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If you follow the English Premier League, you will know that Arsenal won the Premier League title a couple of weeks ago.
It’s been a tough 6-year journey for their manager, Mikel Arteta, but what stood out is that no matter how hard things got, Arteta stuck to the standards he set at the club and, more importantly, focused on following his plan.
He knew that to take Arsenal back to the top, there had to be a plan, and to ensure the plan was followed, standards needed to be set.
In this week’s episode, we’re looking at how your standards matter and why having a plan to fall back on will always give you clarity, focus and make better decision-making easier.
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Script | 419
Hello, and welcome to episode 419 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you will know I have written and spoken a lot about having standards.
Standards for how Long it takes you to respond to emails and messages, and how you manage your calendar, for example.
It’s the standards you set for yourself that will ensure that you do the right things day after day. That if things go wrong, you have something to fall back on that feels familiar and keeps you doing the right things.
My communication standard is to respond to emails within 24 hours. This means that no matter how busy I am, if I have an actionable email I have not responded to that is approaching the 24-hour limit, I will do whatever it takes to respond, even if that means working a little extra time at the end of the day.
This week’s question is related to these approaches. So to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sonya. Sonya asks, Hi Carl, I love COD and the Time Sector System. Both have really helped me to get much more focused on what matters to me. But what frustrates me is that I still have too many days when I procrastinate and don’t get what I want done. How do you stay so consistent?
Hi Sonya, thank you for your question.
As I alluded to, it comes down to the standards you set for yourself. I know that sounds easy, and I know it is not, but the standards you set are what help you push through when you are not in the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done.
Let me explain.
It can be very tempting, when you have just finished reading a book or have taken a course, to be full of enthusiasm to change things.
And that’s not a bad thing. But it’s important to be realistic when setting up your processes and new way of doing things.
If you were to set up a two-hour closing-down routine at the end of each day, you would fail. It’s too long.
Similarly, I’ve seen people get excited by the idea of having a solid morning routine. Then they add so many things to their morning routine that it takes them two or three hours to complete them.
That’s never going to promote consistency. There will inevitably be days when you cannot complete those routines, and then you get it into your head that you’re a failure or that having routines doesn’t work for you. Neither of which is true.
The place to begin is with your non-negotiables. What must happen every day, no matter what?
I know many people, for instance, who will not go to bed until all the dishes have been washed and put away.
That might seem a small thing, but to the people who do that, it is their standard. They couldn’t imagine going to bed without doing it.
One standard I try to get my coaching clients to follow is to do a five-minute daily planning session before they end their day.
That planning session is to review your calendar for appointments, look at your list of tasks, make sure it is realistic and to decide what your two must-do tasks will be.
That’s it. Five minutes tops.
This is a realistic planning session. You can do it from your sofa and on your phone if necessary.
Once you have set it as a standard, you do this every day, including weekends and holidays. Now, weekends and holidays are easier. You will likely have fewer tasks and appointments, but it’s a standard. You do it anyway.
Consistency can be hard when you don’t have any clear standards. Yet, those standards need to be realistic.
One way to do this is to set minimums.
Imagine you decide to read a book every day. Now, I’ve seen people set very unrealistic targets here. This usually begins with deciding to read something like 50 books per year, which is then broken down into reading a book a week.
So far so good.
But what happens if you read something like Andrew Roberts’ book on Winston Churchill or Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci? Both are over 1,000 pages. Those books will take you longer than a week to read.
That’s why this kind of target setting is wrong.
Let’s start with what your purpose is here. Is it to read a set number of books? If so, choose short books, and you’ll hit your target.
But it’s more likely that you want to build the habit of reading. This means it doesn’t matter how many books you read in any given year. All that matters is that you spend time reading each day.
So set a realistic minimum.
If you were to set the target at reading for a minimum of twenty minutes each day, it would not be long before you settled into a routine and just did your reading.
