Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 255 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 255 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.

A few weeks ago, I published a video on planning 2023 on my YouTube channel. In that video, I encouraged viewers to create a note in their notes app and to begin a two-month brainstorming period where they looked at a few areas of their lives and thought about what they would like to change.

These areas were around what they would like to change about themselves, their work and their lifestyles. Plus a couple of questions about goals and bucket lists.

The idea here is to open you up so you can go deeper than your usual new year's resolutions and to give you time to think about the person you want to become.

Well, that two month brainstorming period is coming to an end and it’s time to start looking at what you can do in 2023 that will move things forward on the areas you would like to make changes and in this week’s podcast, a break from the normal format, I will take you through the process of building a plan for 2023 that will be achievable, fun and more importantly will be the catalyst for the changes you will need to turn these ideas into reality.

So, this week, the Mystery Podcast Voice will be having a break, and we’ll get straight into the answer.

So, if you did the annual planning exercise, you will hopefully have quite a lot of ideas written down on your planning sheet.

Now, don’t worry if you haven’t done the annual planning exercise; there’s still a little time left for you to do it.

So, the four main questions on the planning sheet are:

What would I like to change about myself?

What would I like to change about my lifestyle?

What would I like to change about the way I work?

What can I do to challenge myself?

Each of these questions is designed to get you to explore a different part of your life, from you as an individual to the way you work. The final question on challenging yourself is there to help prevent you from stagnating and getting stuck inside the dangerous comfort zone.

If you have completed this exercise over the last six to eight weeks, you will, by now, have quite a list. The problem is you will not be able to complete all of these ideas in twelve months. The trick now is to look at your list as a whole and look for a pattern.

Often you will find in the part about making changes to yourself that there will be some areas you have not been happy with for a while. Your time management might be bad, or you may not be happy with the state of your health.

To give you an example, last year, I wanted to improve the quantity and quality of my sleep—which was not healthy. This led me to look at my day as a whole and to see why I was not getting sufficient sleep. I had too many early starts and late finishes. I could see from my calendar that this was not sustainable, so I created a few rules.

Now, I must be finished at my computer by 11pm and be in bed by 11:30pm. I also changed my morning start from 6:00am to 7:30am.

I also made a point to read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, which is a fantastic book and learned a lot more about ensuring I had a better quality of sleep each night.

I have not been perfectly consistent with this, but I have made a lot of progress and will continue to refine this going into 2023.

And this is something you will discover. It’s unlikely you will be able to change something perfectly—most things we are working towards will always be works in progress—but the act of starting and building in new routines and habits will lead you towards where you want to be.

When it comes to the lifestyle question, what we are looking at here is the way we are living our lives. Three years ago, at the end of 2019, I realised I had got stuck in a rut in where we were living. A few years earlier, my wife and I had decided we wanted to move to the east coast and away from the noisy and poor air quality of the big city, but we were doing nothing about it.

I saw that our reliance on the public transport system was great if we wanted to stay living in the big city, but was the reason we were ‘trapped’ there. We decided that the best way to break this would be to get a car. And that became our goal in 2020.

This meant I needed to get serious about saving money, and that is what I did from the start of 2020. Now, I was helped by the pandemic. That reduced our expenditure significantly because for a large part of 2020, we were unable to go out.

In September of that year, we bought our car, and that changed everything for us. We travelled around the country once a week, discovering new places, and in December, we found a guest house on the east coast that we could rent monthly, and we took the plunge. We signed up for an initial three-month stay in January, and that led to us staying the whole of 2021. At the end of it, we had let our apartment in the city go and moved to a new home on the east coast.

None of these changes would have taken place if I had not identified areas we were not entirely happy with. It was taking the time to look at things as a whole and seeing where we could make changes that would lead us to where we really wanted to be.

Now, what about the way you work? Here you have greater control over things than you may imagine. The pandemic has brought more flexible ways to work, and that’s a great thing. Research suggests that if you are more of an extrovert, you thrive in an environment surrounded by people. Conversely, if you are more of an introvert, you will find working from home incredibly satisfying and productive.

