messages and tasks, it includes all the WhatsApp messages from friends, strangers and the home projects you promised yourself that you would do this weekend, but never did?

It seems we’ve found ourselves caught in the to-do trap. Where the only thing on your mind is all the things you’ve listed somewhere that you think you must do.

It’s a horrible existence. As soon as we sit down to relax, our phone reminds us there’s more to do. More emails and messages come in, task manager reminders pop up on the screen with a bing telling us we’re supposed to call this person or that one.

And given that we now carry our phones around with us everywhere we go, it’s as if the phone no longer serves us, but we serve it: jumping to its every whim and beep.

The problem here is that it’s not something you suddenly start doing. It’s a gradual creep. It begins with waiting for your daughter to text you the time her train arrives at the railway station, to suddenly worrying about whether a customer or your boss sent you last minute Teams message before the end of your work day. You’e got to check right?

And before long, you feel intensely uncomfortable if your phone isn’t in your hand or near you. It’s then when you have gone beyond experiencing a healthy relationship with your digital devices. It’s time to unravel all those now ingrained impulses.

And that’s where this week’s question comes in. 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 Maggie. Maggie asks, hi Carl I see all these productivity YouTube videos, and listen to a lot of podcasts, but very few of them ever talk about how to switch off at the end of the day and relax. This is something I am really struggling at the moment with.

Hi Maggie, thank you for your question.

You’re right, I rarely see videos or hear podcasts talking about switching off and relaxing. I do sometimes hear people saying to stop and relax, but not how to do it.

As I mentioned a moment a go, this is not something we just stop doing. It creeps up on you. One moment you’re a child without any digital devices, being curious, running around, trying new hobbies then falling asleep to suddenly being held hostage by task lists, projects and long lists of thing you think you should do.

Not to mention the anxiety of responding quickly enough to a friend’s text message or your boss’s email.

If you think about it, while we seem to have adapted well to this new phenomenon, and appear to just accept this as the way of life, it’s really a horrible existence.

Last week, I mentioned that I had embarked on a 13 hour autobiographical TV series on Lord Louis Mountbatten.

The series was recorded in and around 1969, so was shot before the dawn of home computers.

What I noticed was how people in those pre-home computer days relaxed. There were family board games, book reading and going out for walks and having picnics by the river.

Because the only way you could be contacted was via a letter, telegram or land line phone, once you left the house you were free. And “free” in a real sense. If you were to take a walk by the river or pond or lake, you could fully engage with your surroundings and the people you were with.

And family meals were important.

The aristocracy in the UK would dress for dinner, and even as we went into the post-war years, there would be a ritual of adults and children washing their hands before sitting down to dinner.

I rarely see that with people today. I should point out that it’s still a good practice to do—you know, washing your hands before eating your meals.

Currently, I am reading the enormous series of books by historian Dominic Sandbrook, the co host of the excellent podcast The Rest is History.

Sandbrook begins this series of books in 1950s UK and I am currently up to 1970, having just finished reading his excellent book Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of The Populist Right, a book about how US culture changed in the 1970s.

The books have chapters on how families lived and the activities they did in their spare time and as I was reading these chapters I felt a sadness that many of these activities seem to have disappeared.

For instance, in the UK, there was in almost every town and village a working mens club. Yes, today that would be considered sexist, but when these clubs started they were established for the men who worked down the mines or in the factories.

One of the clubs I used to go to would have a guest act on every Sunday night. Sometimes the act was a musician other times it might be a comedian. These clubs would be full of husbands and wives having a drink, playing bingo between the act’s sessions.

It was a wonderful evening. I remember never once worrying about work, or even talking about work. It was families talking about where they were going on holiday, playing bingo and watching the acts.

I never experienced what we called in the UK “Sunday night blues”—that depressing feeling of knowing you had to go back to work tomorrow.

I only ever experienced that when I stopped going to the club on a Sunday and instead sitting at home watching TV.

Somehow, we’ve sacrificed human activities—going out with friends and family three or four times a week—to sitting on sofas watching TV or scrolling through endless feeds in social media. Often feeling jealous of the fake lives people put on there.

And certainly not engaging with other human beings in the same room as you.

And the word “Hobby” seems to have become a quaint old-fashioned word. I mean, who’s got time for hobbies today?

And that to me is where people need to start. Have a hobby that does not involve a digital tool.

One of my rediscovered hobbies is collecting books. Real books. I’ve always enjoyed reading. It’s been a big part of my life.

I remember before I got an iPad in January 2011, I would spend weeks deciding which book to take with me on the plane when I travelled. It became an annual ritual. A week or two before I was due to fly I would spend a Saturday afternoon at the bookstore in the local shopping centre looking for something I could read while I was on holiday.

After January 2011, I no longer went to a bookstore. I downloaded books from Apple Books or Amazon. Accidentally, something I had found immensely pleasurable—spending an afternoon wandering around a bookstore, to simply hearing about a book, finding it on a digital bookstore and buying it.

The pleasure of aimlessly wandering around a bookstore was ripped away from me for the sake of convenience.

I can fully understand why the sales of vinyl records and record players have exploded in recent years. The lack of convenience and a limited record collection makes listening to music a genuine pleasure.

Those of a certain age may remember creating something called a “Mix tape”. This was where you recorded from a hi-fi system records to a tape cassette that you could play on a cassette walkman or in the car when going on a long journey.

There was was something deeply pleasurable in make those tapes. I used to do this when going on family holidays. It didn’t require a lot of brain power. Just looking through your records (and later CDs) for songs and then recording them, in real time, to a cassette.

You had to sit and listen the whole song before pressing pause on the tape and choosing the next song. Completely inconvenient by today’s standards, but that wasn’t the point. It was relaxing, enjoyable and there was a sense of pride when finished of a job well done.

And that’s where I think we should be looking for activities that help us to switch off at the end of the day or at weekends. Activities that take us away from the digital noise.

For example, this year, I’ve made it a habit to spend a minimum of thirty minutes reading a real book after I finish my evening coaching calls.

I close down my office, grab the book I am currently reading, and go through to the living room, settle down on the sofa with the book and read. While I will read for at least thirty minutes, I often find myself still reading after an hour. During that time, it’s just me and little Louis lying next to me.

It’s quiet and incredibly relaxing.

Another “hobby” I began this spring was to have a bedding box on the terrace outside my office. In this box I’ve been growing flowers. It needs watering and the occasional weed needs pulling out. This had led me to want to add more flower boxes for next year.

I’ve been sketching out on paper ideas of where I’ll put these boxes and what flowers I could grow in them. I’ve even considered growing my own vegetables too.

All non-tech hobbies that have brought some real enjoyment with them.

Other activities you may wish to consider are knitting and needlework. I’ve remember teaching myself to sow buttons onto shirts and jackets—great fun but can be equally frustrating.

Water colour painting. There’s an initial cost in paints and paint books, but again great fun when you get going. This is a particularly good hobby if you like to get out into the countryside.

Winston Churchill used painting as a way to destress at weekends and on holidays.

While I’m not a big fan doing digital detoxes or restricting use of digital tools, that’s just a waste of time because you end up finding excuses to check your digital devices.

What I have found, though, is if you have a hobby or activity that is non-digital, you lose the temptation to “check” for messages and notifications. You become engrossed in the activity you engaged in.

Perhaps you could have a Saturday or Sunday morning family walk. Give it some added interest by including some bird spotting or trying to find new routes around the park or woods.

When to comes to switching off, look for activities that don’t involve phones or computers. Puzzles are good, learning to detail a car (my current hobby) or some gardening—which can large or small.

I hope that has helped, Maggie. Try to use things to switch off that do not involve a screen and you’ll find yourself relaxing and rediscover some lost pleasures in life.

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

Sunday Aug 10, 2025

Stop Competing with Computers: Why Slower is Actually Faster

Sunday Aug 10, 2025

"Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why."

