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Script |427

Hello, and welcome to episode 427 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.

Eleven years ago, I began writing blog posts on time management and productivity. My goal was simple. To help people navigate the rapidly changing world of time management and productivity.

In 2015, it seemed almost every day a new task manager or notes app would come out promising to make organising your day easier.

This meant established productivity apps such as OmniFocus, Things, Remember the Milk and Todoist had to change to keep up. So these apps started adding features, changing their design languages, and everything started to become more complicated.

AI today is doing exactly the same thing. Promising a lot and forcing established productivity tools to add more and more features, whether we want them or not.

When trying to decide if a new productivity tool is all that it promises to be, I’ve noticed that many of these promises are repackaged things that already exist.

For example, I’ve been using an app called TextExpander for fifteen years now. TextExpander inserts pre-written “snippets” of text through a keyboard shortcut.

I use it for writing dates so I don’t need to look up the date. All I type is “Edate”, and it will give me the date in the UK format: day, month and year.

I also have some pre-written thank you emails there too. They are written by me in my writing style, and a simple keyboard shortcut will give me the email. While TextExpander won’t send the email for me, all I need to do is hit Command and return on my keyboard, and it will send it.

Then we have tools such as Calendly and Acuity. These tools allow you to set up times on your calendar that people can pick from to set up an appointment with you. Once set up, this works in the background, and you have nothing to do.

No back-and-forth negotiating a time. People just click on a link, and these tools deal with time zone differences and all the admin.

No need for AI to get involved.

AI will inevitably change the way we work; for many people, it already has. However, there are some principles that never change.

There will still be 24 hours in a day, you will still be able to only focus on one thing at a time, and you won’t be able to be in more than one place at a time.

Your energy will fluctuate, and you will need to get enough sleep.

The need to manage our time is still there. We still have friends and family, work commitments and perhaps some hobbies. They all need time.

And the principles of time management will not change. If you want to do something, it will require time. Whether that’s cleaning out your car or sitting on the sofa chatting with an AI bot.

Time management and productivity skills will still be needed no matter what advances AI brings to our workplaces and lives.

Thinking about all this led me to look at how people are engaging with my Learning Centre. This is where I have courses and programmes to help people become better at managing their time and become more productive.

As I was looking, I noticed something interesting. The people who have made the biggest positive changes in their lives weren’t the people who bought the most courses.They were the people who kept learning.

They perhaps began with my COD course, my free productivity fundamentals course, then went on to purchase the Time and Life Mastery programme or the Time Sector System course.

Some went on to join my coaching programme so they could have guidance on building their own, tailor-made system.

This highlighted a mistake many people make with time management and productivity. They approach it as if it were a destination. Find the perfect app, read the right book, take the right course, watch one more YouTube video, then they’ll finally be organised.

Yet that’s not how it works, and you’ve probably noticed.

A few years ago, the trend was minimalist desk set-ups. This is where people stripped everything from their workspace so all they had was a small plant, a simple lamp and a laptop attached to a large monitor.

YouTube was full of videos of people showing off their desk setups. They looked great, but did absolutely nothing for their productivity.

Now the trend is to have books and notebooks everywhere. The plants survived, but the little desk accessories have reappeared. Minimalism seems to have lost its appeal. Few people have been able to stick with it.

It seems keeping things minimal is challenging and time-consuming.

I also saw something similar when I was at university; I studied part-time. 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm every Tuesday and Thursday.

On our first day, there were just over 200 students crammed into the lecture theatre. All excitedly looking forward to their graduation day four years later with an LL.B Honours degree.

I remember the professor in charge of the course telling us that 70 to 80% of those in that lecture theatre would not graduate. Not because the course was particularly difficult. It wasn’t. But because committing six hours a week to attending lectures for four years would be a commitment beyond most people.

And on our graduation day, there were just 24 students left. Almost 200 students had quit!

It didn’t matter what tools or processes you had. What mattered was understanding the basic principles of time management. Turning up consistently and doing the work.

It had nothing to do with academic ability or how smart someone was. The people who graduated were the ones who turned up constantly and managed their time so they were able to attend the lectures and do the reading (there was a lot of reading to do for a law degree) week after week for four years.

Being good at time management and consistently productive is more like fitness. Let’s say you wanted to get fit. You wouldn’t expect to take a three-hour course on weight training and suddenly become stronger.

Fitness doesn’t work like that. The same is true of playing the piano, learning a language, cooking, and photography. These are not one-time learning experiences; they’re continuous.

And learning to better manage your time and be more productive is no different.

Our lives and work change. We may begin as a junior administrative assistant, but within a year or two we are managing a team of four people and overseeing projects.

You start a family; now suddenly you have a little monster waking up every two or three hours screaming through the night. And as your kids grow up, you have commitments to take them to and pick them up from swimming or football practice.

The time management skills you learned at school and university don’t work in the workplace. And as you change jobs, you need to learn new ways to manage your time both professionally and personally.

The real challenge isn’t knowing what to do. If you’ve followed this podcast or my YouTube channel, you will already know you should plan your week and day, spend less time reacting to emails and messages, and protect time for your core work (at least I hope you do). The challenge is applying what you know consistently while juggling meetings, deadlines, family commitments and the unexpected events that arrive every day.

This is why consuming more productivity content isn’t going to create the change you want. As James Clear’s Atomic Habits (a fantastic book) shows: Information fades; your habits remain.

Over the years I’ve noticed something about many of the people I’ve coached. The ones that become brilliant at managing their time don’t just complete a course or have one or two coaching sessions and disappear; they keep coming back. They ask questions, refine their systems, and they adapt as their careers and family lives change.

They come back to ideas we implemented years ago and learn new ideas because they now have different challenges.

My best clients have been with me for over eight years, and they are the ones who’ve seen incredible changes, so much so that they’ve inspired me!

I realise now that when my driving instructor told me years ago that: “You don’t learn to really drive a car until you’ve passed your driving test.” the same is true about your time management and productivity: you don’t become more productive and better at managing your time until you start practising what you learned.

All this got me thinking about what productivity education should look like over the next five to ten years.

I don’t believe it’s about creating more courses, and it’s certainly not about developing more complicated systems, packaging them up and selling them.

Instead, it’s about creating a place where people can continue learning, refining and improving over time, just like many of my coaching clients have done. They understand that becoming organised and in control of their time isn’t a project; it’s a lifelong commitment. And like every commitment, it works for those who stick with it.

So, going forward, I will be introducing more live training events for you.

I started doing a few live training events in 2023, and some of my favourite moments have been in those sessions. I’ve been able to answer questions, explore new ideas and help people apply what they’ve learned to their own situations.

Standalone courses don’t allow me to do that, because we are all different, with different professions and responsibilities; no ‘one size’ will fit everyone, and that’s frustrating as a teacher.

Live training changes that. It gives you a place to ask me questions directly related to your challenges. That is what I want to make an ongoing part of the learning experience, not something that only happens occasionally.

The courses and programmes give you the technical knowledge and theory. The live training gives you the practical skills to put what you learn in the courses into practice in ways that work for you.

It’s the difference between learning to drive by reading a book or getting in a car with an instructor and actually going out there and driving.

All this thinking led me yesterday to launch my Productivity Academy. It is the result of months of work, giving you a place where you can keep coming back, get answers to your questions, and work with a group of people on a similar journey as yourself.

And it includes monthly live training sessions that you can join, ask questions, and have the principles applied directly to the way you work.

It will also give you access to all my current and future courses, along with a recommended roadmap for taking them.

My overall goal hasn’t changed. That’s to help as many people as I can become better at managing their time and being more productive so they can enjoy the things they want to enjoy doing.

But I realise I need to do more, and the best way I can do that is to increase the live training element, which will allow me to help you navigate the current and future ways we work.

If you’ve already purchased several of my courses, please don’t think you need to replace them. You don’t. Those courses remain yours exactly as before. The Academy is simply a different way to learn.

The courses will give you the theory and know-how. The Academy will give you the practical skills (and some accountability) to put what you have learned into practice.

If you enjoy learning independently, nothing changes. If, however, you’d like regular guidance, monthly training and access to everything I create going forward, I think you’ll really enjoy becoming an Academy Member.

I will put a link in the show notes to the Academy’s website, and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

I hope to be able to “meet” you in one of our live training sessions soon.

Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you a very, very productive week.

Jul 26, 2026

Your To-Do List Is Hiding the Truth About Your Time.

Jul 26, 2026

14 min

What drives your day? Your calendar or your to-do list? Or perhaps your boss? The answer to that question will determine whether you are or will be productive each day.

Links:

Learn more about the Time Sector System here

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

Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix.

Script |426

Hello, and welcome to episode 426 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 look at the paper planners of the 1980s and 1990s, you would instantly see they were all built around your calendar. Some of the more sophisticated planners had a to-do list and a place to keep notes. Most were just a vertical list of times and the day’s date with a small area at the bottom for notes.