So, perhaps one of the first things you want to investigate is what kind of person you are. Where do you do your best work? Alone, in a quiet place or when surrounded by people and noise.

But there are other things you can look at with your work. For one, identify what your core work is. This is the work you are paid to do. Look at your job description. For instance, a departmental manager is employed to manage a department. What are the core tasks involved in managing a department? Where do you think you could improve in these areas?

For instance, if you want to improve productivity within your team, the best thing you can do is improve your communication. If your way of communicating is not simple, direct, and to the point when assigning projects, that will profoundly affect the outcome of the project.

The method is to tell your team in clear terms what the outcome you want is, and to trust that your team will use their skills and knowhow to deliver the results on time. Interfering, calling too many meetings, and micro-managing will result in a team that performs poorly and is demotivated.

Learn to tell them what you want to and let them get on with it. Develop simple reporting systems that require little time from your employees so they can stay focused on the objective.

If you are a salesperson, what could you change next year that would improve your overall performance? Where do you feel you are weak and what could learn, change or develop that will improve that area?

And that brings us to the final question: what can you do to challenge yourself?

One of the biggest dangers in our lives is our comfort zone. Our ancestors had to deal with war, revolution, disease and predators. Today, for the majority of people on earth, our lives are incredibly easy by comparison. We have an abundance of food, safe houses and access to clean water.

This has made our lives far too easy, and we no longer put ourselves in challenging situations. Without challenging ourselves, we stop growing and when that happens our lives atrophy and we fall behind. You cannot let that happen. It’s devastating on your mental health and leaves you feeling left behind.

Set yourself a challenge in 2023. That could be to climb the tallest mountain in your country, or to do the from couch to 5k running race. Alternatively you could sign up for a challenging course such as a masters degree or to design a 30 day challenge for each month of the year.

Something that would really challenge you.

The great thing about setting yourself something challenging is you will reintroduce yourself to the concept of failure. Failure is the best way to learn and to grow. It’s through failure we learn what works and what does not work. From my own personal experience I’ve learned that failure is the greatest teacher there is.

It teaches you to analyse where things went wrong, where they went well and and helps you to reframe problems and difficulties so you find a way around them.

The important thing to remember is you do not have to change everything all at once. Changing slowly over a number of years is likely to give you better results than trying to change everything in one year. One of my favourite Tony Robbins’ quotes is “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade”

So, think long-term. Having an approach of CANI—Constant And Never-ending Improvement will help you to achieve the things you want to achieve and bring you a lot more fulfilment that trying to change too much too fast and giving up. That destroys your confidence and leaves you feeling terrible about yourself.

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

Monday Nov 21, 2022

The 3 Unsexy Productivity Essentials.

Monday Nov 21, 2022

This week, we’re looking at the unsexy part of becoming more productive and better with our time management.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 254 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 254 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.

Now, most people in the time management and productivity field, such as myself, will generally talk about systems, routines and applications. And while these do have an important place in the helping us be more productive, there are three other parts to the productivity equation rarely talked about and often overlooked.

What are those?

They are Sleep, exercise and diet.

For many people, these three elements are elephants in their otherwise well-ordered life. You know, deep down, if you are not getting sufficient sleep, not getting outside and moving, and eating highly processed and unnatural foods, you are destroying your ability to focus, concentrate and ultimately that effects your overall output. (Not to mention what these will do to your long-term health)

And I am not just talking about work output. If you are constantly tired and unable to concentrate, that’s going to have negative effects on your family life. You will be too tired for quality time with your kids and partner, and that poor diet and lack of sleep will adversely affect your mood when you do have time for your family life.

We have a lot to look at here so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been so busy at work this year that when I get home all I want to do is crash on the sofa and do nothing. I end up watching TV or watching YouTube videos until very late and then not getting enough sleep. I know I should spend some time planning my day and doing some exercise, but I just don’t have the energy. How do you fit in time for exercise and planning?

Hi Ryan, thank you for your question.