Eddie Cantor

This week, I’m answering a question about why it’s important to slow down and allow your brain to do what it does best and why you do not want to be competing with computers.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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

Script | 380

Hello, and welcome to episode 380 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.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the hype about AI and what it promises to do or can do for you.

And it is an exciting time. AI promises a lot, and our devices are becoming faster. Does this mean it’s all good news? Well, maybe not.

You see, while all this technology is becoming faster, our brains are not. Evolution takes time. We can still only process information at the same speed people did hundreds of years ago.

And it’s causing us to take shortcuts. Shortcuts that may not necessarily be in our best interests.

Thirty years ago, people would buy a newspaper in the morning and that single newspaper would furnish us with analysis and news throughout the day.

I remember buying my newspaper from the newsagent outside the office I worked at in the morning. I would read that newspaper during my coffee breaks and lunch. I’d begin with the front page, then the sport on the back page and usually in the afternoon, I’d read the opinion pieces.

It was a daily ritual, and felt natural. I’d pay my fifty pence (around 75 cents) each morning and by the end of the day, I would feel I had got my money’s worth.

I remember reading full articles, getting to know both sides of the argument and the nuances within each story.

Today, people are in such a rush, they rarely read a full article, and only get a snapshot of what’s really going on. There are apps that will summarise documents, articles and important reports for you. But is this really good for you?

This is why over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally slowing down.

It began with bringing pens and paper back into my system, then going on to wearing an analogue watch instead of an Apple Watch. It’s moved on to buying real books, and this year, reacquainting myself with the joys of ironing, cooking and polishing shoes.

And that brings me on to this week’s question. So, that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, you’ve talked a lot about your pen and paper experiment and I was wondering why you are going against technology, when clearly that is the future.

Hi Michael, thank you for your question.

I should begin by saying I am not against technology. I love technology. I still use Todoist and Evernote, and I use Anthropic’s Claude most days. Technology is still a big part of my life.

However, I began my “analogue experiment”—if you can call it that—because I began to realise that trying to keep up with all the advances in technology meant I was missing out on life.

I had stopped thinking for myself and was looking for confirmation of the opinions I had formed about a subject. And technology does that extremely well.

I remember during the last US Presidential election I was curious about what the arguments were about. I watched a few videos on YouTube from Fox News and MSNBC trying to maintain some kind of balance.

That didn’t turn out so well. I must have accidentally watched a video or two more from Fox News and suddenly my YouTube feed was full of Greg Gutfeld and Meghan Kelly.

So much for trying to hear both sides of the argument.

It took over a month to get those videos out of my YouTube feed.

From a time management and productivity perspective I’ve always felt it’s important that you decide what is important and what is not.

For most of you, you will have gained a few years experience in the work that you do. That experience is valuable. It gives you an advantage. You have learned what works and what does not work. Not in a theoretical way, but in a practical way.

Sales courses can teach the theory, but to become a great salesperson requires real, hands on experience. Talking with real people, dealing with objections and allowing your personality and charm to come through. You can’t learn that from an online course or four hours chatting with an AI bot.

Henry Kissinger was a divisive figure. Some loved him, others hated him. Yet successive presidents both Republican and Democrat sort his advice long after he had left government. Why? Because of his vast personal experience dealing with dictators and uncompromising world leaders.

Now I understand why technology does this. Companies such as Google and the media organisations want my attention. Their algorithms are trained to do just that. And as a human being it’s very difficult to resist.

But the biggest problem with this is everything is becoming faster and faster. So fast, that your brain cannot keep up.

Now there are things we should move fast on. An upset customer, a natural disaster in your town or city, A suddenly sick loved one or a burst pipe in your bathroom.

Equally, though, there are a lot of things we shouldn’t be moving fast on. Deciding what must be done today, for example, sitting down and talking with your kids, or partner. Talking with your parents, siblings, friends or taking your dog out for a walk.

One work related example would be managing your email. There are two parts to this. Clearing your inbox requires speed. You’re filtering out the unimportant from the important. And with experience, you soon become very fast at this.

Then there’s the replying to the important emails. That requires you to slow down and think.

Now I know there are AI email apps that promise to do the filtering for you. Yet do you really trust that it got it right? That lack of trust results in you going through the AI filtered emails, “just in case”.

Which in turn slows down the processing. You would have been faster had you done it yourself.

But this goes beyond where AI and technology can help us. It goes to something deeper and more human.

One of the most mentally draining things you can do is sit at a screen all day.

You can respond to messages, write reports, design presentations, edit videos, and read the news all from a single screen. This means that, in theory, except for needing to go to the bathroom, you could spend all day and night without getting up from the chair.

That’s not how you work. Your brain cannot stay focused for much more than 90 minutes without the need for a break. Yet, if a break means you stare at another window, perhaps stop writing the report and instead read a news article, your brain is not getting a rest.

Instead, one of the best things you could do, particularly now, with the new flexible ways of working, is to get up and do something manually.

Perhaps take the laundry and do a load of washing. Then return to your computer, work for another hour and then hang the washing up.

Two things happen here. First, your brain gets a rest from deep thinking and does something simple. And secondly, you move. Another thing your brain requires to work at its best.

Repetitive tasks are therapy for your brain. This is why some say that jogging or hiking is therapeutic. The act of putting one foot in front of another is repetitive and your brain can operate on automatic pilot.

Yet, there’s something else here.

The other day I had a pile of ironing to do. It wasn’t overwhelming, but there was around forty-minutes of work there to do.

At the same time, I was working on an article I was writing. That writing began strongly, but after an hour or so, my writing had slowed considerably. I was struggling. It was at that moment I looked up and saw the pile of ironing.

So, I got up, pulled out the ironing board and iron and spend forty minutes or so clearing the pile.

WOW! What a difference. After hanging up the clothes, I sat back down at my desk and the energy to write returned and I was able to get the article finished in no time at all.

Now what would have happened had I stayed tied to my desk? Probably not very much at all. I would have continued to struggle, perhaps written a bit, but likely would have had to rewrite what I had written.

Instead, I gave my brain a break. I did something manual that was repetitive, ironing. I know it’s not exciting, but that’s the point. It recharged my brain and I was able to return to my writing refreshed and didn’t need to rewrite anything later.

Other activities you can do is to make your own lunch. Going into the kitchen to make a sandwich does not require a lot of brain power. It gets you up from your desk, gives your brain a break from the screen and you’re making something.

It was a sense that everything I was doing was done at a screen that was the catalyst for me to return to doing some things manually.

I remember when I decided to start using a pen and notebook for planning out my week. I was shocked how much better I thought.

When I was planning my week digitally, I couldn’t wait to get it over. Just to make it feel more worthwhile, I would clean up a folder or clear my desktop of screenshots and PDFs I no longer needed. I noticed I was doing anything but actually plan the week.

When I closed my computer, pulled out a notebook and one of my favourite fountain pens, I actually planned and thought about what I wanted to accomplish that week.

My Saturday morning planning sessions have become one of my favourite times of the week. I can stop, slow down and just think slowly and deeply about what I want to accomplish.

And all these little things that have slowed me down have resulted in me getting far more done each week.

Without consciously choosing to do so, my social media time has dropped significantly. I don’t watch as many YouTube videos as I used to do, and I feel more fulfilled and accomplished at the end of the day.

A couple of months ago, while my wife was studying for her end of term exams, I would finish in my office, go through into the living room where she was studying, pick up a real book and read.

It was a lovely feeling. My wife, Louis and myself all on the sofa engaged in something meaningful. We were still able to ask each other questions, but for the most part it felt calm, quiet and natural.

Last weekend, during my TV time, I began watching the autobiographical series on the Life and Times of Lord Louis Mountbatten.

Mountbatten was born in 1900 and died in 1979. He lived through two World Wars, was a part of both, was a member of the Royal Family, being the cousin of King George 6th, and was involved in many post war events.

