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

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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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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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The 2025 Summer Sale

Script | 373

Hello, and welcome to episode 373 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.

Whoever controls your calendar controls you. They can (and often will) destroy your plans for the day, prevent you from doing your most important work and be the reason you fail in your career goals.

If you are a leader, you will likely have plans for your team. In order to implement those plans and move them to completion, you will need time. It’s up to you to find that time.

Top leaders understand this. They are very strict with their calendars. Nobody but themselves has control of it. And, probably the most important factor of all, they have the confidence to cancel appointments if those appointments do not align with their weekly or daily strategic plan.

And yes, it’s a confidence thing. Nobody, not even your boss, really has control over your time. You always have the option to negotiate an appointment or say no.

In this week’s episode, I will share some ideas you can use to get control of your calendar and have the confidence to negotiate appointments and/or say no.

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

This week’s question comes from Karen. Karen asks, Hi Carl, I lead a team of sixteen people and am struggling to get my work done because my boss and team are always demanding meetings with me. Do you have any tips on protecting time for important work when you don’t have control of your calendar?

Hi Karen, thank you for your question.

This can appear to be a difficult change to make. Particularly if your team and bosses have become conditioned to you being available whenever they need you.

One of most powerful lessons I learned in my early career was from the so—called “my office door is always open” concept. For those of you not familiar with this concept, it began in the late 80s or early 90s (possibly earlier). This was where bosses used to tell their employees my office door is always open. You can come and talk to me at anytime.

Nice concept. It gave the impression that your boss was approachable. Yet in reality, it was not really a practical way to operate.

It meant that bosses were constantly being interrupted—well, those that we not scary, anyway,

The two most productive bosses I had in my early career did follow this policy, yet with one addition. That was to tell us that when their door was closed they were not to be disturbed.

One of those bosses, would close his door every day around 2 pm. He would then use that time to get his most important work done. David, had a secretary, who would hold his calls too. If you needed David between two and four, you had to go through his secretary, Michaela and Michaela protected David’s time ruthlessly.

Yet, for the other times in the day, David was available. He’d walk around the office from time to time asking if we were okay. He made himself available.

What happened, was if we needed David for anything, we knew we had to catch him before 2 pm or wait until after 4 pm.

I don’t recall anyone complaining. The Managing Partner of the firm respected it. And so did David’s clients—he was a partner in the law firm I worked at.

The key to this working was David’s consistency. His team, bosses and clients all knew that David would not be available between two and four.

Since then, every productive person I have met, has operated something very similar. They have periods of time in the day where they are not accessible. In that time they are doing their most important work. That period of time is generally at the same time each day.

I remember, once being on a training course and the instructor, told us she would be available at any time after 11:00 am if we had any questions.

That’s it. A simple sentence. “Available at anytime after 11:00 am”. I don’t recall any one of us on that training course ever trying to contact her before 11:00 am.

Now, it might not be possible for you to cut yourself off from the outside world at the same time each day—although we all do this when we are sleeping and the world doesn’t end, does it?

A lot of this depends on the job you do. I’ve mentioned before in this podcast the best salesperson I’ve ever worked with, Claire.

Claire would never be available between 9:00 and 10:30 am. It was during this time she was on the phones prospecting and following up customers. That one strategy was the difference between her and every other salesperson in that company. She outsold her nearest colleague two to one most months.

We worked a nine hour day in that sales job, and Claire was unavailable for just ninety minutes. She was in charge of her diary. That still left her with seven-and-a-half hours where she was available.

So, Karen, the place to begin is to ask yourself how much time do you need each day to stay on top of your work?

Given that a managerial role is largely about communicating with a team and bosses, you will likely need to be available most of your working day. Yet, you will still have some individual work to do. So, how much time do you need to complete that work each week?

You will only be able to work with averages. You will not be able to be specific about how much time you need each week. You’re human. Sometimes we are on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, we’re tired and anything we do is sluggish and slow.

By working with averages, you’re still getting work done and when you are on fire you can catch up.

For instance, on average, I need around 14 hours a week to create my content. This means each day I protect two hours for content creation where nobody can interrupt me. I then have an extra hour or so in the afternoons I keep flexible for finishing off any work.