And there was a reason for that. People working in the 20th century understood that no matter what you wanted to do each day, it would require time.

Dropping your kids off at school likely involved a twenty-minute detour on your regular commute. Restocking your paper-clip box would require you to walk to the stationery cupboard to fill it, another ten minutes, and then there was all the travelling around to meet people. (No Teams or Zoom in those days).

Needs drove how we managed our time, and your diary was the only tool that could prevent you from overloading yourself. You could see in an instant whether you could sit down and type out the report or proposal. Because, given that there were no smartphones or tablets, and laptops were prohibitively expensive, you also had to be in the right place in order to do much of your work.

I fondly remember the days when I left work at the end of the day, and there was no way a client, colleague or boss could contact me until I arrived for work the next day. My work Email was only on my work desktop, and that was in the office.

Now, somewhere along the timeline, those barriers have been broken down. Your work can, and does, follow you home.

I recently saw a before-and-after picture of people sitting around a resort swimming pool in the 1990s and one in the 2020s.

In the 1990s, people were sitting around the pool talking or reading a book. In the 2020s, people were staring at their phones. No talking, no books. Just eyes glued to a screen.

It’s quite sad really to see. It’s also why your clients, colleagues and bosses are on holiday with you.

If you’re carrying your work life on your phone, then there’s no escape at all. It would require a superhuman effort to avoid occasionally looking at your emails and messages. I know some people can do it; most cannot.

Today’s episode is about how to put your calendar back to where it belongs: being your primary productivity and time management tool.

So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the recently returned Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Judy. Judy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say many times that your calendar should be your primary productivity tool. I really struggle with that because I have so many tasks to do, and so I find myself beginning and ending my day in my task manager. Do you have any suggestions on how to make my calendar my primary focus?

Hi Judy, thank you for your question.

There is a problem with task managers today, and that is their sophistication.

Before we went digital, if you used a to-do list, you needed to handwrite it each day. While this may not have been very convenient, it forced you to only write out the tasks that needed to be done.

Remembering to watch a TV show or read a newspaper article would rarely, if ever, be written on a to-do list unless it was something you genuinely wanted to do.

Even then, when I think back, I knew that The A Team would be on a Saturday at 6:00 pm, and that Ally McBeal was on a Sunday night at 9:00 pm. And I was always at home at those times, and if I wasn’t, because there were no streaming services, I wasn’t going to see the show then unless I set the video recorder, and to do that you needed a doctorate in Theoretical Physics.

Today’s digital To-do lists are fantastic. You can add tags and labels, set start and due dates, make tasks recurring, and create multiple lists.

All great features.

And if your to-do list can do all that, what’s the point of using a calendar? You can put events and date reminders into your task manager and have one single place to see everything you have to do.

Doing things this way immediately poses a problem, though. You remove the time constraints a calendar gives you.

With a calendar, you can see your day as a whole. You get your 24 hours, and if you tried to over-schedule yourself, you would instantly see it with multiple appointments at the same time. You can then act and reschedule things or cancel a meeting or two.

With a task manager, you cannot see that. All you get is a list of things to do. And if you’re not curating that list each day, the list just gets longer and longer.

Then you find important must-do tasks get lost among low-value, would-like-to-do-someday tasks. This then requires a lot of time to sort and organise.

But rather more damaging is what this does to your sense of control. Maintaining all this in your task manager creates a sense of overwhelm, and the increase in decision-making required leaves you feeling exhausted at the end of the day.

When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool, you only need to decide what type of work you will do at any given time in the day.

For example, imagine it’s the tax reporting season, and you need to get all your finances in order. Not a small task, and something you likely need four or five hours to complete.

If you were to have a task in your task manager that says “do taxes”, that’ll be a task you will keep rescheduling. It’s not a pleasant task to do, and you know it will take you four or five hours to do.

However, if you managed this on your calendar, you could schedule a couple of hours on Saturday morning one weekend and a further two hours the following weekend. Now you know you have the time protected. All you have to do is turn up and do the work.

Not turning up and doing it is an entirely different problem. That’s not respecting your calendar, which is never a good habit to have.

One other thing you will notice about scheduling this kind of work on your calendar is you see it there well before the time, and that helps you to mentally prepare for the task.

Perhaps you decide to get all the paperwork ready on the Friday evening so you are ready to go first thing Saturday.

On a task list, a task like this will likely be buried away somewhere, and you only see it when you do your daily planning that day.

I’ve always found historical figures’ to-do lists fascinating. People like President Eisenhower, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Maya Angelou and Margaret Thatcher’s to-do lists never contained any dates.

Now, people like President Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher had diary secretaries. These were people who managed their calendars and informed them at the start and end of each day what their schedule was for that day.

This is something I’ve found Siri and Alexa superb at. I can walk into my office in the morning and ask what my appointments for the day are. I can also ask them to block out time tomorrow or Friday for doing a specific piece of work.

With AI coming on board, that feature can only get better. If I say to Siri, “schedule a deep work session on Friday morning at 9:30”, Siri will inform me that the cleaner will be coming at 9:30 am, and I can decide to keep the focus session or change it to a time I will not be interrupted.

Each week I write a script for this podcast. I usually do this on a Thursday morning after my meetings. Today, my last meeting was cancelled, so I was able to get to writing earlier.

I haven’t needed to look at my to-do list once yet, and it’s already 11:00 am. My day began at 8:00 am with a one-hour meeting. It finished at 9:30 am. Originally, my plan was to finish my meetings at 10:15 and begin writing at 10:30 am. As it happened, because of the cancellation, I was able to begin writing at 9:45.

I don’t need to change my calendar; I knew that once my meetings were finished, my next task was to write. So I did.

So where should a task list fit into your overall system?

Task managers are great at collecting stuff you have to do. Far better than calendars, as a calendar will demand a date at the very least. Task managers don’t need a date. You just add a task to the inbox, and there it will sit until you decide to do something with it.

If you follow the Time Sector System, you process your task manager every 24 to 48 hours, and when you do so, you decide when you will do the task. It will either be this week, next week, later this month or next month.

On your calendar, you protect time for the different categories of work you do. For instance, if you write proposals, then you would have time protected on your calendar for writing proposals. You will likely also have time set aside for dealing with your communications (emails and messages, etc.), and admin.

Then at the appointed time, you use the tags or labels in your task manager to pull up the tasks that match that category of work.

That’s an oversimplification of the system. If you want to learn more about the Time Sector System, I recommend checking out the course I have for it. I will put the details in the show notes.

This ensures you are not over-scheduling yourself or attempting to do more than you can do. It also teaches you to say no. You can see whether or not you have the time and space to do the work being asked of you.

If you consistently follow this method, backlogs no longer grow, and you stay reasonably on top of your work, although being on top of your work at all times is rarely achievable.

The biggest, more positive change you could make to your productivity system is to put your calendar back in its proper place. Namely, make your calendar your primary productivity tool and use your task manager as a support tool that tells you what to do when you sit down to work.

I should add that for some of you this change will be uncomfortable. If you’ve allowed your calendar to fill up with meetings, leaving you no time to do the work you are meant to do, sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it won’t make the problem go away.

This is when you may have to have a conversation with your boss. More than five hours of meetings a day, and you’re not going to be able to do much work beyond responding to messages. When you take into account toilet breaks, making coffee, and your lunchtime, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else.

I hope that has helped, Judy. 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.

Jul 19, 2026

How to Protect Your Most Important Work When Everything Goes Off Plan

Jul 19, 2026

13 min

The legendary American Football coach, Vince Lombardi, said: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up."

Now that’s true in American Football, and it’s also true in life.

No matter how well you plan your day or your week, your plan will inevitably get attacked by outside influences.

A disorganised, reactive boss, a tired son or daughter who won’t get out of bed in the morning, a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or your accountant telling you that you need to pay a big tax bill.

These are all sudden, impossible to plan for attacks on your carefully planned day.

Having a plan is one part of a productive day. Having an arsenal of tools to defend your plan is another. And it’s that part that most people never prepare for.

In this week’s episode, I will share with you a few ideas that will help you defend your plan and show you how to get back on track if you are prevented from following it through.

Let’s go.

Links:

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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

Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix.

Script |425

Hello, and welcome to episode 425 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.

Whenever I ask a client how their week went, most answers are negative.

They usually go something like:

“Well, it started well. I got everything I wanted done on Monday and Tuesday completed, but then I had to suddenly go out to see a customer on Wednesday morning, and that just threw me off track. I didn’t get back to the office until 4ish, and then I had to report back to my boss. That went on until 6:00 pm. Argh! It was a disaster”

Well, was is a disaster?

Perhaps not. All it was was one day out of five that did not go as planned.

It’s possible that a day like this will have put you behind on your plan for the week. It could also mean that getting everything you want done that week will no longer be possible. But that does not necessarily mean it’s become a disaster.

The issue really is not preventing things from going wrong; that would be a challenge beyond almost everyone. Instead, the focus should be on recovering from an unexpected event or interruption to minimise the damage to your plan.