As he was describing his work, I noticed there was no “9 til 5” hours or any of the structures we impose on ourselves today.

For most of Mountbatten’s life there was no television. Instead, people wrote letters or read books in their quiet times. Most weekends were spent socialising with family and friends and there was a lot of walking in the countryside.

Yes, Mountbatten lived a privileged life, he was royalty after all, but even if you study the working classes of the time, they went to work—often hard manual labour, and come home where they would either spend the evening talking and playing games with their families or call into the local pub and enjoy time with their friends and neighbours.

They were different times, of course, but the noticeable thing was the everything that needed to be done got done.

Was was most striking about these times was the sense of fulfilment people spoke and wrote about. They were doing hard manual work, yet had a sense of accomplishment each day.

Today, that sense of fulfilment and accomplish can be lost and instead because of the endless lists of to-dos, messages to respond to we feel overwhelmed and swamped.

The most noticeable benefit I’ve found by returning to a few analogue tools is I no longer feel overwhelmed. I find I am more intentional about what I do and at the end of the day, I feel a sense of accomplishment.

So there you go, Michael. That’s why I’ve brought back some analogue tools into my life. They slowed me down, enabled me to think better and ironically, I am getting a lot more done that I did when I was completely paperless and digital.

I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.

Now I must go and hang up the laundry.

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

Sunday Aug 03, 2025

Plans vs. Planning: The Churchill Principle for Real Productivity

Sunday Aug 03, 2025

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential”

That quote from Winston Churchill perfectly captures the dilemma we face when it comes to planning.

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

Script | 379

Hello, and welcome to episode 379 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.

Planning and organising have their place. Yet, there is a danger of taking them too far and using them as an excuse or as a way to procrastinate.

Ultimately, whatever you are planning to do will eventually need to be done. The goal, therefore, is to get to the doing part as quickly as possible.

One of the dangers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, is the emphasis on organising and doing the weekly review. It’s a procrastinators heaven. An authority in the the productivity space giving you “permission” to spend two to four hours a week planning and reviewing and another large proportion of your time organising and reorganising your lists.

Don’t get me wrong. Both planning and organising have their place and as Winston Churchill says, “planning is essential”, but it’s a thin line between helpful and unhelpful planning and organising.

In today’s episode, I will share with you some ideas that you can use to ensure that you are following some sound principles with your planning and reviewing.

So, that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Sally. Sally asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling to get myself organised. I have so many things on my desk and on my computer’s desktop I don’t know where to start. I feel like all I do all day is plan what to do and tidy up my lists. How do you avoid over planning and organising?

Hi Sally, thank you for your question.

Firstly, I must admit I have been down this road of over-planning and organising.

I read Getting Things Done in 2009 and loved it. I ditched my Franklin Planner, the “tool” I had been using consistently for over fifteen years, bought myself a nice Quo Vadis notebook (the paper quality was better than Moleskine) and spent a whole weekend setting up the notebook as a GTD tool.

I also printed out the GTD weekly review checklist from David Allen’s website and stuck that into the back go my planner and became a GTDer.

It took me seven years to realise that I wasn’t getting anything significant done. I had a lot of ideas, plans and goals, yet all I seemed to be doing was reviewing, planning and doing the easy things from my context lists.

Replying to emails was much easier than sitting down to write the first chapter of the book I wanted to write. Spending more time mind mapping the presentation I had to give on Friday seemed more important than opening up Keynote and designing the presentation.

Yet, ironically, it was an end of year review that forced me to face up to reality and see that while I was excellent at planning and reviewing, I had become terrible at doing the work.

And this is one of the most common problem areas I see with many of my coaching clients. The fixation on having everything perfectly organised and planned.

You see, the problem here is not that everything is neatly organised and you have the plans to do whatever it is you want to do. The problem is nothing is being done to do those plans.

While I was working on my recent Time-Based Productivity course, the project note I had for it was a mess. I had a lot of notes, ideas and thoughts. Yet, I maintained a strict next actions list at the top of the project note as well as links to the documents I was working on.

It didn’t matter that below those items was a horror show of ill-thought out ideas and random thoughts. They were there in case I got stuck somewhere. What mattered was the important information was clear and at the top of the note.

The note was designed so that the work got done. It was not designed to look pretty.

I’ve seen clients with thirty page Word documents detailing their department’s plans for the year. It’s written in some vague management language that leaves a lot to interpretation. It’s as Winston Churchill once said of a similar document from the government’s treasury department:

“This paper, by its very length, defends itself from ever being read.”

You can spend hours going through a document like that, and nothing will ever get done.

What matters is knowing what the department’s objectives are and what needs to be done to accomplish them.

That does not need thirty pages. That can be summarised on one page, at most.

If you’re working in an organisation that loves using management speak to communicate their ill-thought through ideas, one of the best ways to navigate these documents is to establish what the ultimate goal is.

What are the targets, or in management speak “KPI’s” (Key Performance Indicators)? Once you know how you or your department will be measured, you can use your own experience and knowledge to put in place a plan to achieve those targets.

Ultimately, your boss, and their boss, are concerned about your targets. How you achieve those targets are less important, although they should always be achieved legally, of course.

In many ways translating these verbose annual planning documents is the role of the departmental managers. This means translating them into actionable items so that everyone in the team clearly understands what they are aiming for.

This then reduces the necessity of further planning meetings and everyone can get on and achieve the objectives.

And this is the same for individuals.

When we plan things out we are exploring options, considering best ways to do things and perhaps thinking of potential outcomes.

While these exercises do have their place, they cannot replace doing the work.

The objective, therefore, is to figure out as quickly as possible what you need to do to get the work completed.

My wife bought me a new iron and ironing board for my birthday. I love ironing, I find it relaxing. I’ve learnt that no matter how big the pile of ironing is, the pile is not going to diminish by more planning and strategising. The only way the pile of ironing will shrink is for me to plug my iron in, set up my ironing board and get started.

Now years of ironing has taught me to begin with the clothes that require a cooler setting and finish with clothes that require a hotter setting such as linen shirts. That’s experience, although, I remember being taught that one by my grandmother many many years ago.

The final part of this is choosing when to do the ironing. For me, I find ironing after I’ve been sat down for a long time works best. I’m stood up and have to move around to hang my shirts up after they’re ironed. So, doing the ironing in the afternoon or early evening works best for me.

Given that I generally do the ironing once a week, all I need to decide is when. When will I do it? That’s the only planning I need to do with something I routinely do.

When it comes to organising, I’m always surprised how so many people have missed one of the best features of computers and technology. It’s not so you can sit and stare at a screen for hours on end. It’s the speed at which a computer can organise your files.

You can choose to organise your files by date created, date modified, title, type of document or by size. The only thing you need to do is to put the file into a folder.

If you were to keep things as simple as possible, two folders one for your personal life and one for your professional life would work. (And I know a lot of people who do just that and can find anything they need with the use of a keyboard shortcut or a few typed letters.

While travelling last month, I had all my flight confirmation emails and car hire documents stored in Evernote in its own notebook. Before we set off, I made sure this notebook was downloaded to my phone so that no matter where I was in the world, I was not going to be relying on flakey internet.

This meant, when we finally reached the car hire desk at 11 p.m. At Dublin Airport, all I needed to do was open Evernote, type Europcar in the search and all my details we instantly on my screen ready to show the assistant.

Most notes apps people are using today have incredibly powerful search features built in. Evernote was build on its search features. I’m frequently amazed at how quickly Evernote can find something I vaguely think might be in there.

I remember my wife trying to sort something out for me on a Korean website while we were sitting in cafe. She asked me if I remembered my password for a particular website I had not used for over ten years.

I opened up Evernote and typed in the name of the website and in less than second the login and password details were there. My brain cannot work that fast when trying to recall something from ten years ago.

What this means is you do not need to spend days or months trying to come up with a “perfect” notes organisation system. You could quite easily operate on a simple professional and personal folder system.