I allow no more than twenty one hours of meetings each week. 90% of the time that is more than enough for the meetings and coaching sessions I have each week.

I know if I allow more than 21 hours, the additional admin cost and lost time for critical work will mean I have to work late nights and Saturday just to catch up. Not something I am prepared to do.

Earlier, I alluded to “negotiating” appointments.

Imagine you’re in the market to buy a Rolls Royce car. (I said imagine). If you call the Rolls Royce dealership, you’re going to have to negotiate a day and time. The “sales process” for buying a Rolls Royce is not your typical process. It’s an experience.

You’re not just buying a typical car. These days, you’re buying a unique bespoke car. The salesperson you talk with will need time to go through all the panelling options, Exterior colours and interior seat fabrics, and even the type of material you want your dashboard made from.

The person you speak with when making your appointment, will negotiate a time to visit the showroom. That’s part of the experience.

Now if you were in the market to buy a Ford, Toyota, Hyundai or VW, and call to make an appointment, you can name your day and time. The salespeople will very likely accept your first day and time.

Now which experience would leave you feeling special?

If you think about your readiness to accept any appointment at any time, what does that say about you?

Negotiating your appointments elevates your status in the mind of the person wishing to make an appointment with you. The harder it is to get an appointment with you, the more likely you will have a favourable outcome. It’s the “you must be important if it’s difficult to make an appointment with you”.

Try getting an appointment with Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadala. It’s not that they don’t do appointments, it’s just they restrict the number of meetings they are available for each day and the meetings they do attend must count.

So, if you protect 9:30 to 11:00 am each morning, if someone wants to have a meeting with you during that time, you would say could we meet at 11:30 am instead? 9 times out of 10 your suggested time will be accepted. If not, the person wanting to meet you will likely suggest an alternative time.

If you cannot find a suitable time, then you will have to use your protected time. But with this strategy, it will be very rare that you need to do that.

I promise you, if you do this a few times, your confidence will rapidly improve and you will find that your focus time blocks will be protected.

The challenge we all face today is we feel we must be available at all times for whoever wants to communicate with us. If it’s not Teams or Zooms calls, it’s instant messages and email. The trick is to become less available.

Be like the Rolls Royce salesperson. Make getting an appointment with you part of the experience. If it’s a little harder to get an appointment with you, the person you’re meeting is going to be much more open to finding a solution with you there and then, instead of scheduling another meeting with you to “sort the details out”.

Ask yourself, what the worst that could happen if you “negotiate” with the person wanting to meet with you? The worst is they refuse your suggested time and insist you meet them at their preferred time. At that point you can accept.

Yet, I can promise you, the majority of people you negotiate times with will accept your time. The time they chose was completely random anyway. No matter who they are, your boss, your most important customer or whatever, they will thank you for taking the initiative and suggesting a time.

I will end with a recent example of this. I am in the process of changing my car as the lease on my current one is expiring in September. We called the dealership to arrange a test drive in a car I was interested in, and the sales manager informed us that this week they were fully booked up, but they had an opening on Thursday or Friday afternoon next week.

I was both impressed and relieved. Impressed because he did not jump at the chance and suggest we come down that afternoon or tomorrow. I had a sense of scarcity. Relieved because he took the decision for making the appointment out of our hands.

We arranged 1pm the following Thursday and when we arrived, the car was on the forecourt ready and waiting for us. A very impressive experience.

So, there you go, Karen. Don’t be afraid to negotiate your appointments and meetings. Build confidence in negotiating interruptions from your team and protect sufficient time for getting your core work done.

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

Sunday Jun 01, 2025

From Burned Out to Balanced: The Three Pillars of Productivity

Sunday Jun 01, 2025

Do you feel you have to push yourself every day just to stay on top of your work? Well, this week I’m looking at why this happens and what you can do to prevent it.

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

The 2025 Summer Sale

Script | 372

Hello, and welcome to episode 372 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 have ever watched a Formula 1 race, it can be easy to believe that from the moment the lights go out and the race starts, the cars go flat out until the end of the race.

Ah, as if it were that simple.

