<a aria-current="page" href="/" class="router-link-active router-link-exact-active"> Your Time, Your Way

Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here

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

Script | 418

Hello, and welcome to episode 418 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.

Recently, I had a call with one of my coaching clients who is completely on board with AI. He’s gone down the usual rabbit hole of ChatGPT, then Claude, then back to ChatGPT, then to Google’s Gemini and now he’s obsessed with Claude again.

It reminded me of the late twenty-teens when everyone was switching between Evernote, Notion, Apple Notes, and then Roam Research. It was an amusing merry-go-round.

One of the ironic things about my client is that he’d had to wake up at 5:00 am to review the materials for a workshop he was delivering that day because he suddenly thought Claude might not have given the correct information, and he needed to check everything before 9:00 am.

I asked him how long he usually took to prepare for a workshop like this, and he replied that it normally took three or four hours. However, he said emphatically, with Claude’s help, it’s taking him around six to eight hours.

I did point out the obvious. With AI’s help, it’s taking twice as long, but he dismissed that, saying AI was the future and that by doing it this way, he was learning and would eventually be faster.

Fair point.

But he did have to wake up two hours earlier than normal. Not something I would enjoy doing.

This reminded me that life, whether it’s our personal or our professional lives, shouldn’t be lived at speed. Life should be lived at our own pace.

Two YouTube videos I recently watched emphasised this. One was by Matt D’ Avella, and the other was from Samurai Matcha.

In Matt’s video, entitled I Tried to Optimise my Life. It made it Worse, Matt pointed out that trying to live a productive life left him feeling frustrated. All the curated lists and time blocks on his calendar just set him up for failure.

If he didn’t clear his to-do list or he was unable to follow his time blocks, he’d end the day feeling that he’d failed. This left him feeling miserable all evening and wondering what was wrong with him.

Then I watched Samurai Matcha’s video entitled “10 Real Japanese Organisation Tricks”, in which he explained why his girlfriend’s organisation philosophy was brilliant.

Her philosophy was that the goal of organising is to always know where everything is. This meant that things were stacked so you could see what was in a cupboard or refrigerator as soon as you opened the door. That clothes were arranged so that, just by looking in a wardrobe, you could instantly see what was in there.

It isn’t about having everything look pretty and tidy, only to be unable to find what you are looking for. It’s about knowing instantly where everything is.

So there you have one person trying to optimise everything and setting himself up for failure every day. And another who is essentially working by her own logic, making her life as simple and easy as possible.

You can guess who was the more relaxed, settled and happy with life.

And this is the point. Life’s not about optimising everything. We’re human beings, but we’re trying to turn ourselves into machines that can be programmed to wake up at a particular time, jump into a bath of freezing water, do a two-hour morning exercise routine, spend an hour writing morning pages and then finish it all off with twenty minutes of meditation.

That’s not what life is about at all.

One way to get started in creating a calmer, quieter way of living is to begin with your non-negotiables. What are the things you must do each day?

There are the obvious ones, such as sleeping, brushing your teeth, washing and eating. Most of those our bodies have ways of ensuring we do them. We get sleepy, and we get hungry.

But what other things would be non-negotiable for you?

For me, taking Louis out for his walk, doing a little exercise and enjoying a cup of tea with my wife when she gets home from university are non-negotiable at a personal level.

At a professional level, my non-negotiable is spending 2 hours a day creating. That could be writing, recording or planning. It doesn’t matter what I create; all that matters is that I create something.

And that’s it. Together, that’s around four to five hours a day.

Once you have established what your non-negotiables are, it becomes easy to say no to things that could interfere with them.

Another way to bring some calm and quiet back into your life is to focus on time not what you have to do.

Let me explain.

Most of what comes at us each day is not within our control. You do not know how many Slack or Teams messages you will get today. Neither do you know how many emails you will get nor what you will be asked to do.

What you do know is how much time you can dedicate to these inputs.

Over the years, I’ve learnt that if I allow 40 minutes or so each day to respond to my actionable messages and emails, I’ll mostly stay on top of my communications. Sure, occasionally I am behind, but as I can see I am getting behind, I can allow a little extra time to catch up if necessary.

I also know that if I have two hours a day to create, I’ll always hit my publication schedule.

If you work on projects, what would happen if you dedicated 2 hours a day to quiet, focused work on them? No distractions, no interruptions, just quiet, focused work.

From the people I’ve worked with who have done this, they’re amazed at just how much work they get done each week. And how deadlines no longer become stressful or missed.

Two hours may not seem much, but over a working week, that’s ten uninterrupted hours. Ten hours you know you will not be interrupted by anyone.

The great thing about this approach is that you gain control over your time. And with a little consistency, you soon find yourself on top of your work.

You also learn where your limits are.

I know my brain gets tired around the 90-minute to 2-hour mark of focused work.

Sure, there are days I would love to spend three hours in focused work, but experience has taught me that the extra hour is a wasted hour. I make more mistakes; I start snatching a quick look at my messages and emails, looking for anything to distract me. That pile of washing suddenly needs to be put away, or those cups and dishes need washing and putting away.

Once you know your limits, you can work within them.

This approach is a more human way to go about your day. It’s not optimised to create impossible days, leaving you feeling exhausted, unfulfilled and disappointed with yourself.

It’s set up to work with your strengths and, more importantly, with your biorhythms. Your body’s natural rhythms.

The advantage of this kinder, calmer way of going about your day is that you naturally slow down. You have the space to deal with the urgencies and the demands of your bosses, clients and colleagues. And that results in fewer mistakes, leaving you with less corrective work to do.

The problem with being human is that we are really quite fragile. My client, who woke up at 5:00 am to fix Claude’s mistakes, will find the afternoon a dead zone. He’ll be exhausted and trying to operate at 100% with less than five hours of sleep.

That lack of sleep will likely affect his food choices at lunchtime. He’ll probably grab a quick sandwich or something else high in carbohydrates, which will spike his insulin levels, leaving him feeling drowsy afterwards.

And then we’re also susceptible to all sorts of bugs and illnesses, which can have a debilitating effect on our energy levels.

Again, not within our control unless we seal ourselves off from the outside world. Not a great idea.

I can assure you that the best approach to managing time and improving your productivity is to be human about it. Work with you and your natural state, rather than trying to be like a machine.

Take care of your three foundations: get enough sleep, eat healthy and move frequently.

Then, have a plan for the day. Not a minute-by-minute plan, but one that takes care of your non-negotiables, allows for some focused work time and has enough flexibility to take care of unknowns that will inevitably pop up throughout the day.

Since the 1980s, technological advances have consistently promised us less work and more leisure time. And yet that’s never materialised. Instead, the opposite happens.

Smartphones took business communications out of the office and made them omnipresent, leaving us with no place to hide. The desktop computer eliminated the typing pool and left managers and executives responsible for crafting their own letters and emails.

Cloud computing eliminated the filing cabinet and placed company documents within our reach 24/7, even when we were supposed to be on vacation.

What’s more, all this technological advancement has sped everything up. And it’s this speeding up that has left us with so much more to do. What used to take us three or four days to do is now expected to be done in an hour.

That’s where the problem is.

Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate this: be human. Make your own decisions about what you work on and when. Wrestle back control of your calendar and protect time to do the things that matter.

These are simple steps, not easy to implement initially, but worth putting the effort into implementing them.

As Matt D’Avella has discovered, and Samurai Matcha’s girlfriend already knew, keeping things human, simple and logical to yourself is the best way to live in a calm, quiet, focused way.

Now, before I go, if what you’ve heard today in this podcast resonated with you and you want to learn more, my Quiet Productivity Method programme will do just that.

Recently updated to cover your non-negotiables, the superb daybook system and how to plan your days and weeks so you are living within your time means, this programme will teach you, step by step, how to create a system that works for you. How to find time for what you want, and much more.

In addition, you will also become a part of the Quiet Productivity Method community, where you can share ideas, ask questions and join the monthly live sessions that will answer your questions and hold you accountable as you move away from the unsustainable task-based systems of old and towards a sustainable, humane, time-based system.

I do hope you can join me.

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

Sunday May 17, 2026

How to Stick with Time Blocking the Right Way

Sunday May 17, 2026

There’s a conflict in time management and productivity that few people ever talk about. That’s the conflict between being productive and being responsive.

It’s almost like the Ying and Yang of life. A sort of Newtonian “everything has an equal and opposite reaction.”

While we may want to shut ourselves away and give our full focus to an important piece of work, there’s always someone, somewhere, who wants to interrupt us and keep us from being productive.

It’s this that we will be looking at this week.

Links:

Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here.

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

Script | 417

Hello, and welcome to episode 417 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

I’m sure we’ve all been there. We have an important piece of work to complete, and we need a good two or three hours of uninterrupted focus to do it.

We block our calendars and pre-plan our day to minimise the risk of anything happening that will interrupt our plan.

And then the day starts, you turn up for work, and all hell has broken loose. Bosses and colleagues are in a panic, and you’re told you must attend an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. No ifs or buts, you must attend.

Argh! It’s enough to have you asking what the point is in making plans when this always happens.

Well, not so fast. It’s just Newton’s third law of Motion acting in a way Sir Isaac Newton never expected.

The pressure of needing two or three hours of quiet, focused work is matched by the force of people needing your attention right now.

Finding the antidote to this phenomenon is what this week’s question is all about.

