Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 264 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 264 of the Working With 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 for this show.

There’s something special about pen and paper. The feel of the pen moving on paper and the simplicity of collecting notes, ideas and even marking off tasks feels better than tapping your mouse or trackpad on a task.

Sadly, technology has made task and appointment management extremely convenient. It’s fast and easy to add and check off tasks and it’s far easier to carry a phone than to always having to make sure you carry a notebook with you.

While I love technology and the convenience it brings with it, I do miss being able to slow things down and handwrite notes, ideas and lists of things I want to do and it seems many other people also prefer the more naturalness of using pen and paper to manage their lives.

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

This week’s question comes from Max. Max asks; Hi Carl, The problem for me lies in the tools. Before coming across your work, I used a paper notebook and generally followed the Bullet Journal methodology. I have found that I do not enjoy using digital tools for organising, note-taking and general brainstorming. Something about moving a pen across paper just works for me. How would you implement your Time Sector system with a paper notebook and a pen?

Hi Max, thank you for your question.

One of the benefits of using a digital system is that all your repeatable routines and areas of focus tasks automatically show up in your list of tasks to do today. These will need to be manually transferred to your today list when you do your planning with a paper based system.

The good news here is, if you do a daily planning session, you can pull your recurring tasks from your routines and areas of focus lists and add them to your list of tasks for tomorrow. This gives you the opportunity to decide whether you can do those tasks for tomorrow. This would likely mean you will be copying five or six tasks each day from a master list to your daily list.

Personally, I like this as it forces you to deliberately consider what you will do today.

However, to make this more concrete, so you don’t miss anything, I would create a page divided into seven boxes. Each box represents a day of the week, and you can add your recurring tasks in there.

For monthly and yearly recurring tasks, I would put them on your calendar. As you are only doing this with your monthly and yearly recurring tasks, it won’t overwhelm your calendar.

Okay, aside from that, the Time Sector System works very well through a paper based system.

In all task management systems whether they are digital or not, the most important list is your today list. The key with this list is it is curated, relevant and up to date will all the excess removed.

This is one of the disadvantages of the digital system. Because it is so easy to add a date to a task and then “forget” about it—the date and forget problem—we add random dates to tasks and then our daily lists become swamped before we even start the day. The paper based system avoids this because for you to create a daily list you manually need to add tasks to it.

So, what about the folders? Well here I would create a This Week list every eight pages in your notebook. (Or 14 pages if you have two pages representing a day) You can then add tasks you want to do that week to those pages.

These lists would take care of your Next Week lists so you would not need to create a Next Week list.

For the This Month list, That I would add to the beginning of each month. These are tasks you know need to be done sometime this month, but are not entirely sure when you will do them. This is a list you can review each week and bring forward any tasks to the appropriate list.

Long-term and on hold lists would be kept either at the beginning of your notebook or at the end. You can decide where that list is best kept in your notebook.

One of the downsides to running an analogue system is you need to set up each notebook you use. This is the same with a bullet journal as well as a non-digital GTD system—something I did when I first began using the GTD method years ago. You will need to set up the pages each time you start a new notebook.

The good news here, is this process does get faster with each new notebook and each new notebook gives you an opportunity to refine your system.

The focus with the Time Sector System is on “when” you will do the task, rather than “what” the task is. This means the most important page in your notebook is today. Nothing else matters today when you are doing your work and relaxing in the evening. Tomorrow comes in to play when you do the ten minutes planning the evening before.

That’s the set up, what about collecting stuff? Where would you put the inbox? When I ran an analogue system, my inbox was the daily page. I would add new tasks and reminders to the bottom right hand corner of the page for processing later in the day. Once I had transferred the new tasks to their relevant week, I would cross them out. This way, when I did the weekly planning, I could do a quick check to make sure I had caught everything and I wasn’t looking all over the page for tasks I may have missed.

Your project notes want to be kept at the back of your notebook. When you transfer to a new notebook, you want to only put in your current, active projects. If you have projects not due to start over the next three months, you can add these to a master projects list on a separate page.

However, here comes another issue with analogue systems. Email and digital documents such as Google Docs and shared Office files. You will need a digital system to run along side your notebook.

Managing your actionable email would be fairly easy as you can put a single recurring task reminding you to clear your actionable emails. Adding links to documents in the cloud will obviously be difficult. For this you will need some form of digital system to run alongside your paper-based system.

However, there is another way you can do this which is more of a hybrid system. You notebook can be used as your collection, and planning tool. It can also contain your list of tasks for today. You can also use your notebook for all your meeting notes.

However, you maintain a master list in a digital format. For instance, keep all your recurring routines and areas of focus in a digital app. You can also transfer all your collected tasks into your task manager and move things around your time sectors there. Then each evening, when you do your daily planning you can transfer you daily list for tomorrow to your notebook.

This method has the advantage of overcoming any issues with the digital world. While we may want to maintain everything manually, the world doesn’t operate like that and we do need access to shared documents, emails and text messages.

It will also save you a lot of time when you fill a notebook. You won’t have to set up a new notebook as the backend information will always be maintained digitally and all you are doing is transferring information to your notebook on a daily basis—a great way to force you do to a daily planning session.

I’ve experimented a lot over the last few years with different methods, and my love of fountain pens and quality notebooks has had me try a paper-based system. Sadly, I’ve struggled to run a 100% analogue system because the people I work with operate digitally. That said, many people I know still take notes in meetings with pen and paper and keep that notebook on their desks while they are working and takes notes directly into it through the day.

So, it is possible to run the Time Sector System via notebook. It’s a bit fiddly, but certainly doable. Analogue systems do assist the planning sessions, because if you are not planning regularly your notebook will rapidly be out of date. However, the best approach would be to run a hybrid system where all your project details, regular recurring tasks and areas of focus are kept digitally and on a daily basis when you do your daily planning you can transfer everything over.

And planning out goals and projects will always be better on paper. AS you said in your email, “there’s something about moving a pen across paper just works for me.” And if it works for you, then don’t change it.

I hope that helps, Max. Than 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.

Monday Feb 13, 2023

How To Get Back To Basics With Your Task manager.

Monday Feb 13, 2023

Podcast 263.

This week, we are looking at the humble task manager and at how to get the most out of it by getting back to basics.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 263 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 263 of the Working With 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 for this show.

Since even before the Ivy Lee Method was first used in 1918, listing out your tasks for the day has been a common way to manage all the things you have to do. Externalising what needs to be done, is a tried and tested method for managing what we do each day. When you combine a well managed task manager with a calendar, you have a very powerful way to get your work done and to have time for rest each day.

Now, as usual we humans are incredibly destructive. For some weird reason we seem to hate simplicity and love to over complicate things until they are destroyed.

A classic apocryphal story that illustrates this is during the space race, both NASA and the Russians were having difficulty finding a writing implement that worked in a zero gravity environment. The traditional pen needs gravity to work and when you take gravity out, the pen will no longer work.

NASA spent millions of dollars researching this. Yet the Russians spent nothing and solved the problem. The Russian space agency gave their astronauts pencils. Pencils don’t need gravity.

This week’s question touches on this problem of over-complexity and I will give you some ways to get things back to a more simple footing so you can focus more on doing your work and spend less time organising your work.

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

This week’s question comes from Thomas. Thomas asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently been watching a lot of YouTube videos on using task managers. I like the idea of keeping all my tasks in one place, but it’s so confusing. There’s so many different ways to use a to-do list I just cannot figure out which is the best one. Do you have any recommendations?

Hi Thomas, thank you for your question and yes, you are right; it is very confusing.

The problem here is everyone will have a different way to manage their work. This is in part because we are all different (which is a good thing), and we all do different types of work. While you might have a generic job title such as a doctor or dentist within those generic titles there are a multitude of different disciplines.

Another problem is we now have many more options than using a piece of paper and a pen to write out what needs to be done today. Now the task manager has been digitalised, developers can add features to differentiate themselves from other developers building task managers.

It a combination of these two factor that has inevitably led to things becoming overly complicated.

But let’s just push back the complexity and look at what a task manager needs to do.

A task manager needs three areas: An area to collect things, an area to store things and an area that tells you what needs to be done today.