This is a problem I know many people face. Planning the day at the end of the day when you're tired and just want to do nothing because you are exhausted. It’s not going to be something high on your list of priorities.

Let’s be honest, we can all operate a reasonably productive day without doing daily planning. For most people, this is how they have operated for years without any immediate adverse effects. However, a question I would ask is without following a few simple daily practices, how are things turning out?

If you are stressed out, anxious and exhausted at the end of your working day, is that a good thing? Is that how you want to feel at the end the of the day?

So, what can we do?

Well, this is what I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. While new systems and apps are exciting, and the sexy part of productivity and time management, these things will only go so far. No new app or system will change the work you still have to do. Just because a task is in Things 3 instead of Todoist, won’t change the fact that the task still needs doing.

No app is going to plan the day for you—even with machine learning or artificial intelligence. Only you, as an individual knows what’s important to you. I find it interesting that Outlook Calendar’s AI will fill your blank times with work, never tell you to call your partner, or go for a walk.

Now, I’ve been studying productivity and time management long enough to know that it’s never the case of not having time. You have time. You have more than enough time to fit everything in. The real reason you “feel” you don’t have time is you have not prioritised what’s important to you.

But, let’s step back a little and look at the three absolute basics of being more productive. Let’s start with sleep. When you get sufficient amount sleep, you are more awake, more creative and focused. Those three on their own will give you a far more productive day than being half asleep, and distracted.

I did a little experiment earlier this year. I spent a week surviving on four and half hours sleep each day. That week was a complete disaster for my overall productivity. Work that I was normally able to easily get done in a week, was a struggle. In fact, I had to give up trying to do some of the work I wanted to do.

By the end of that week, I had a backlog. I NEVER have backlogs. I was too tired to clear my actionable email each day. I became irritable towards the end of the week, and I started craving sugary snacks after only two days.

By the end of the week, I was exhausted. My exercise was terrible. Even taking my dog for a work became a chore—something I normally love doing.

Now, I’ve never been a good sleeper. But The lessons I learned from that little experiment got me serious about my sleep. I will cancel meetings and appointments now if I need to, to ensure I get my minimum number of hours (six and half).

So, Ryan, my first tip is sort your sleep out. If you don’t know how much sleep you need, do an experiment over the end of year break and sleep with no alarm for seven days. Make a note of how many hours sleep you get each night and average it out. That will tell you how much sleep you naturally need. We are all different here.

From my experiment during my last break, I discovered I actually need an average of 7 hours 20 minutes. I’m not there yet. As I say, I have a minimum of 6 ½ hours, but next year I will work towards moving that to the seven hours twenty minutes.

I would strongly recommend to all of you that you read Matthew Walker’s book, Why We Sleep. That will change your whole thinking about sleep.

Just getting enough sleep each day will radically improve your overall productivity as well as your mood, so you are a lot more attentive to the people you care about.

Now, what about exercise? Now here’s the problem with exercise. A lot of people hate exercise. Possibly because how they were introduced to exercise at school has left a scar that still lives with them today. Yet exercise is essential for productivity.

However, to get the benefit of exercise, you do not need to go to a gym or out running. Really, what is meant by “exercise” is movement. We need to move.

It’s interesting that when Apple were developing the Apple Watch, the two key parts to their exercise app were number of “active” minutes and the number of times you stood up per day. They even put a target on these:

Thirty minutes of activity and standing twelve times per day. The standing metric was measured by making sure you stood at least once for sixty seconds or more every hour or so.

So, what is involved in movement or activity. Well, a thirty minute intentional walk would do. But you can go further. Stop using lifts (or elevators as they are called in North America) and escalators. Reintroduce yourself to stairs. The stairs are a great source for getting the blood flowing and improving your focus and productivity.

Even if you have a disability and are unable to walk unaided, any kind of activity you can do that will raise your heart rate counts as exercise. A non-motorised wheel chair gives you wonderful opportunities to move with your upper body for example.

One tip I learned from a preventative medicine doctor (Dr Mark Hyman) is to get yourself outside and walk for twenty minutes after a meal. That movement will prevent your blood sugar levels from spiking after a meal and help you to avoid the ‘afternoon slump’ that affects so many people.