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

This week’s question comes from Tim. Tim asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve tried to do time blocking for years and have never found a way to stick with it. My colleagues always seem to have urgent questions or need me to do something right now. Do you have any ideas to avoid this from happening?

Hi Tim, thank you for your question.

You may have heard of the concept of manager vs maker (or sometimes producer). A manager’s role is to ensure the work is getting done, allocate resources, and hold meetings.

A maker’s role is to produce the work.

The conflict is between the manager’s need to know what’s happening and the maker’s need for uninterrupted time to produce the work the manager is chasing.

In my experience working with teams, the best teams are those where managers trust their teams to get the work done. Where the flow of information is smooth and works both ways, and the need for “update” meetings is minimal.

The most ineffective teams are those where managers constantly want to know what’s happening, are unclear about what they want and by when, and don’t protect their team from interruptions.

You can tell these managers by the number of “status” meetings they have each week. Every day is full of them.

I remember seeing an interview with Toto Wolff, the CEO and team principal of the Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 racing team. In one response to a question, he said:

“My role is to hire the best people, tell them what I want, and then get out of the way and let them do their work.”

Toto Wolff is not an engineer or aerodynamicist, but he is an excellent leader and manager.

Many of the software engineers I’ve spoken with tell me they need about 4 to 6 hours a day to focus on writing code. And even with the help of AI, there’s still a lot of focused work required.

AI doesn’t magically produce code. It needs prompting, the right context given and a clear outcome. And the results need to be carefully checked and tested. A lot of focused work.

The answer to many of these issues for the people who produce the work is to use time blocking.

Now, time blocking often gets abused. I’ve seen countless articles and videos suggesting that you block every hour (and sometimes minute) with something.

This is wrong. That’s not time blocking. That’s setting yourself up for failure, bordering on self-abuse.

Time blocking that works is when you protect two or three hours a day for deeper, focused work. You then leave the rest of the day open for meetings, interruptions and lighter work such as responding to messages and emails.

It’s balancing the need for being productive with the need to be responsive.

Yet it’s also about putting in place barriers that help you get your work done, and communicating to your colleagues and bosses that you cannot be disturbed right now.

I’ve found it’s that communication step people struggle with. There seems to be a fear that people will think less of you because you are not available to their every whim when they need you.

Complete fallacy. The people in your organisation who get the most respect are the ones who are strict about when they are available and when they are not. They have clear barriers, and no one crosses those barriers.

The people who get the least respect and are often the ones left behind on the promotion ladder have no barriers. They are always willing to stop and chat about this, that, and the other.

These are the people who end up taking their work home and are always the last to submit on a project.

As Jim Rohn said, "When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two.”

The problem here is that when you don’t set boundaries and are always available, your bosses feel they have to supervise you more. You get caught in a vicious circle.

And because you are always submitting your work at the last minute, you’re being interrupted by colleagues and bosses asking how you’re getting on.

When it comes to protecting time on your calendar for focused work, timing is everything.

According to several studies, around 80% of people are at their most focused and creative in the morning. This means, if you want to produce your best work, do it when you are at your most focused and creative.

If that is the morning, protect time in the morning and leave your afternoons open for discussions, meetings and other responsive tasks.

To give you one example, I have a client who is a software engineer.

She’s the manager of a team of engineers, and each morning at 8:30 am, they have a 15-minute ‘stand-up meeting’ to inform everyone of their plan for the day. (They all follow the Daily Planning Sequence).

This informs the team when each of them will be doing their focused work time (usually a three-hour block), what meetings they have, and when they will be available to discuss projects.

My client blocks her calendar from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm for doing her focused work, but does allow 9:00 am to 9:30 am to discuss any issues with individual team members or her bosses.

Then 9:30 hits, and she shuts down Slack and email, opens up her coding software, and for the next three hours, it’s complete and total focus time.

Since she and her team adopted this practice, they’ve never missed a deadline, and no one ever has to take work home. And more importantly, their productivity, as individuals and as a team, has shot through the roof.

This has the added benefit of their bosses now knowing not to disturb them during focus time. There’s plenty of time to update projects or gather information before and after a focus block.

It works. It’s balancing the need to be productive with the need to be responsive. And during an eight-hour workday, her team is only unavailable for three hours, not all at once. So there is always someone available to field questions from higher-ups and clients, if necessary.

Now, there is another block I would highly recommend, and this one will help to reduce and even eliminate backlogs. This is the communications and admin hour.

Let’s be honest, Slack and Teams didn’t do what they promised. Make communicating between teams and colleagues easier and faster. All these tools have done is take away the immediacy of email, move it to another tool, and made it noisier than email ever was.

We still get far too many communications, and far too many low-value and time-wasting messages.

The problem today is the one we’ve faced since the dawn of email: the feeling that we must respond immediately. Now, I’ll take you back to the two opposing forces at play in your workday: the need to be productive and the need to be responsive.

If you were 100% productive, you wouldn’t be communicating with anyone and would be focused solely on your work. If you were 100% responsive, you’d never get any work done, as you’d be responding to interruptions and answering questions and messages all day.

So, there’s a need to find some balance.

In my real-life tests, I’ve found that if you set aside an hour later in the day to respond to your messages, backlogs rarely occur, and if they do, they remain under control.

This only works, though, if you are consistent with this method.

You’ll never be on top of your messages if you sporadically deal with them throughout the week.

But if you consistently spend an hour or so responding to these messages and catching up on relevant threads, you’ll never feel overwhelmed, and if things do build up, adding an extra 30 minutes is often all you need to get things under control.

Now, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. You’re open calendar.

Time blocking will never work if you do not get control of your calendar and get in first. In other words, your focus block and your communications and admin time should be pre-blocked on your calendar.

I’ve seen people wait until Monday morning to find time to get their productive work done, only to discover their calendar is full of meetings.

No, no, no. It doesn’t work like that.

You have to go into your calendar and begin protecting time today. Perhaps your calendar is now full for the next two weeks. If so, go out three weeks in the future and set up some recurring blocks of time for doing your productive work now.

You can change these later if the time you’ve protected is needed for something important, but if you don’t do it now, you will never do it, and the pattern you’re stuck in today will be the same pattern you’re stuck in in three weeks.

I would also recommend setting these up as recurring blocks. That makes your life easier, and you soon come to respect these time blocks.

This also makes planning the week simpler. Knowing that you’ve got a couple of hours each day protected for your productive work, you can assign dates to your work more confidently.

I know when I begin the week, that I will have time on Thursday to write this script. I have time protected for doing so.

So there you go, Tim. I hope that has helped.

Look at the work you do, calculate where your balance between being productive and responsive lies, and then reflect that in your calendar.

I mentioned two hours a day for focused work, but if you are in a role that requires you to be particularly responsive, you may only allow one hour a day. But that is far better than nothing.

Good luck, and thank you for your question.

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

Sunday May 10, 2026

How to do a Reset.

Sunday May 10, 2026

If you’re listening to this, there’s a good chance you’re a human being. (Although the speed at which AI is developing may be not all of you… A big hello to Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT (As Boris Johnson would say it)

And, as a human being, you’re attacked every day by emotions, fatigue, viruses and micro-managing bosses and demanding colleagues.

You’re not going to be able to stay consistent with your productivity systems and processes. (And even AI gets confused from time to time)

You WILL fall off the wagon from time to time

As David Allen, of Getting Things Done (GTD), often emphasises, falling off the productivity "wagon" is normal and expected. His most famous quote on this topic is: “If you don't fall off the wagon regularly, you're not playing a big enough game.”

So, what can you do when you do fall off? How can you quickly get back on track? Well, that’s what we’re going to look at today.

Links:

Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here.

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

Script | 416

Hello, and welcome to episode 416 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 is what to do when your systems become neglected following a particularly busy period, a holiday, or illness or even plain, good old-fashioned laziness.

It happens to everyone from time to time, and it certainly doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.

Yet it can leave you feeling that there’s something lacking, that perhaps there’s something wrong with you.

Of course, simply not true. There’s nothing wrong with you at all. It’s another sign that you are a functioning human being. (That’s a good thing, by the way)

All that’s happened is you got very busy and attended to the most important work that needed doing in that moment, or that you’ve just got back from holiday (vacation), and there’s a lot of catching-up and cleaning up to do.

Both scenarios can leave you with some tidying up to do. That doesn’t mean everything has failed. It just means there’s some tidying up to do.

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 Ernesto. Ernesto asks, Hi Carl, thank you for the Time Sector System. Finally, I have a system that works after many years of trying. My question is, what do you do when, for whatever reason, you fall off the wagon and let things slip? Is there a quick way to get back on track?

Hi Ernesto, thank you for your question.

Firstly, as I mentioned, this is perfectly normal. So many things can cause us to stop following our system, leaving us feeling anxious about everything that needs cleaning up.

The first place to start is by cleaning up your to-do list for today. This is what I call the business end of any task management system. Your today list.

With the exception of your inbox, all your other lists are just holding pens of tasks that you have processed and decided do not need doing today. Your inbox is where unprocessed tasks sit until you decide what to do with them.

So get your list of tasks for today cleaned up. Reschedule tasks that do not need to be done today, and delete or check off those that have been completed or are no longer needed.

This one step will clear the runway and give you a curated list of things that do need to be done today.