The truth is if a team tried to do this, they would be guaranteed to lose the race.

Even though a race may only last ninety minutes, during the race the teams will need to conserve their tyres and fuel. Going flat out to the finish would degrade the tyres too quickly, which would mean they lose essential grip in the corners, and running out of fuel would be game over for a team.

You are like that Formula 1 car. When you start your day you have a limited amount of energy and your ability to focus needs to be managed through the day.

It’s not physical energy. Your body has a way to utilise your fat reserves to help keep you out of danger when necessary, physically. It’s your mental energy. That is limited. And it’s a lack of mental energy that results in you making mistakes, procrastinating and being unable to make a decision about what to work on next.

It your mental energy that requires careful management each day. Getting home exhausted each day won’t do very much for your relationships. You won’t be in the mood to do very much, and having a conversation with your partner or kids won’t be a top priority.

Yet, your family may have been waiting for you to get home to talk with you, play and just have some quality time.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. There are things you can do to preserve your mental energies so you arrive home feeling relaxed, fulfilled and ready to engage with your family.

However, before we get to how to do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Matt. Matt asks, Hi Carl, do you have any ideas on how to stop feeling constantly tired and using the weekends just to recover before doing it all again on a Monday?

Hi Matt, thank you for your question.

If you are constantly feeling tired, my first advise would be to go see your doctor. A constant feeling of fatigue or tiredness could have an underlying reason and it’s better to get that checked out first.

If, your doctor reports there are no underlying illnesses, then it’s time to look at your lifestyle.

As I wrote in Your Time, Your Way, there are three areas you need to keep in balance. These are the foundations of any productive life.

They are:

Sleep, movement and diet.

Are you getting enough sleep for you? We are all different when it comes to the amount of sleep we require. Some of you may work well on six hours, while others may require eight or nine hours sleep.

If you want to operate at your best each day, finding out how much sleep you need would be a first step.

For years I thought I only needed six hours of sleep. Yet when I did the test that Matthew Walker, the sleep doctor, suggested, I discovered I actually needed seven hours twenty minutes.

What is that test? I hear you ask. What you do is sleep with no alarm for seven days and calculate how much sleep you slept each night. Then you add the total number of hours you slept and divide that number by seven.

That will give you roughly the number of hours of sleep you need.

I did this experiment while I was on holiday—when I didn’t have to wake up at any particular time. That way I had no anxiety about not waking up on time.

Now I make sure I get seven hours at a minimum.

Movement does not mean you have to go to the gym or out running. If you look back to a time when fewer people were overweight, the 1950s for instance, there were very few gyms—and the gyms then were centred on specialised bodybuilding or competitive sports people.

You didn’t see people jogging round parks either.

Instead, people moved more. They walked, took the stairs, manually cleaned their houses and were more active in general.

The statistics are shocking. In the 1950s, around 10% of the adult US population were classified as being overweight. That number was 6% in the UK.

In 2020, those numbers had increased to over 40% in the US and 38% in the UK.

While I know convenience is wonderful, it’s also destroying our health. Humans were designed to move. We are not designed to spend as much as fifteen hours a day sitting down.

Your brain needs movement. This is why often you will find you come up with solutions to difficult problems when walking down a street or exercising.

Movement does so much more for you. It gives your brain a chance to reset, relax and more importantly these days, gets your eyes off the screen.

And then there is diet.

I am sure you re familiar with how you feel after a lunch high in carbohydrates. You feel drowsy, sluggish and sleepy. It even has a name; the afternoon slump.

If your diet is a mess—full of highly processed foods, sugars and carbohydrates, you are going to struggle to focus. You’ll always be feeling tired, sluggish and exhausted.

Switching your diet to a healthier one, will do wonders for your overall productivity and mental energies.

So, get those three basic fundamentals of a productive day sorted first and you will see a significant improvement in your productivity and focus.

Next, though, is how we apply ourselves each day. In other words, how we manage our workloads.

Constantly switching your attention between designing a presentation or trying to figure out how to ask Chat GPT the right prompts so it gives you the answers you are looking for while a the same time responding to Slack or Teams messages will leave you completely wiped out in no time at all.