Seventy years ago, it would have been very hard to find a gym. Lifting weights was an exclusive and minority sport and unless you were into body building—a sport most people had never heard of back then—your only introduction to a gymnasium was at school and most people treated those as a wicket form of torture netted out my evil PE teachers.

Why were gyms so rare back then? Well, that’s because we moved a lot more and never needed them. There wasn’t the convenience we have today. Escalators were rare, very few people had TVs in their home (and those that did had to keep getting up to change channel) and if someone called you, you again had to get up, go to the hall and answer the phone.

There was no home delivery pizza or other convenience foods, so we had to cook. Our whole lives were based around movement.

Today, it’s perfectly normal for many people to get home, sit down on the sofa and not move again until they head off to bed four or five hours later. They left their home, walked the three metres to their car, drove to the office, parked in the car park, walked the five metres to the lifts, got to their desks, and spend the next eight or nine hours sat down. Then repeated the homeward journey, to spend the evening sat on a sofa.

Is it any wonder in the developed world over 60% of people are dangerously overweight and suffering from some form of preventable cardiovascular disease?

And that leads me to the final piece in the mix. Diet.

Yes, convenience food is often delicious. It’s also quick and can fill a hole instantly. You would think if all I have to do is order something through an app, have it delivered to my door within thirty minutes that would allow me more time to get more stuff done.

Well, no. The majority of food we eat today is highly processed, full of sugar and is not satiating. It leaves you craving more which has disastrous effects on your blood sugars. This then leads to spikes in your insulin levels and if repeated over a long period of time will result in you becoming pre-diabetic or full blown diabetic.

And diabetes is not a disease you want. It’s linked to the increasing numbers of dementia, not to mention the likelihood of limb amputations, irreversible heart disease and kidney failure. You really do not want to develop this horrible disease.

The effects of all that sugar and highly processed food on your productivity is devastating. It’s what leaves you feeing hungry mid-morning, sleepy in the afternoon and exhausted in the evenings. You’re not in the mood to focus your attention on anything. This is why we are so easily distracted by email, messages and our co-workers gossiping.

The trouble is most people are in denial about the state of their diet. They think the problem is they have too much work, they are overwhelmed or their systems are a mess (so they need to find a new app).

No. If you’re not getting enough sleep or exercise and your diet is a disaster zone, that is the reason why you are stressed out, overwhelmed and tired all the time. It’s not your work or the things you have to do.

Now, as we come towards the end of the year, my advice is start with these three unsexy parts of the productivity mix. Make a commitment to yourself to start moving and sleeping more and sort out your diet.

As I mentioned before read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep book. In addition, I would recommend Dr Mark Hyman’s Pecan Diet book as well as Dr David Perlmutter’s Drop Acid.

Once you’ve read those three books read Dr Jason Fung’s Obesity Code.

If you commit to reading those four books over the end of year break, you will furnish yourself with the knowledge to make better choices about how and when to sleep as well as what to eat. They will dramatically change your life.

Making changes in these three areas of your life: your sleep, movement and diet will have a profound impact on your energy levels through the day which will impact the quality and quantity not only on what you do last work, but with your relationships with the people that matter most to you.

Plus, of course, you will significantly reduce your risk of developing debilitating lifestyle diseases that will ultimately prevent you from living the life you have always dreamed of.

Thank you, Ryan, for you 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 Nov 14, 2022

How to Bring Real Balance Into Your Life.

Monday Nov 14, 2022

This week, we’re looking at building balance into our lives, and I explain why we look at the whole idea of balance the wrong way.

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Episode 253 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 253 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 frequently hear about balancing our lives. Terms like “work/life balance” are bandied around as if it’s something we can achieve. The trouble is, building balanced days and weeks is an elusive goal. There’s simply too much we want to build into our days:

Seven to eight hours sleep, quality time with our family, exercise, eight to nine hours of work and time for eating, resting, TV and hobbies. Add all that up and it’s more than twenty-four hours.