One of the tricks I have to help me here is to give myself a few minutes each evening to clear this list. Anything I have not completed that day is either checked off if done, rescheduled if not, or deleted if no longer needed.

Doing this every day ensures it takes only a few minutes, and by the start of the new day, my today list is curated, accurate, and focused.

I’m reminded here of a story I learned from friend of this podcast, Simon Jeffries, a former UK special Forces officer, who mentioned that when he joined the Royal Marines, from day 1, the training instructors began teaching a simple habit that all marines live by:

As Simon says, “the military doesn’t take civilians and turn them into soldiers overnight. It can't. Day one of training, the standard is simple...

Turn up on time. Keep your kit clean. Look after your rifle.

That's it. A few weeks in, the expectations layer. Month after month, the load increases. The standards compound until discipline is second nature — under fatigue, under pressure, under fire.

Centuries of trial and error went into that approach.

And the reason it works isn't complicated. You cannot expect discipline under fire unless it's second nature. And second nature requires progressive, consistent training.”

Now I’ve often talked about the standards you set for yourself. That could always end the day with a clear plan for the next. It could also be to clear your today’s to-do list so it’s reset and ready for tomorrow.

Being consistent and making it a non-negotiable, no matter how tired you are, will soon embed this habit so it just becomes second nature.

The next list to clean up is your inbox. There’s potential for something important and urgent to be missed here.

If you’re like most people, you will be throwing a lot of things in there throughout the day. By the time you get to the end of the day, a lot of what you added will have been forgotten about.

It’s this that makes keeping this list under control important.

The good news about your inbox is that while you will be adding important things in there, you’re also likely to be adding things that, in hindsight, you do not need to do. These can be deleted.

What remains can be processed using three simple questions:

What is it? A note, an event or a task. If it’s a note, copy and paste it into your notes. If it’s an event, such as an appointment, move it to your calendar.

For what remains, ask yourself:

What do I need to do with it? This is about making sure the task is written clearly, so it’s clear what you need to do.

And finally, ask, “When will I do it?” That will guide you where to put it now that you have processed it.

Is it something that needs to be done this week, or can it wait until next week, etc.?

If it needs to be done this week, you will again ask the question: when? When will you do it?

Beyond that, everything else can wait until your next weekly planning session.

One of the side benefits of the Time Sector System is that you will find many of the tasks you postpone to next week, this month, or next month will sort themselves out and can be deleted. This is one of my favourite aspects of the Time Sector System, the natural elimination of low-value tasks.

It’s worth mentioning a couple of tips David Allen, yes, the Getting Things Done David Allen, gave me when we met in Seoul a few years ago.

David had been travelling through Asia for around ten days, and I asked him how he stayed on top of everything while he was away on business trips.

He said that the most important thing to stay on top while travelling was communications. Emails will back up very fast if you’re not dedicating some time each day to clearing them.

Even if all you can find is 20 minutes in the morning before your day begins, take it. One missed day of managing this beast, and you’re going to have to find twice as much time tomorrow, and so on.

The second tip is to block off at least half a day when you return to catch up. Process your inbox and clear or reschedule any overdue tasks.

David Allen blocks a whole day if he’s been away for a week or more. Half a day if it’s less than a week.

Treat this day as an extra day of your trip. Nobody knows you’re back. You quietly get on and catch up with everything you have collected while you were away.

I adopted both these tips for all my travels, and they work.

If you don’t do this, you’ll be spending the next two to three weeks trying to catch up while getting on with your regular work.

Think of it this way: if your regular work naturally takes up your full working day, why do you think adding in a load of catching up will be easily absorbed? It won’t.

Make the time for it.

Think of the end of each day only happens when you have done a reset and got yourself ready for the new day.

I will add that I also have a closing-down routine that involves washing any remaining dishes, brushing my teeth, locking all the doors, and closing the terrace curtains. It takes less than five minutes, but it’s now something I automatically do before going to bed.

It doesn’t require any extra energy or thought. It just happens.

Doing the daily reset should also be automatic. I remember when I first entered the workplace as a young twenty-year-old and seeing how all my colleagues used to tidy up their desks before going home.

Nobody would ever dream of leaving papers, pens, pencils and files all over the place. They were tidied up, and that marked the end of the day.

Funnily enough, as I think about it, I still do that today. My work day is not complete until I have a tidy desk and my task list is reset and ready to go for tomorrow.

Less than five minutes, and all reset and ready to go.

That’s how you guard against falling off the wagon. Having a few small habits to ensure you clean up at the end of each day.

I know it’s human nature to overthink things, but if you stop and consider what’s really important, knowing where you need to be tomorrow morning and what your most important tasks are for the day is all you really need to get yourself back on track.

And one of those important tasks could be to catch up and clear your inboxes, if that is where many of your current issues are. You get to choose. But do make that choice. Don’t ignore it and make the excuse that you are tired.

It’s less than five minutes. Come on, you can do that.

Many of the concepts I’ve talked about here and much more will be a part of next week’s live Ultimate Productivity Workshop. 2 sessions, 2 hours each over two Fridays (or Saturdays if you are in Australia or Asia)

There are some places left if you want to join us.

This workshop has helped hundreds of people finally gain control of their time and build a system that prevents backlogs and keeps them from falling off the wagon.

And, given that it’s live, you have the chance to share your own experiences, learn from others and ask questions.

There are a lot of exciting lessons in this workshop. I do hope you can join me and let me help you finally make time for the things you want time for.

I will include the link where you can learn more and register for the show in the show notes.

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

Sunday May 03, 2026

The Time Management Secret I Wish Everyone Knew About

Sunday May 03, 2026

What are your priorities today? What about tomorrow? Do you even know?

This week, I’m sharing a simple switch you can make that will make prioritising your work almost automatic… Almost.

Links:

What is Time-Based Productivity?

Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here.

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

Script | 415

Hello, and welcome to episode 415 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

How do you decide what to do and when? Do you operate a FIFO methodology (First In, First Out) or is it something more nuanced than that?

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that almost everyone has too much to do and too little time to do it. That’s perhaps the reason you are listening to this podcast.

It’s further complicated by the scope of what we are asked to do. Today, we have Slack or Teams messages that somehow cut through our defences and turn into long, time-consuming “chats” about a minor issue on a project that isn’t due to be completed for another six months, preventing us from doing the rather more important work we had planned to do that day.

Then there is email, treated slightly less urgently than instant messages, but it can again destroy our focus, leaving us distracted and unable to finish the work we need or want to complete.

Every day is a challenge. What to do, what is the most urgent, and what is the most important thing you can do today? And if you can work on the most important thing, will you have enough time to do it? If not, would it be better to do something else?

Agh! It’s enough to drive anyone around the bend. And it’s not isolated. Every day we have to go through the same decision-making process. It’s exhausting and stressful (Is this the right thing to work on, or should I respond to that email I just received from my colleague?) and can lead to a prioritisation freeze and activity addiction, where looking busy is more important than doing work that matters.

This week’s question is about ideas for solving these challenges, 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 Benjamin. Benjamin asks, What are your thoughts on organising work into categorised FIFO-style lists, adjusted for priority, and then using time blocks to work through them without expecting every block to result in a fully completed task unless there’s a real deadline attached.

Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question.

I think you are on the right lines with your ideas there.

Let me give you an example of this working.

I teach a method called Inbox Zero 2.0 for managing emails. This method has two parts. The first is to clear the inbox. This is about speed, and all you are doing is filtering out the informational emails that don’t need any action, except to archive them and moving any actionable emails to a folder called “Action This Day”.

Later in the day, you go into that folder and try to clear it.

Now, the ‘secret sauce’ of this method is that the emails in your Action This Day folder are in reverse order. The oldest ones are at the top, and the newest ones are at the bottom of the list.

(You can do this from the folders’ settings in Outlook and Apple Mail. I’ve never been able to find a way to do this in Gmail)

This means, when you come to ‘clear’ the Action This Day folder, you start at the top and work your way down. You try to clear it every day, but often that’s not possible; sometimes there are too many in there.

However, because you start with the oldest, the remaining emails, the ones you were unable to get to, will likely have only recently come in, so the urgency is less than the ones you did respond to.

Now, occasionally, an email that recently came in needs to be responded to that day. Here, you would “adjust for priority”, as you aptly call it, Benjamin and respond to these out of their natural order.

It’s a system that has worked for years, never letting me down. Because I spend at least 20 minutes a day on my actionable emails, my emails rarely back up; my inbox is cleared every day, and nobody needs to wait more than 24 hours for a response.

Now, you mentioned doing as much work as you can within the time blocks you set. That is exactly how to do it.

This is also where many people go wrong with time blocking. Time blocking isn’t about squeezing in a specific amount of work within the time you have set. That’s never going to be possible.

You see, there are too many variables acting on us each day. The first is that you have no idea what emergencies will happen in the middle of a time block.

I’ve worked in offices where I settle down to write an important contract only to be interrupted by a fire alarm that took more than an hour to have the building declared safe. Rare, but does happen.

More common are the interruptions from our colleagues. We just do not know for sure that something more urgent will pop up when we are trying to complete a planned piece of work.

However, that does not mean time blocking doesn’t work. It does.

It does because it allows us to organise our days by what matters most.

For example, if you are a lawyer who needs time each day to prepare or review contracts, blocking two hours each day for this work ensures you always have time to do this important work.