You’d still be able to find anything you were looking for, and all you would need to do is to learn how to use the search features.

So, Sally, if you want to get things organised, let your computer do the work for you. Start by creating a simple folder structure of personal and work, and organise your documents there first.

As you’re doing this I would add that you ensure the title of the documents and files are clear. Sometimes we download something from the internet and we end up with a jumble of letters and numbers. While your computer will be able to tell you when you downloaded it and what the file type is, it won’t be able to tell you what it is. That part of the organising process is on you.

If you wish to have a little more structure than simply personal and professional you can modify things later. The goal here is to begin the cleaning up process.

And don’t forget the delete key. It’s your best friend when cleaning up.

Once you’ve tidied everything up and you know where everything is, when it comes to what to do next will naturally follow.

This organising may take you a weekend to do. Yet, that investment in time will be well worth it. You’ll feel less anxious, lighter and will have begun developing confidence in your system. That’s a very nice place to be.

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

Sunday Jul 27, 2025

From 600 Tasks to 8: How Paper Planning Saved My Sanity

Sunday Jul 27, 2025

“Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool. Obviously, you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.”

That’s a quote from Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. And is the start of my attempt to explain why you don’t want to be abandoning the humble pen and paper just yet.

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

Script | 378

Hello, and welcome to episode 378 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 recently came across a short video from Shawn Blanc of the Sweet Setup website who argued that paper-based planners enable better focus and less distractions that their digital counterparts.

And in my now ten-month experiment with the Franklin Planner I also have discovered that planning on paper gives me greater insights about what is important and what is not, it has allowed me to reduce my to-do list dramatically and improved my ability to think at the next level—the level that really matters if you want to go beyond just the rudimentary basics and create something special.

This week’s question is about my “experiment” and what I did it and what I learned. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, hi Carl, I’m curious about your Franklin Planner experiment. Why did you do it and what have you learned from the experience?

Hi Phil, thank you for your question.

Before I begin, I should give you some background.

My planner journey began on my 18th birthday when my uncle and auntie bought me a black leather Filofax. These were all the rage in the mid to late 1980s. They were a symbol of what we called in the UK the “YUPPIE generation”

A YUPPIE was a young urban professional or young upwardly mobile professional. It was a term used to describe a young, well-educated, and affluent person who worked in a city. It was often associated with a particular lifestyle and consumption patterns.

Filofaxes had a diary—usually a week to view—, an addresses area, and other planning pages such as a goals and notes area and an expenses tracker.

I loved that Filofax. And I remember carrying it around with me everywhere. I was living the YUPPIE lifestyle without having the job, type of car or luxury apartment associated with them. I was pretending hahaha.

A few years later, while working in car sales, I was introduced to the Franklin Planner. I think it was around 1992 or 1993, by my general manager, Andrew.

That changed everything for me. No longer was I just carrying around information—really what a Filofax did in those days—and I had a tool that enabled me to establish what was important to me (my “governing values”) and a way to plan the day, and week.

I used that Franklin Planner for fourteen years. It went everywhere with me. I’d take it on holiday with me and often find myself sat on the hotel’s balcony late at night writing out how I felt my life was going and what I wanted to change.

It was a tool that kept me accountable to my goals and values and really did change my life for the better.

Then came what I call the digital explosion in 2009. That’s when I got my first iPhone and that coincided with my first reading of David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

I stopped using the Franklin Planner and began a transition to digital tools.

It was an exciting time and my whole time management system began to change. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Yet, on the whole I enjoyed the evolution.

That’s the background.

So, why did I decide to go back to using a Franklin Planner.

Well, I had begun to notice that I felt I was rushing everything. Sure, some things needed to be done quickly, but the majority of my work didn’t need to be done right now. Those tasks in my task list could wait until another day, yet, I had this feeling I had to complete them today.

It created a sense of anxiety. A sort of low level buzz in my head telling me I should be doing work, checking off my tasks and not taking time to step back and think if what I was about to do was necessary or important.

It was unpleasant.

So, I decided to go back and try a Franklin Planner for a few months to see what would happen.

It was a revelation and I was shocked.

The first thing I noticed was I slowed down. Because you have to manually write out your tasks and appointments each day, you had time to contemplate whether they really needed to be done.

With my digital system, I had things like watch this YouTube video, or read this article. Yet, these were not important at all. For some reason the digital task manager elevated their importance because they were on the list and had to be done—which, of course, they didn’t.

I never wrote those down in the Franklin Planner. I might have written them down in the notes area for later, but they would not be a task.

It was too easy to add stuff to a digital task manager, which meant all sorts of rubbish got added to the list. What that did was to make my task lists bigger and bigger. It got to a point where there were over 600 tasks in my task manager.

I remember looking at that realising that 80% of what was in there was either no longer relevant or would be a waste of time if I did do them.

That never happened with the Franklin Planner. The act of writing down tasks, meant you would carefully consider whether it was worth doing or not.

The result of this transition was instead of having fifteen to twenty tasks on my task list each day, in my Franklin Planner I had less then eight most days and what was there was genuinely important.

Another area that changed almost immediately was I started to think again.

Earlier last year, I had started planning out my projects, YouTube videos and weekly plans in what I called my Planning Book. This was an A4 ring-bound notebook that contained all my plans and initial thoughts about a project or video.

Suddenly, I found I was thinking things through better. When I sat down to plan out something, I was completely engaged. There were no pop-up notifications, or other digital distractions that would stop my thoughts. I could go deep, much deeper than I ever did digitally.

And the results were almost instant. My YouTube video views went from an average of 3 to 4 thousand in a week to over 10,000!

The only change I had made was to plan out my videos on paper instead of an Evernote note.

On analysis, what I noticed was I became a better storyteller—and important part of creating YouTube videos. And that resulted in almost three times more views on YouTube.

I quickly began to see that there was something going on here.

Digital tools are great. They are so convenient, and it’s fantastic that you can carry around fifteen years of notes on a simple device like your phone. But, is that really helpful.

99% of my journeys and trips never required me to have to look up some important information.

And on those rare occasions when I did need to look up something, I could have easily explained to the person I was meeting that I would send the information when I got back to my office.

In fact, remembering to do that after writing it down on a piece of paper may have impressed the person I was meeting and would have given me time to think of a memorable way to convey the information.

Returning to the Franklin Planner and bringing some paper-based planning back into my life has been a revelation. It’s slowed me down, while at the same time has helped me to become far more productive.

It’s done that by getting me to think again.

And that’s perhaps where digital tools are failing us.

Technology is all about speeding things up and making things more convenient.

Think about it, the introduction of elevators and escalators has coincided with people becoming less fit and healthy. The convenience of delivery food has created a generation of people who wake up, sit down at a desk all day, then order food and continue to sit while they eat highly processed foods that are slowly killing them.

Walking up stairs and cooking your own food ensures you are moving and likely eating a lot healthier. It also means you more likely to eat with your family and as a consequence maintain that all important communication with the people you love.

Technology has massively increased the speed at which things can be done. And in some areas that’s helpful. But, and this is a big but, your brains ability to process all that information has not speeded up.

This means, if you want to feel fulfilled and be more productive, you should become better at filtering out the noise and focus on the things that are genuinely important.

Digital tools make that difficult with their emphasis on speed and monotonous lists.

Paper-based tools enable your brain to slow down, work at a healthy pace and to think deeper. A consequence of which means you think better, make better decisions about what to work on and feel less stressed and overwhelmed.

Will I go back to an all-digital system? No.

I’ve found a happy balance. My Franklin Planner allows me to make better choices about what I should work on today. My Planning Book gives me a space to think about what I am trying to do and to brainstorm better ways of doing the work.

However, I do see a space for digital tools.