Anything else that adds to that is just adding complexity. Now task manager developers can easily create something with those three areas that works well. Unfortunately, for us, that would be boring and so we now have flags, tags and filters (and a whole lot more in many cases)

Now these can be useful, but they are definitely not essential.

So, how can you make a task manager work effectively?

Well, understanding the three areas would be a good start. Let’s look at these individually.

First you need to be collecting all your commitments, tasks and anything else you need to do in your inbox. It’s no good collecting some and leaving others in your head. This is not something you can do half-heartedly. Either you go all in or don’t bother at all.

Your head is the worst place to remember what needs to be done. It’s not designed to store information. It’s designed to recognise patterns. We use all our senses to do that. Sight, taste, smell, touch and sound are our primary pattern recognition senses and the ones used every day. We would immediately think something is wrong if we go outside when there’s a blue sky and the sun is shining, but when we do step outside we get wet. There’s an interrupt in the pattern and our brain alerts us to something not being right and our fight or flight reaction will engage.

That’s where our brains work incredibly well.

If someone gives us a random series of numbers that do not fit a pattern (such as giving us a telephone number) we will struggle to remember them. Give us a series of numbers such as 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and we will remember—we recognise the pattern.

So the first thing to do if you want a task manager to work is to collect everything and not trust your brain to remember to do the task.

The second area of a task manager is the storage area. I like to think of this as a holding pen for tasks I have not yet decided when I will do them or are not due today.

If we were not organising tasks into holding pens, our inbox—the place you collect your tasks—would soon be swamped. Once that happens you stop looking at it and it becomes a waste of time.

This means every 24 hours or so, you want to be clearing out your inbox, making decisions about when you will do a task and storing them in appropriate holding pens.

Now, there’s a lot of variability in how you organise your tasks. For instance, I organise my collected tasks into time sectors—ie when I am going to do the task. For me, all I want know is whether I will do the task this week, next week, this month, next month or sometime in the distant future.

Other ways to organise your tasks would be by context. This is more commonly known as the GTD method (Getting Things Done) Here you would organise tasks by what you need to do the task—such as a computer, or where you would do the task—in your office or at home, or person, such as your boss, partner or colleague.

The truth is you can organise your tasks in whatever way you want. The important thing is; the way you organise your holding pens needs to work for you.

The thing about these holding pens is you do not work directly from them. They are simply storage areas. They are for planning purposes only.

In my coaching programme, I can quickly tell if a client does any planning by where they choose their next task. If they are in and out of their holding pens looking for tasks to do, that’s a clear indicator that no planning is being done. Essentially, you are planning every time you complete a task and move on to the next one.

This means instead of spending thirty minutes or so on at the end of the week doing a weekly plan, you are doing micro planning between tasks and that adds up to a lot more time than thirty minutes over the course of a week. It’s a very inefficient way of managing your tasks.

It’s a little like working in a shop. If you do your planning, the stock you need is right there in the shop on a shelf where the customer can pick it up, bring it to the counter and pay for it. It’s a seamless, efficient way to conduct your business.

If you don’t do your stock planning, a customer would come in, ask you for a particular product and you would need to walk into the warehouse, find the box the product is in and bring it to the counter. It’s incredibly inefficient and will leave you exhausted. And yet, according to statistics, 93% of people are doing no weekly planning. No wonder there are so many exhausted people.

The final part of your task manager is your today list. It’s this list that needs to be kept clean and tight. It must show you only the tasks that need to be completed today and not anything you might like to do. This is what I like to refer to as the business end of your task manager. If you do have extra time at the end of of your list, by all means go into your holding pens and look for a few tasks you can clear before the next day—or better still, take some well deserved rest.

If you are collecting everything and doing your weekly and daily planning, when you start your day and open your today list, you can be confident that the tasks on this list are the only ones that need concern you today.

When you have your task manager working in this manner, where you collect everything, process what you collected into their appropriate holding pens, (or delete the things that are no longer relevant) and you work primarily from your today list, you will find getting through the day Is easy.

You won’t feel as mentally exhausted because you are not doing mini-planning sessions between tasks,—which is a real drain on your mental resources—and you find you flow from one task to another.

There are other strategies for managing your today list. For example, group similar tasks together so you are not switching your focus. This means if you have five or six calls to make, block an hour or so out and sit down and do them all together. Respond to your actionable emails all at once—as late in the day as you can as that prevents email ping-pong.

Now the problem we all face today is in the competitive world of productivity apps the only way for developers to distinguish themselves from their competition is to keep adding features. We now have flags, which to be honest is quite useful, tags and labels, filters and multiple different views.

While all these extra features may seem nice, none of them actually help you to do your work. We cannot do multiple tasks at the same time. I cannot make two phone calls at the same time nor can I write three articles. I can only do one task at a time. This means for me to be at my most focused, all I need to know is what to work on now, and then get on and do it without being distracted by what I need t todo next.

If I have a lot of random tasks on my list, I’ve just slowed myself down because now I have to decide what to do. And human nature being what it is, I’m likely to pick the easiest task—just to complete a task and get the dopamine hit.

This is a terrible way to do your work. You are at your best in the morning and that is the time to tackle the hardest tasks, leaving your easiest tasks to later in the day when you are not going to be at your best.

So, Thomas, if you want to remove all the complexity, focus on the three areas of your task manager and make sure you get those parts working well for you. Ignore al the extra features—they may become useful later, but if you are starting out, focus your attention on collecting everything—make that a habit. Don’t overthink how you structure your lists, folders etc. These are holding pens for when you do your planning, and make sure you spend enough time dong the work to clear your tasks each day.

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

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

Monday Feb 06, 2023

Why You Must Become Boring To Succeed.

Monday Feb 06, 2023

This week’s question is all about building success into your life and why to do it, you need to become boring.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 262 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 262 of the Working With 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 for this show.

It’s strange how themes crop up and then suddenly I see the theme everywhere. This week, that theme has been all about how to turn something into a success and why so many people fail.

It’s sad that the media only show the fruits of success—showcasing expensive houses, exotic holidays and flashy cars. That may be the results of living a successful life, but it is not how you become successful. The way success is trailed would make anyone feel that only a lucky few can ever be successful, yet that is simply not true at all.

Success has nothing to do with where you were born, what school or university you went to, whether you have wealthy parents or were lucky enough to win the lottery. Success has nothing to do with genetics or background.

Whether you succeed or not depends entirely on the choices you make and how you define success. When I see so called instagram influencers living it up on expensive looking yachts or standing at the steps of a private jet, I turn off. I do not see that as success—that’s showing off. Success should be measured by you and what you achieve and ultimately what you contribute to this amazing world.

So, before we get to this week’s question, just pause for a minute an ask yourself what you would have to achieve in order for you to consider yourself a success?

That could be to complete a full course marathon, to raise your children to be respectful of others or it could be to solve a global problem. However you define success, that needs to be your starting point. If you don’t know what that is, you will have no information on which to build a strategy.

Okay, enough of my rambling introduction, let me know hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Roger. Roger asks: Hi Carl, I recently took your PACT course, and was curious to know if you still follow those ideas and whether you would add anything to the cours e today.

Hi Roger, than you for your question.

Okay, before we start, I should explain to those who don’t know, I have a free course in my Learning Centre called PACT. PACT stands for; Patience, Action, Consistency and Time. It’s a course that gives you a framework to achieving success at anything. In the course, I used building a blog, podcast or YouTube channel as examples, but you could apply to principles to anything and you will be successful. I’m willing to guarantee that.

However, one thing I know is 95% of the people who set out to succeed at something will fail. Why is that? It’s because to become successful at anything you need to become boring. You will also likely have to ditch quite a few of your friends and stop seeing some of your family members as well.

It’s this sacrifice that most people are unwilling to make.

Now, if you have read Napoleon Hill’s brilliant book Think And Grow Rich, you will know about “Burning Desire”. It’s this burning desire that Napoleon Hill discovered was the common denominator among the thousands of highly successful people he interviewed for the book. They knew exactly what they wanted to achieve and set about single-mindedly to achieve it. The excluded everything from their lives that distracted them from achieving that success.