And in this week’s episode, I will share a few ideas to help you quickly get back on track after one of these inevitable, unexpected events.

But before I do that, I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, but sadly, once again, she’s sunning herself in a resort somewhere, so I’m afraid it’s me reading out the question again.

This week’s question comes from Will. Will asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve finally become consistent with my weekly planning (thank you for the tip about doing it on a Saturday morning). My problem now is when I look at my plan at the end of the week, I’ve got practically none of it done. There’s always some emergency that throws me off my plan. How do I get myself to stay on track?”

Hi Will,

Thank you for your question.

Now, the first thing I would tell anyone is not to go for perfection. If you have ten things that you plan to get done over the next seven days but only manage to do seven, I would say that was a pretty good week.

You did seven important things that you wanted to do. That’s a 70% success rate. I’d take that.

The reality is you are unlikely to ever hit 100%. I know I never have; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has.

There are just too many things that can happen that will throw you off track. Plus there’s the human side of things too.

We often expect to be able to do far more than is possible, and then there’s always a missing piece of information that you need to ask someone else for, and they are away all week at a conference and won’t be able to send it to you until next week.

There could be a proposal you submit, anticipating approval, only to have it sent back to you for adjustments that will then require resubmitting.

None of these can be anticipated; building in some buffer time can help, but it’s still not likely to give you a 100% success rate.

If you are hitting 100% consistently, that’s likely to suggest that you are not pushing yourself hard enough to develop, but that’s a whole different story.

One trick I often suggest to my coaching clients is to build in a “catch-up” afternoon, or, if you can, a “catch-up day”, later in the week where you avoid scheduling meetings or other commitments and keep it free for catching up on anything you may have fallen behind with.

For example, I don’t schedule anything on a Thursday afternoon. I often have meetings mid-morning (I think of it as a calls day), and one task: writing this script.

Other than that, there’s nothing. This means that if I am behind on anything, I have a whole afternoon to catch up. (There’s always something I will be behind on) This week, I am behind on a few videos I want to record. Should have got them done yesterday, but I ran out of time. So, this afternoon I will be recording.

Another tip is to look at your weekly plan not as a task-level plan, but as a set of objectives. In other words, plan for bigger things such as making progress on a project, getting four exercise sessions in, clearing a backlog or resolving an issue with a customer.

This is a reason why I developed the Weekly Planning Matrix. It’s four squares representing four areas of your life:

Core work: the work you are employed to do. (Just as an aside here, if you’re a part of my Learning Centre, last week’s Learning Note has an excellent example of how Warren Buffett identified his core work)

Projects and issues: these are the higher-level things you want to make progress on professionally.

Personal: For things that need addressing in your personal life, such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment, deciding how many exercise sessions you will do, etc.

And finally, the radar, which is for things you do not need to do anything about but should be aware of. For instance, if your in-laws are coming round for a few days later this month, or you’re waiting for a package to be delivered.

Because you’re limited for space in each square, you become mindful about trying to do too much. If your projects and issues square is full, and next to that you see all your core work tasks, you will instantly see if you are being over-optimistic about what you can get done that week.

I’ll leave a link to a video I did on doing the Weekly Planning Matrix in the show notes for you.

The next idea is related to your daily planning.

Because it is almost inevitable that an unexpected event will occur at some point during the week, your daily planning can be used to reassess your weekly plan.

Let me give you an example from my week this week. I planned to record some additional videos on Tuesday, but when I went to set things up, I discovered that the local government had decided Tuesday was a great day to dig up the road right outside my office. Jackhammers, reversing vehicle warning beeps, and road cleaners were all in full operation. It was an orchestra of wonderful modern city life noise

That plan had to be scrapped. So, I looked at my calendar and saw that Thursday afternoon was clear (it always is, remember, for catch-up), so I moved the time block to Thursday afternoon.

Now, I did that calendar adjustment as soon as I realised I wasn’t going to be able to record the videos, but I could easily have left it until later in the day, when I did my daily planning.

That’s why your daily planning is so useful. It allows you some time each day to step back, reassess your plan for getting the important things done and make any alterations based on the new information you have.

And that brings me onto the timing of your daily planning.

Time and time again, when one of my clients switches over to planning their day the evening before, they tell me that it was life-changing.

It’s life-changing because you will immediately discover your evenings are more relaxing. Once you’ve planned the day, your brain lets go of all the stuff you’re feeling a little anxious about. It quietens down.

You also find you sleep better because you know what you will be doing the next day and that all your “bases” are covered, so to speak. No more “oh Crikey. I forgot to do X” just as you’re drifting off to sleep.

And when you begin your day, you’re already clear about what needs to be done. That gives you a tremendous amount of focus and prevents you from going looking for trouble by looking at your actionable email, sifting through Slack or Teams messages or going into Jira looking for open tickets.

Now, I know all that’s well and good, but what happens if one of these legendary Unexpected Events happens when you’re in the middle of doing your most important work for the day?

This is the proverbial Vince Lombardi’s “getting knocked down” situation. And as Vince Lombardi says, it’s all about getting back up again once you’ve been knocked down.

The only thing I’ve found that works here is that once you’ve dealt with the Unexpected Event, pause. Yes, that’s right. Stop.

Just briefly. Look at your calendar and see when your next committed appointment is, and take a look at your prioritised task list and see what’s left to do.

Often you will find that now that you no longer have the time you thought you would have, some of the remaining tasks can be rescheduled to another day.

You may need to send a quick message to someone who is expecting something from you, but what you want to be doing is resetting your priorities based on the time you have left.

For those of you who wisely set aside time to deal with your actionable emails and messages, you could reduce the time you spend there. For instance, if you have an hour protected for admin and communications later in the day, cut it to 30 minutes.

Remember, with things like messages and emails, one is always greater than zero. Giving yourself thirty minutes today means you’re not going to have to find an extra hour tomorrow.

What was that old proverb, “a stitch in time saves nine”? Something like that.

I would add an extra tip here. Something I’ve found very helpful. That is to reassess your prioritised task list between each session of work.

Emails and messages, for example, can be devastating to even the best-laid plans. Given that most of us check our messages between sessions of work anyway, there’s always the danger that you’ll find an Unexpected Event” that requires thirty minutes or so of your time.

So, give yourself a few minutes away from your desk and mentally re-evaluate your plan for the day. Be comfortable switching things around. For example, if you have to attend an unplanned meeting after lunch, you may find that moving your communication and admin time forward will reduce any pressure you may feel after the meeting.

So there you go, Will. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.

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

Jul 12, 2026

You Don’t Need More Time. You Need Fewer Choices.

Jul 12, 2026

13 min

Socrates, that wise philosopher of the 5th century BC, said:

"The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less."

And the consensus across the centuries has always been clear: happiness isn't a destination you reach by wanting or accumulating more, but a state of mind achieved by reducing what you want.

This week, I’m exploring the common problem of wanting to do more and more, yet never finding the time to do what you want.

Links:

Learn more about the Perfect Week Calendar

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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

Script |424

Hello, and welcome to episode 424 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One of the most common questions I get asked is: How do I find the time to do everything I want to do?

And as David Allen said in his book Getting Things Done, you can do anything you want, but not everything.

In other words, you can do all the things you want to do, just not all at once.

This is a problem all humans have faced since the dawn of time: we are limited by the number of hours we have each day.

And before we acknowledged time and dates, we were still limited by daylight hours and the need to sleep.

In many ways, truly understanding that we will always be limited by time is the first step to discovering peace and happiness.

I remember many years ago having an argument with a colleague about why the iPhone’s constraints were better than Android’s lack of constraints.

This was back in the day when you really didn’t have many options for what you could add to an iPhone’s home screen. The date and time, design, and colours were fixed, and the apps you downloaded were presented as Apple allowed them to be.

Android phones, on the other hand, let you download widgets, move your app icons wherever you wanted, and install thousands of different themes.

What was interesting is that my colleague was always fiddling with his phone. Never being happy with the way his home screen looked.

I had no choice. Which meant I wasn’t fiddling with my phone all the time, trying to find the perfect setup and design. I was therefore happy with what I had.

Funnily enough, now that Apple does give us more choice as to how our phone home screens look, I do waste a lot of time trying to find the right colour combinations and layouts. (And I’m still not happy with it!)

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

This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of things I want to do, such as learning to play the guitar, reading more books, and taking my kids out on the weekend. Yet I never have time to do any of these, and when I do, I’m so exhausted that all I want to do is sit and watch TV. It’s so frustrating. Do you have any ideas on how to fit all these things into my week?

Hi Scott, thank you for your question.

I’m not sure whether you have completed the “Perfect Week” calendar exercise yet, but I would recommend it.

This is an exercise where you take a blank weekly calendar and map out all the things you want to do each week by when you will do them.

Start with your personal life, then add your professional life. I will put a link in the show notes to a video I did on this.

This exercise tells you whether you are being overambitious. You will quickly see if what you want to do is realistic, impossible, or somewhere in between.