I always scan in my plans to a digital project note. The output of my work is digital. Blog-posts, YouTube videos, online courses and even my coaching programmes are all done digitally. (I use Zoom to talk with my clients who are based all over the world)

I also use Todoist to keep track of the recurring stuff I would likely forget to do. Reminders to water the office plant (every four days), to do my expenses, respond to my actionable emails and to send out regularly recurring invoices are all managed in Todoist.

The conclusion I have come to from this experiment is that the perfect system is a hybrid of digital and analogue tools. Your calendar works best digitally, yet on a daily basis, slowing down and writing out what you will do that day works better in an analogue form. It stops you from overwhelming yourself.

Thank you, Phil, for your question. And thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

Sunday Jul 20, 2025

The Vacation Productivity Paradox: How to Rest AND Get Ahead

Sunday Jul 20, 2025

“If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.”

That’s a quote from Alex Pang’s book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.

How many of you are taking a holiday (“vacation” for my American friends) this year?

I know that for many—myself included—taking a holiday is not something they find comfortable. They know they need it, yet there’s just so much to do and so little time to do it.

Anyway, having just returned from a ten-day holiday, I thought I would share with you some ways you can get some significant rest and still use your holiday time for some useful work.

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

Script | 377

Hello, and welcome to episode 377 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.

For many people, going on holiday is something they look forward to. It’s an opportunity to get away from the daily grind of meetings, deadlines, emails, and messages.

Yet for others, it can be more stressful than when at work. There’s a worry that something important will be missed or that an emergency of their making will occur while they’re away.

However, there’s is something else a holiday offers you, that few people ever take advantage of. In this week’s episode I will share with you the things I do while away.

Now, some of what I do may not be for you—I run my own business which means I need to be watching, at the very least, what is happening within the business each day. Yet, many of the things I will suggest may be just the thing for you to help you get on top of your work.

Now, before I get into the ideas, just a quick heads-up.

Before I went away, I launched a brand new, ground-shattering course. The Time-Based Productivity course.

It’s an evolution of everything I’ve taught over the last several years.

You have no control over what’s coming in each day, yet feel you must finish everything. Trying to decide what’s important, what can wait, and what must be done right now causes you to freeze, become anxious, and then spend time reorganising all your tasks.

It’s unsustainable and leaves you feeling lost, out of control, and overwhelmed.

Enter time-based productivity, where what matters is how much time you allocate to the different types of work you need to do.

It’s a method that works, and will transform your relationship with time once and for all.

There’s currently an early-bird discount of 20% on the course. So, if you want to become less stressed, more in control of your time, and have the time to do the things you want to do, this course is for you.

Oh, and I should point out that this course also gives you free access to my Areas of Focus and my all-new Time Sector System course.

Okay, now on with the podcast.

First up, we have to accept that even though we are on holiday, email and messages are not going to stop coming in. They just don’t.

If you’re employed, I would strongly advise that you set up an auto-respond email that informs the sender that you are away and will not be checking your email while away or responding to anything when you get back.

Instead, inform them to resend the email on the day AFTER you get back.

This does two things. The first is it allows you, if you wish, to delete anything that came in while you were away. For those of you who are more squeamish, you can archive them instead.

The second is it sorts out the important from the not important automatically for you. If something’s important, you will get the email again the day after you return to work.

Why the day after you return? Well, I can promise you on your return to work, there’s going to be a lot of catching up to do. You don’t want a lot of emails coming in on that day causing you to instantly feel overwhelmed on your first day back.

For those of you, like me, who cannot, or are not willing to, stay away from their email, then setting up a routine can help.

I travelled to Ireland. That’s eight hours behind Korea, so my sleep schedule changes. Normally, I am a night owl. I prefer to work late into the evening and start the day around 8:30 am.

When I am in Europe, that changes and I become an early bird. I normally wake up around 4:00 am and go to bed around 8:30 pm.

I use the two hours between 4:30 and 6:30 am to deal with communications and admin tasks that, as a business owner, are my responsibility to deal with.

It’s just two hours a day done before the day gets started.

The great thing with this approach is that once I’ve done it, that’s it for the day. I won’t return to my email or messages for the rest of the day and I get on and enjoy the holiday.

This is a better approach than to come back to 800+ emails and messages on your first day. If you’re going straight into meetings and catching up with what has happened while you were away, you’ve just created a huge backlog for yourself that will take weeks to get back on top of.

Next. One of the biggest issues I get from my coaching clients is they don’t have any time to step back and define what is important to them, reorganise their daily structure or to establish what their core work is.

Holiday time is great for this. There’s often a lot of travelling involved, and it’s likely to be with your family. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk with your partner about what you want as a family.

My wife and I use flying time to talk about what we want to accomplish as a family over the next year. It’s not planned. It’s spontaneous. And, it’s usually when we are flying back home rather than when we fly out. Yet, we always do it.

I remember when I was employed and suffering from what we called “the holiday blues”. This is where you feel slightly depressed on your return to work for a week or two. You miss the sense of relaxation and have nothing to look forward to except for the daily drudge of work and meetings.

Having a talk with your partner and or family on your return journey can give you a multitude of things you can do as a couple or family. Giving you something to look forward to.

If you’re taking a summer holiday, this is also a good time to review how you are doing on your goals this year.

When this year started, I was 88 kilograms (about 195 pounds or nearly 14 stone). That’s way above my target weight of between 80 and 83 kilograms (175 to 180 pounds or 12 ½ to 13 stone)

So, my number one health and fitness goal for 2025 was to get my weight back to within my normal range. That was achieved, but, while away I ate too much—don’t we all when on holiday?—and need to refocus my attention on getting it back.

Fortunately, it’s only two or three pounds, so the target it to get it back within acceptable limits by the end of July.

This means, I need to quickly get back into my exercise routine and eat healthily.

It’s a great way to get yourself refocused on your return.

Another thing you can do while away is to do some digital cleaning up. I love this time.

While you’re on holiday there is likely to be pockets of time you can use to clean up your notes, calendar and task manager.

Let’s be honest, when we’re in the day to day hustle, we throw a lot of useless information into our notes and add tasks into our task manager that we know we will never do.

This is a wonderful time to clear these out.

Last Wednesday, my first day back at work, my notes were organised, my task manger was clean and tight and my calendar was cleared of conflicts. What a wonderful way to restart.

What I noticed was I felt organised, focused and ready for anything. Isn’t that what a holiday is meant to do for you.

Yet, if you don’t do any cleaning up, you come back to a mess. Nothing has changed and the very things you hate about your work life continue. No control, a messed up list of things to do and a calendar that fills you with dread.

And, something powerful happens when you do this learning up. You learn a lot.

You discover better workflows and processes and you gain a sense of optimism about how the changes you make now will bring you incredible rewards once you return to work.

I often find I cannot wait to get restarted because I’m excited to test out new ways of managing my work day.

And let’s be honest, cleaning things up doesn’t require a lot of mental energy. It’s the kind of thing you can do in the evenings with a laptop on your knees while enjoying a cocktail or two. (Although not too many. You don’t want to delete important things)

Now, you may be thinking ‘no way! I’m on holiday I don’t want to deal with any work issues’. And I get that.

But, and it’s big but, your holiday may only last a week or two, and then you’re back at work. Doing all or some of these tips, will last far longer and leave you with less stress and overwhelm.

It gives you optimism, and helps you to refocus on the important things in life. Surely, a few hours out of your holiday time to do some cleaning up is worth it to feel that way?

In the past I’ve not done any of these things and just found myself in the same mess I was in before my holiday. It’s not pleasant and that’s when I struggled with the holiday blues.

Now, I do these things and I’ve never experienced holiday blues and instead am excited to get back to work feeling refreshed and energised.

It’s your choice. But I can assure you, if you do all of these or just some of them on your next holiday, you will continue to do it for every holiday in the future.

Thank you for listening and don’t forget to check out the brand new Time Based Productivity Course.