One example, Napoleon Hill gave was Edwin Barns’ single-minded determination to work with (not for) Thomas Edison. Edwin Barns’ gave up everything he had, boarded a freight train and traveled to see Thomas Edison.

He started out cleaning Edison’s offices. Never complained and just worked his way up. Never forgetting his desire to work with Thomas Edison.

After five years of hard work, he got his chance and took it. Barns promised Edison he could sell the Edison Dictating Machine, a machine Edison was having difficulty in selling.

Barns never lost that burning desire and became a fabled rags to riches story.

Barns’ story epitomises how to become successful at whatever you want to be successful at. The problem, for most people, is you need to make sacrifices and sadly, most people are not willing to do that today and instead will reach for all the excuses they can find—the excuses that successful people abandoned years ago.

In many ways, becoming successful is all about shifting your mindset from one that will happily accept any excuse to one where you no longer accept them. A trick I use is if ever I catch myself saying words like “I can’t” or “I don’t have time” I stop myself and ask “why?”

Interestingly, almost always the answer is: I don’t have a desire to do it. To me that’s not an excuse. That’s being honest with myself. I’m fascinated with NASA’s 1950s and 1960s space programme. I will read articles and books and watch documentaries on the amazing things those pioneers at NASA achieved. Yet, I have no desire to go to the moon.

To me PACT is all about becoming successful. You need patience because success in not going to come overnight. No matter what the media tells you. You have to start somewhere, and more often than not that start will be at the bottom. You don’t walk out of university and become the CEO of Google, Apple or Coke a Cola on your first day. You have to start at the bottom and work you way up.

But more than just having patience you need to take action. You need a plan or a strategy from which you will take action that will lead you towards becoming successful. It’s likely you will need to change your plan—adjust course from time to time—but the overall objective is never lost.

It’s here where goal planning comes into the mix. The overall desire to achieve something is going to be far off into the distant future. The college graduate with the desire to become the CEO is likely to have a twenty to twenty-five year apprenticeship. This means the long-term desire needs to be broken down into bite sized chunks. Chunks you can focus on each year. From being a fresh recruit, you might set the goal to become a supervisor in two years, a manager after a further two years etc. This helps you to stay focused.

And then you need consistency. The quality of your work needs to be consistent, your approach to your work needs to be consistent and your daily actions needs to be consistent.

It’s this consistently doing the right things day after day where you develop mastery.

I mentioned in a previous episode one of my favourite TV shows, BBC’s The Repair Shop, those skilled craftspeople have repeated their skills day after day. Susie Fletcher, the leather specialist, sews leather every day. She began her passion for leather crafting when she was thirteen years old. Forty years later, she’s still passionate about working with leather and repairing leather goods. Consistently using the skills she learned many years ago day in day out.

And it’s being consistent with the simple things. I’m still shocked at the number of people who do not consistently do a weekly planning session. How will you ever be successful at what you do if you are always reacting instead of giving yourself thirty-minutes each week to step back look at what you are doing and to plan out the week ahead. It’s that weekly planning that will keep you on the right path. It will stop you from being distracted by the unimportant and keep you focused on what’s really important to you.

And finally, you need to take your time. To be successful at anything you need time. Time to develop your skills and knowledge and time to build experience. You cannot short circuit this. Sure, you can go out and buy subscribers on YouTube or Instagram, but you will know they are fake and these subscribers will not be engaging in your community. It doesn’t take long for others to see through your charade anyway.

I’ve noticed that for a blog, podcast or YouTube channel to really start to grow it will take on average four years. Four years of consistently taking action every week. It’s the same with most businesses. You will not likely be earning a consistently good income for the first four years. It will be hard, difficult and often painful. But if you apply the PACT principles, you will more than likely get there.

Your journey to success is a personal journey. The sacrifices you will need to make will be different from other peoples sacrifices. Some of you will achieve the success you want quickly, others will take a lot longer. That’s absolutely fine because ultimately, it’s not really about whether you become successful or not. It all about becoming a better person each day.

It’s that sense of continuous improvement that leaves you feeling fulfilled and feeling a lot less stressed and worried. It’s as if you know you are on a mission and some days won’t be great, but others will be and as long as there are more great days than bad, you will be making progress.

So to answer your question more directly, Roger, no I wouldn’t change anything about the course. PACT still works. Its formula has helped many people, including myself, to build a business, blog, YouTube channel or podcast. Or all of them.

I recently wrote a blog post on three keys to success. These three keys are research, experiment and practice. They fit into the PACT model in a way. The first step is to decide what you want to accomplish, but after that you need to do research. Find the people who have already achieved what you want to achieve or something similar. That will give you the blueprint to success (or the strategy you need if you like)

After that, you need to experiment. The blueprint you found worked for someone else, it’s not likely to work for you exactly—that would be copying anyway. Instead you take the blueprint and modify it to better fit you. That where you need to experiment.

After that, you need to practice and keep practicing. You’re developing your craft, your expertise and there you need to be patient. You need to accept that it will be boring because you’re following the same process day after day. However, following that process is something you will love doing because eventually you will see the results. It also makes your day a lot easier. You’re not trying to reinvent anything, you already know what you do will result in something at the end of the day. Just keep following the process.

And every once in a while look up, review what you are doing and modify where necessary. That will keep you on track.

And finally, the best advice I can give you is to enjoy the journey. Embrace the good and bad and learn. That’s where the fun is.

Thank you Roger, for you question and than you for listening.

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

Carl.

Monday Jan 30, 2023

How To Manage Your Calendar.

Monday Jan 30, 2023

This week’s question is all about getting the most out of your calendar. The most powerful tool in your productivity toolbox, yet surprisingly the least spoken about.

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The Ultimate Productivity Workshop

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 261 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 261 of the Working With 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 for this show.

The humble calendar has been around for a very long time. And there are many iterations too. There are seasonal calendars still used by many farmers to the little electronic calendars on our phones. It always strikes me as odd that when you do a search for productivity apps, all you get are task managers and notes apps.

Yet, if you don’t take control of your calendar, you will always be running out of time, missing meetings and chasing the elusive goal of being “finished”.

It’s your calendar that will never lie to you. It gives you the twenty-four hours you have each day and you get to design how you use those twenty-four hours.

In my opinion, your calendar beats all other productivity tools and apps because it’s the only tool you have that will tell you where you need to be, when and with whom.

Now, just before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, I just want to give you a heads up that there are still a few places left for February’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop.

Beginning on Friday 3rd February, and for the following three Fridays, I will be doing a ninety minute workshop that takes you through the process of building your very own productivity system—a system that works for you. We will start with the calendar, then go on your task manager and managing your communications—email and messages and end by bringing everything together.

This is a wonderful opportunity to join a group of likeminded people who together will help you to overcome any obstacles you may have and to bring in some solid practices that will serve you over the years to come.

The focus of this workshop is on you. I want you to bring your productivity and time management issues so we get real life experiences and to develop methods and processes to ease these issues so they no longer create a bottleneck or obstacle to taking control of your time and you life.

I hope you can join me. I’m so excited to being able to help you and others build their Ultimate Productivity System.

Full details for this event are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Lisa. Lisa asks, Hi Carl, I’ve see a few of your videos on how you use your calendar, and was wondering if you have any tips for someone who works in a typical office and struggles to find time to get on and do my regular work in between a lot of meetings and interruptions.

Hi Lisa, than you for your question.

I think we need to address the elephant in the room first. Allowing your calendar to show you are more available than you really are.

For many of you working in an office environment where your boss and colleagues can see your calendar—or at least when you have availability—it can be hell trying to organise your day. When your boss or colleague is attempting to set up a meeting, they are not concerned with how much work you have to do, they just want to schedule a meeting and ultimately the day and time will be set according to when everyone is available.

This means if your calendar is showing you free at 9:30 am or 1:30pm (a common free time for most people) that’s when meetings are likely to be arranged.

Now the problem here is 9:30am is the best time to get down to some focused work. You’re much more likely to be fresh and alert at that time and less susceptible to distractions. My advice to anyone who wants to get better at their time management is to block 9:00am to 11:00am for their most important work of the day.