This week’s question is about how we can build a more balanced life and there is a way, but first we need to dispose of the traditional thinking about what a balanced life is and embrace a different approach.

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

This week’s question from from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl, I work a full time job, have two young kids, a husband and a lot of hobbies I want to pursue. The trouble I have is I cannot fit everything I want to do into my schedule. I’ve tried your perfect week idea, but I find I run out of time. Are there any other ways I can try to have a more balanced, less stressful life?

Hi Annie, thank you for your question.

I was very much in the same boat as you a few years ago. I was trying to build a business, work a full time job, exercise every day and spend quality time with my family and it was impossible.

Whenever there was a public holiday, I wanted to work on my own business, but there were family responsibilities that could not be ignored and my regular work days were lengthening. I found myself working well past midnight, and having to wake up at 6 AM to get to my first classes.

It was around then I realised that there will always be periods of time when we need to get our heads down and do our work. But these intense periods of work do not last.

Take starting a business as an example. If you decide to start your own business, the first thing to get thrown out of the window is the idea of working nine til’ five. That’s a corporate office life concept that does not work when you start your own business. Starting your own business requires a 24/7 commitment. If you’re not working on your business, your brain will be solving problems and coming up with fresh ideas. It’s constant and doesn’t stop.

However, that’s when you are in the startup phase. Once you have your business up and running, things slow somewhat. You develop processes for doing your work and you soon start to get your time back.

When I first began my YouTube channel, it took me pretty much all day on a Friday to record and edit my videos. Today, I can do the recording and editing in less than three hours. I developed processes. I learned how to use Adobe’s Premiere Pro video editing software and I have systems in place to ensure everything is uploaded quickly and efficiently.

What we need to do is to look at time and balance over a longer period. You are not going to balance individual days, everyday. You may be able to balance occasional days, but to do that you would have to almost micro-manage your day, and there are so many things that could torpedo your plans, trying to do this too often will just result in stress and anxiety.

For example, Annie, if you are trying to juggle your work, your family, hobbies and other things in your life, you could look at your whole week. Accepting on, say, Tuesday and Thursday you will be focused on work, but you could also make Wednesday and Friday family nights and Mondays could be used for your hobbies.

For this to work, you would need to be doing a weekly planning session. It would be during this planning time where you block activities on your calendar for the following week. Having a plan like this then allows you to plan at a deeper level at what you will do.

For instance, one of your children may have a swimming lesson on Wednesday evenings. You could block out Wednesday evenings to go to the swimming pool and perhaps add going out for dinner with your kids afterwards. That’s spending quality time with your kids.

If you know, you will have time on a Thursday for catching up on work, you would be much more relaxed and present with your kids on a Wednesday.

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that there will be periods of time when we need to be completely focused on a project. A project that requires a lot of time and attention over a month or more.

In these situations, if you are worried about trying to balance your time, you are introducing a lot of unnecessary stress into your life. Important projects that need lot of focus need time. You cannot rush these things. Introducing stress into the mix is going to harm that focus and will be very unhealthy for you.

However, if we look at a period of say three months, and see how balanced those three months were, you are likely to find that you have been pretty balanced. When I analyse my last three months, I’ve worked on two big projects, spent a few days with my family, exercised almost every day and managed a few easy days of rest and relaxation.

Those big projects consumed me for around ten days each. They involved a few sixteen hour days and a lot of focus and thinking. But a three month period has around ninety days, so twenty days out of ninety is pretty balanced.

In those ninety days, there have been twelve days off (I try to take one day off a week) for you, Annie, you may two days off a week, so that twenty-four days.

Most people’s problem with balance is they are looking at things in a too shorter time frame. If you extend the time frame over three or more months, you have a far greater chance of balancing your life.

If you look at author, John Grisham’s work and life balance, he will spend around three to six months of the year in intense writing mode. Each day for those three to six months he’s completely consumed with the book he is writing. Once finished and the manuscript is sent to his publishers, he disappears on holiday. For the next few weeks it’s all about rest and relaxation.