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

Sunday Jun 29, 2025

The Power of Mundane: Simple Systems for Complex Lives

Sunday Jun 29, 2025

“Every morning in SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they'd do is inspect my bed.

If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers would be pulled tight, the pillow centred just under the headboard, and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack. It was a simple task, mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection.

It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors. Tough, battle hardened SEALs. But the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day.

It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another, and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter.

If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.”

That is an excerpt from Admiral McRaven’s Commencement Address at Texas University in 2014. And it’s the heart of this week’s episode. Simple, mundane tasks that carry far more weight than you may think.

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Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems.

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

Script | 376

Hello, and welcome to episode 376 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.

If you were to read the comments on any productivity or time management YouTube video, you’ll find many well-meaning commentators talking about this app, or that new method or hack to play with.

The truth is few of them will work and most involve adding more and more layers of complexity which only stops you from doing the work that matters.

Real improvements in your time management and productivity comes from the boring and mundane. It’s the sitting down to respond to your emails and messages every day. It’s taking the laundry to the washing machine and hanging it up after it’s been washed. And yes, it’s making your bed each morning before you leave to take your kids to school.

Doing the simple, basic tasks each day whether you’re in the mood or not, is the secret to massively improved outcomes. It means when you get home after a particularly stressful day, everything is calm, peaceful and ready for you to relax get some rest.

It’s how you avoid getting home, stressed out and exhausted only to find your breakfast things are still on your dining table, your bed’s unmade and your laundry basket is overflowing with clothes that are beginning to give off a rather unpleasant odour.

And, yes, it means giving yourself five to ten minutes each day to map out your day. To see where your appointments are and what tasks you must get done.

None of this is complicated. It’s basic, it’s almost laughably unimportant, yet it isn’t. These are the critical things each day that ensure you remain on top of everything and know what needs to be done, where you should be and when and leaves you feeling calm, serene even, and ready for the next day.

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

This week’s question comes from Charlie. Charlie asks, hi Carl, over the last twelve months, I feel everything has spiralled out of control. I get home exhausted and just never seem able to catch up. My Task list is out of control and my calendar seems to fill up with random meetings each day. What can I do to get some control back into my life?

Hi Charlie, thank you for your question.

This is something that can happen from time to time. Things spiralling out of control. It’s often because we say “yes” a little too freely, or we stop following some basic principles.

The basic principles of better time management and productivity are planning your days and week. Not in a micro-management way, but more in a what’s happening tomorrow or this week way.

It’s also understanding that in most cases you can cancel or reschedule a meeting. I’ve often looked at my diary for tomorrow and seen I was over scheduled and realised I needed to postpone some meetings or rearrange some of the things I had planned to do.

It’s never the end of the world if you have to reschedule. It’s just a part of life.

For example, if you’re scheduled to pick your kids up from school but realise that if you do you’ll not be able to finish the proposal that must go out today, you could ask your partner or parents to help you out today.

It’s only today. Or, you may decide to ask to be excused from a team meeting so you can finish the proposal.

We always have options. Yet, if you want more options, plan the day the evening before and you will see any potential conflicts with plenty of time to explore all options.

If you don’t plan your day, it’s likely you will see the problem you have a couple of hours before you have to pick your kids up. You’re not leaving yourself with much time to sort out the conflict.

It’s the same reason why weekly planning is critical. The weekly planning session gives you the “big picture” view of your week. It your chance to see any potential issues well before they become crises.

This is the number one reason you will find you feel behind, rushed and overwhelmed. You’re not giving yourself a moment to pause to look ahead for potential storms so you can plot an alternative route through.

To start getting back in control, do a weekly plan for next week. Open you calendar and first look for any conflicts—these are where you have inadvertently double booked yourself. You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one.

Next, open your task manager. This is probably where the bigger problems lay. When we lose control we start throwing all sorts into our tasks managers. It’s easy to put stuff there.

If your sense of control has completely gone, it’s possible you may have stopped looking at your task manager altogether. If that’s the case, open it.

Now you have a choice. You could declare task management bankruptcy and delete everything. Don’t worry, if something’s genuinely important, you’ll be reminded of it somewhere. You can then add it back later.

The second choice is to go through everything in your task manager one by one. Delete what’s no longer relevant, update what is by making sure the task is written in an actionable way. In other words you have an actionable verb in the task so it’s clear what you need to do.

Then for anything in your inbox, ask the three processing questions:

What is it?

What do I need to do?

When will I do it.

Then, organise your tasks by stuff you will do this week, next week, next month.

Once done, go back to your this week list and, with your calendar open, put the day you will do the tasks next week.

Now be smart here. If you have six hours of meetings on Wednesday, avoid putting tasks on that day. You won’t have time. Not when you remember you will need to spend some time on your email and messages and any other matters that will inevitably pop up once the week gets going.

Anything not in your this week list can be left undated. Hopefully, many of those will sort themselves out. If they don’t, you can look at them again when you do you next weekly planning session and decide if they need to be brought forward into the following week.

Just doing these basic weekly planning steps, you’ll instantly give yourself a sense of control.

Yet, this is only as good as your ability to say no.

You cannot be in two places at once, and you’re not going to be able to complete sixty tasks and attend seven hours of meetings in one day. If that’s what your day looks like stop.

You’re going to have to say no to something and the sooner you do this the easier it is to do it.

The consequences of not doing these planning sessions are missed deadlines, over booked calendars and a lot of late nights and weekends spent catching up, feeling stressed and blaming your company.

The blame game solves nothing unless you’re willing to say “no. This has go to stop”. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t complain. A bit harsh, I know, but you always have a choice remember.

More basics are giving yourself time each day for your messages and emails. I’m always surprised how unwilling people are to protect time for dealing with these.

99% of the time it’s out of control email, Slack and Teams inboxes that people are most stressed about. And I know, if you don’t spend sometime on your communications daily, they will backlog quickly.

And when I say quickly I mean it. One day missed will mean you will need double the time tomorrow. And that keeps increasing until you decide to spend a whole day clearing up your email.

If you want to avoid spending days clearing your email inbox, protect time every day for dealing with it. That has to be a non-negotiable.

I believe it was Einstein who said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

Well unless you protect time for managing your communications each day, you’ll be spending days clearing your inbox every month. Nothing will change unless you are prepared to change the way you schedule your day.

So there you go, Charlie. The important basics of getting back control and staying in control, is daily and weekly planning and protecting daily time for dealing with communications. Do that, and you’ll soon find yourself regaining control.

I know it sounds simple, perhaps too simple but it goes back to what Admiral McCraven said in his commencement address, “if you want to change the world, begin by making your bed.”

Thank you for your question, Charlie, and thank you to you too for listening.

Oh, and just a quick update, this podcast will be on holiday for a couple of weeks. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

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

Sunday Jun 22, 2025

The Time-Based Productivity Revolution: Stop Counting Tasks, Start Managing Time

Sunday Jun 22, 2025

”But the fact remains, with all the changes that have happened in our lifetime—whether we’re “boomers,” “Gen Xers,” “Millennials,” “Gen Zers” or whatever comes next—one thing has never changed nor will it ever change, and that is the amount of time we all have.”

That’s a quote from Hyrum Smith’s book, The 3 Gaps: Are You Making A Difference

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Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems.

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

Script | 375

Hello, and welcome to episode 375 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 may have noticed is that there are many things we have to or want to do, yet there never seems to be enough time to do them.

You are not alone. Everyone feels this either all the time or at least some of the time. The reason is that it’s true. There will always be more to do than time available to do it.

This means we should approach the problem from a different angle.

Traditionally, people have spent extra hours trying to catch up. Working late or even working the weekend. Yet, is throwing more time at the issue the best solution?

I don’t think so.

We live one life. Our work is just one part of that life. If you work an average forty-hour week, your work only accounts for around 25% of your time.

Yet, for many people, their work causes 80% or more of their stress.

