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The Time-Based Productivity Course

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

Script | 379

Hello, and welcome to episode 379 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Sally, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is the same for individuals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Jul 27, 2025

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

Sunday Jul 27, 2025

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

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

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Links:

The Time-Based Productivity Course

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

Script | 378

Hello, and welcome to episode 378 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

Hi Phil, thank you for your question.

Before I begin, I should give you some background.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the background.

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

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

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

It was unpleasant.

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

It was a revelation and I was shocked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, I do see a space for digital tools.

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

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

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

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

Sunday Jul 20, 2025

The Vacation Productivity Paradox: How to Rest AND Get Ahead

Sunday Jul 20, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The Time-Based Productivity Course

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

Script | 377

Hello, and welcome to episode 377 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, now on with the podcast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a wonderful time to clear these out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Jun 29, 2025

The Power of Mundane: Simple Systems for Complex Lives

Sunday Jun 29, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Links:

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

Take the Areas of Focus Course

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

Script | 376

Hello, and welcome to episode 376 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Charlie, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it?

What do I need to do?

When will I do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Jun 22, 2025

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

Sunday Jun 22, 2025

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

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

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

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

Script | 375

Hello, and welcome to episode 375 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One thing you may have noticed is that there are many things we have to or want to do, yet there never seems to be enough time to do them.

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

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

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

I don’t think so.

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Marcos, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me give you an example of this with email.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Jun 15, 2025

Finding Your Direction When Life Feels Chaotic

Sunday Jun 15, 2025

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

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

Alice: I don't much care where.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Script | 374

Hello, and welcome to episode 374 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Julie, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family and relationships,

health and fitness,

Finances,

Business / career

Lifestyle and life experiences

Self development

Spirituality

life’s purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Jun 08, 2025

Whoever Controls Your Calendar Controls You: Mastering Executive Time Management

Sunday Jun 08, 2025

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

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

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

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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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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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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