The great thing about seeking balance over a longer period of time is you feel a lot less stressed and anxious. You know you can allow certain parts of your life to consume you for periods of time. Whether that is work or family related. It also means you can be much more present in the moment, without worrying about what you are not doing.

Another concept I’ve looked at in the past is the eight week work cycle. This is where for six weeks you focus all your efforts and attention on working on a specific project and once that has been concluded, you rest for two weeks. During those two weeks you attend to all the things you haven’t put much attention on.

Around two years ago, I adopted a quarterly week off. This is where I take the last week of each quarter off. I got this idea from Tim Ferriss. He actually takes two weeks off and travels to a different country or city for the duration of the break. He’s a little stricter than I am in that he comes off the grid entirely. No phone, no internet, just him his thoughts and a notebook.

What I’ve noticed is people who have adopted a longer time frame to create balance in their lives get a lot more done and are a lot happier and less stressed. They know there will be time for spending with their family and friends, and when they are with their family and friends they really are with them. Not being physically present but mentally being elsewhere—thinking about work, or a project that is not getting done.

In a recent weekly newsletter, I wrote about the time pendulum. In this the needle swings to the left occasionally when you have a lot of work related stuff on your plate. It’s all consuming and needs you attention beyond your regular work hours. However, the pendulum will always swing back towards the right where you get time to rest recuperate.

Fighting to keep the pendulum in the middle is a stress you do not need. Acceptance of the intense period of work, knowing that the pendulum will swing back to the right is a welcome way to maintain a reasonably balanced life.

There are always going to be periods when your time and attention will be dominated by a single project or event. That’s life. There’s no point in fighting it, you cannot win that battle. However, acceptance, though, relieves you of that stress and you no longer feel like you are in a fight. Instead, you can put all your focus and attention on the task in hand, knowing you will soon have time to rest, recuperate and focus your attention on other areas of your life you feel may be out of balance.

Hence the reason why it’s so important to know what your areas of focus are. If you haven’t taken the time to build out your areas of focus, that would be the first thing I would recommend you do. I’ve put a link in the show notes for you to download the areas of focus workbook. I would recommend you give yourself a few days to go through that and build out those eight areas that important to us all.

Thank you Annie 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 Nov 07, 2022

How To Stop Overthinking and Overcomplicating.

Monday Nov 07, 2022

This week, we’re looking at how to stop overthinking and over-complicating our lives.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 252 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 252 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.

One of the biggest drains on our productivity is over-thinking things. It’s this overthinking that usually leads to overcomplicating our task managers, notes apps and work in general.

However, there are a few things we can do that will eliminate the need to think too much about things. One of those, I’ve written and spoken about a lot, and that is in the way we write our tasks. If you write tasks in a haphazard way, you will end with tasks such as a website address with no idea what you need to do, or a single name with no indication what you need to do with that name.

Whenever you write a task, you need to have an actionable verb telling you precisely what needs to be done. For instance: “look at this website for design ideas” or “call Jenny about next week’s meeting”. It’s a simple trick that adds, perhaps, a few seconds to writing out the task, but it will save to a lot more than a few seconds when it comes to deciding when you will do the task.

It’s surprising how much time we lose when we need to think about what to do and how to do it. It’s when we do that that we discover multiple different ways to do something, and if we are not motivated enough to get whatever needs doing done, we use the excuse to “think about it” as a way to delay doing the task.

So, before we get into the depth of this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Leon. Leon asks, Hi Carl, I’ve been following you for a long time now, and I understand how to set up my system. The problem I have is I feel I waste so much time trying to decide what to do and how to do it. I collect everything in my inbox but then never do most of the things I put there. How do you manage all your tasks?

Hi Leon, thank you for your question.

When you say, “I waste so much time trying to decide what do and how to do it” I presume that this will be a symptom of how your write your tasks and not being clear on where your priorities are.

If we leave writing your tasks out for the moment and look at the decision part, this should be almost automatic. When you know where your priorities are, there will always be a natural hierarchy for the tasks that you do.