Your brain was not designed to be switching contexts in that way all day. It’s called cognitive overload and while, perhaps, in the moment you don’t recognise it, what you are doing is rapidly depleting your brain’s capacity to make decisions, and remain focused on the job at hand.

It’s the most inefficient way to go about your work.

The danger is it becomes addictive. I’ve seen in recent years this called “dopamine addiction”. This is where you have become addicted to the drama of urgent deadlines, the sound of another notification and constant buzz of distractions from breaking news and short videos with flashing lights and rapid changes in context.

It destroys your focus, mental energy and leaves you feeling worn out and exhausted at the end of the day.

To improve your focus and better manage your mental energies, look for ways to group similar work together.

For example, if you find that you focus better in a morning, try to avoid having meetings at that time. Instead, perhaps start your day with a two hour session of work on a particularly difficult project or task. One that requires a fair bit of creativity or skill.

Then give yourself thirty minutes or an hour before you attempt to do another mentally challenging task.

I’ve found that when I suggest to clients that they use these gaps between periods of deeper focused work to get up move around and use their phones to reply to messages using the dictation feature, or return phones calls, they get an instant boost in their energy levels.

If you think about it physiologically, you’ve gone from hardly moving at all—sitting down and focusing on something—to getting up and moving and suddenly your blood is surging again, in a positive way.

More importantly, you’re not context switching in a mentally depleting way.

A quick tip I can share with you here is to keep the first thirty minutes of your work day free. Use that time to get a heads up on your day. Clear your email inbox, have a chat with your colleagues or hold a quick team meeting to discuss the objectives for the day.

What this does is prevents that sense of FOMO (the fear of missing out). It settles your mind, gets you focused on your objectives and gives you time to deal with any unknown emergencies before you settle down to doing some difficult work.

I’, currently reading a book called “In Search of C. The Biography of Mansfield Cumming”. Mansfield Cumming was the founder of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The British version of the CIA.

The service was founded in 1909—five years before the start of the First World War. The majority of the UK’s workforce at that time were employed either in factories or in service.

In service meant people who worked for the aristocratic landed gentry in their large mansions and palaces.

Very few people worked in offices.

Those that did, didn’t work a nine till five job. It was far more flexible than that. Often the day was spent travelling between meetings. And given that most transport at that time was horse and cart, you can imagine how slow that was.

Then there was large liquid lunches, often taking up to three hours.

It was in the evenings that any work managed to get done. Mansfield Cumming, for example, would spend most of his evenings replying to letters and reading documents.

One time, when Cumming was ill and bed ridden, his superiors send over a typist so he could stay on top of his correspondence.

120 years ago, people recognised the dangers of letting correspondence get out of control on the efficiency of getting work done.

And don’t be fooled into thinking things were very different then. Not only did they get an equivalent number of letters as we do emails, they also got telegrams—the equivalent of Slack or Teams messages today.

It might not have been digital, but the volume was very similar.

Today, we allow ourselves to neglect staying on top of our correspondence and admin. When we do that it creates a low level of anxiety draining our energies. The fear of not knowing what is waiting for us. And the fear that we might be missing something important.

To avoid this, find some time each day to dedicate specifically to dealing with your messages. Try to do this as late in the day as you can. This avoids you getting trapped in email ping pong. That’s were when you reply you give the receiver time to reply to you the same day. That just doubles up the time you need to spend dealing with your messages.

Slowing down your response times, gives you space to get back to doing the work you have identified as being important.

So there you go, Matt. If you want to have the energy to do a days work and have enough left in the evening to spend doing the things you want to do, then first make sure you are taking care of the basics, tough sleep, movement and a healthy diet.

Then avoid getting trapped by context switching. Protect time on your calendar for doing specific types of work that is similar in nature, and allow sufficient flexibility between these sessions for moving and dealing with the inevitable message load.

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

Oh and one more thing. Yesterday, saw the launch of my summer sale. If you would like to pick up a course, or a bundle of courses, or perhaps join my coaching programme, you can now save up to 25%. All you need to do is visit my Summer Sale page and get all the details. I will put the link in the show notes.

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

Sunday May 25, 2025

Half Your Life Is Over—Now What?