What most people find when they do this exercise is that they are being wildly unrealistic.

I’m currently reading Sir Alan Lascelles’ diaries from 1940 to 1945. Sir Alan was the Private Secretary to King George VI at that time, and it’s interesting to see how he spent his days.

Sir Alan loved going to the theatre, gardening and reading books. Those were his main hobbies. However, being a senior member of the Royal Household, he was also in demand from the King and the government of the day.

Yet, what I learned is that even during the war, because his “interests” were small, he was able to maintain all of them.

Take gardening, for example; Sir Alan’s home was outside London. So during the week when he was required to stay at Buckingham Palace, he could not attend to his garden. But at weekends, when he was not travelling with the King, he would spend his days pottering about in his garden.

During the week, when he was in London, he would combine lunches and dinners with meetings with government officials, and maintain his social life by going to the theatre with friends and family.

Now, in those days, people engaged in what we would call “knowledge work” today had much more flexible hours.

Most mornings were spent doing their most important work. The work that required focus.

One thing Sir Alan did each day was take a walk with the King for an hour, where they would discuss the affairs of state. In many ways, this was their daily meeting, though neither of them really considered it one.

This walk invariably took place just before lunch.

Lunch, again, was usually business, but occasionally it would be with his wife or son, or a friend.

Afternoons were often meetings, and they ran into dinners. From the diaries, it seemed that most evenings were spent meeting with a colleague or an official to discuss business.

If he didn’t have a business meeting in the evening, he would go to the theatre with his wife or a friend.

What’s interesting about this way of living is that there were no real-time barriers between work and personal life. Some of those evening meetings went on into the early hours of the morning; other times, if there were no meetings in the afternoon or evening, people would go shopping or take afternoon tea with a family member or friend.

There were instances where an important communique needed to be written, and Sir Alan would be up late at night writing it.

I would say that Sir Alan was working around 50 hours a week, but they were not evenly distributed. Some days he’d work 18 hours, the next maybe only 4.

Our obsession with the “work-life balance” has distorted our lives. Now we are trying to cram so much into our 8-hour work day that we leave ourselves exhausted at the end of it.

There’s no energy left to do the things we want to do. All we are fit for is crashing on the sofa and watching TV or scrolling our social media feeds.

What people like Sir Alan did was to spread their work more evenly throughout the day. They would take a walk for an hour mid-morning, have long lunches with friends, have business meetings in the evening over dinner, and often work on an important piece of work late into the night.

Now, it’s true that in the 1940s TV was not a thing. All people had for entertainment were the radio and record players. So reading books, going to the theatre with friends, and gardening were likely easy to do.

Today, we do not have any more time than they had in the 1940s. We still have the same 24 hours a day.

What has changed is we have far more options than they had.

And that’s where the problem is. It’s not time. It’s the options we have.

The activities you mention, Scott, should be entirely possible. Spending an hour or so each evening playing the guitar should not be a challenge; neither should reading a book for 30 minutes before bed.

If you were to get home around 7:00 pm, have dinner with your family, and then practice the guitar around 8:30, would that be impossible?

If not, what would you do instead after dinner?

Likewise, if you want to take your kids out at the weekend, what’s stopping you? What are you doing instead?

One of the best things I’ve ever done was to strip out the artificial lines between doing my work and my personal life.

Now, I do my most important work in the mornings and, wherever I can, avoid meetings at that time. I keep the afternoons relatively free for chores and family outings and do some work between 8 and 10 pm. That could be meetings, project work, or dealing with my communications and admin.

I’ve recently started reading books for 30 minutes or so after lunch. I find it refreshes me, and I’m ready for whatever’s in store for me in the afternoons. I used to read the news or look at social media at that time, which often drained me mentally. Reading a book does the opposite.

I’ve noticed that with my team too.

We don’t have any regulated work times in the company. People can work whenever they feel like it. My Marketing Manager likes to do her work early in the morning; my video editor prefers the evenings.

We work on timelines. For example, I supply my video editor with that week’s videos on a Wednesday afternoon, and she has until Sunday evening to complete the edits.

As the boss, the only thing I care about is receiving the edited videos no later than Sunday evening.

The final issue most people face is wanting to do too much.

Reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books, we learn that Lord Peter had two hobbies. Playing the piano and collecting books. When he’s had an exhausting day or was stressed about something, he would either pick up a book or play the piano. They were his go-to relaxation methods.

What do we do today? We get ourselves stressed out because we want to learn to play the violin, take up pickleball, go to the movies with our friends or our partner, learn to cook, clean out the wardrobe, redecorate the bedroom, read more books, and write in a journal every day.

Well, you can do any of those things, just not all of them all at the same time.

The problem is when we are faced with too many choices, we end up doing none of them. Instead, we’ll end up crashed in an armchair scrolling.

One thing you can do if you have multiple things you want to do is divide them into seasons.

For example, if gardening is something you want to do, you could spend your time gardening on longer, warmer days. On the colder, shorter days, you could switch to indoor activities.

So Scott, first I would suggest doing the “perfect Week” calendar. That will tell you how much time you actually have for all the things you want to do.

Then be a little more flexible with how you divide your time in the day. Squeezing all your work tasks into a single 8-hour slot is exhausting. Try to break up your day with longer breaks. I know not everyone can do that, but it is something worth trying if you can. You’ll be a lot less exhausted in the evenings.

Finally, be realistic about what you want to do. Remember you can do anything, but you cannot do everything.

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

Jun 28, 2026

How to Keep Going When the Motivation has Gone

Jun 28, 2026

15 min

You may have come across the quote: “Motivation gets you started, but discipline keeps you growing." By John C. Maxwell, the author and leadership mentor.

Motivation is an interesting concept. It’s often required to get things started, but if you only rely on your motivation to do something, particularly if that something is not easy or particularly enjoyable, it won’t keep you going.

This week, we’re looking at how to use motivation to develop the right habits that will keep you consistent.

Links:

The 2026 Summer Sale page

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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

Script |423

Hello, and welcome to episode 423 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One of the consequences of writing a journal every morning is that you come up with a lot of ideas about how you would like to change your life or the way you work. And many of those ideas can motivate you to try something new.

That could mean reading a real book every evening instead of watching TV or scrolling through the news and social media. Or perhaps to go out for an evening stroll after work, or plan your day the evening before, so you can enjoy a more relaxing evening.

All seemingly easy to do.

And then you decide to do it. The first day is easy, the second a little less so and by the time you get to the end of the week, you’ve lost all motivation and picking up a book or going outside for a walk feels like the last thing you want to do after such a hard day. So you skip it.

It’s only one day, it can’t do any harm, can it? And then the next day you don’t do it, and the day after that and so on. Eventually, that great idea you had about changing a bad habit has ended up in the pit of tried-but-forgotten great ideas.

It happens to all of us. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you; all it means is that you’re relying on one of the most overrated ways to change something, motivation.

Motivation is fleeting; it never lasts, and it hates reality. It’s also affected by the quality of your sleep, how distracted you are, and your overall mood. It’s a very unreliable friend.

Great at encouraging you to get started, but terrible at keeping you going when things get difficult.

The good news is there is a more reliable way to make changes, but the bad news is you may need to initially feel uncomfortable. Yet it’s worth it.

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

This week’s question comes from Fran. Fran asks, Hi Carl, what do you do when you don’t have the motivation to do what you have planned to do?

Hi Fran, thank you for your question.

To answer your question directly, I don’t rely on motivation. I remember the days when I smoked, and almost every night, when I went to bed, I would motivate myself not to smoke the next day.

Thinking about that now, it’s funny, because as I was “motivating” myself, I was smoking my last cigarette of the day. “No, I won’t smoke tomorrow!”

Then, when I woke up in the morning, I would make my coffee, then go outside for my first cigarette of the day.

Where was my motivation when I needed it most? It wasn’t there.

In the end, I finally quit smoking by removing all temptation from the house and not carrying any money with me when I went out. Just my travel card and a lunchbox.

It was tough, but after a couple of weeks, the habit was disappearing, and by the end of the month, I could not imagine smoking again.

I’ve seen this time and time again with people. Those who motivate themselves to go out for an evening walk after dinner, for example. It’s easy to do that in the summer, when it’s likely still light outside and the weather’s warm and dry.

Then the temperatures cool, the light fades, and the rain comes down. “Ah, it’s cold and raining, I won’t go out tonight, I’m tired anyway, and I left my umbrella at the office.”

The one that still surprises me, though, is the daily planning.

Daily planning takes no more than five minutes and can be done just before you finish your work for the day or as the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed.

Five minutes, and after a while, it can be done in 2 or 3 minutes.

And yet, people still struggle. Why?

Because they are relying on motivation.

I remember when I first read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, and when I read the chapter on planning your day, I was incredibly motivated.

I was fortunate that as I was reading the book, I was setting up my Franklin Planner and one of the steps when using a Franklin Planner is to do the “planning and solitude” exercise every day.