Blocking time for it means no one in your office can steal that time from you. It’s like you have an appointment with yourself each day to do your most important work.

If you do not, for whatever reason, complete as much as you would have liked to, it’s okay, because you can pick it up again in your next blocked time slot.

This is more about consistency than time blocking. If you consistently turn up and do the work, you’re never going to be far behind and are unlikely to have any significant backlogs.

Yet if you don’t protect your time, it’ll be stolen.

Not blocking time for doing your most important work is like parking your car in a high-crime area and leaving your wallet on the passenger seat with the windows wide open. There’s a good chance your wallet won’t be there when you get back to your car.

Time blocking gets a bad reputation because people erroneously think it’s about blocking your entire day with activities. No. That’s not time blocking. That’s masochism.

Time blocking your whole day wouldn’t work anyway. A traffic jam, a distraught colleague, a micromanaging boss, or a fire alarm would ruin your day, and then you’d waste time trying to reschedule everything.

Time booking works when you use it lightly.

Look at it this way:

You build each day around a few critical blocks of time. For instance, two hours of deep solo work where you get on and write the reports, prepare the presentation, or sort out an issue that’s been dragging on for weeks.

Then there’s likely to be time required for responding to all the messages you get each day. I doubt anyone can escape that deluge, but ignoring it will just create bigger and bigger problems further down the line.

So perhaps you set aside an hour for dealing with your communications and any low-value admin. (Another area that can backlog pretty quickly if you’re not staying on top of it.)

That’s just two blocks, consisting of a total of three hours. Yet it’s three hours, which, if followed consistently, would keep you on top of your critical work and prevent backlogs in the areas most susceptible to them.

Three hours that would reduce your stress, lower your anxiety, and put you ahead of 97% of your colleagues.

This does not guarantee you will always be on top of your work. As Baz Luhrmann’s 1990s hit says:

“Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind… the race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.”

But what will guarantee you stay ahead is being consistent with it.

When you start each day, ask yourself: where’s my focus time and where’s my comms and admin time?

You mentioned categorising your tasks, and that’s a great idea too, Benjamin. Not all work is equal, and sometimes a deadline will need us to adjust our priorities.

Now, categorising your work can be a minefield if you are inclined to overcomplicate things. This should be avoided.

Think of it this way: When a pilot prepares for a trans-Pacific flight, there are just three categories. Pre-flight, in-flight and landing.

Each of those categories has distinct types of tasks to be completed.

For us, knowledge workers, it really comes down to a few simple categories. For example, there are four that almost everyone will have (including airline pilots):

Communications

Admin

Planning

And chores

Chores are always there. We all occasionally have to pick up a prescription, make a dentist’s or doctor’s appointment or take our kids to ballet, football or cricket practice.

Beyond these four, it will depend on the kind of work you do. A lecturer at a university may have student affairs, lectures and research as categories.

A salesperson may have prospecting, follow-ups and proposal writing.

My advice is to keep your categories to no more than eight and make them as general as possible.

For example, with the lecturer, student affairs could include grading papers, setting exams, writing references and arranging for one or more of your students to participate in a work experience programme.

Once you have your categories, you have a way to prioritise your work.

Again, this will depend on your work. For me, my most important priority each day is my content category. I create content every day. It could be this podcast, a blog post or a YouTube video.

For a salesperson, the most important category may be prospecting, because without a steady supply of potential customers, everything else will eventually dry up.

This now helps you with what you will do in your time blocks. For me, 9:30 am to 11:30 am is my content creation time. It is blocked on my calendar, and everyone knows not to disturb me during that time—including my wife!

The salesperson may choose 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm as their prospecting time, and that, again, would be protected as a time block on their calendar each day.

The idea is to match your most important categories with time blocks on your calendar.

This is how time-based productivity works. It works on the time available to do your work. Not everything has to be done today or even this week or month.

When you’re processing your work inbox, you decide what you need to do with something, then choose the best time to do it.

There will be other factors to take into account, such as the deadline, who’s asking you to do something and so on. But ultimately, you are deciding when to work on a particular category.

This is the opposite of the more traditional task-based systems that treat every task as individually important and as something that must be done ASAP.

That way is unsustainable, as I am sure many of you have found out. It creates huge lists of stuff that may or may not need to be done, which just overwhelms you. You cannot do everything at once or even this week.

If you want to learn more about time-based productivity, I have added a link to a blog post I wrote about it in the show notes.

And just a heads up. The next Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming soon. On Fridays the 15 and 22nd May, 2 sessions, 2 hours each over two weeks.

If your calendar is swamped with meetings and commitments, that leaves you with no room to do the work these meetings are generating. If you find your inboxes are overflowing with tasks and messages, and you cannot see a way out of it all, then this is the workshop for you

This workshop will teach you, in a live setting, how to move from an unsustainable, task-based system to a more sustainable, time-based one, along with many other lessons to help you get control of your calendar and all those inboxes.

I will put the details in the show notes so you can learn more about how this workshop will help you. (Oh, and a warning, be prepared for some homework if you join us)

I do hope you will be able to join me.

Thank you, Benjamin, for your question. I hope this has been helpful.

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

Sunday Apr 26, 2026

The Best Ways to Organise Your To-Dos

Sunday Apr 26, 2026

Podcast 414

"Organisation is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. But if you spend all your time organising, you never do the 'something'."

That’s a paraphrase of a quote from A. A. Milne and his book The House at Pooh Corner. And touches on the question I’m asking this week.

Let’s go,

Links:

Learn more about the Time Sector System

Take the Time Sector System Course

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

Script | 414

Hello, and welcome to episode 414 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

How do you organise your work?

There was a trend a few years ago to organise our tasks in multiple different ways. There were the original Getting Things Done contexts: @office, @home, @phone, @computer, etc.

Some preferred to manage their tasks by project, creating long lists of projects and assigning tasks to them.

Most of these trends died out because, ultimately, they were just new ways of avoiding the work while still feeling that the work was getting done. A kind of modern-day equivalent of shuffling papers on your desk.

All these trends did was create a longer list of lists, full of spurious tasks that likely didn’t need to be done or had already been done but not checked off.

Then there is the idea that we can organise tasks by how much energy we estimate a task will consume. This one still persists, and I will explain shortly why this one doesn’t work.

Yet there is one way to manage your tasks that has been around for well over a hundred years and still works, one that almost all top-level executives use, but given that it is simple and we humans love to overcomplicate things, it never seems to get much coverage.

Anyway, this is what this week’s topic is all about, 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 Ken. Ken asks, Hi Carl, what do you think is the best way to organise tasks? I’m thinking about using energy levels to keep my lists low. Have you had any experience with this method?

Hi Ken,

Thank you for your question.

I have to confess that over the years, I have jumped on every trend for organising my lists of tasks. And, except for two methods, pretty much all fail.

They fail for the reasons I alluded to a moment ago. They are too complicated and require far too much maintenance to keep organised.

You see, the methods that work are simple, and therefore, in today’s world, they are not sexy.

The simplest of them all is one I personally have gravitated back to in recent years. That is a simple daily list of tasks to be done today. These are taken from a master list, which is organised during the weekly planning session into the days you plan to do them on.

This method has a built-in safety valve. You can see how many tasks you have allocated to a specific day, and if it looks unrealistic, you can move them to other days to balance out your week.

Given that you are looking at this daily list every day during the Daily Planning Sequence, it can be adjusted for any unknowns that suddenly arise as the week progresses. (Which of course always happens)

To maintain this method, all you need is two to three minutes a day and around thirty minutes for your weekly planning.

Not exciting, sexy or newsworthy. It doesn’t require expensive apps or AI. You can operate this method using a simple $1.00 notebook or a text file on your computer.

But it works. It’s flexible, and as long as you are being sensible, you’re never going to feel overwhelmed.

This is where other methods go wrong. They often involve a lot of organising, and given that you are not always looking at the lists you are creating, you have no idea what kind of monster is growing.

Take organising by projects as an example. I don’t know where this comes from. It certainly doesn’t come from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. GTD, as it is called, organises lists by what David Allen calls “Contexts”.

Contexts are created around tools, places or people. For instance, if a task requires a computer to complete it, you would assign it to the @Computer list. If you need to talk to your partner about something, you would add it to your @Partner list, and if you can only complete the task at home, you would add it to your @Home list.

The danger with this kind of organising is twofold. First, some of your lists will become enormous. So big that you don’t want to look at them, as they become scary and leave you feeling anxious.

And second, some tasks could theoretically fall into two or more lists. For example, if you need to book flights for a trip with your partner, you could allocate it to your @computer list or your @Partner list, and, as you will likely do this at home with your partner, it could conceivably be placed in your @Home list.

So where do you put it?

So you create a Project called “Family trip to Jamaica” and place the book flights task in there. Excellent. Next, you may add “Book hotel” and then maybe add a packing list and places to visit. Soon, a simple “project” has an array of tasks, some of which need to be done before you go and others when you get there.

That isn’t really the problem. The problem is you don’t have a single project like that. You may end up with projects like buying a new car, redecorating your living room, and, not to mention, all the various projects you will have at work.

Soon, that project list is out of control.

Just maintaining it and reviewing what needs to be done next takes hours.

And let’s be honest here, how many of you are willing to consistently spend two or three hours of your weekend reviewing all your projects?