Sunday May 25, 2025

How important is it to develop your Areas of Focus? That’s the question I am answering this week.

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Download the Areas of Focus Workbook

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

Script | 371

Hello, and welcome to episode 371 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.

Why spend time working on your areas of focus when there’s already a ton of stuff to do and not enough time to do it?

While very few people ever overtly ask that question, I recall asking myself that question when I was starting out on my productivity and time management journey in my twenties. It seemed such a waste of time when I had people to call, work to do and a multitude of other commitments waiting for me to deal with.

The trouble was that while I was running around dealing with all the so-called urgent things, I was neglecting what was genuinely important to me. You know things like spending time with my family, reading books, and knowing what I wanted to do with my career. Those things felt like a luxury I just didn’t have time for.

But what was I really doing? I was prioritising the unimportant over the important because I was addicted to being busy. And that’s not healthy.

It destroys relationships, damages your health (mentally and physically) and just leaves you feeling empty and exhausted at the end of the day.

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

This week’s question comes from Ben. Ben asks, Hi Carl, I hear you talk a lot about Areas of Focus. What advice would you give to someone who hasn’t got time to write out their areas of focus? To me, that doesn’t honestly seem like a good use of my time.

Thank you Ben for your question.

Let me briefly explain what your Areas of Focus are.

We all share eight areas of life. These are:

Family and relationships

Career or business

Health and fitness

Lifestyle and life experiences

Finances

Personal development

Spirituality

Life’s purpose

They all mean something to us. Yet, how we define them will be very individual. How we prioritise them will also be personal and will change as you go through life.

When you are young your career and business area may be high on your priority list. Once you have a career or run a business, you may find other areas such as your life’s purpose and spirituality will rise up the list.

I remember when I was in my twenties, I felt I was immortal. I smoked and enjoyed a beer or six on a Friday and Saturday night. Health and fitness was not a priority.

When I reached thirty, I realised I was overweight and climbing the stairs was ridiculously hard. It left me puffing and panting embarrassingly. Something needed to change. So I reduced my drinking, eventually quit smoking and began running. Health and fitness shot up my list of priorities.

The thing is, if you do not know how important these areas are to you, you will continue to ignore them. It’s surprisingly easy to develop horrible diseases such as diabetes if you have not prioritised health and fitness.

And, of course, the elephant in the room. How many relationships have been destroyed because a person’s work takes over their life?

Your time is limited. According to Oliver Burkeman, you have around 4,000 weeks. That’s it. And if you’re 40 years old, you’re around half way through those 4,000 weeks. Scary thought, right?

So spending time defining what these areas mean to you is a critical first step to building a life that leaves you feeling fulfilled, energised and in balance with what is important to you.

The way to do this is to download my free Areas of Focus workbook, which you can get from my website. That workbook will take you through the steps to dine your areas of focus and to pull out the actionable steps you can take to keep things in balance.

These will range from simple tasks such as sending an amount of money to your savings each month. A task that will likely take you less than two minutes each month. To having a date night with your partner every Friday evening.

Your health and fitness area is another one that does not require a lot of time. Twenty to thirty minutes a day. Think about that for a moment. Twenty to thirty minutes a day to protect your long-time health, keep you energised and help keep your weight down. That’s a no brainer.

Yet to me, the most useful part of developing your areas of focus is it makes prioritising your day easy.

If you know what is important to you, you know what your priorities are.

For your work, if you know what is important to you in your career, you will be fifty percent of the way to knowing what your priorities are.

For example, if your career goal is to become the CEO or head of a department, you can develop a career path that will take you towards achieving that goal. You will be clear about what experience you need to gain in order to move to the next promotion, what skills you need to develop and which areas you need to improve.

The other fifty percent comes from knowing what your core work is. Your core work is the work you are employed to do. (Not the work you volunteer to do). The clue to this is often in your job title. A salesperson is employed to sell, not spend days in internal sales meetings. A teacher is employed to teach, not waste time dealing with student administration.

Once you are clear about these, you will find planning your days easier and prioritising your work almost automatic.

There is another way knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is it helps you to structure your week.