This week, I want to share some ideas and a paradigm shift in how you think about the tasks you have to do and the time you have available. It’s a simple shift, but one that will reframe your relationship with time and ultimately give you more time for the things you want time for.

So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Marcos. Marcos asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to keep up with all the tasks in my task manager. Most days feel like I am adding more tasks than I complete, and my inbox is now full. Todoist won’t allow me to add any more. How do you cope with an ever-growing list of things to do?

Hi Marcos, thank you for your question.

There could be a number of reasons for this. One of the most common ones is moving any email you need to respond to into your task manager’s inbox.

You don’t need to do that. Instead, you can create a folder in your email system and call it “Action This Day”. Then, any email you need to act on—reply, read, forward, etc. You place it there.

Then, add a recurring task in your task manager that tells you to “clear my Action This Day folder”.

That will remove many tasks from your task manager. It will also begin the process of changing the way you think about things to do and the time you have available to do them.

It’s no longer about how many emails you must reply to; it’s about when you will work on your emails.

Other things that can clog up a task manager are articles and newsletters to read, YouTube videos to watch and books to buy.

All good stuff, but since so many of these are non-urgent, you would be better putting them in a dedicated note in your notes app.

That way, when you do have time to read or watch these, you can open up your notes app and choose something.

I covered this recently in one of my YouTube videos. There is information we like to collect—articles, YouTube videos, etc., often the easiest thing to do is to add this information to your task manager’s inbox. After all, reading or watching them is something to do.

Yet, the worst place to collect these items is your task manager. There’s no urgency to read or watch these. We can do it anytime. Perhaps we’re waiting at the doctor’s office, or, in my case, for my wife somewhere.

In these situations, I can open my notes app and, depending on my mood, choose between reading or watching something—my notes are always on my phone.

So, Marcos, one of the first things you can do is to remove all these non-urgent informational items from your task manager and move them to your notes app.

I would add that a great place to read articles is something like Instapaper or Read. Both of these apps are designed to collect newsletters and articles.

Using tools like these gives you a central place to read your saved articles. It’s like having your personalised curated news feed.

The only addition is finding a regular time to read what you collect. The problem with keeping these in your task manager is that you’re not reading them. Moving them out of your task manager and into a read-later app is just shuffling things around if you are not committing to a daily reading time.

When I commuted to work each day, I read these articles on bus and train journeys. This prevented me from getting sucked into the negative news cycle and clickbait headlines.

My news feed was free of junk and algorithmically generated stuff I was no longer interested in.

And there is another tip for managing the things we have to do. Having a set time each day for doing the things we want to do.

The challenge we all face today is that everything is so convenient; we can pretty much do anything at any time. You can set up a bank account, apply for a credit card, and even buy a car online today.

You don’t have to leave the comfort of your own home.

In the past, if we wanted to open a bank account or buy a new car, we would have to go to a specific place. Going to these places meant we needed to schedule time to go.

I remember when I was in car sales and couples would come in either in the evening or at weekends. During the weekday, things were relatively quiet for us. Time spent with a customer would typically be around an hour or two.

So the customer had to go to a showroom intentionally, talk to a human being and in most cases test drive a car.

Now, if you can do almost anything at any time from anywhere, the challenge becomes, what do you do now?

If you are task counting, you’re putting yourself into an impossible situation. The number of tasks you have to do is not within your control.

You do not have control over what your boss or customers will ask you to do today. You don’t have much control over what your partner or family members may ask you to do. You also don’t know when they will ask you to do something.

By focusing on what you have to do, you’re setting yourself up for overwhelm.

Instead, you will find focusing on when you will do something a much more realistic approach. Not only do you put yourself back in control, you will also be working within a realistic system.

This system is called time-based productivity, and it’s been around for a very long time.

I’ve tracked it back to 1918 with the Ivy Lee Method. That’s where you wrote down the six things you want to get done the next day, and when the day began, you started with the first item and worked your way down the list until the end of your work day.

Anything you did not get done would be moved to the list for tomorrow. It’s simple and based on a realistic evaluation of how much you could get done in a day.

From there, it advanced throughout the century to when we began using things like the Franklin Planner.

Something went wrong in the early 2000s. Somewhere along the line, we stopped calculating how much time we had available to do things and began focusing on the things themselves.

Well, that’s an impossible situation. You’ll always have stuff to do. If you focus on all that stuff, you’re going to feel anxiety, stress and overwhelm.

If you want to stop the struggle Marcos, then returning to a time-based system will do that for you.

The first step is to look at all the tasks you have to do and categorise them. You will have admin and communication tasks—we all do. Then there will be tasks related to your specific work. If you work with clients, then there will be client work to do. If you work in management, there will be management duties you will need to perform.

Once you know what your categories are, you can then allocate specific time for doing those categories of work.

Let me give you an example of this with email.

Imagine you get 150 emails a day. Of those, around thirty require you to take action. When you process your email, you move those actionable emails into your action this day folder, and either delete or archive the rest.

This leaves you with thirty emails that require some action from you.

If you were to allocate an hour each day for dealing with your actionable emails, you will always have time to respond to your email. Sure, some days you may not be able to clear them all. However, if you consistently spend an hour a day on these, you will never develop a significant backlog.

Most days you will be ahead; other days you might be slightly behind. But you won’t feel it’s out of control.

You can also apply this to your admin tasks. Admin tasks have a habit of building up over time because they are generally low in urgency and importance.

If you were to give yourself thirty minutes or so each day for admin tasks, you would find that no backlog is building up, and you are, for the most part, on top of things.

You can do the same for your client work. If part of your responsibilities is to send out proposals to customers, then allocating some time each day for doing this means all you need to do is refer to a list of proposals to write, and for that allocated time, you do as many as you can.

That list may be in a CRM system or a simple note in your notes app. Your calendar will tell you that it’s time to write proposals. You then go to your list of proposals to write, and start.

This way, you won’t need to use your task manager.

I do this with my coaching clients. Every day, I allocate an hour to writing feedback for each client. The list of feedback to write is in Evernote. Some days, there will be six or seven pieces of feedback to write, and other days, perhaps only two or three.

I know I can write around three pieces of feedback in an hour. This means if I do this every day, nobody is likely to be waiting more than 48 hours for their feedback.

I’m not focused on how many pieces of feedback I have to write. All I am focused on is writing the feedback in the hour I have to write it. I will write as many as I can. No pressure. Just begin with the oldest and carry on down the list.

And that, in a nutshell, is what time-based productivity is all about. It’s not about how much you have to do. It’s about how much time you have available to do the work you have to do.

If you have enormous backlogs now, you may need to increase the time you allocate to specific work periods for a little while. That actually helps because it means you are learning new habits and processes for getting the work done, which ultimately speeds you up over time.

So there you go, Marcos. I hope that has helped. Take a look at your task manager. Remove individual emails and stuff to read or watch.

Then in Todoist, use the labels to categorise your work and use those categories to protect time in your calendar to do the work.

Be consistent with this and you will soon find that the overwhelm and struggle diminish.

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

Sunday Jun 15, 2025

Finding Your Direction When Life Feels Chaotic

Sunday Jun 15, 2025

“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don't much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.

Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”

That is the famous dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carrol.

And it’s a great illustration of what happens when you don’t know what is important to you and where you want to go. You’re going to go get somewhere and that somewhere is probably going to be a place you never wanted to go to.

This week, I’ll share with you why developing your Areas of Focus is so important.

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Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems.

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

Script | 374

Hello, and welcome to episode 374 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.

So, why are your Areas of Focus important? Well, in a nutshell, they give you direction. They help you to prioritise your days and weeks and give you purpose.

Without them, you’ll end up helping someone else achieve their goals, more often than not, in exchange for money, only to discover you’re health is shot to pieces and you’ve spent your forty years of working life miserably giving away five days a week to something you hated doing.