For something like your trip, it would be far easier to create a note in your notes app. Here you can keep your flight tickets, hotel reservation confirmation, packing list and places to visit in one place and have a master checklist for everything you need to do.

In your task manager, all you need now is a single task reminding you to book your flights, or simply to look at what needs doing next on your checklist.

Now you mentioned managing your list by energy levels, Ken.

On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. After all, why would you tackle a task that will require a lot of energy when you are not feeling energetic?

And when you are feeling low on energy, you can clear off some of those low-energy tasks.

Hmmm, but does it work?

Well, no.

For one thing, your energy levels are not consistent. Some days you feel on fire, and others you feel like you’ve been hit by a bus and dragged through a hedge backwards.

The trouble is, when you go to bed, you have no idea how you will feel the next day.

Then there is the issue of deadlines. Whether you feel like doing a task or not, if the deadline is 12 pm today, you’ve got to finish it, no matter how energetic you feel.

Then there’s the human factor. We are wired to be lazy. This comes from the days when we lived on the Savannah. Food was scarce, and we needed to conserve our energy for hunting food.

Then there were the winters when finding food was even harder. Only fatter people would survive winters because we needed to live largely on our fat deposits when we were unable to find food.

This is why it’s easy to gain weight and much harder to lose it. Our body wants to store fat. It does not want to let it go.

While we consciously know food is not scarce for most of us today, our lizard brain doesn’t know that. And our lizard brain controls our survival instincts, so it will override our conscious intelligence.

This means when we are feeling low on energy, the last thing we will do is open up our task managers and pick something to do.

Instead, we’ll crash on the sofa or take a nap.

And so your low-energy list will keep growing.

Then there comes the question of how to define a medium-energy task. What does that mean?

It’s likely you will define those tasks differently depending on how you feel on the day you process them.

The second way to organise your tasks that actually works is to go by when a task needs to be done.

Let’s go back to the flight example. If you are planning your trip for September and want to get everything booked by the end of June, the window to complete that task is from now through to the end of June.

Given that you want to do this with your partner, it’s likely you will do this task when you are with your partner.

If you are away on a ten-day business trip this week and next, you cannot do the task then, so don’t put it on your list for this week or next.

As we are about to start May, I would add this task to my Next Month list. I don’t need to do it now, but it will need to be on my list in June.

Hopefully, you are familiar with the Time Sector System. This organises your lists by when you will do them.

The only list in play each week is your This Week list. This contains all the tasks you have decided need to be done this week. Everything else is in either your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or long-term and on-hold lists.

Each week, you look at these lists and decide what to bring forward to your This Week list.

The simplicity of this method is that when you process your inbox, you are asking three simple questions:

What is it? - Is it a task, an event, or a note?

What do I need to do to complete it?

And, when will I do it?

In a very short time, you get super fast at processing your tasks, and with the exception of your long-term and on-hold list, none of your lists will grow out of control. Well, not if you give yourself about 30 minutes each week to maintain and update your lists.

Given that you are working from a single list, your This Week list, once again, you have the built-in safety valve because you can see how many tasks are on your list before the week begins and can adjust it to be more realistic if it becomes too large.

The purpose of your long-term and on-hold list is to eliminate, not accumulate. In other words, every month or so, you go in there and delete tasks you no longer want or need to do.

To learn more about the Time Sector System, I have a course that will teach you how to use it as well as a comprehensive blog post explaining why this method works so well in today’s world.

I will put links to both in the show notes for you.

So there you go, Ken.

There are always new, exciting ways to organise your tasks, but ultimately it comes down to what needs to be done today. That’s all that matters at the work level of managing our tasks.

Things that don’t need to be done today should never be on your daily list.

Your energy levels will fluctuate throughout the day; it’s not something you can control. Energy levels can be affected by the quality and quantity of your sleep, what you ate for lunch and whether you are coming down with a cold or the flu.

What you can control is what you do right now. You could take a nap, go for a walk or sit down and attack that list of prospects that you’ve been meaning to contact for the last three weeks.

My advice would be to work with what you have direct control over, and that ultimately comes down to when you will do something.

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

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

Sunday Apr 19, 2026

How 1920s England can Inspire Your Productivity

Sunday Apr 19, 2026

“I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.”

I’ve been reading Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Set in the 1920s and 30s, the stories feature an aristocratic private detective in a style similar to Sherlock Holmes. And that quote comes from Lord Peter Wimsey himself.

In this week’s episode, I share some of the productivity methods these fictional characters followed, as well as some from the biographies of these authors.

Links:

Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme

Interview with Harvey Smith

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

Script | 413

Hello, and welcome to episode 413 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.

1920s and 30s England was an interesting time. The country was changing. The First World War broke down many of the class barriers that existed before the war, and while many manual labour jobs remained brutal, conditions were slowly improving.

The way people lived their lives was also changing. There was more leisure time, and cars were becoming more common, giving people more freedom to travel, certainly at weekends.

And yet, with all these changes, there were still some customs and habits people followed that gave them structure and balance. They also used nature far more than we do today. Lives were much simpler; heart attacks and cancer were rare; there was little waste; and recycling was part of life.

It could be asked, what went wrong?

I began this episode with a quote from the character Lord Peter Wimsey.

Lord Peter was very much in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and throughout the novels, many of Lord Peter’s friends would often accuse him of being “Sherlockian”.

What I noticed about these characters was that in the 1920s and 30s, some customs helped people avoid procrastination.

You can also see these in play in the Downton Abbey and Jeeves and Wooster TV series as well.

The first productivity method you will see is that days were structured around meal times.

Breakfast was informal, and people ate when they were ready. However, lunch was always a proper meal, not a quick snack taken at a desk. It would have been unthinkable not to take the one-hour lunch break.

Even manual workers would stop for lunch and eat together.

Taking a proper lunch break can do wonders for your productivity. First, it gives you a break from doing tasks, and it should always be eaten with other people.

But the biggest impact on your productivity was having a natural deadline. Because you were dining with others, you had to stop at the right time. No, “I’ll just finish this and take a quick lunch break”.

It was down your tools and go out.

This gave you a hard deadline to finish what needed to be finished before lunch. And when you have a hard deadline, Parkinson’s law comes in. This is “work fills the time available”

If you have two hours to finish a task, it will take you two hours. If you only have an hour, it will take you an hour.

What happens is that you enter a deeper state of focus when you are under time pressure. That’s how Parkinson’s law works. But it can have the reverse effect.

If an email would normally take you 30 minutes to respond to, but you have an hour before your next appointment, that email will take you the full hour to write.

This is why procrastination is now a thing; in the 1920s and 30s, it was rare. The natural mealtime deadlines prevented a lot of procrastination. Today, those mealtimes are woolly and ill-defined, removing a natural deadline, causing you to procrastinate.

What people ate also had an impact. It was largely fish or meat with vegetables. No HPFs (highly processed foods) or low-value carbs. It was foods that didn’t mess with your blood sugar, which leads to the afternoon slump.

Alcohol was often also included. How on earth deep focused work got done in the afternoons, I don’t know.

Dinner was an altogether different affair. The time was set, and you dressed for dinner too. The ladies wore evening gowns, and the gentlemen wore dinner suits (tuxedo for those of you living on the other side of the Atlantic).

This meant if you did have a job and were not of “independent means”, you had to leave work on time to be home in time to dress for dinner.

After dinner was interesting. The ladies would gather together in the drawing room for music and conversation. The gentlemen would retire to the smoking room for brandy, coffee and cigars. There, the day’s business was often discussed.

This was the aristocracy, not the middle or working classes. Although even the lower classes treated dinner more formally than we do today. It was the family meal of the day, and everyone was expected to be there.

After that, people often wrote letters, read books, or, in the case of people like Winston Churchill, went back to their studies and did some more work.

And that was something I have noticed. Because there were no fixed working hours for the upper classes, work occurred at all hours of the day. A lot of work happened after dinner, rarely in the early hours of the day.

This gave a lot more flexibility for things like admin and communications. Most letter writing was done late in the day.

The founder of the British Intelligence Service (MI6), Sir Mansfield Cumming, would retire to his study after dinner to read through all the papers he’d received that day and send out letters to his agents around the world, often until 2 in the morning.

Yet Cumming was famous for two to three-hour lunches and late starts to the day.

The problems we have today are caused by on-demand entertainment. There’s always something to watch on YouTube or Netflix. And our sofas are very tempting after a nice dinner.

Once there, it’s a real challenge to get up. Take those temptations away, and what else will you do?

If you think about that for a moment. If a family had dinner together at 7:00 pm, discussed the day, and afterwards joined in an activity, they would be spending quality time together every day.

Then at 9:00 pm, you could go back and clean up your messages, clear any admin tasks for an hour or so and still have time for reading or a hobby.

It’s often our fixation with work-life balance that puts unnecessary barriers in our day. No personal stuff during office hours and no work stuff in our personal time.

And yet, what do we do in our personal time? Spend hours in front of a screen, not talking with our family or friends, instead sending WhatsApp messages and commenting on social media posts.

Cal Newport and Tim Ferriss write their books late in the evening. In Cal Newport’s case, he spends time with his young family until they go to bed, and then goes to his home office and writes for two or three hours.

Cal Newport is a good example because he’s completely rejected social media, so he has time to write after his kids have gone to bed.