If you decide that maintaining your health is a priority for you, you can open up your calendar and schedule in your exercise times. Similarly, if you enjoy weekends going on adventures with your friends, that can be managed in your calendar.

With your work, once you know what your core work is, you can ensure you have sufficient time set aside for doing that work. For instance, if you are a software developer, how much time do you need to spend developing software so that you meet your deadlines?

That might equate to four hours a day of undisturbed coding. If that’s the case, you can block that time out and get very strict about accepting meetings.

Yet, none of this will be obvious if you have no idea what is important to you. You’ll find yourself being pulled and pushed into doing things that do not align with your values and areas.

There’s a great quote from Jim Rohn which says:

“If you don't have a plan for what you want, then you will probably find yourself buying into someone else's plan and later find out that was not the direction you wanted to go. You've got to be the architect of your life.”

And that’s what your Areas of Focus do for you. It gives you a blueprint for the life you want to live.

Once you know what your blueprint is, you can begin making changes to build the life you want to live.

It’s funny because as I think about this, Ben, I’m reminded of what my life was like before I sat down to work out what I wanted for my life.

I felt I was drifting. Everything that came at me appeared urgent. I was being pushed this way and then the next day I’d be pulled in another direction. Other people were telling me how I should be living my life. Even down to what I should be wearing, the kind of car I should be driving and the career I should be following.

Yet, none of that was what I wanted. It was what other people wanted me to do. It wasn’t until I read The Ten natural laws of time and life Management by Hyrun Smith that I finally woke up and realised I did have a life worth living and I could build the life I wanted to live.

And that’s when I sat down and worked on my Areas of Focus. The initial ideas were reasonably easy to write out. It became a little harder when I fine tuned them and pulled out the action steps I needed to follow consistently in order to stay on track. In total it took a few weeks to come up with a set of areas I was happy with.

But it was worth it. Almost instantly my life changed. I was more focused, intentional and other people’s opinions about how I should be living my life were listened to, but if they did not align with what I had identified as being important to me, quietly rejected.

Now one thing about your areas of focus is they will change. You will find yourself fine-tuning them from time to time. How you think about family and friends will be different when you have your first child or grandchild.

Your career might be important today, but less so after you retire.

You may not have discovered your purpose in life yet. I didn’t know what mine was until I was in my mid-thirties. But it’s worth thinking about as that one area has the potential to bring you so much joy and fulfilment.

I get to help hundreds of people every day. Nothing can beat the feeling of receiving an email or a comment from someone I have been able to help.

And that’s what your areas of focus will do for you. They give you focus, they show you what to prioritise and brings purpose and fulfilment into your life.

To me establishing what your areas are is the most important part of building any time management and productivity system. Without these, you have no foundations and will be at the mercy of everyone else.

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

Sunday May 18, 2025

Digital Overwhelm? How Getting the Basics Right Changes Everything

Sunday May 18, 2025

How can you preserve simplicity and work at a reasonable pace in an increasingly complex and rushed environment? That’s the question I’m answering today.

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The ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP

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

Script | 370

Hello, and welcome to episode 370 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.

Two of the challenges we face today are the increasing complexity in our work life. Yet, that has been around forever. New technology requires us to learn new techniques for doing things and, perhaps, the biggest challenge of all is dealing with the speed at which things come at us.

Interestingly, the number of emails we get today is comparable to the number of letters people in the 1970s and 80s received. Yet the number of phone calls we get have dramatically dropped. That’s largely due to the move towards instant messages—which were not around in the 70s and 80s.

The difference is the speed at which we are expected to respond. With a letter, there was some doubt about when the letter would arrive. It might arrive the next day, but there was always a chance it would take two or three days.

And when it did arrive, we had at least twenty four hours to respond. Today, there are some people who expect you to respond to an email immediately—no thought that you may be working on something else or in a meeting with an important customer.

So the question we should explore is how we can navigate the way we work today without letting people down, but at the same time work at a comfortable speed which minimises mistakes and leaves us feeling fulfilled at the end of the day.

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

This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks, Hi Carl, over the years, my productivity system has changed with technology. I began, like you, with a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, then I moved to Getting Things Done and managed everything digitally. These days, I am struggling to keep up, and it just seems so complicated. Do you have any thoughts on how to keep things simple?