Equally, if you get outside at lunchtime for twenty to thirty minutes, you are going be fresh again when you return—well perhaps not if you’ve had a high carbohydrate lunch—but for most people, the early afternoon can result in another good focused session.

These times should be protected at all costs.

Of course, you may not always have control here—some departmental meetings are set for early Monday morning and later Friday afternoons, but you can still block time out on a Tuesday to Thursday for focused work.

Just giving yourself a few hours each week for focused work time will often give you enough time each week to get the bulk of your work done. It doesn’t have to be every day. And all you need to do is block the time on your calendar. I call these session by what I will do in them. For instance, I have a two hour writing time block on a Monday morning I also have a three hour audio/visual time block on a Friday morning where I record and edit my videos.

Now, If you are a boss, I beg you to implement a no meeting day each week. It might not be convenient, but the amount of work your team gets done on the no meetings days will astound you. There’s something about knowing you are not going to be disturbed that will allow your team to plan what work needs doing and they will be a lot more focused.

Another tip on calendars is to have a master calendar. By this I mean have at least one calendar that shows everything going on in your life; both personal and professional.

Now, in an ideal world you will be able to subscribe to your work calendar on your phone or personal computer (not work computer) and you can then add this to your personal calendar. This way you will see everything going on in your life.

This is important because your dental, doctor and physical therapy appointments, for example, are not going to happen before or after work. You need to see these with your work calendar. Equally, you may need to pick up your kids earlier some days or there might be an event in the evening you need to leave work a little earlier for. If you separate your work and personal calendars, you are inevitably going to miss these when you do your daily and weekly planning.

Now, I subscribe to the belief that we live one life and our work is just a part of that one life. And if you think about it, we work on average 40 hours a week. Well, that’s only 24% of your total week. When you separate your work and personal calendars—ie you have them on different devices, because your work calendar is the most dynamic—the one that changes the most—it will be this one that dominates your life and that isn’t good.

Balance is created when you see you life as a whole. Where you can see, on one screen, your work and personal commitments. This is how you avoid overwhelming yourself and being constantly late for meetings and appointments. You can see quite clearly how much discretionary time you have and how much of your day you have committed to meetings, appointments and other commitments.

Now this might be a good time to remind you of the time -v- activity equation. Of the two sides to this equation, only one is flexible. Time, is fixed. You cannot change that. Now within those twenty-four hours, you need to eat and sleep—that’s going to eat up more of your 24 hours that your work. You will likely need around ten hours for sleeping and eating. Throw in showering, brushing your teeth and you are looking at 11 hours of you day taken up already.

It’s up to you to decide what activities you will do each day. That’s the only part of the equation you can control. Delegating that control to other people is going to leave you miserable and you will feel your life is out of control. It’s not a pleasant feeling and is often a cause of all sorts of mental health issues.

Now how do you take control?

Well, the first thing to do is to create a new calendar and call it your “perfect week”. This is your ideal week. You want to go into as much detail as possible here. Don’t just block out your work hours, for instance. Instead, block out focus time blocks, commuting time (you’re idea commuting time) and other work related items you would like to do each week such as project days, catch up days and prospecting time or creative time. Whatever time you need for doing your work.

You also want to scheduling in your exercise, family and relationship time as well as time for working on your hobbies, reading and anything else you would like time for in your personal life.

When you do this exercise, you will be surprised how much time you actually have. You have a lot more time than you think. It’s this exercise—putting everything together as you would like it on one calendar that you get to see this.

Now, it’s unlikely you will be able to start living this perfect week immediately, that’s not really the point of the exercise. The goal is to merge you real life calendar with this calendar over time. To give you a benchmark, it took me nearly two years to merge my real life calendar with my perfect week calendar. It was a fantastic exercise (and project, in a way). It was also fantastic to initiate a change and see how my life changed and how much more balance I was able to bring into my life.

For me, I started with my morning routines. I put them into my calendar. Seven days a week and scheduled that in. It’s 45 minutes every morning and one of my favourite times of the day.

I then fixed in my exercise times and then rearranged my appointment availably that around the things I wanted to or needed to do .

I should point out your “perfect week” calendar will always be a work in progress. Things change, and we change with them. I revisit my perfect week every six months or so to see how I am doing and look for ways that will improve it.

It doesn’t matter if you are a content creator, coach, admin staff or nurse. We all have the ability to take control of our lives and build the kind of week that empowers us, keeps us healthy—physically and mentally—and leaves us feeling in control of our destination. All you need to do is to decide where you want to spend your time.

Now, finally, for those of you who work in a company that is obsessive about security and will not allow you to subscribe to your work calendar on your personal devices. This means you have some extra work to do.

My advice is to use twenty minutes of your weekly planning time to copy out your meetings and appointments into your master calendar. I know this is extra work, but there isn’t another way round it. You could live with two calendars if you wish, but in my experience you are inviting trouble with that approach.

Hopefully, there will be a few recurring meetings that can be fixed anyway. I know it’s extra work ,but the effort will be rewarded.

Well, I hope that helps you, Lisa. Than you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.

Don’t forget my Ultimate Productivity Workshop starts on the 3rd of February. Get yourself signed up today—you won’t regret it.

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

Monday Jan 23, 2023

A Few Of My Favourite Productive Habits.

Monday Jan 23, 2023

This week’s question is about all those little secrets I’ve discovered over the years that make getting work done on time, every time, easy.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 259 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 260 of the Working With 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 for this show.

Over the years, I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks that have adopted have helped me to fine-tune my system and greatly improve my overall effectiveness and productivity. This week’s question asked me directly about some of my lesser-known secrets.

It was an interesting question because many of the things I do each day I’ve absorbed into my system and never really think about it anymore. It’s a little like learning to drive a car. At first, you have to consciously remember to put the key in the ignition, or to put your foot on the brake and press the start button; after a while, those steps are done unconsciously. And BOOM! I’ve just given you the first tip, and I haven’t even revealed the question.

The secret to mastering productivity or anything else is repetition. However, before I explain that a little more, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Craig. Craig asks, Hi Carl, I’ve followed you for a while now, and I have always wondered, beyond what you share through your YouTube and blog if there are any other little nuggets you use every day that you haven’t revealed in some form or another?

Hi Craig, good question. I’ve never thought of that before. I’m sure there are things I do do every day that I do unconsciously that help my overall productivity. You set me quite a challenge here.

Well, let me return to what I was saying in the introduction. “The mother of mastery is repetition”. The more you do something, the better and faster you will get at it.

Take, for example, the humble weekly planning session. When you first do one, it will take you a long time. There are a lot of things you need to go through for the first time, and you will have to consciously think about what you are looking at and will likely read through everything.

Over time though, you learn what needs looking at and what can be skipped. If you come from a GTD background, you will feel you must go through all your open projects. And again, if you are a GTDer, pretty much everything you want to do will be a project—the anything involving two or more steps being a project idea.

That means you are going to have to go through hundreds of projects each and every week. Good luck with that one, my friends.

Now a more pragmatic way of doing your weekly planning session is to look through only your active projects. And here, you really only need to ask yourself what needs to happen next and when do I need to do it.

This dramatically reduces the amount of time you need for a weekly planning session, and as you get consistent with it, i.e. you do one every week, you know exactly what needs looking at. It just becomes natural. You know where to start, and that triggers everything else.

Incidentally linked to your weekly planning session is timing. When should you do yours? Now, over the years, I’ve tried all sorts of different times. I discovered the worst time to do your weekly planning is Sunday night. Yes, I know many of will be shouting at whatever device you are listening to this on. But bear with me.

Doing your weekly planning on a Sunday night is akin to leaving your exercise until the evening. You are going to be inconsistent. Your willpower is at its lowest in the evening, and worse, you will have pretty much forgotten a lot of what happened in the week just gone by.

The best time for a weekly planning session is first thing Saturday morning. Hear me out. Firstly, you’re doing it in the morning and therefore, your willpower is at its highest. It’s also a time where you likely do not have wake up early for work and you can wake up refreshed.

Next, no matter what you are doing on a Saturday morning, there’s no excuses. If you need to set off early for an adventure day, you can wake up thirty or forty minutes earlier and get it done. AND… The icing on the cake… getting your weekly planning done first thing Saturday morning, leaves you worry free for the rest of weekend knowing that you’ve got the week ahead planned and you can now relax and enjoy the weekend.