Rest was taken very seriously in the 1920s and 30s. A lot of it was social. Parties and weekend getaways.

I’ve spoken about Ian Fleming’s work habits before, particularly when he was in Jamaica writing the next James Bond book. But when he was back in London, he still worked in very much the same way.

Mornings were intensely focused work, followed by a long lunch, then letters, and then home for dinner, or out with a friend. Afterwards, he would go to his study and edit a manuscript or read through the papers he’d received from his foreign correspondents around the world. (He was the foreign news editor at The Sunday Times Newspaper)

The most noticeable thing I learned from this era has been to structure your days around meal times. I now do intense creative work in the mornings, followed by more leisurely afternoons, and then, after dinner, go back to doing some work for an hour or two.

I still work for around eight to ten hours a day, but I find that my energy levels remain strong whenever I am working. There are plenty of breaks throughout the day where I can socialise, spend time with my family and still get a lot of work done.

And then there was movement. A lot of movement.

The 1920s and 30s were a lot less convenient than they are today. This meant we had to walk a lot more than we do now.

Weirdly, people have become obsessed with their step count today. They struggle to get even 8,000 steps in. And gyms are everywhere.

There were no gyms, and nobody was counting steps back then. They didn’t have to. It was natural to walk 10,000+ steps every day. If you wanted food, you had to prepare it; there was no app to order it.

Although the upper classes did have servants who could produce it for them when necessary. But given that refrigerators and microwaves were not a thing then, a sudden order of food would have resulted in a cold meat salad and not much else.

As an aside, just do a search for 1950s New York or London and look at the images. There’s a significant difference between the size of people then and people today. Yet, no gyms, no smartwatches calculating steps, sleep cycles, or anything else.

It was purely natural. Real food, not processed rubbish, plenty of natural movement, and no gyms.

If you want to be more productive every day, move more. This is really what balance is all about. The so-called work-life balance is a modern concept, but what really matters at life level is the movement-rest balance.

With the right movement-rest balance, your productivity will naturally increase. You will be a lot less mentally tired, and when you do move, you can map out what you will do next.

I find that the biggest benefit of working from home has been that I can get up between work sessions to do the laundry or take Louis out for his walk. It gives me a natural mental break, and I do something physical. That refreshes my brain, and I can come back and do some more mental work feeling energised.

I know it will be impossible to turn back the clock and go back to living the way people did in the 1920s. Technology and cultural changes would make that impossible.

However, there are things we can do, as people did back then, that will naturally increase our productivity.

First, focus on the rest-movement balance. If you’re mentally tired, do something physical instead of collapsing on the sofa. If you’re physically tired, do something mental.

And move more than you currently do. We have become alarmingly sedate today. Dance while you’re cooking or making tea or coffee (I do that hahaha)

Eat real food, not processed rubbish, and take proper lunch breaks. Get out, move and socialise if you can. Treat them as a non-negotiable.

Be relaxed about work-life balance. It’s not natural. There will be times when the best thing you can do is to clear some backlogs in the evening, and equally, there are times when the best thing you can do at 3:00 pm is go out for a walk or hang out the washing.

Another aside. The worst invention has been the tumble dryer. Before we had them, we had to hang out the washing. This involved bending down to pick up clothes from the washing basket and then reaching up to hang them on the line. Possible one of the best workouts you would ever get.

I know today’s episode has been different. I hope you’ve found it interesting. It’s well worth reading some of these older novels to learn how people used to live their lives.

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

Sunday Apr 12, 2026

How to Find Your Purpose in Retirement

Sunday Apr 12, 2026

Podcast 412

Continuing my series on designing the “perfect” retirement, this week, I share some insights on one of the most common fears of retirement, that of losing your purpose.

Links:

Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme

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

Script | 411

Hello, and welcome to episode 412 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.

Throughout our lives, there is usually some goal or purpose we are attempting to achieve.

When at school, it’s to pass our exams so we can go on to university or to get a job in a specific field. When we begin our careers, we are often driven to work hard to get promoted. Or at least that’s how the theory goes.

The trouble is, if you step back from these “goals”, they seem to be pushed onto us by our parents, society and our peers.

It’s rare for anyone to step away from this blueprinted path and set their own course. In the past, people who did not follow the well-worn path would have been politely described as “eccentric”, or impolitely “weird”.

I remember back in 2002, when I quit law and flew to Korea to teach English, my friends and colleagues could not understand why I would give up a career in law to teach English.

Yet, my heart was not in law. It always felt wrong. If I am being honest, I believe my motivation for studying law and working in a law firm was purely about status and about living a life that other people wanted me to live.

Coming to Korea turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. I discovered my purpose: to help other people, and I found the medium through which I could do that: teaching.

It’s what I still do today. I help people through teaching.

In our working lives, it’s easy to have a purpose. It might not be our true purpose, but climbing the promotion ladder does seem to give us a purpose. How high up the ladder can we climb?

Yet, chasing the next promotion is never going to be a life’s purpose. It might be a career goal, but ultimately, it will end at some point, and that ending point will unlikely be within your control.

I’m reminded of one of England’s top lawyers, Lord Jonathan Sumption.

Lord Sumption was a celebrated barrister, rising to the top of the legal profession when he became a judge at the Supreme Court.

The mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court judges in England is 70, so when Lord Sumption turned 70, he retired from the legal profession.

However, his real passion was never for law. That was his career, and he was very good at it. His real passion was for medieval history, and today Lord Sumption is regarded as one of the leading historians of that era. He continues to write books and talk on the subject.

Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs in his brilliant Unleash the Power Within seminar. These human needs are:

The need for: Certainty - the certainty that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure, and the need for uncertainty and variety - the need for the unknown and new stimuli.

The need for significance - the feeling of being unique, important, special or needed and then the need for connection and love - a strong feeling of closeness to someone or something

And then there are the two areas that when we are young, we often dismiss, largely because we are so caught up in our own lives. They are the need to contribute and the need to grow.

When I first did the associated exercise related to these needs, I did just that. My top two were the need for certainty and the need for significance. (Typical for someone who creates content, funnily enough)

I dismissed the needs to contribute and grow. Yet now, I see that these two needs are the source of our purpose.

All living beings need to grow. When we stop growing, we start dying. Just look at what happens to muscles when we stop using them. They weaken and whither. That’s your body doing its job. It wants to conserve energy, and if you’re not using an energy-expensive muscle, it will weaken the muscle.

That is just another reason it’s important to make sure you do your resistance training every day. (Or at least three to four times a week).

Yet growth is not just about the physical; it’s also about the mental. The need to be continuously learning.

This is where our hobbies come in. Hobbies such as learning languages, geology, car mechanics, medieval history, and problem-solving keep our brains active. Our brains continue to grow as we learn.

A good reason not to try to figure everything out by using customer service or Chat GPT. Use your problem-solving skills to figure it out.

And the contribution is where we get our sense of fulfilment. Passing on our knowledge and what we have learned from our life experiences by teaching others.

When I worked in law, it always felt like it was just about billable time. How much could we charge the client? I tried to convince myself that I was helping people, but my bosses were not interested in that part. They just wanted to know how much I had billed that week.

When I began teaching English to adults in Korea, that changed. It did not matter how many students I had in my classes. I got paid the same. Now I felt I was contributing to someone’s success.

Something changed in me, too. I felt excited to go to work every morning. I’d never felt that before, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. It was because each day I got the chance to help people improve their lives and career prospects, and it was a joy to see their progress.

If you were to build a retirement around growth and contribution, you would soon find that your purpose becomes clear.

For most of us, our purpose is unlikely to be as grand as bringing world peace or finding a solution to global warming. For some, maybe, but for most of us, not likely.

Purpose is often much smaller than that. It could be to raise and support your children so they can navigate through their worlds with positivity and pragmatism. For others, it could be, like me, to teach as many people as I can to be better organised and less stressed.

The late Prince Philip, who died five years ago, told his daughter, Princess Anne, that to find your purpose, you should find something that you feel you can make an impact on.

For Prince Philip, that meant conserving and protecting the planet, as well as helping young people be active through his Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme.

He was talking about conservation and climate change in the 1950s, well before it became fashionable to do so. He was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, wrote multiple books on the subject, and was active in climate science.

For Princess Anne, it has been, and remains so today, saving children in war-torn environments, animal welfare and hearing dogs for the deaf.

Which then leads us to the second problem here.

When we retire, it can be very tempting to fill our calendars with all sorts of work in the name of good causes. Don’t do that.

You are not going to be able to have an impact on everything. Instead, you want to look at what you are genuinely interested in.

Prince Philip gave a 19-year-old Princess Anne some sage advice when she asked him what she should get involved in. He told her that she would be inundated with offers to be a patron of this or that. He advised her that she could never be a patron of everything, so she should choose those in which she had a genuine interest.

Ron Dennis, the former owner of the McLaren Formula 1 team, retired from Formula 1 in 2017 and dedicated his retirement to helping young people achieve their aspirations and to become role models for future generations.

His experience of working with people like Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Kimi Räikkönen gave him the knowledge and experience to help young sportsmen and women achieve their dreams.

There’s likely to be something that you have an interest in. If that can be coupled with your knowledge and experience, then you have something you can contribute, and that, in turn, will give you a sense of purpose.

In many ways, the challenge is not about finding purpose; it is narrowing it down to the one or two things that we feel we can have an impact on.