Hi Tom, thank you for your question.

One way to look at this is to remember that the basic principles of good time management and productivity will never change. Those principles are incorporated in COD—Collect, Organise and Do.

No matter how complicated or fast things get, we still need a way to collect stuff and trust that what we collect will be where we want it to be when we process it.

We need an organisation system that works for us. And that means, we can find what we need when we need it.

And finally, we want to be maximising the time we spend doing the work, so we avoid backlogs building.

It’s within this framework we can evolve our systems.

Thirty years ago, we would have been collecting with pen and paper. Today, it’s likely we will collect using our phones or computer.

Thirty years ago we would have had stacks of file folders and a filing cabinet or two to store those folders. Today, those files will likely be held in the cloud—Google Drive, iCloud or OneDrive, for instance.

So while the tools have changed, the principles have not.

I’m a big rugby fan. I’ve been following Leeds Rhinos since my grandfather took me to my first game when I was five years old.

The teams that win the championships and cup games are the ones who get the basics right. In rugby, that is playing the majority of the game in the oppositions half. Being aggressive in defence and ensuring their players are disciplined—giving away silly penalties is one sure way to lose games.

The teams that lose are the ones who don’t get these basics right. They try to be clever, get frustrated, and drop the ball (quite literally) and give away unnecessary penalties, which results in them giving away territory and playing the majority of the game in their own half.

The message is always the same. Get the basics right and the results will come.

This is the same for you, too, Tom. Get the basics right and that’s following the principles of COD.

The problems will start when we begin trying to do multiple things at the same time. Multi-tasking is not a strategy. Sure there are some things you can do at the same time. Walking and thinking about solving a problem, listening to a podcast while doing the dishes or cleaning up the house.

But you are not going to be able to write a report, prepare a presentation and reply to your emails at the same time. These are very different types of work requiring different skills.

A report is well thought out words and conclusions. A presentation is a visual representation of your main points and writing emails is about communicating clearly in words. All requiring different parts of your brain.

This is why categorising the work you do works so well. With categorising, or chunking or batch processing—they all mean the same thing—you are grouping similar tasks together and doing them at the same time. For example, you can collect your actionable emails together and set aside thirty to sixty minutes each day for responding to them.

If you were consistent with that, you would always be on top of your mails and no one would be waiting much longer that 24 hours for a reply.

Similarly if you were responsible for sending out proposals to prospective customers, if you were to spend an hour or so on those each day, you would rarely have any backlogs and your proposals would be going out quickly without errors.

It’s when we stop following these principles we become like the losing rugby teams. We’ve stopped following the game plan and become frustrated, which leads to mistakes which in turn means we lose the game.

Or in the world of work, we create backlogs, deadlines are missed and we feel horrible, stressed out and overwhelmed.

I’ve always found it fascinating to learn how productive people work. I saw recently an interview with Tim Cook, where he mentioned he wakes up at 4:00 am, and the first hour of his day is spent doing email.

I remember reading that Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter and the CEO of Square, who would schedule his days by category of work. Monday and Tuesdays were spend on marketing, Wednesdays were problem solving and Thursdays would be spent at Square and Fridays at Twitter.

They all have some structure to their days. Incidentally, this was the same for Winston Churchill and Charles Darwin. They both followed a strict structure to their days which ensured they spent time each day on the things that mattered.

While the way we work and the tools we use to do our work may change, the way we structure our days doesn’t have to.

Twenty years ago, spending an hour on returning phone messages was the norm. Today, that same hour will likely be spent responding to Slack or Teams messages and email.

If you want to get control of your time and remain productive, it will be helpful to know what is important.

What is your core work? The work you are paid to do? What does that look like at a task level? Working in concepts doesn’t work here. You need to go to the next level and determine what your work looks like at a task level.

An accountant will need to put numbers into a spreadsheet (or something similar) in order to get the information they need to be able to advise their clients. The question therefore becomes how much time do they need to do that each day to ensure they are on top of their work?

As a former Franklin Planner user, you will know the importance of daily and weekly planning. This is about knowing what is important today and this week. It’s about allocating sufficient time to getting that work done and being strict about what you allow on your calendar.