It was suggested that you give yourself 15 minutes a day for this, and the first thing you wrote at the top of your Prioritised Daily Task list was “Planning and Solitude,” which would be given priority A1. It was the most important task of the day.

And that’s what I did every evening. I sat at the table with my planner and planned out the next day. Then, I checked off the Planning and Solitude task. This meant that by the next day, my first task was already complete.

And since then, which was the early 1990s, I haven’t missed some form of a daily planning ritual. I cannot imagine going to bed not knowing where I need to be and what needs to be done.

I doubt now I could get to sleep without knowing. I even do this when on holiday.

Just saying that now means I’ve consistently planned my day for over 30 years! WOW!

The people who succeed at staying consistent with their plans are the ones who start small.

Often, we will take a course or read a book, get motivated and try to change everything all at once.

That’s the hardest way to do it.

Recently, I’ve been watching documentaries on how great football managers turn teams around. I’ve now studied Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, Johan Cruif and Mikel Arteta.

And there’s a common thread between all of them.

When they took over a team, the team was not performing. Often, they were struggling at the bottom of their league.

Yet, the change didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, step-by-step process. In all cases, they first fired old players who may have been brilliant, but were unwilling to adopt a new philosophy or were a bad influence on new players.

They recruited professional players who were willing to adapt to the new style of play. And in almost all cases, their first season was not great.

Then things began to change: the team started climbing the league and eventually winning trophies.

These managers treated the necessary changes as a project. It wasn’t about “motivating” the players to play better; it was about having them buy into the new culture of doing things.

As Arsene Wenger, the legendary Arsenal manager, said in one interview when talking about his successor following his retirement:

“We need someone who understands that football is not just about winning. It’s about how you win. The philosophy has to come first. The results follow the philosophy, not the other way round. The philosophy is not a tactic. It’s a value”

In other words, when you decide something needs to change, knowing why it needs to change is important. What’s your reason, your philosophy and the value behind that change?

When you know the reason you want to change, “motivation” no longer comes into it.

One of my clients works for a company that was advised by a well-known consultancy to change its management methods to an “Agile” system.

There was then a flurry of activity by senior management, a great deal of money spent on training, and many employees were made redundant.

Ten years later, that company has slowly moved back to the way they managed things before they were force-fed Agile. What went wrong?

Well, the motivation was high at the start of the transformation. Senior managers were buying into the vision that the consultancy company was selling. The problem was that there was no clear reason to change.

Sales were great, the culture was one of the best in the industry, and people loved working for the company. The company’s sales team had strong relationships with their customers, and while there were areas for improvement, there was no need for a root-and-branch change in how everything was run.

Today, the company is struggling against its competition, the employees are demotivated, and sales are average at best.

And yet the Agile methods could have worked had the reasons for the change been better communicated. My client still has no idea why the company changed its management methods.

Without a strong reason to change, you will find your motivation runs out very quickly.

Talking with some of the members of my Retirement programme, I’m surprised by how quickly they start taking health and fitness seriously after retirement.

We go through our working lives sitting for 8 hours a day, slowly and quietly destroying our posture and mobility. We don’t sleep enough and eat convenient food because who’s got time to eat healthily when you have hundreds of messages to respond to, and you’ve got to get the latest marketing campaign finished by the end of the week?

And then we go for a medical check-up and discover that we are pre-diabetic, we have early signs of heart disease, we are no longer able to get up out of a chair without using our arms, and we haven’t seen our feet for years.

Suddenly, we’ve found the motivation to eat and sleep better. We take those daily walks, and many of us join fitness classes.

But to continue with this new, healthier lifestyle requires more than motivation. There needs to be a purpose.

Recently, it was reported that former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. He was fortunate that the cancer was caught early, and he’s now in remission.

Suddenly, a guy who lived an unhealthy lifestyle of cigarettes, wine, sitting around, poor sleep and extreme work schedules has become a non-smoking, vegetarian, teatotaller

Sure, the shock of being within a year of death was pretty good motivation, but why is he sticking to his new lifestyle? Because, as he says, he wants to see his grandchildren grow up. Now that’s a pretty good reason for making these difficult changes.

So there you go, Fran. Motivation is great for getting you started, but ultimately, you want a very good reason to change what you want to change.

Getting organised, improving time management, and being more productive are nice things to do. You feel more in control of your life, are more relaxed, a lot less stressed, and you find you sleep better. But the most important thing is to know why you are doing it.

For me, being less stressed, being more in control of my time, and getting the right things done at the right time give me more time to spend with my family and do the things I love.

That’s my “why”. That’s why I make sure I do my daily and weekly planning, why I am strict about what I say yes to and why I will never let my email and messages become backlogged.

I hope that helps, and thank you again for sending in your question.

Thank you to you too for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.

Jun 21, 2026

How to Stop Interruptions.

Jun 21, 2026

13 min

Zig Ziglar said, “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24 hours a day”

When you know where you are going and what you want, you will often find that time will take care of itself. Yet when we have no direction, no idea of what we want, and allow other people to dictate what we do and when, that’s when time, or rather a perceived lack of it, becomes the issue.

Today, we’re looking at how to discover our direction and decide what we actually want.

Links:

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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

Script |422

Hello, and welcome to episode 422 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One of the first exercises I ask people to do in many of my training programmes is to establish their Areas of Focus.

There are eight areas that we all share. These are:

Family and relationships.
Career or business
Health and fitness
Finances
Lifestyle and life experiences
Self-development
Spirituality
Life’s purpose

The exercise has you define what each of these means to you, and then identify any recurring tasks that will help keep them in balance so that you are living your life based on what you have identified as important to you.

The thing about your areas of focus is that, while we all share the same eight areas, how we define and prioritise them will differ.

This also changes depending on where you are in life. For someone who has retired, career or business will likely drop in priority and lifestyle and life experiences may move up.

Yet the power of knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is in how they help to give you direction and purpose.

This week’s question is about how to maintain that balance when competing demands outside of your control clash with your own priorities.

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

This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl. I use the Time Sector System, and for the most part it works brilliantly. The problem I have is that my boss and sometimes my family keep demanding my help with things that are not my priority. How can I stay on track with the things that are important to me?

Hi Annie, thank you for your question.

This can be very frustrating, particularly if you have spent time establishing what is important to you, yet other people keep trying to pull you away from doing the things you want to do.

This is where having some structure built into your week can help.

Let’s say that health and fitness is high up on your priority list and that you have chosen to exercise three times per week.

From that, you can pick your exercise days. These could be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example.

The first step would be to lock these “dates” on your calendar. Then make sure they are non-negotiable.

For instance, when I was a teenager, I was a competitive 800- and 1,500-metre runner. I was a member of an athletics club and our training days were Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings.

Those days and times were non-negotiable. I would never miss a training session. My social life, as well as studying for my exams, were built around these days.

Pretty soon, everyone in my family circle, as well as teachers, knew that on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, I would not be available for anything. I was training.

Many years later, when I went to university, I did night school. Our lecture times were Tuesday and Thursday night, 6:00 to 9:00 pm.

I was working full-time at the time, and since it took 20 minutes to get from my office to the university, I had to leave the office at 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I made sure my boss and colleagues knew these times, and not once in four years do I remember missing a lecture.

I made sure I never scheduled meetings beyond 4:00 pm on a university day, and my close friends and family also knew when I would be at university.

University was easier than the running club. The university worked in semesters; my athletics club didn’t. I remember some of my training partners turning up on Christmas and New Year’s Day if they were on a training night.

There’s an old saying, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”

And having worked with over 500 people in the time management and productivity space, I can tell that old saying is true.

You will find what is important to you by looking at what you will not negotiate on.

I have a friend who is a huge Manchester United fan. He has not missed a home game in over twenty years. It’s now become a point of pride for him.

As soon as the new season’s fixtures list is published, he opens up his calendar and blocks the time out for the whole season.

I remember early on, when Simon began going to Old Trafford, trying to persuade him not to go watch the game and instead to come out with us. The answer was always “no”.

After a while, we stopped asking him. We know he’d go to Old Trafford and maybe, if it was an afternoon game, he would join us later. That was the best compromise we could get out of him.

Looking back now, I have huge respect and admiration for him for sticking to his priorities.

And that’s what happens when you stick to your priorities: people respect and admire you.

It doesn’t happen immediately, but when they see that you do not compromise on what you have prioritised, they stop trying to pull you away.

This is why time blocking, when done right, works.

Everyone in my circle, from my wife to the people who work with me, knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 am, I am doing focused work. For the most part, that work will be my creative work: writing, recording videos or this podcast, for example.

No one interrupts me anymore. They used to. But by sticking to my plan, people left me alone.

It’s only two hours a day, but those two hours add up to 10 hours a week. And you can do a lot in 10 hours.

But it’s not just that you stick to your plan; it’s also that it gives you confidence when you plan your week.

When you know that no one will bother you when you are doing your focused work, you can confidently work with the hours that you have.