A bit harsh, I know, but if you’ve read the book The Top five Regrets of The Dying by Bronnie Ware, you’ll know that the number one reason given was “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

It’s your areas of focus that will allow you to live a life true to yourself because by developing your areas of focus, you’ll learn what is important to you and what is not.

And the second reason? I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

When you don’t know what is important and what is not, you will work too hard. Everything becomes important, and that means you work long hours and at weekends, missing out on your children growing up and enjoying the best years of your life doing the things you want to do.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how you want your life to work out.

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

This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I hear you mention knowing what’s important to you a lot, yet I really don’t know what’s important. I’m under pressure at work and I have two teenagers at home. I feel my life is being pushed and pulled by everyone but myself. What can I do to create some boundaries in my life?

Hi Julie, thank you for your question.

It’s when we feel lost and out of sorts that our Areas of Focus can help to bring back some peace to our lives.

Our areas of focus are focused on our needs and wants. And because of that, people feel it’s an indulgence to even consider spending time on developing them. That’s particularly the case when we have a young family and we’ve allowed our work to dominate our lives.

The first book I ever read on time management and productivity was Hyrum Smith’s Ten natural Laws and time and Life Management, and around the first quarter of that book is spent on developing what Hyrum Smith calls your governing values.

Your governing values are the values by which you live your life by. With these, we will all be different. For some, being a good mother or father will be their most important value, for others, it might be building a successful business.

Now, when I read that book I was around eighteen or nineteen and that part of the book washed over me. I was young, I believed I was immortal and I could do anything I wanted to do. I didn’t have time to think about my “governing values”.

Yet, with age, came wisdom and around my late twenties I began to see the importance of having a set of values to guide me.

That’s when I gave myself a couple of weekends to write out my governing values. Funnily enough, as I look through my old Franklin Planners from that era, I can see that the values I wrote down then are not far away from how I define my Areas of Focus today.

it’s these areas that give you a direction and a purpose. They help you with prioritising your days and weeks and give you a solid foundation on which to build your goals.

For example, I used to be a smoker. Throughout my twenties and thirties I’s smoke around twenty cigarettes a day. I found it relaxing, a great way to step away from my work and to think. Yet, I knew that by continuing to smoke I was violating my area of health and fitness.

I was going to the gym and running, I was eating healthily, but i was destroying all that by continuing the smoke. As I got older, the pressure inside me to quit something I enjoyed doing grew stronger. it eventually reached a point where I had to quit.

Every time I reviewed my areas of focus, I had that niggling voice reminding me that the vision I had for my later life—being able to travel the world running marathons, exploring places like Mount Kilimanjaro and the Rocky Mountains would be just a pipe dream because I would be spending my later life in and out of hospital.

And so, I set the goal to quit smoking. Now for anyone who has gone through the process of quitting smoking, you’ll know it’s one of the toughest things to do. It took me two years to finally quit. Yet, the effort was worth it.

Quitting gave me a sense of accomplishment, a realisation that I could do anything if I put my mind to it and it was compatible with what I felt was important.

Yet without a set of principles—something your areas of focus will give you—things like stopping something that is slowly killing you or staying in a career that is draining you and leaving your feeling depressed and unhappy—will never occur to you. They will be placed on what Brian Tracey calls, “Someday Island”, a place where nothing happens because you’re waiting for “someday”.

another illustration of this was when i joined a law firm. I had spent six years training to be a lawyer. I worked hard, to get my legal qualifications, yet when I began working in a law firm, I quickly realised I’d made a huge mistake.

I hated being stuck behind a desk eight or none hours a day.

Prior to working in an office, all my jobs had involved a lot of moving around. I began my career in hotel management, where I spent all day running around a large building dealing with all sorts of issues. I’d sometimes be on reception helping to check people out, then I’s be in the restaurant serving lunch. It was fun, physically exhausting, yet incredibly fulfilling.

Then I went into car sales. And again, my days were largely spent running around a showroom and forecourt talking with customers.

Suddenly, I’m chained to a desk and within six months I’d gained 20 pounds in weight, I was unhappy, and felt trapped. It was as if I had been sent to open prison where I was expected to be in one place for eight to nine hours a day Monday to Friday. it was horrible.

So, I quit and came to Korea. a decision that turned out to be the best decision I’ve ever made.

Yet, when i told my friends and family I was quitting the law firm and going to teach English in Korea, they thought I was mad. Why was I quitting a potentially lucrative career to go and do something I knew nothing about?

Yet, it was my areas of focus that told me what I needed to do. staying in that legal job violated my career and business area. I was trapped in an industry that held firm to a tried and tested career path. I didn’t want that constraint. I wanted a lot more freedom to help people and perhaps change their lives for the better. Being a lawyer would never give me that freedom.

The benefit of having a set of established areas of focus is they give you a blueprint for the life you want to live. By writing them down, and reading through them every six months or so, you get the chance to realign yourself with the way you want to live your life.

Now, for those of you who have not looked at your areas of focus before, there are eight areas we all share. These are:

Family and relationships,

health and fitness,

Finances,

Business / career

Lifestyle and life experiences

Self development

Spirituality

life’s purpose

Each one of those mean something to us. However, how we define them will be different of each of us, snd in what order of importance will change as we go through life.

For example, as you get older, your health and fitness and finances will likely move up the list and your career and business will drop down.

When or if you start a family, your family and relationships will rapidly climb the list.

You may even find that over time you redefine one or more of your areas. This is perfectly normal.

however, at their core, these areas define who you are and what’s important to you.

This means, Julie, when it comes to juggling your career with your family, you will be able to see by how you prioritise your areas whether you should attend your daughter’s netball finals or that important meeting at work.

If family and relationships is above your career, then it’s an easy choice to make. However, if you have prioritised finances above family and relationships, you’ll need to decide if the risk of missing out on a promotion, is worth it to see your daughter play in the netball finals.

The problem most of face is there are too many competing demands on our time. Time is fixed. We get twenty-four hours a day; that’s it. The good news is, no matter what work you do, you always have control over how you spend those twenty-four hours.

I know many people will say they don’t have control over their time. But you do. You can decide not to attend a meeting you’ve been invited to. You get to choose whether to tap the accept, decline or maybe button when it appears on your calendar.

Whether you accept a meeting request or not, will depend on what you prioritise.

Given a choice between a meeting with an important person on a Saturday evening or spending that time with my wife, I already know the answer. my wife will have priority. Family and relationships is much higher than my career/business area.

I can renegotiate the meeting with the important person. Saturday nights are my family’s protected time. It’s one night a week, and I won’t sacrifice it for anything.

This also translates to my work week. My exercise time is 5:00 pm. At that time, I stop what I am doing and either head out for a run or go upstairs to the loft and lift weights. I never schedule meetings at 5 pm. That’s my exercise time and right now, my health and fitness area is higher than my career/business area.

All this comes down to knowing what’s your areas of focus mean to you and how you prioritise them. There we will all be different, but it’s your areas of focus that will give you a blueprint for how you want to live your life, what is important to you and where you want to spend your time.

Not knowing what your areas of focus are will be like being Alice in Alice in Wonderland. you’ll feel the need to go somewhere, but will have no idea where and then you will end up following someone else, and that someone else will not always have your best interests at heart.

I hope that has helped, Julie. My advice is to spend some time working on your areas of focus. Determine what’s they mean to you and pull out any activities that you can do consistently and add them to your task manager or calendar. That way you will stay on course. And, if you find you are not happy with the direction you are going, redefine your areas and adjust course.

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

Sunday Jun 08, 2025

Whoever Controls Your Calendar Controls You: Mastering Executive Time Management

Sunday Jun 08, 2025

“Whoever runs your schedule is the most important person in your world as Leader. You need time to think, time to study and time to get the things done you came to leadership to do. Lose control of the schedule and you will fail.”

That is a quote from former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. And it strikes at the heart of mastering time management. Today’s episode explores why your calendar is your most important productivity tool.

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