The same challenge we faced when in the corporate world is still there in retirement: overcommitting. This is why it’s important not to rush into things when you transition. Explore, think, test, and experience by all means, but set a deadline for refining your activities into something more manageable.

One of the wonderful things about the world we live in today is that we can share our ideas and experiences by writing a blog, recording a podcast, or even starting a YouTube channel.

The great thing about these avenues is that they need consistency to grow. A weekly podcast does far better than a podcast that rarely adds episodes. This helps you to bring structure into your weeks. You can set aside a day or two each week for your content production.

As your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel grows, that in itself gives you a sense of purpose, particularly if it is contributing to making an impact on something you have an interest in.

So, if you are struggling to find your purpose, first, don’t overthink it. It’s rarely about solving the world’s problems; it’s more about helping people to better themselves, and as someone with the experience you have, you are in a very strong position to be able to help.

Make sure it is something you are interested in, something you enjoy reading about and something you like talking to other people about. If you wake up excited about doing something related to this, then you’ve found your purpose.

One of the most inspiring stories I heard about was about two Canadian gentlemen who loved skiing. Each year, they would go skiing together with their families.

When they retired, they both decided to take their ski instructor certification and become ski instructors. And that is what they do today. They are both qualified ski instructors, and each winter they spend their days teaching people to ski.

This keeps them fit and strong and brings an incredible social experience.

I hope this has helped. If you have any questions around your retirement or impending retirement, let me know. I’m happy to answer your questions in this podcast.

And don’t forget, I have recently launched a brand new programme called Designing the Perfect Retirement. This programme sets out a blueprint for you to create a retirement you find fulfilling and inspiring, and that keeps you fit, healthy and active.

In addition, this programme gives you access to a community where you can share experiences and advice. I will put the details for this programme in the show notes.

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

Sunday Apr 05, 2026

Lessons in Purpose and Productivity When Planning Your Retirement

Sunday Apr 05, 2026

Podcast 411

Last July, I had a conversation with my father-in-law. He was scared and worried. He was due to retire at the end of 2026 (now only a few months away), and he had no idea what to do.

It was that conversation that inspired me to dig deep into what it takes to build a solid, meaningful and joyful retirement. That’s what we’re going to look into today.

Links:

Get the Designing The Perfect Retirement Programme

Interview with Harvey Smith

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

Script | 411

Hello, and welcome to episode 411 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

I’m in my mid-fifties now, a time when many people start to think about what they will do when they walk out of their workplace for the last time and enter the next chapter of their lives.

It’s a scary time for many people. Yes, there’s a lot to look forward to: being able to design your own days and go on trips whenever you want, without needing to submit a holiday request form. But there’s an underlying sense of anxiety, will I be bored? Will I lose my health? Will I be lonely?

This is why giving some thought to your retirement before you retire can bring you a sense of relief and purpose.

But what do you want to do?

As the productivity saying goes, “You can do anything but not everything”.

So one of the first things to do when you begin thinking about your retirement is ask that question: What do I want to do?

And this is important.

My grandfather was a farmer all his working life. He had a dairy farm, and each morning at 5:00 am, he would wake up, bring the cows into the dairy and start the milking for the day.

He did this for over forty years, seven days a week. Farming is not so much work; it’s a way of life. When my grandfather was not milking, he was repairing machines and fences, and doing all the other odd jobs that needed to be done.

At the age of 60, he retired.

His plan was to travel, something he’s never been able to do, enjoy a little gardening and take life easy.

That didn’t happen. For someone who had been active all his life, not having to get up early in the morning, come rain or shine, and now being able to stay in bed and have a leisurely morning reading the newspapers was a temptation that was hard to resist.

And so he stopped. He didn’t do very much, and within two years, he was dead.

He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, and while the operation to remove the cancer was successful, he developed complications and passed away a few weeks after the operation.

I was only 12 years old when he died, and it was the first family death I experienced. It was a horrible experience. I was close to my grandfather. He was a lovely person.

It woke me up to the frailties of a human life at an early age. Aunties and uncles often said he died because he retired. I was too young to understand that at the time, but I remember a friend of my mother’s later once telling me that the biggest killer is your armchair.

That person was the famous international show jumper, Harvey Smith.

Harvey is 87 years old now. When he retired from show jumping in 1990, he didn’t sit around in his armchair. His dream was to build a horse racing stable. And together with his wife, Sue, that is what they did.

In 2013, Harvey and Sue trained the horse Auroras Encore, which won the prestigious Grand National horse race at Aintree in Liverpool that year.

I know many of my non-British listeners may not have heard of the Grand National, but anyone in the UK will know it is one of the biggest races on the horse racing calendar.

But not only that, Harvey’s written at least four books, and he still doesn’t spend much time in his armchair.

If you want to hear Harvey’s words of wisdom, there is a superb YouTube video in which he and Sue are interviewed. I’ll put that video link in the show notes. Harvey is a true Yorkshireman with the wonderful Yorkshire wit.

Retirement is not the end. It’s the start of a new chapter in your life. You have built up a wealth of knowledge and experience and likely collected quite a few interests along the way. Retirement is your time to use that knowledge and work on the things that interest you.

So what interests you?

I’ve had a love of bonsai trees since I was in my twenties. I was probably inspired by the film The Karate Kid.

While I have a couple of trees now, I don’t have the time to properly learn to nurture and grow them. However, when the time comes for me to slow down and retire, one thing I will do is spend a couple of weeks in Japan learning from the masters.

When I was researching retirement for my father-in-law, I came to see that there are three pillars you need to ensure are built into any plans you may have.

The first is mental. This does not mean mental health as it is discussed today; it is about learning.

Learning something new.

That could be a foreign language, art history, or how to train racehorses. It doesn’t matter so much what you learn; it is about learning something challenging. Something to get your brain around. Something that will make you think.

The dangers today are AI and the loss of critical thinking. In retirement, you do not want to lose the ability to think critically.

Go out and buy the textbooks, enrol in courses, listen to podcasts and do the hard work of learning. Keep your brain active.

It’s this that will keep you sharp and cognitive. As the saying goes, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”

The second pillar is physical. After we reach 30, we start to lose muscle mass. Again, it’s the “if you don’t use it, you lose it” problem.

Unfortunately, for most of us, around thirty, we get chained to a desk and a computer, and we use our arms to help us get out of a chair. We stop using most of our muscles.

This weakens our strength, and it is gradual. Hardly noticeable. So we don’t see the damage we are doing to ourselves.

When we reach our mid-fifties, that muscle loss accelerates. We can lose as much as 10% of our muscle mass over five years. It’s scary.

The consequence of this is that the risk of falling rises, and one of the biggest killers of older Adults is the complications of dealing with the injuries caused by falling. Broken hips, legs and shoulders. Not at all nice.

By adding in a daily exercise session that focuses on your core strength—stomach, legs and ankles, and doing some cardio such as walking up hills to the point where you become out of breath, is all you need.

Thirty minutes a day. That’s it.

If you add in some stretching exercises later in the day, you are building a natural defence against one of the biggest underlying killers among older people.

Your muscles are your natural defence against many lifestyle-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and gout! Yes, gout is making a comeback. A disease prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries is making a comeback because of how we live today.

Build in some exercise every day.

If you want a simple exercise programme, the one that the late Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, used every day from his time in the Royal Navy, then look up the 5BX. Look for the original Royal Canadian Air Force instructional video on YouTube. It’s brilliant and very quaint.

If you want to know how effective this exercise programme is, look at Prince Philip at his final public engagement. He was 97 years old then, and you can see from the way he walked just how fit he was.

The final pillar is social.

When we are at work, there is a natural connection with our coworkers. There’s a camaraderie and a social aspect to working with other people.

We may not like our coworkers, but there’s still the connection.

When we retire, that disappears, and it’s important to replace it with new connections.

However, there’s a danger here. It can be tempting to replace all those meetings on our work calendars with volunteer work in retirement. Don’t do this.

Go back to asking yourself what you want to do. Hopefully, what you want to do excites you. If you are replacing those work connections with volunteer work you do not find interesting, you will soon find yourself swamped.

Not what retirement is all about.

Be very strict about what you will get involved in. Be clear about what you want out of this chapter of your life.

Perhaps some of the hobbies you try will bring with them exciting connections. Imagine how many new people Harvey Smith has met through horse racing.

But do not rush into it. Take your time. This period of your life is about you and what you want from it.

If you are worried about retirement, or are retired and have found yourself overwhelmed by all the activities you have embarked on, I have just launched a brand-new programme to help you.

Ever since I started writing about time management and productivity ten years ago, I have had many people ask me to put together something for retirees.

It was my conversation with my father-in-law last year that started my research. And that research uncovered some of the most inspiring stories of people I have come across.

There was Jack Weber, a retired dentist who wrote a memoir of his life and published it on Amazon at the age of 100.

And then there was the gentleman who inspired me when I was fifteen years old.

I was a competitive track and field athlete back then, and this gentleman was in his 80s. He would be one of the first people to turn up to training every Tuesday and Thursday evening.

When he was younger, he was a sprinter. Now, in his 80s, he ran marathons. Although he was in his 80s, he looked about 65.

I remember saying to myself that when I am 80, I want to be doing that. And that has been and still is a huge motivation for me. I’ve never stopped running and exercising for an extended period. I have tried to keep myself reasonably fit throughout my working life so that when I do finally retire, I will have the strength to run those marathons.