Most of the anxiety that we feel is not caused by the volume of work we have to do; it’s caused by not knowing when we will be able to do it.

Yet there’s a fix for that.

Let’s say you have to review and report the sales figures to the CEO each day. As you do that task every day, you will know how long it takes you to do. In this example, you know it takes you 45 minutes, and you have to send the report in by 5:00 pm.

Now you have the two most important numbers.

When you begin the day, you have access to yesterday’s sales figures, so you have everything you need.

That means the question becomes, when will you do it?

If that were me, I would do that as soon as the day begins. Get it done early so that if anything goes wrong in the day, it won’t matter. The sales report is done and only needs to be emailed.

And in many ways, that’s what you are doing. You’re analysing how long it takes you to do the different parts of your job on average and then using that data to decide when, and if necessary, how often you need to do it.

This is like taking your game from being a Sunday League team to being a Premiership team.

The Sunday League team turns up and plays. No thoughts about tactics or strategy other than to score more goals than the opposition does.

A Premier League team strategises, has a plan, and sticks to it. If they go behind, they stick to the plan. They don’t panic.

I recently watched a docuseries on Amazon called All or Nothing. In this particular programme, José Mourinho has just taken over as manager of Tottenham Hotspur.

In one of his first games in charge, Tottenham go behind in the first half and panic. They forget the plan, and everything begins falling apart.

At half-time, you can see Mourinho calming the players down. He tells them to stop panicking and to follow the plan. He talks to them gently and says when they get back on plan, they’ll soon find a way back into the game.

And sure enough, that’s exactly what happens. In the second half, Tottenham are more relaxed, more controlled, and they win the game by three goals.

In our lives, there’s always going to be interruptions and demands from others. Some of them you can politely decline, others perhaps not.

When you cannot decline, because it’s a demand from a boss or a family member, the good thing is the decision is made. You need to do what’s being asked of you.

The key is not to throw out your plan. The key is to get back on plan as quickly as possible.

The worst thing you can do in these situations is to panic. That tenses you up, and you stop thinking objectively. Instead, accept, adjust and execute.

Accept the situation for what it is. It’s something you have to do that you did not plan for. So, adjust your plan. Appraise how much time will be required to carry out the new instructions, and then change your plan accordingly.

Then carry out the work.

It’s helpful if you have a few non-negotiables. For instance, experience has taught me that if I do not spend some time each day on my emails and messages, these will quickly get out of control.

Ideally, I like an hour to respond to messages and emails, but if I’ve had to adjust my plan, I’ll do 30 minutes. It just helps keep things under control and doesn’t mean I have to find more time tomorrow than I planned for.

The most important thing, though, Annie, is that you first decide what is important to you and what is not. This will help you to make the right decisions each day. That’s why going through the Areas of Focus exercise will put you in a much better position.

You will know what is important to you, and you can build your calendar around those priorities.

After that, when things are demanded of you that you cannot decline, stay calm and composed and adjust your plan accordingly.

It’s never the end of the world, and as long as you get back onto your plan as quickly as possible, you’ll soon find that at the end of the week, you’re not far from where you wanted to be.

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

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

Jun 14, 2026

How to Build a Plan That Actually Bends

Jun 14, 2026

14 min

"A million dollars a shot is my price. But I only take one a year. The rest of the time I maintain my skills."

That was Francisco Scaramanga, the villain in The Man With the Golden Gun, played by the superb Christopher Lee. Who, interestingly, was a cousin of James Bond creator Ian Fleming and a regular golfing partner of his.

Now, while I certainly wouldn’t recommend following Scaramanga’s career path, there’s a valuable lesson in that line.

The reason Scaramanga could ask such a high price was not because he worked all the time. It was because he spent most of his time practising, refining, and maintaining his skills so that when the moment came, he could perform at an exceptional level.

And that brings us to this week’s question, which is all about developing, and more importantly, maintaining, your skills at managing your work and your time.

Links:

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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

Script |421

Hello, and welcome to episode 421 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.

There’s a belief, held by many, that becoming better at time management and productivity is something you learn once and then you’re set.

Or all you need to do is buy the latest productivity tool and all your struggles disappear.

Hahaha, it’s not quite so easy.

Theoretically, it may be possible to add a new app or use a new process for getting your work done. Unfortunately, life doesn’t fit perfectly into the little boxes we create. There’s always something different or new.

This is why the idea of plotting out every minute of your day on your calendar doesn’t work in practice.

Simple, natural things are not always predictable. You don’t know when you will need a bathroom break, or if a colleague asks you a question, or perhaps you spill your coffee all over your desk.

If any of these things happen when you have carefully mapped out every minute of your day, your day is ruined.

The missing pieces are flexibility and practice, and that is where this week’s question comes in.

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

This week’s question comes from Kathy. Kathy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve recently taken your Time Sector System course and loved it. One thing that’s worrying me, though, is that no matter how well I plan my week, by Tuesday, my whole plan is ruined. Do you have any tips on staying on plan when things become hectic?

Hi Kathy, thank you for your question.

This is a common discovery. Once you know the theory, putting it into practice can show up bumps in the road that cause problems.

One of the first problems people face is changing habits. If, for instance, you’ve never planned a week or a day, getting into the habit of consistently doing so is hard.

After all, you’ve spent most of your life so far without having a plan; skipping a daily or weekly planning session isn’t going to cause too many problems.

Yet when you are building your system, it’s that skipping that causes a problem. The more times you don’t do it, the longer it will take you to build the essential habits.

The goal is to use your new knowledge automatically. When you’re processing your inbox, you instinctively know what to do. It’s like there’s a voice in your head asking the three questions:

What is it?
What do I need to do with it?
When will I do it?

When you start, asking these questions can be slow. You’re naturally thinking too much. But when you’ve done it consistently for a few weeks, you think less, and you automatically move things to their rightful place.

Today, I can process an inbox of twenty items in less than 6 minutes. When I first started following this sequence of questions, though, it would easily have taken me twenty to thirty minutes. I was overthinking and learning patterns.

In one scene in The Man With the Golden Gun, Bond and Scaramanga are having lunch. The lunch begins amiably, but soon turns hostile. At one point, Bond reaches into his coat pocket to pull out his gun.

The camera pans to Scaramanga, who is pointing his legendary golden gun at Bond.

The surprising thing here is that Scaramanga had to build his gun from a golden cigarette case, a lighter, a fountain pen, and a cufflink. All Bond had to do was pull his gun from his shoulder holster.

How was Scaramanga faster? Practice.

How many hours would Scaramanga have had to practice putting his gun together to get that fast?

I know, it’s fiction. But the point is, you get faster the more you do something.

This is why people who continually switch apps are also consistently behind on their work. They remain stuck at being slow.

What’s happening there is they have to learn new ways of getting things into their system, and then moving tasks, and learning all the new features.

And that doesn’t account for the time it takes to move everything over to the new app.

It’s dead time. Instead, sticking with the apps you already have forces you to get better and faster at using them.

Then we come to the realisation that no two weeks are ever the same. No matter how carefully we plan something, things will inevitably go wrong.

This is where practice and experience come in.

I have a client who travels for work a lot. Sometimes he travels domestically; other times he travels internationally, often to the other side of the world, which involves 20 hours of flying time.

He found the Time Sector System worked brilliantly when he was working from his office, but it fell apart when he had to travel.

When we analysed the problem, we discovered that he was trying to run things the same way while travelling as he did at his office.

How many times have you booked a flight, found that WIFI would be available for the flight and thought, ah, I’ll catch up on my email and messages when flying, only to discover that the WIFI doesn’t work?

Now, you could respond to your actionable emails while flying, but you won’t be able to send them until you get into a WIFI zone. But that disruption to your plans can leave you feeling very frustrated.

The solution in this case was to have a travelling routine. On days when my client was travelling, he reduced his task list to the essentials. Rescheduling or postponing routine tasks

He also set up a routine for international travel, using the flight time to plan and clean things up. None of which required WIFI.

The first few times he used this new process, he found he needed to make adjustments, but after a few tries, he had it working perfectly.

And that’s the key part. Build in flexibility.

In my client’s case, it was not to try and follow the same system when travelling as he does when at the office.

When you plan your week, allow for the unexpected.

One way to do this is to ensure that, when you plan your week, you have time for the essential things. That would be your core work and the parts of your life you have decided are important. Time with family and friends, hobbies and exercise, for example.

Once you have those on your calendar, then really you have the beginnings of a solid plan that should be flexible enough.

Hopefully, you have already locked in your core work.

When I was a teacher, I had an hour each day protected for class preparation. I was teaching around four to five hours a day; those times were fixed each month and were non-negotiable. I had to be in the classroom teaching.

The class preparation time did change from day to day, but it was always there, and I tried to fix it around the same time each day, which made it much easier to make it a habit.

The unknowns often come from project work. Projects, by their very nature, are unique. Each one requires something different. You will find that while you may not be able to plan precisely what needs to be done at a weekly level, scheduling time to work on your projects each week will help ensure you have enough time to keep these moving forward.