Next tip. Turn everything you do repeatedly into a process. What I mean here is whether you are replying to your actionable emails, preparing for a meeting, or doing follow-up calls, create a process for doing it.

For example, when I clear my actionable emails, I make a cup of tea, turn on BBC Radio 2 and listen to Ken Bruce on the BBCs Sounds App—well I do at the moment, sadly we learned this week that Ken Bruce will be leaving at the end of March and I don’t know what I will be listening to from April. But that’s something I can deal with another day.

The tea, the music and the time of day (5pm to 6pm) sets an atmosphere and I open up my Action This Day folder and start at the top and work my way down (my email’s in reverse order—oldest at the top). I resist the temptation to cherry pick. I just start at the top and work my way down.

Sometimes, the top two or three are quick replies, sometimes they are longer replies. Either way, I start there and work my way down the list.

I would say five or six days a week I clear them all, and on the day or two I don’t, no worries, the ones I did not get to will be the first ones I deal with tomorrow.

It’s a process that begins in the morning when I clear my inbox. There’s usually 80 to 120 emails in my inbox in a morning (I live on the other side of the world, so most of my mail comes in through the night) So, I clear that first—I need to know about cancelled appointments and any “fires” before I start my day, and then email is pushed to the side until later in the day when I clear the actionable mail.

If you want to learn more about my process, I have a couple YouTube videos on it, and if you want to go much deeper, you can always enrol in my Email Mastery course. (Details as usual in the show notes)

Speaking of email and other forms of communication, here’s another tip I follow. Set rules for how and when you will respond to the various inputs. And I can assure you this works whether you are the CEO or the newest recruit if, and you need to courage to do this, you spell out your rules to everyone.

My rules are: Emails will be responded to within 24 hours. Instant messages within two hours and phone calls immediately.

I remember those laughable days when companies tried to apply rules such as phone calls will be answered within five rings. These kind of rules are ridiculous because they are unsustainable. It left staff on edge because every time the phone rang they started counting. Terrible if you were trying to do some focused work.

I’ve come across some companies that still think this is a good idea. Respond to customer or client emails and messages immediately. Not only is this impossible, but it’s terrible for your customers and staff. You set unrealistic expectations for both.

Set your own rules and communicate these to everyone. People don’t care whether you respond immediately or not, what they want is consistency so once you set your rules. Be consistent.

I can assure you, once you have these in place, you are much less jumpy when you get a message or an email. You know you have time to finish what you are doing before having the need to look at it. (That’s also hard to do, but again, with practice it does get easier)

One of the most powerful productivity habits I have is never going to bed without knowing what two things I must do tomorrow. This is so ingrained in me now that I cannot sleep until I know.

Most days, I will do this leisurely in front of Todoist before I close the lid on my computer. Other days, when I am a bit rushed, or not in my office, I’ll do it from my phone. Just open up Todoist, look at my tasks assigned for tomorrow and flag the two I must do tomorrow.

The beauty of this is I know once my morning routines are complete what I need to do and instead of not looking around for what to do, I get straight onto it. And that saves me a huge amount of time cumulatively through the week.

Ideally, I like to sit down and do this in front of my computer with my calendar open. It’s a ten minute daily ritual, if you like, that saves me hours each week. I think this is why I cannot understand why so few people do it and why I preach so much about it.

As I was thinking about this question, the biggest thing I do is to create processes for doing my core work—the work that is essential each week. That’s this podcast, my YouTube videos, blog post and newsletters as well as writing client feedback and of course doing my coaching calls. I know exactly how much time I need for these activities each week and that time is blocked out in my calendar.

It’s a non-negotiable part of my work life. Each part has a process, and from time to time, I look at my processes to see where I can improve them.

One final tip, whenever Todoist or Evernote update their apps, I always have a play with the new features. I want to know if the new features will enhance my processes or not. The only way to learn that is to play. Likewise, when Apple do their OS updates, I will watch the event, again to see where I can improve my processes.

I also resist the temptation to look at new apps. Todoist and Evernote have served me very well for the last ten years or so. I know them, they are familiar and they have never let me down.

And that’s about it, Craig. I think I’ve covered quite a few tricks I use that I may not have covered here or in my YouTube videos. I hope they can be useful to you.

Thanks, Craig, 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.

Monday Jan 16, 2023

How To Keep Your Daily List of Tasks Manageable

Monday Jan 16, 2023

This week’s question is on how to reduce the number of tasks in your task manager.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 259 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 259 of the Working With 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 for this show.

We’ve all face this problem. Getting tasks into our task manager, adding dates and then discovering that we have far too many tasks to complete on a given day. It’s problematic because we feel once a date is added, it must be done on that day.

The truth is, most of the tasks on your list for today do not need to be done today. They could be done tomorrow or the day after, and nothing would go disastrously wrong. Yet, the task being on your list today leaves you feeling it has to be done today.

In many ways, this is a symptom of becoming better organised and more productive. It’s not the disaster many feel it is, just a growing pain and one that, with a little strategic thinking, can be overcome.

So, today, that’s what I will do. I will share with you a number of tips and methods that will help you to overcome this feeling of overwhelm and the need to do everything on your list each day.

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

This week’s question comes from Philip. Philip asks; Hi Carl, I’m having a big problem with my daily tasks. No matter how hard I try, I never complete my tasks for the day, and it causes me to feel deflated and disillusioned. I keep trying different task managers, and that does help for a week or two, but after that, I find myself in the same problem. How do you stay on top of your tasks every day?

Hi Philip, thank you for your great question. And don’t worry. You are definitely not alone with this problem.

The first thing to understand is if you are following the Time Sector System, the focus is not necessarily on what you do each day; the focus is on what you get accomplished in the week. This is why the most important folder you have in the Time Sector System is the This Week folder. This is where you put all the tasks you want to complete this week.

All the other folders are just holding pens for tasks you have not yet decided when you will do. And that’s okay.

When you stop focusing on daily task numbers and instead focus on what you will accomplish in the week, if you get to the end of Monday and you still have several tasks to complete, you can relax and simply reschedule the remaining tasks for another day in the week.

Now, there will inevitably be tasks that need to be done on a given day. For those tasks, you use the 2+8 prioritisation method—where two of your ten most important tasks must be completed that day. (Even if you have to pull an all-nighter to do it—which hopefully doesn’t ever happen, but that’s the mindset you want to have)

You can utilise the power of time blocking and block out sufficient time to make sure you get those two tasks completed for the day. For instance, this week, on Tuesday, I had a two-hour block of time for writing. On my task list, I had this podcast script to write as a priority task. Hence, I wrote this script in that two-hour block of time.

When I did my planning for the day on Monday evening, I saw the task, and I saw I had a writing time block. I made writing the script a priority task and went to bed knowing I had sufficient time to write the script.

Linked to this, there are a couple of things you can do that will help to reduce your daily task list numbers. The first is to theme your days. This is an idea from Mike Vardy of the Producivityist podcast. Mike calls it Time Crafting, and essentially, you theme each day. For example, you may have Monday and Tuesday for client and customer work. Wednesday for follow-ups and chases, Thursdays for project work and Friday for admin.

Knowing what your core work is will help you design this effectively. If you don’t know what your core work is, you will fall into the trap of firefighting—where you are always reacting to what is thrown at you rather than being more proactive and focusing your time and attention on what you are employed to do.

Once you set your theme for the day, when you do your weekly planning session, you can move tasks that relate to each theme to its day. For instance, all your admin tasks can be scheduled for your admin day, your client matters can be scheduled for your client work days, and any project tasks can be done on project days.

The key to making this work, though, is to fix the days. When you find yourself knowing that Mondays are for working with your clients and customers and Fridays are your admin days, life becomes that little bit easier.

Now, there will inevitably be emergencies that need your time and attention on days when you planned to do something else. That’s just life, and that’s where you need to build some flexibility into your approach.