Perhaps part of the problem we face today is the increasing demands on our time. It’s easy to ask someone to jump on a Teams or Zoom call for “a few minutes” Ha! How often does five minutes turn into thirty minutes?

And because of the simplicity of doing these calls, we accept. Perhaps too readily.

I don’t have Zoom or Teams on my phone. If I am not with my laptop, I cannot do a video call. It’s a rule. And a non-negotiable one too.

Where are your rules? What will you accept and, more importantly, not accept?

One way you can manage this is to limit the number of meetings you have each day. If you spend seven hours of your eight hours of your work day in meetings, how will you find the time to do the work you are employed to do?

That isn’t a task management issue. That’s a time issue. It doesn’t matter how many tasks you have to do today if you do not have the time protected for doing them. It’s on you to protect that time and that doesn’t matter where you are in the hierarchy chain.

If your boss expects you to be in seven hours of meetings each day and write reports, prepare presentations and respond to your emails and messages, that’s an issue you need to take up with your boss. No tool or productivity system will sort that out for you.

Even with the help of AI, you will struggle to do your work with that kind of time conflict.

Now when it comes to managing your files and notes, I would say don’t reinvent the wheel.

Several years ago, Microsoft and Apple’s engineers released we were terrible at managing our documents. So, they began rolling out self contained folders for their professional tools such as Word and Keynote.

You no longer need to file these documents in folders you create. Instead you can save them and let your computer organise them for you. For example, if you use Word, all your word documents can be saved to the Word container folder in OneNote. Just like Google Docs. These are all kept together and you can then organise them in a variety of ways.

You can do it alphabetically, the date the document was created or when it was last modified (great for when collaborating with other people). In iCloud and Google Drive, you can also organise by which documents are shared.

Your computer does the hard work so you don’t have to. There’s certainly no longer a need to create sophisticated file folder structures that take forever to keep organised. You don’t have time for that. Let your computer do the work for you.

And not only have these companies made organising our work easier, they have been gradually improving search features too. Now as long as you know a date range, a keyword or a title, you’ll be able to find any document in seconds.

There is no longer any need to manually organise your documents. The only responsibility you have is to ensure the names of the documents you have saved mean something to you. If you’re downloading a document, make sure you rename it. There’s some very strange file naming conventions out there.

And that’s about it, Tom.

Stick to the basics of COD—Collect, Organise, Do. Be strict about what you allow on your calendar (even if that means you need to an uncomfortable talk with your boss) and let your computer do the hard work of filing for you.

I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question.

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

Sunday May 11, 2025

The Intentional Day: How Top Performers Plan Their Time Differently

Sunday May 11, 2025

Podcast 369

What’s the most effective time management practice you can adopt today that will transform your productivity?

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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The ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP

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

Script | 369

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you want to finally have a time management and productivity system that works for you, and have an opportunity to work with me and a group of like-minded people, then join us next Sunday. I will put the link for further information into the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, what do you consider to be the best daily habits for living a productive life?

Hi Mark, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then mentally mapping out when you will do your work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope that has helped, Mark. Thank you for your question.

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

Sunday May 04, 2025

Breaking the Backlog Cycle: Never Get Behind Again

Sunday May 04, 2025

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

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Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink

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Script | 367

Hello, and welcome to episode 368 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Wyatt. Thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it?

What do I need to do with it?

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

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

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

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

There are two additional things here.

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

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

The second is to follow this process every day.

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

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

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

Now, let’s move on to your appraisals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Apr 27, 2025

Beyond the Chaos: Building a Low-Maintenance Productivity System

Sunday Apr 27, 2025

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

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Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink

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Script | 367

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the topic of this week’s question and so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

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

Hi Lindsay, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

But, it doesn’t have to be that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then process your inbox. Use the three questions:

What is it?

What do I need to do?

When will I do it?

And then move the task to the appropriate folder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First accept your human limitations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now look at your work.

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

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

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

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

That meant I had only three hours available for appointments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Apr 20, 2025

How To Be Productive And Organised.

Sunday Apr 20, 2025

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

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