If you’ve ever read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you will no doubt remember the chapter: Sharpen the Saw.

In the chapter, Stephen Covey uses the example of a wood cutter who’s working so hard that they never stop to sharpen the saw. Over time, the time required to cut the tree increases, not because the woodcutter is getting weaker, but because the saw is becoming blunter.

Your time management and productivity skills operate the same way. Sometimes you have to stop and sharpen your skills.

For example, I use an iPhone, and every time Apple updates its iPhone operating system, I review my collecting methods to see if anything in the new software will make collecting faster.

For example, when Apple added the action button to their phones, it let me map that button to add tasks to my task manager’s inbox. It’s super fast, and after a few days it became automatic for me to tap the action button when I needed to add something.

The most productive people I know spend time improving their ability to produce.

This is why athletes train, musicians practise scales, pilots rehearse procedures, and surgeons continually update their skills. The performance people see is only possible because of the preparation and practice nobody sees.

This is also why the Scaramanga quote fits this question. His point was essentially the same. As he said:

“The rest of the time I maintain my skills.”

Scaramanga’s version is darker, of course, but the principle is identical. Exceptional performance is not the result of the moment itself; it’s the result of the time spent preparing for that moment.

If you find that by Tuesday your plan for the week looks destroyed, allow for that when you plan your week.

One way you can do this is to plan your objectives.

What is it that you want to get accomplished next week? These could be:

To finish an important proposal

Get on top of your emails

To clean up the garden

To exercise a minimum of four times

To update your LinkedIn profile

With these five objectives, you can then decide when you will do them.

One tip here is to front-load your week with these activities. This way, if you do get waylaid, there’s still time to recover in the week.

This reminds me of a story from one of the world’s top rugby coaches. When he joined a new team, he found that if the team got ahead early in the game, they invariably won.

However, when they went behind early on, the likelihood was they would lose.

When he analysed this, he found that the team panicked when they fell behind, dropped their plan, and spent too much of the game taking unnecessary risks to get ahead.

He reminded the team that it was an 80-minute game and that what really mattered was sticking to their plan.

Tackle aggressively, maintain their defensive line and minimise mistakes. If they stuck to that, they would likely end the game ahead.

You don’t win games in the first twenty minutes. You win the game over 80 minutes.

It’s the same for you, Kathy; you don’t win or lose the week early on. You win the week by sticking to your plan and making adjustments where necessary, without losing sight of it.

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

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

Jun 7, 2026

How to Get Started With COD

Jun 7, 2026

13 min

“In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics, you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.”

That was Tom Seaver, an outstanding baseball player. And it points to an important factor in managing your time and being productive.

And it’s a single word: Consistency.

Links:

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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

Script | 420

Hello, and welcome to episode 420 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.

There seems to be a consistency crisis. If you were to analyse anyone who has been successful at anything, you would find that, hidden behind that success, lies a high degree of consistency in following the basics.

Last week, I talked about your standards. Setting your standards and staying true to them. Well, a close relation to your standards is consistency.

Yet, consistency is hard. It’s boring, and your brain is often your worst enemy. It tells you that you’re tired; you can take a rest. Or you can skip today. You’ve been busy; it’s okay.

But it’s not okay. Not if you want to develop your consistency.

So how can you stay consistent, even on your worst days? That’s what we’re looking at today.

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

This week’s question comes from Stephan. Stephan asks, “Hi Carl, I’ve been following the COD system for almost a year now, and I know it works. Most days I do well. I collect, and I organise. But I am not consistent. What can I do to get consistent organising and planning my days?

Hi Stephan, thank you for your question.

Now, before we begin, I am not going to advocate that you turn yourself into a non-communicative monk. There does need to be some flexibility. Yet to succeed at anything, you will find that, somewhere in the mix, something needs to be done consistently.

Something in the quote I began this podcast with from Tom Seaver jumped out at me. The line was:

“If you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.”

I know from experience and from feedback from those who have taken my Email Mastery course that if you consistently spend 30 minutes or more on your actionable emails, your email will never get out of control.

The numbers take care of themselves.

This means when you plan your day, you ask yourself where you will find time for communications.

Managing your communications is not about the number of messages you get. We all get too many. There are messages that need answering, messages for information we should read, and a lot of messages we can ignore and delete.

But, when you begin the day, you have no idea how many you will get and of what type they will be. This means you cannot plan for the number or type of message that needs to be replied to. Numbers don’t count. Yet, if you know each day that you will spend at least 30 minutes on them, it’s unlikely you will ever have an out-of-control inbox.

Some days you will clear them; other days, you won’t. But as long as you’re consistent, the numbers will stay low.

Your consistency will take care of the numbers.

When it comes to COD, that’s the collect, organise and do framework. The only area that needs deliberate consistency is the organising.

You see, once you have established your UCT (Universal Collection Tool), you will naturally collect everything that needs to be collected. And if you have that set up properly, what you collect will drop into your trusted inbox.

However, the key is organising what you collected and that involves asking three questions:

What is it? A note, an appointment or a task

What do I need to do with it? Move it to your calendar, add it to your notes or process the task so that you can ask…

When will I do it? That would be either this week, next week, this month, next month or sometime in the long-term.

If you consistently do the organising step, you will become very fast at organising.

When I began following COD, I confess it would take me 20 to 30 minutes on some days. That was because I collected a lot, and asking and answering the three questions was slow.

But I stuck to it. I went through the exciting first stage, then the boring middle (where you ask yourself if it’s worth it) and finally to the stage where it was automatic.

And the benefit was that, as I was pushing through the boring middle, my brain was establishing patterns that sped up the organising stage.

Now, I can clear an inbox of fifteen to twenty items in less than 5 minutes. Something that used to take at least 15 minutes.

But there are other factors here.

The biggest factor, aside from consistency, is that I don’t change my tools.

I’ve been using Todoist for 15 years, Evernote for 17 and Apple Calendar for 25. I know these tools inside out. I’ve set up keyboard shortcuts, and they are now part of my muscle memory.

When any of these tools update and add features, I will look at the new features and ask myself whether each will improve my workflow and make things faster. If not, I don’t use the new feature.

Evernote, for example, has recently added an AI-enabled feature that automatically assigns a title to a note. Nice. But it takes me less than ten seconds to add a title, and I know from the mistakes I’ve made in the past that if I don’t add a title that means something to me, I’ll not be able to find the note as quickly as I would like in the future.

So, I don’t use that feature.

So, how do you become more consistent? There are two things that will help.

The first is to start small.

Doing a huge overhaul of your system and adding multiple steps to keep it organised will ultimately fail. You’re asking too much of yourself.

Instead, pick one area.

For example, when you’ve run COD for a while, you will realise that your notes rarely contain anything urgent. The urgent area will be what you throw into your task manager.

This means you can start by committing to yourself to always process your task manager’s inbox at the end of your workday, and to leave your notes, perhaps organising and cleaning up, once a week.

When you make this commitment, don’t just imagine you will be able to do this from your laptop while sitting at your desk. Consider how you will do it if all you have is your mobile phone.

While I like to do my organising on my laptop at my desk, there are days when I am travelling and cannot.

However, checking my task manager’s inbox each day is a must, so I will do that on my phone.

I’ve done this from airport lounges, buses, my parents’ living room and once from a motorway service station.

Another area where consistency is incredibly helpful is doing the daily planning.

Daily planning involves three steps.

The first is to check your calendar to see where your appointments are tomorrow and where you need to be in the morning. (20 seconds max?)

The second is to curate your to-do list so that your tasks for tomorrow are realistic. (Around two to three minutes)

And finally, to decide what your two must-do tasks are for the day. (Another 2 to 3 minutes)

When you are consistent with this, it will take you no more than 5 minutes. And best of all, if you are pushed, you could do this from your mobile phone.

One of the benefits of consistency is that you no longer need to look at how much you have to do.

Because you are consistently planning, clearing your communications, and protecting time for your most important work, all you need to do is ensure you are prioritising the right things each day, and the number of things to do will take care of itself.

I recently saw a documentary on Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese football player (soccer player for my friends across the pond).

Ronaldo is 41 years old and is playing in a record sixth World Cup this summer.

How has he remained at the top of the sport for so long? Can you guess? Consistency.

Interviews with former teammates talk of a person who turns up for training an hour before anyone else. Who stays and practices his shooting long after his teammates have finished and a person who prioritises sleep and diet.

Ronaldo was doing that long before other professional footballers were.

When asked about it, Ronaldo says he learnt early in his career that consistently paying attention to what matters was the key to getting to the top.

Being consistently on time for meetings, handing in work on time and doing what you say you will do when you say you will do it are just examples of good manners and professionalism. Not doing so damages your chances of promotion.

But I again go back to what I said earlier: don’t try to change everything at once. Pick something you want to improve and start there.