One of my favourite TV shows is BBC’s Repair Shop. If you don’t know this show, it’s about a group of skilled craftspeople who restores and repairs people’s things. These things can range from old alarm clocks that a grandparent owned and passed down to an old corner shop sign that has seen better days. The skills on the show are amazing. But one thing that stands out to me when I watch this show is before any work is done, the craftsperson looks at the object as a whole and looks to see what work needs to be done.

Invariably, the first step is to clean the object so they can get a better view of what needs to be repaired.

Often when we get a task, we don’t stop to look at the task as a whole and see what needs to be done. Our brains are terrible at estimating what needs to be done and how long it will take. It’s far better, when you process what you have collected in your inbox, to give yourself a few extra seconds to stop and think about what needs to be done before you move it to one of your time sectors. In my experience, most of your collected tasks don’t take as long as you first imagine. Often a task is similar in nature to other tasks you have to do and can be added to the same day you plan to do those similar tasks.

Which leads me to one of my favourite tricks to reducing my task list for the day, and that is to use spreadsheets.

The great thing about a spreadsheet is you can design it to contain whatever information you like. You can then manipulate that information in ways that give you a list you can work from.

So, if you work in sales and you need to follow up with prospects each day, rather than have all these follow-ups in your task manager, you put them into a spreadsheet. You then only need a single task in your task manager that tells you to do your follow-ups for the day.

The great thing about this is rather than having ten to twenty individual tasks randomly thrown into your task manager; you can “chunk” your follow-ups together because when you open your spreadsheet, the only decision you need to make is how long you spend on that task.

This also helps you better manage your time. You can dedicate however much time you like to doing your follow ups each day, and rather than looking for the tasks and the time you waste doing that, they are all contained in a single place with all the information you need from when you last spoke to the customer, to their contact details and any other information you want to keep.

This also avoids the problem that is inherent with a task manager. Once you check off a task it disappears. You no longer have any information you may have collected. You can try and search for your completed tasks and I know most task managers do allow you to do this, but it’s cumbersome and is a huge time waste.

Plus, if you are using Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel online, you can get the URL for the sheet and paste that into the recurring task so all you need do is click the link and you’re straight into the sheet you need with all the information you need right in front of you.

The final part to this conundrum is to be strict about what gets into your system. This comes back to the time v activity equation. Time is fixed. We only get 24 hours a day and we cannot change that. The only part of the equation we do have any control over is the activity part—what we do each day.

I’ve been reminded of this since I returned to Korea from Europe. Travelling east gives you jet lag and I am terrible with it. This means for the first week or two, on my return, I am very tired in the afternoons, become wide awake in the evening and wake up around 4 AM. I have in the past fought this and stayed in bed wide awake getting more and more frustrated. Instead, these days I get up at 4 AM and get as much work done as possible before the inevitable slump later in the day.

Gradually, my sleep returns to normal, but I find the 4AM starts are great for my productivity. I know. I cannot change the time I have each day, but I can get as much work done in the time of day I am awake and rest when I am feeling extremely tired.

So, there you go, Philip. I hope that has given you a few tips and tricks that will calm your overactive task manager and bring you some peace. Thank you for your question and thank you for listening.

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

Monday Jan 09, 2023

How Get Started With A Solid Morning Routine

Monday Jan 09, 2023

This week, it’s all about building a morning routine that leaves you focused and energised.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 258 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 258 of the Working With 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 for this show.

Something I have noticed about productive and successful people is they all have a morning routine that helps them to focus and energise themselves for the day ahead. Whether these people are sport stars, business executives or a stay at home parent, each days begins the same way—with time spent on themselves.

And that is the key to an empowering morning routine—it’s the time spent working on yourself in a way that leaves you feeling focused and ready for the day ahead.

This week’s question is all about morning routines: what to include and more importantly, how to be consistent with them.

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

This week’s question comes from Jules. Jules asks, Hi Carl, I like to idea of having a morning routine, but I’ve never been able to make anything stick. Do you have any tips or tricks for being consistent with things like morning routines?

Hi Jules, thank you for your question.

The one thing I have learned about morning routines (and end of day routines) is to make them stick you need to ensure that the activities you do are activities you enjoy doing. For many people it would be nice to start the day with exercise, but if you live in a country where the weather is somewhat unpredictable, waking up and heading out for a walk in torrential rain, is not necessarily the best start to the day.

Another mistake I see is to copy someone else’s routines. For example, Robin Sharma, advocates waking up at 5 AM and spending the first 20 minutes of your day with exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of study. That works for Robin and indeed works for many others who follow the 5 AM Club (as it is called), but for others—such as myself—waking up at 5 AM is impractical as I often work late and need seven hours sleep.

Indra Nooyi, former PepsiCo CEO wakes up at 4AM to read books and her email. For me, if I were to wake up at 4 AM to read books I’d find myself falling back to sleep very quickly.

Other people’s morning routines are not going to work for you. You need to find your own way. But the question is how do you do that?

Well, the first step is to decide how much time you want to spend on your morning routines. Too much time, for instance, will either mean you have to awake up too early, or delay the start of your day leaving you with too much pressure to get things done.

The ideal amount of time is no more than sixty minutes. Sixty minutes is enough time to do most things and means you are not going to interfere significantly with your sleep.

For the record, my morning routine takes around 45 minutes.

The next step is to decide what you want to do in your morning routines. Now, the thing here is whatever you do it must be something you really enjoy doing. You are not going to be consistent with these if you do not wake up and look forward to starting your routine.

So, what would you enjoy doing in a morning? Some things you may want to consider are:

Meditating

Some light exercise

Writing a journal

Reading

Going for a morning walk (preferably with a dog—that’ll put a smile on your face)

Taking an ice bath (not my cup of tea)

Choose activities that leave you feeling happy and energised.

You may want to experiment here for a few weeks. I’ve found some things look exciting on paper, but in a morning when you try doing them they just don’t fit right. For instance, a few years ago I tried meditation for fifteen minutes. I really didn’t enjoy it, so I ditched meditating.

Once you have a few activities the next step is to find your trigger.

This comes from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. The idea is you use a trigger activity that is easy to begin your routines. For example, my trigger is putting the kettle on. This has been the first thing I have done each morning for years. The turning on of the kettle to make my morning coffee starts my morning routine.

While I wait for the kettle to boil, I begin my stretching routine. These are a series of stretching exercises I picked up from Brian Bradley of the Egoscue Method. Once the kettle has boiled I brew my morning coffee and while that is brewing, I drink a glass of lemon water.

The great thing about having a trigger activity is that once you start, it becomes natural to move on to the next activity and you do not need to think about what to do next. This is again something from James Clear’s Atomic Habits and it’s called habit stacking. The trigger begins the stack.

Now on to timing. Once you know what activities you want to do in your morning routine, the question is how long do you need? As I mentioned earlier, anything up to 60 minutes is great.

My work day usually begins at 8:00 am, and I need forty-five minutes for my morning routines. This means I wake up at 7:00 am. This gives me plenty of time to complete my morning routines and leaves me around fifteen minutes to prepare for my first work activity whether that is a coaching call or writing.

Now, if I need to wake up earlier—which sometimes does happen—for example, let’s say I have a call at 7:00am, then my wake up time is 6:00am.

If you have young children, being consistent with your start time can be difficult, however, as your children grow up, they will go through phases. Some phases could be they wake up early, and you may need to work with them—perhaps give them an activity to do while you do your routines, other times you’ll struggle to get them out of bed and perhaps waking your kids up could become a part of your morning routines.

The thing is, don’t let outside influences destroy your morning routines. My recent holiday travels meant I wasn’t able to complete my morning routines consistently and that was okay. As soon as I landed and got to my hotel, had a good sleep, I started the next day with my morning routine. It’s not the end of the world if you miss a day or two because of travel or kids waking up at unexpected times.

Now, one thing I would advise you don’t do is to add your whole morning routine to your task manager. Most people have five to ten items on their morning routine list and adding these to your task manager will clutter things up.

If you want to track your routines, use your notes app. Most notes apps allow you to create a checklist so all you need do is create a checklist and duplicate this list each morning, if you want to track your progress.

Alternatively, if you do want to track your routines, I would advise going old-school analogue and printing out a calendar. Stick that on your refrigerator or the door of your bedroom and crossing off the days you complete your morning routines. There’s something about seeing your progress across the month on paper that encourages you to keep going.