What happens is that the books you get into and enjoy reading, you’ll read for longer than twenty minutes. Slower, harder books will likely have you reading for twenty minutes. That’s fine; you’re still reading.
You did what you set out to do, and after twenty minutes, you can stop.
That’s a realistic standard to set for yourself and one likely to become a non-negotiable.
Incidentally, you can do this with exercise and dealing with your messages. Set a daily minimum amount of time you will spend doing these activities.
And I should say there is some psychology behind the twenty-minute minimum. If you were to tell yourself you will spend an hour on a particular activity every day, your brain will push back.
On the days you are feeling tired, a little sick or ‘just not in the mood’, that one hour will feel like an eternity.
Twenty minutes, on the other hand, seems achievable, no matter how you feel. Remember, it’s a minimum. Once you’ve done your twenty minutes, you can stop. Often you won’t, but you can if you are still not feeling up to it.
I do this with my emails and messages. I like to finish my day with all actionable messages cleared. But there are days when, for one reason or another, I cannot do so. I then apply the twenty-minute minimum.
I tell myself I will spend twenty minutes clearing as many as I can.
It’s this standard that makes it easy to keep on top of messages.
I began this episode by explaining how Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, turned around the club by setting non-negotiable standards.
Arteta’s attitude is that if you cannot accept these standards, then you’re out the door. It’s as simple as that.
And I saw this with Manchester United’s former manager, a brilliant manager, Alex Ferguson. Ferguson took over the management of Manchester United in 1986. On his arrival, he set about setting some very high standards at the club.
It took around four years, but by setting those standards, Manchester United turned the 1990s into Manchester United’s greatest generation.
Change is hard. It’s particularly hard to stick to your new set of standards when things don’t seem to be improving. When there’s no immediate payoff.
Your old habits don’t want to die, and they will fight to stay around. This is why trying to change everything all at once almost always fails.
Instead, start small. Daily planning is an easy place to start because all you are doing is reviewing your appointments for the next day, ensuring your list of tasks is realistic, and identifying your must-do tasks.
With practice, you will be able to do this in about two minutes, and the more you practice, the more you see the benefits of having clarity on what must be done and where you need to be each day.
From there, add in a weekly planning session. This is where you set your plan for the week and decide your objectives. It is not about reviewing all your tasks and projects. You’re not reviewing, you’re planning.
Reviewing is entirely different.
The best time to review a project is when you’ve just finished working on it. The project is fresh in your mind, and you will know precisely what needs to happen next.
It’s by having a plan that you will find you procrastinate less. You don’t become frozen by the number of things you need to do. You know what your objectives are for the week, and you will do what needs to be done to accomplish them.
Commit to your plan, and you will have the energy to push towards it. Without a plan, you’ll procrastinate because all you will see is a mountain of work to do, and you have no idea what to do or where to start.
Let me show you this in action:
Imagine you have thousands of emails in your email inbox, and you are desperate to get it under control and clean it out. But the sheer size of it freezes you. Where do you start? What would be the best way to go about it? And you’ll be thinking this will take forever.
But what if you decided to start with the oldest ones and spend a minimum of 20 minutes a day on this project until it’s done?
Let’s be honest, if you’ve got thousands of emails in your inbox, it doesn’t really matter where you start. You’ve just got to start somewhere.
Twenty minutes a day, from the oldest to the newest. Now that’s a plan.
And you’ll find that by starting with the oldest first, you’ll be deleting a lot. Most of what you have will be out of date, moved on or already resolved. That builds momentum, which in itself generates energy.
If you’d like to learn more about setting your non-negotiables, having a plan for the day and a set of clear objectives for the week, my recently released Quiet Productivity Method programme will help you.
It’s packed with ideas like these, along with the right set of tools to give you clarity, focus, and a sense of calm throughout your day.
I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you to learn more about this immersive programme.
Thank you, Sonya, for your question, and I hope this answer has helped.
Thank you also to you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.
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