Watch out, London, New York, Tokyo and Paris. I’m going to be running your streets in twenty-five years’ time!

If you are interested in this programme, I will put the details in the show notes. This programme will teach you about the three pillars, the pitfalls to avoid, and how to manage your calendar so you are not overwhelming yourself.

In addition, by joining, you get free access to a community of like-minded people where you can share your experiences and learn from others who are enjoying this fantastic chapter of your life.

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

Sunday Mar 29, 2026

How to Time Block Like a Leader

Sunday Mar 29, 2026

Have you ever wondered how those in highly demanding jobs that require almost 24/7 attention to the job manage to do it? Well, I’ve been researching and found a few common habits that may help you get more out of your day.

Let’s begin…

Links:

The 2026 Spring 50 Sale

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

Script | 410

Hello, and welcome to episode 410 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

It seems everyone feels under pressure with increasing workloads and demands on their time. And research is backing this up.

Instead of reducing the workloads of the typical knowledge worker, AI is increasing it. In one study published last month in the Harvard Business Review, 83% of knowledge workers reported an increase in their workloads after adopting AI tools.

Yet even in the age before AI, smartphones, and desktop computers, there were jobs that required an intensity few people could or would endure for very long.

For example, if you were to look at the daily schedules of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, you would see an official workday beginning around 6:30 am and ending well after 7:00 pm, 7 days a week.

Just look at pictures of President Carter on his inauguration day and compare them to pictures of him on President Reagan’s inauguration day; you can see the toll the presidency had on Carter. It seemed to have aged him 20 years, and yet it was only four.

If we were to look at President Obama’s schedule. While he did not typically start work until around 9:00 am, he would work well into the night, catching up on briefing documents and other background reading. In total, he was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

Yet each of these leaders used techniques that helped maintain some calm amid otherwise chaotic days. They were well-tested, proven techniques that so many people seem afraid to use today.

This week’s question is about these techniques and how you might adopt some of them to manage your workload while still having time for rest and family.

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

This week’s question comes from Aaron. Aaron asks. Hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who cannot get on top of their work, no matter how many “time blocks” they put on their calendar?

Hi Aaron, thank you for your question.

Now, you didn’t specify what kind of work you do, but I can answer based on what I’ve learned from former world leaders and CEOs and how they managed their days when facing global challenges.

I know not all of us are running a major country, but lessons from people like Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Ford may help you see that there are ways to take control of your time, do the things you want to do, and get a lot done.

The first approach almost all highly effective people do is to protect time for quiet work. This might not necessarily be deep focused work; it could be reading reports or, in the case of presidents and prime ministers, briefing documents prepared for them by their staff.

Of the people I have read about and studied, all of them protected some time during the day. Mostly, this was early in the morning or late at night.

John F Kennedy, for instance, would read the newspapers at 6:30 am, before he met anyone in his office. This gave him a heads-up on emerging world events and often meant he knew more about a subject than any of his aides did.

One interesting note about Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, was that they both took a speed-reading course when they were younger, and it is reported that John Kennedy could read 1,200 words in one minute.

Imagine that. That’s going to save you a lot of time. That’s being able to read one of my longer blog posts in a single minute!

As a side note, it is reported that Theodore Roosevelt would read a book a day, sometimes two, as well as all his briefing documents.

Now, I suspect that in the early to mid 20th century, with no computers, people read far more than we do today. If you are reading thousands of words a day, you’re naturally going to become a faster reader.

Presidents Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson would read briefing documents late into the night. In the case of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, this was often until 2:00 am in the morning.

President Obama also read late into the evening, from around 8:30 pm, after spending some time with his family, he would go to a quiet room and read until midnight or 1 am.

The advantage of doing their reading late at night was that they were unlikely to be disturbed, and it was quiet.

One thing you could do is set aside time somewhere in your day for undisturbed quiet work. Whether that is reading, working on a project or simply replying to your emails and messages.

Just this one change in your day will relieve some of the pressure you may be feeling. It will give you time to work on the non-urgent things that, if you ignore, will soon become urgent and add to the stress and anxiety that working reactively inevitably causes.

Now let’s talk about structuring your day.

This is something that, if you’re not doing, you’ll find yourself getting pulled all over the place with no chance of getting on with anything important.

Structuring your day means planning out what you will do and when. When will you do your most important tasks of the day? When and where are your meetings? When will you take time to rest and relax with your family?

If you begin any day not knowing this, your day will run away with you.

Again, let me give you an example of a US president.

Jimmy Carter would disappear into the living quarters of the While House at precisely 6:30 pm every evening to have dinner with his family.

No matter what was going on in the world. Whether it was a Middle Eastern oil crisis, spiralling inflation or some other world crisis (sound familiar?), Carter would never miss his family’s dinner hour. It was sacred.

During that time, nobody from his office was allowed to interrupt him, no matter what was going on in the world. That could wait an hour. Spending some quality time with his family could not. His daughter was young at that time, and she would go to bed around 8 or 9 pm.

Could you do that? Could you “disappear between 12 pm and 1 pm, cut off from the outside world; no phone or computer for one hour, so you could stop and enjoy lunch with your family or friends?

It’s easy to believe that we have to be “available” all the time. No, you do not.

Not even the leader of the Western world needed to be available every hour and minute of the day.

You’re not dealing with a world crisis where people’s lives are at stake. You’re likely dealing with more mundane issues, like a customer who is frustrated because their ordered electric window motor hasn’t arrived as promised. Or a boss who suddenly becomes agitated because sales dropped 12% last month.

Gee whizz! What can you do right now? Probably nothing. You’re not going to be able to miraculously produce an electric window motor in a few seconds, nor can you change last month’s sales figures.

These things can wait an hour or two. They really can!

This is why, when I get clients to do the “perfect week” exercise, I ask them to do their personal life first. This is the one area most people will sacrifice for their work.

When will you spend time with your family? When will you exercise? When will you spend time on your hobby?

These should be your non-negotiables every day.

President Eisenhower would stop work at 3:30 pm every day to spend an hour or two practising his golf on the White House putting green.

President Johnson would go for his daily swim at 2:00 pm every day.

And Gerald Ford would start his day with an hour on his custom-built static bicycle and finish off with 50 push-ups. Every day!

It did not matter what was going on in the world; these presidents knew that exercise was important for them to function, and they made sure they were clear-headed enough to make the right decisions on some of the world’s biggest and most urgent problems.

Your customer’s missing electric window motor or your boss fretting about a 12% drop in sales is nothing compared to what these presidents had to deal with every day.

Make sure that what is important to you is prioritised, time protected and non-negotiable.

Urgent events will pass, and your being unavailable for an hour or two is not going to significantly affect the result one way or the other.

Another part of all these presidents’ days was taken straight out of Winston Churchill’s daily routine.

The daily nap.

When you are tired, stressed, anxious, and worn down by the constant noise and decision-making, you will no longer be able to make good, rational decisions. It’s as if your brain tightens up and can no longer access your creative thinking.

Winston Churchill discovered this while serving in the army in India in the early 1900s. India is very hot during the day, and it was customary among the officer class to take naps during the warmest part of the day.

Churchill discovered that by taking a proper nap mid to late afternoon, you could do high-quality work well into the evening. And so, when he returned to the UK, he continued to take naps.

As Churchill said, "Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.”

Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter all took daily naps. Ranging from 30 to 60 minutes. It was their way of shutting out the noise of presidential work and giving their brains time to re-energise and refresh.

I remember when I first came to Korea and discovered that many of the office workers I was teaching were working 18-hour days and surviving on only 3 to 4 hours of sleep.

I asked them how they managed to do that six days a week, and they replied that they took a nap when they returned from lunch.

Korean office workers are legendary for eating a full lunch in less than fifteen minutes. That left them with forty-five minutes to an hour for a nap.

Not so common today, working hours in Korea have reduced over the last ten years or so, but back in the early 2000s, work hours here were gruelling.

So there you go, Aaron. There are ways of managing our workloads. It may mean you need to consider redesigning your work hours. The 9-to-5 concept is a relatively recent one. Before the 1980s, people in positions of authority would take longer lunches, and these were often social; and they would do much of their focused work either early in the morning or late at night (Tim Cook still does this)

But whatever you do, put your life first. Work is fleeting. Yes, it’s a part of your life and an important one, but it is only a part of your life. Your personal life matters too.

Put your family and friends and health, both physical and mental, first. Then decide how you will structure your days so that the important things get done.

I hope that has helped. And don’t forget that my Spring sale ends on Tuesday, 31 March (two days left). If you want to pick up my recent Time-Based Productivity course (which includes free access to the Time Sector System course) for just $99.00, you have about 48 hours left to get it.

Plus, you can save $50 on my 2-session coaching programme. A great way for me to help you personally get control of your system so you are more focused and clear-headed about what needs to be done and when.

I will put all the details in the show notes.

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

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

Sunday Mar 22, 2026

How to Easily Manage Your Communications

Sunday Mar 22, 2026

Email, Teams, Slack and other instant messaging systems are great, until they clog up our day and we find we spend more time responding to messages than we do doing any meaningful work.

What can we do? Well, that’s what I’m answering in this week’s episode.

Links:

Get the Email Mastery Course Here

The Hybrid Productivity Course

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