While all our digital technology is great and allows us to get a lot of things done, it can also hide inside our devices and be forgotten. Having a piece of paper stuck on your door cannot be hidden. You see it every time you go to bed and every time you wake up. It’s there to remind you of your commitment.

One thing I would recommend you do as a way to close your morning routines is to end them by reviewing what your objectives for the day are. This helps you by focusing you on the results you want from the day. For instance, if you have a proposal to finish, make that an objective. You may also decide that getting out and doing some form of exercise is important that day. These can then form your objectives for the day and when you review these, you can decide when you will do them.

It’s reviewing my objectives for the day that has been a revelation for me. This has been the single most important thing that has helped my focus. All I am looking at are the two most important things I have decided on doing that day. Before I end my morning routines, I decide when I am going to do them and that’s it. I’m ready for the day ahead.

So, Jules, to help you stick to your morning routines, keep things simple. Make sure you only allow thing you love doing onto your morning routines list and most importantly of all, find your trigger. The one thing you do each morning without fail. I should have mentioned that brushing your teeth is one of the best triggers because it’s something you do each morning.

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

Monday Dec 19, 2022

Building Productivity Into Your Team.

Monday Dec 19, 2022

In our final episode of the year, we’re looking at how to improve the productivity of a team.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 258 | Script

Over the last year or so, I’ve received a number of questions related to helping a team improve their overall productivity. Now, this is a difficult question to answer because each individual team member will be motivated by different things and each person will have a unique approach to getting their work done.

Motivation is a key part to individual productivity. If you are not motivated by your work and you see it only as a way to pay the bills, more fulfilling motives such as ownership of a project or task, developing your skills and helping people solve problems don’t feature in an individual’s mindset.

That said, it is possible to build a highly productive team that has clear outcomes each day and week and at the same time builds ownership, camaraderie and a strong team work ethic. And that is what we will be looking at today.

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

This week’s question comes from Tony. Tony asks, Hi Carl, I manage a team of eight people and we are responsible to sales and the initial after sales programme following delivery of out product. The problem I am having is keeping my team focused on what we are trying to accomplish. They often get distracted by low value tasks that means we often fall behind on our plan. Do you have any advice on helping teams be more focused?

Hi Tony, thank you for your question.

As I mentioned in the introduction, working with a team of people has its own challenges when it comes to productivity but there are a few things you can do that will enhance you teams overall productivity.

The first is clear communication.

Often what happens within a team is there is poor communication on the results that the team is expected to accomplish. At the beginning of a year or a quarter, team leaders are usually reluctant to talk about what the team’s targets are.

Managers are quite happy to discuss individual targets with employees, but rarely talk about the group target.

The problem here is you encourage team members to focus on their individual targets and the team’s. What you want to be doing is ensuring that the team as a whole knows the target so that they can work together to achieve that team goal.

I remember when I was selling cars in the early 1990s, there were three of us in the new car sales team, plus a sales manager. Claire, Bob and myself.

Claire was an outstanding sales person. She was focused, aggressive (in a positive way) and could pull sales out of nowhere. Bob on the other hand was slower. He was patient and gentler, yet he had an enormous amount of experience and consistently brought ink the sales. Me? I was somewhere in the middle.

Each month out team’s target was to sell 35 cars. Now, traditionally, that number would be divided between the three of us equally, but while Claire rarely missed her targets, Bob and myself struggled to hit the target.

Yet, our sales manager, David, realised that the important target was the 35 cars. Not that his three sales people sold twelve cars each per month. If we had focused on the individual numbers, Claire would have slowed down in the forth week of the month, while Bob and I would be slow at the beginning of the month.

On the white board in David’s office, there was only two numbers. The target (35) and the number of cars we had sold that month. This way, we were encouraged to work as a team.

It also meant that if Claire’s more aggressive approach was not working with a particular customer, David would ask Bob or myself to step in and close the sale. Equally, if a slow burn approach appeared not to be working, we would ask Claire to step in and close the sale.

We had a regular morning meeting at 8:30am and in that meeting we discussed what we had on as potential sales, and we set objectives for the day.

The communication was clear and we set about our day with clear objectives to accomplish that day.

That team was the best team I ever worked in in terms of productivity. As far as I recall we never missed our targets, and we won a lot of awards for the best new car sales team within the group.

The success of that team was down to simple communication and a shared objective.

The next important factor for improving your team’s productivity is to trust your team to get on and do their work. This is about allowing your individual team members to own the task or objective.

If, as a manager, you are micromanaging your team and always monitoring what they are doing, you are destroying the team’s trust. You, as a leader, need to trust your team to get on do what they do best—their job.

As a leader of a team, your job is to ensure your team is moving in the right direction and to remove any barriers your team may face in the execution of their work—more on that later.

What this means, is once you have given your team members their instructions, so to speak, you need to leave them to get on and do it. Hence the importance of clear communication. If you are constantly calling, messaging and emailing them for updates, you are preventing them from doing their work. Your team need space to do their work.

Now in my experience, if a manager or team leader is always requesting updates, it’s a sign they do not trust their team. That is not a productivity issue, but a recruiting one. It means you are recruiting, or you feel you are recruiting, so called “B players”. That needs to stop. If you are employing the right people—the A Players—you can then step back and let them do what they do best.

Now, I know as a leader you need to report to your manager or leader. And that goes back to how you are communicating with your team. If you need to regularly report numbers to your manager, you should set up a simple reporting system that your team updates at the end of each day or week. That way, you will have access to the numbers you need to report to your boss without interrupting your team.

So, make sure you have clear reporting processes put in place for your team. Do not over complicate this. Updating the reporting system should not take your team more than ten minutes each day to do.

Now, back to your role as a barrier remover.

The best managers I’ve ever worked with saw their job as helping me and my colleagues to do their job with as little friction as possible. If there were procedural problems within the company, my manager would step in to sort out these problems. If I ever had a difficult customer, or student, my manager would step in and clear whatever problems I was having.

I remember one occasion where we had a particularly difficult student in our language institute. She was never happy with the teacher she was given and would inevitably complain if the teacher diverged from the textbook. Whenever she turned up in one the teacher’s classes, they would freeze up and their classes became very boring, which meant they lost students.

Our institute manager and I (as I was the native English teacher’s manager at that time) sat down and worked out a strategy to help this student achieve what she wanted to achieve. We even had a meeting with her to explain our teaching philosophy.

In the end it was decided I would teach her next class and before the class started I sat down and explained my teaching methodology to her and got her to agree to following my method for a month.

What we did was take a difficult student away from the other teachers so they could get on and do their job and allowed the most experienced teacher (at the that time, me) to solve the problem. We did. And, I got an invite to that student’s wedding six months later.

The one thing you do not want to be doing as a manager is imposing your productivity system on your team. What works for you is not likely to work for them. Instead, you want to be focusing on is giving clear instructions to your team and letting them get on do what they are best at doing.

The final piece of this puzzle is how you communicate with your team. If you allow your team to communicate in anyway they like, you are going to find you are swamped with emails, Teams or Slack messages and a backlog of phone calls.

Set a standard. If you are not already using something like Microsoft Teams or Slack, then look into adding a channel like this as your team’s communication channel.

This allows you to centralise all messages and gives your team a resource for solving problems that individual team members have solved. It can become a team Wiki page.

You also need to avoid placing response time expectations on your team too. If they feel they need to reply to your messages within minutes of receiving them. They are not going to be productive. Your team need the space to do their work, not worrying about replying to your messages as soon as they come in.

However, if you put in place a workable reporting system, you should not need to be asking your team for updates—that information will be available in the reporting system.

One final part to this is the question about whether you need a task or project manager to manage the tasks within your team. These can help if your team are working on joint projects. These can also help you as a manager to see what’s happening, what still needs to be done and where there are holdups. I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of the various apps you can use here, but in my experience working with teams, the best apps for managing team based work are apps like Trello, Microsoft Planner and Asana—boards seem to work better than lists with teams.