It takes time and effort to build consistency. If you have to remind yourself to do something, you’re not ready to move to the next one.

Doing my focused work in the morning and allowing 45 minutes each day for my communications didn’t happen overnight. It was a stuttering start. Yet, eventually, it just happened. I no longer needed to think about it.

It’s the same with doing my daily planning each evening. Today, I cannot imagine not going to bed without knowing where my appointments are tomorrow and what my must-do tasks are.

That’s how you build consistency. One step at a time.

Now you mentioned the COD system, Stephan, and on that subject I do have some news. I’ve just cleaned everything up and added a new quick start guide to the resources section.

If you’re already enrolled, head over to the course on your dashboard, and you will see the guide at the bottom.

If you’re not enrolled and want to learn more about COD, you can do so for free by taking the COD course. I will leave a link for it in the show notes for you.

Thank you, Stephan, 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.

May 31, 2026

Why Your Standards Matter and How Arsenal Won the Premier League.

May 31, 2026

13 min

If you follow the English Premier League, you will know that Arsenal won the Premier League title a couple of weeks ago.

It’s been a tough 6-year journey for their manager, Mikel Arteta, but what stood out is that no matter how hard things got, Arteta stuck to the standards he set at the club and, more importantly, focused on following his plan.

He knew that to take Arsenal back to the top, there had to be a plan, and to ensure the plan was followed, standards needed to be set.

In this week’s episode, we’re looking at how your standards matter and why having a plan to fall back on will always give you clarity, focus and make better decision-making easier.

Links:

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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

Script | 419

Hello, and welcome to episode 419 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’ve followed me for any length of time, you will know I have written and spoken a lot about having standards.

Standards for how Long it takes you to respond to emails and messages, and how you manage your calendar, for example.

It’s the standards you set for yourself that will ensure that you do the right things day after day. That if things go wrong, you have something to fall back on that feels familiar and keeps you doing the right things.

My communication standard is to respond to emails within 24 hours. This means that no matter how busy I am, if I have an actionable email I have not responded to that is approaching the 24-hour limit, I will do whatever it takes to respond, even if that means working a little extra time at the end of the day.

This week’s question is related to these approaches. So to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Sonya. Sonya asks, Hi Carl, I love COD and the Time Sector System. Both have really helped me to get much more focused on what matters to me. But what frustrates me is that I still have too many days when I procrastinate and don’t get what I want done. How do you stay so consistent?

Hi Sonya, thank you for your question.

As I alluded to, it comes down to the standards you set for yourself. I know that sounds easy, and I know it is not, but the standards you set are what help you push through when you are not in the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done.

Let me explain.

It can be very tempting, when you have just finished reading a book or have taken a course, to be full of enthusiasm to change things.

And that’s not a bad thing. But it’s important to be realistic when setting up your processes and new way of doing things.

If you were to set up a two-hour closing-down routine at the end of each day, you would fail. It’s too long.

Similarly, I’ve seen people get excited by the idea of having a solid morning routine. Then they add so many things to their morning routine that it takes them two or three hours to complete them.

That’s never going to promote consistency. There will inevitably be days when you cannot complete those routines, and then you get it into your head that you’re a failure or that having routines doesn’t work for you. Neither of which is true.

The place to begin is with your non-negotiables. What must happen every day, no matter what?

I know many people, for instance, who will not go to bed until all the dishes have been washed and put away.

That might seem a small thing, but to the people who do that, it is their standard. They couldn’t imagine going to bed without doing it.

One standard I try to get my coaching clients to follow is to do a five-minute daily planning session before they end their day.

That planning session is to review your calendar for appointments, look at your list of tasks, make sure it is realistic and to decide what your two must-do tasks will be.

That’s it. Five minutes tops.

This is a realistic planning session. You can do it from your sofa and on your phone if necessary.

Once you have set it as a standard, you do this every day, including weekends and holidays. Now, weekends and holidays are easier. You will likely have fewer tasks and appointments, but it’s a standard. You do it anyway.

Consistency can be hard when you don’t have any clear standards. Yet, those standards need to be realistic.

One way to do this is to set minimums.

Imagine you decide to read a book every day. Now, I’ve seen people set very unrealistic targets here. This usually begins with deciding to read something like 50 books per year, which is then broken down into reading a book a week.

So far so good.

But what happens if you read something like Andrew Roberts’ book on Winston Churchill or Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci? Both are over 1,000 pages. Those books will take you longer than a week to read.

That’s why this kind of target setting is wrong.

Let’s start with what your purpose is here. Is it to read a set number of books? If so, choose short books, and you’ll hit your target.

But it’s more likely that you want to build the habit of reading. This means it doesn’t matter how many books you read in any given year. All that matters is that you spend time reading each day.

So set a realistic minimum.

If you were to set the target at reading for a minimum of twenty minutes each day, it would not be long before you settled into a routine and just did your reading.

What happens is that the books you get into and enjoy reading, you’ll read for longer than twenty minutes. Slower, harder books will likely have you reading for twenty minutes. That’s fine; you’re still reading.

You did what you set out to do, and after twenty minutes, you can stop.

That’s a realistic standard to set for yourself and one likely to become a non-negotiable.

Incidentally, you can do this with exercise and dealing with your messages. Set a daily minimum amount of time you will spend doing these activities.

And I should say there is some psychology behind the twenty-minute minimum. If you were to tell yourself you will spend an hour on a particular activity every day, your brain will push back.

On the days you are feeling tired, a little sick or ‘just not in the mood’, that one hour will feel like an eternity.

Twenty minutes, on the other hand, seems achievable, no matter how you feel. Remember, it’s a minimum. Once you’ve done your twenty minutes, you can stop. Often you won’t, but you can if you are still not feeling up to it.

I do this with my emails and messages. I like to finish my day with all actionable messages cleared. But there are days when, for one reason or another, I cannot do so. I then apply the twenty-minute minimum.

I tell myself I will spend twenty minutes clearing as many as I can.

It’s this standard that makes it easy to keep on top of messages.

I began this episode by explaining how Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, turned around the club by setting non-negotiable standards.

Arteta’s attitude is that if you cannot accept these standards, then you’re out the door. It’s as simple as that.

And I saw this with Manchester United’s former manager, a brilliant manager, Alex Ferguson. Ferguson took over the management of Manchester United in 1986. On his arrival, he set about setting some very high standards at the club.

It took around four years, but by setting those standards, Manchester United turned the 1990s into Manchester United’s greatest generation.

Change is hard. It’s particularly hard to stick to your new set of standards when things don’t seem to be improving. When there’s no immediate payoff.

Your old habits don’t want to die, and they will fight to stay around. This is why trying to change everything all at once almost always fails.

Instead, start small. Daily planning is an easy place to start because all you are doing is reviewing your appointments for the next day, ensuring your list of tasks is realistic, and identifying your must-do tasks.

With practice, you will be able to do this in about two minutes, and the more you practice, the more you see the benefits of having clarity on what must be done and where you need to be each day.

From there, add in a weekly planning session. This is where you set your plan for the week and decide your objectives. It is not about reviewing all your tasks and projects. You’re not reviewing, you’re planning.

Reviewing is entirely different.

The best time to review a project is when you’ve just finished working on it. The project is fresh in your mind, and you will know precisely what needs to happen next.

It’s by having a plan that you will find you procrastinate less. You don’t become frozen by the number of things you need to do. You know what your objectives are for the week, and you will do what needs to be done to accomplish them.

Commit to your plan, and you will have the energy to push towards it. Without a plan, you’ll procrastinate because all you will see is a mountain of work to do, and you have no idea what to do or where to start.

Let me show you this in action:

Imagine you have thousands of emails in your email inbox, and you are desperate to get it under control and clean it out. But the sheer size of it freezes you. Where do you start? What would be the best way to go about it? And you’ll be thinking this will take forever.

But what if you decided to start with the oldest ones and spend a minimum of 20 minutes a day on this project until it’s done?

Let’s be honest, if you’ve got thousands of emails in your inbox, it doesn’t really matter where you start. You’ve just got to start somewhere.

Twenty minutes a day, from the oldest to the newest. Now that’s a plan.

And you’ll find that by starting with the oldest first, you’ll be deleting a lot. Most of what you have will be out of date, moved on or already resolved. That builds momentum, which in itself generates energy.

If you’d like to learn more about setting your non-negotiables, having a plan for the day and a set of clear objectives for the week, my recently released Quiet Productivity Method programme will help you.

It’s packed with ideas like these, along with the right set of tools to give you clarity, focus, and a sense of calm throughout your day.

I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you to learn more about this immersive programme.

Thank you, Sonya, for your question, and I hope this answer has helped.

Thank you also to you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.

May 24, 2026

A Calmer, More Human Approach to Time Management

May 24, 2026

14 min

Is it possible to remain calm and focused when everything around us is getting faster, noisier and seemingly more demanding?

I think it is, and in this week’s episode, I’ll share some of my insights so you, too, can remain productive in a quiet, focused way.

Links:

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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