The key to making task and project managers work is someone needs to have responsibility to ensure they are updated. If you, as the team leader are the only one using this system it is not going to work. You need commitment from your team and that means you will need to show the benefits to your team.

I would suggest you set up a training morning or afternoon with your whole team to go through how to use the system. Allocate responsibility for making sure the system is up to date and clearly define expectations.

In my experience, if you commit to training your team correctly in using the task manager, you will get support. A lack of training and understanding of the benefits is usually the reason why these well-intentioned approaches fail to work.

So there you go, Tony. I hope that helped and thank you for your question.

Thank you to you too for listening and let me wish you a wonderful Christmas (if you celebrate Christmas), and a fantastic start to the new year.

This podcast will be back on the 9th January.

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

Monday Dec 12, 2022

The End Of Year Clean Up

Monday Dec 12, 2022

This week, what could you change about your system to get it ready for 2023?

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 257 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 257 of the Working With 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 for this show.

There’s something about an end of year that turns our minds towards cleaning things up, making changes and planning. Yet when you think about it, these things can be done at any time in the year. Cleaning your task manager of tasks that have been sitting around for over a year, reviewing how we manage our tasks and making plans can all be done anytime. All we need to do is make that decision.

That said, the end of year often does give us some extra time to do these things. Emails reduce a little, and most people’s attention turn towards the upcoming year. And certainly if you live in the west, Christmas week does take us away from our work and spending time with family and friends.

I find this presents opportunities to clean up my notes for the year, delete tasks I’ve added, not done and are just sitting around in my task manager cluttering things up.

This week’s question is on this very subject. What can we do to change things, reenergise tired processes and fix things that haven’t worked well throughout the year.

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

This week’s question comes from Jan. Jan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve seen you mention your end of year clean up in your blog posts in the past but I’ve never seen or heard you describe what you do. Could you explain your process for cleaning things up?

Hi Jan, thank you for your question.

My end of year clean up has become a bit of a ritual for me now. It’s something I enjoy doing because I am not working in the sense of creating content, instead I am doing a lot of sitting around and TV watching, not something I do at anything other time of the year. It’s relaxing and my mind isn’t “on” in the sense of thinking what to create next.

So, where do I start?

The first step for me is to do a review of all the apps I am using. The goal here is to eliminate apps I am not using. That means evaluating the usefulness of the apps I have on my computer, phone and iPad.

Through the year I will test a few apps to see what everyone is talking about. In the past, I’ve had apps like Notion, Obsidian, Things 3 and OneNote on my computer and as they didn’t make the cut, so to speak, I deleted them.

This year, I will be happily removing all the COVID apps I installed, I noticed these were still hanging around on a “just in case” basis. But as Korea is no longer doing test and trace and we can travel without the need for a PCR test, I can remove these.

I should point out if you do this exercise, once you’ve cleared all these apps, your computer, phone and tablets feel faster. I’m sure there’s no difference, but it does feel faster.

Next is to go into my workhorse apps and clean them up. I usually start with Todoist because this is the easiest one to clean up. With the Time Sector System, the folder you want to be paying attention to is your Long-term and on-hold folder. This folder can easily become a dumping ground and the end of the year is a good time to go in there and delete tasks you know you’re not going to be doing.

For tasks that have been sitting in there for a while but you feel you will still likely want to do them, you can move them out of your task manager and create a project note or add them to a list of tasks you want to do in the future but require further planning out, again in your notes.

Then it’s time to go into my notes. Now for me, this year is going to be a difficult one. This is the year I will be making a decision on whether to relegate Evernote to being a storage app and go all in on Apple Notes.

Now, the reason for this change of approach with Evernote is because Evernote is going in a direction that will not support how I use notes. That’s not a criticism of Evernote, I feel Evernote is doing brilliantly. However for me, I want my notes app to be simple with as few features as possible. When an app has too many features, the temptation to play around with formatting, colours and setups is too much for me. I spend more time playing than doing and that does nothing for my productivity.

Apple Notes, on the other hand, is simple, has great search features and works across all my devices. The test size is readable (while Evernote on my phone and iPad is too small for me to read comfortably), and it does the job I want a notes app to do with little fuss.

Throughout the year, if you are using a notes app properly, you will have collected a lot of notes that you no longer need. These need to be deleted (or archived). I love this purge. It almost acts as a review of my year. I go through my folders, clearing our old notes and making sure the titles and any tags I am using for the notes I keep are relevant and searchable.

This step is important. The search features on our computers are very powerful these days, and saves us a lot of time when looking for a note. If you haven’t learned how to use the system search on your devices, that’s something I highly recommend you do. It will save to a lot of time.

It during this clean up process when you will also see ways where you can improve your structure. If you’ve read Tiago Forte’s Building A Second Brain book this year, a book I would highly recommend, you may want to implement some of the principles in that book at this stage.

Now while you cleaning up your task manager and notes app, you want to be asking yourself: “how can I do it better?”. We want to be building seamless and effective systems, and there’s always room for improvement. If you remember the principles of COD—Collect, Organise, Do—you want to be asking yourself how you can improve your collecting process and how you can reduce the time it takes you to organise what you collect so you can spend more time doing the work.

The more time you spend in your task managers and notes apps, the less time you spend doing the work. So ask yourself, where can you speed up the process?

The final step to the end-of-year clean up is to go into the folders where you store your documents. Now, this is often the hardest part of the process because, over the year, we will have accumulated a lot of documents that either we no longer need or can be archived.

I use an external hard drive to move files and documents I no longer need. This helps to keep my computer’s drive clean and also reduces the need for more space in my cloud storage services.

I would also recommend you go into your Documents folder on your computer. We often download PDFs and other documents here and then forget about them. Clean that out.

Once you’ve cleared everything up, now it’s time for the fun part. Asking yourself how you can improve your system. Again, what we are looking for here is speed. How can we get faster at finding our stuff? Researching your device’s search tips and tricks is a great way to do this. I’ve learned so much by watching YouTube videos on learning how to get the most out of Apple’s Spotlight (and optimising it to work better for me).

The point of this exercise is to get your systems ready for the new year. You don’t want to be going into the new year with slow, unwieldy systems. Starting the new year with a clean set-up not only speeds everything up, but it also sets you up for a fantastic year.

The final part of this process is to look for bumps in the road where your system isn’t working too well. I find these bumps are usually in your task managers. Your task manager needs to tell you what you should be working on today. Everything else in there is simply holding pens for tasks you don’t need to do today, or you have not yet decided when you will do them.

How can you best set this up so when you go into your task manager to see what needs to happen today, you can see instantly what your objective tasks are—the tasks that must be done today?

And now for the bonus.

In recent years, I have taken to using the end-of-year break to go through my calendar to see how I can better optimise my week, so I get to spend more time doing the things I love doing. From spending more quality time with my family to being more consistent with exercise.

For 2023, the area I want to improve is my sleep. I am a terrible sleeper, and I need to be more consistent with this. So, one of my objectives is to redesign my week, so I have a cut-off time each day—a time I need to switch off my computer and a time I need to be in bed.

If you have followed my tip to design your perfect week, you can turn on this calendar and see how you can merge this with your actual week. To give you an example, I want to better use the mornings for creative work. I am at my most creative in the morning and a lot less so in the afternoons. I can block time out on my calendar for writing and recording and push off all my meetings to the afternoon or later in the morning.

I understand not all of you have complete control over your calendar. But you likely have more control than you think. Blocking time out now means other people cannot schedule meetings when you could be getting on with your focused work. Try it. It might just work. If it doesn’t, then you can go back to the drawing board and rethink your strategy here.

So, there you go, Jan. I hope that has helped and I also hope you get some time over the Christmas break to play with this. The key is to not put pressure on yourself to do this. It needs to be fun. I like to sit with my parents in the evenings and while they watch their favourite TV shows, I can be getting on and cleaning things up.

As this exercise is fun, I can be present when we are talking and while they are consumed in the TV show. I can be cleaning up.

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

Monday Dec 05, 2022

Why You Need To Take Projects Out Of Your Task Manager

Monday Dec 05, 2022

Podcast 256

This week, we’re looking at the overwhelming number of so-called “projects” people create and why it’s these that contribute to overwhelm and a lot of wasted time.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System