For instance, if you were a salesperson when at work, your priorities would always be those tasks that risk you gaining a sale. Everything else, no matter how loud the task is—colleagues or bosses screaming at you for an activity report, for example—are not priorities.

I know it’s hard to ignore your boss. But if you needed to call your boss about your activity report or a customer asking for further information, your customer is the priority and there shouldn’t even be a debate about it. Remember, you’re a salesperson. Your job is to sell. So, of the two calls; calling your boss or calling the customer, which one is likely to result in a sale?

A doctor would never leave a seriously ill patient to answer a question from a manager. Doctors are trained to identify where their priorities are. You need to train yourself to know instinctively where your priorities are.

And therein lies the secret to simplifying your work.

When you know what your objective is, all you need work out is the fastest way to get from where you are now to where you want to be.

Now, it would be very rare for you arrive at a project or task you haven’t done before, or done something similar. A manager having to hire or fire someone will have done that before. The difference is the role you are recruiting for or the person you are firing. However, there will already be a process to achieve these results.

Over time you want to be fine-tuning your processes. I understand when you do something for the first time it’s likely to take longer, but as you are doing it you are learning how to do it, and you can fine-tune your process as you go along.

The key is the keep focused on your outcome. What are you trying to achieve?

Imagine you need to hire a new designer for your design team. Your company will likely already have a recruiting process, and if not, someone within your organisation will have hired someone at some time. Find out how they did it. Open your notes app, and write out a checklist of all the steps you anticipate you will need to do. Once you have your checklist, go through it and look for the shortcuts.

When we brainstorm these ideas, we overcompensate. We think of all the little things that likely don’t need doing. Once we have brainstormed what we think needs to be done to achieve our outcome, we should go through the list and eliminate the unnecessary (and obvious tasks).

Now, I’ve covered daily and weekly planning numerous times on this podcast, and it is a vital part of making decisions about what to work on.

What I’ve noticed is those people who get the importance of daily planning and do it consistently, are the ones who are not overwhelmed or struggling to get their work done. It’s this step back at the end of the day to look at what needs to be done and deciding what you must get done the next day that makes all the difference.

It eliminates procrastination at a key part of the day—the start. You know, from the moment you wake up what you will do first.

For instance, last night, as I was doing my planning, I identified my next YouTube video needed to be uploaded and scheduled and this podcast script had to be finished before 11:00am.

If you look at that sentence, two important words: “needed” and “had” to. There’s no debate. Once my morning routines were finished, I completed the YouTube video and uploaded it, and now I am writing this script. The current time is 9:40am. There’s no question in my mind about whether I will get these two tasks complete before 11 AM. They will be done.

This means, right now, my email is off—anything coming in in the next sixty minutes can wait and my phone is on do not disturb. I am focused on the job in hand and anything else can wait until this script is finished.

Now, if you have never allowed yourself to be in an environment where you cannot be disturbed by all the digital noise in our lives, you will find working in this focused way very uncomfortable. But the discomfort is temporary. When you know what’s on your calendar, and you know what needs to be done before your first commitment of the day, you will be relaxed and focused on the job in hand.

The worst thing you can do is to look at your task list first thing in the morning and try to decide what to work on. This will inevitably lead to procrastination and you waste so much time trying to decide, that very little of your important work will get done before you have to attend to your first appointment or the noise coming in from your phone or email.

Now here’s a quick tip for you. Do this planning on a weekend as well. On a weekend we do not need to be as meticulous, but it’s a very powerful way to make sure that the things you want to do in your personal life get done. For example, if you decide on Friday night that tomorrow you will wash the car, there is a greater chance you will do it without hesitation. Equally, you may decide that Sunday morning, you will take your kids out for a bike ride or a walk in the park. Make those decision before you end the day. When you wake up, you will be focused on getting your kids ready and won’t be looking for excuses not to do it.

Finally, how are you writing your tasks, Leon? David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, says: when you write a task in your task manager write it for your dumb self. What he means is, if you write out a task such as: “mum birthday”, that tells you nothing about what you need to do. All it tells you us your mum has a birthday.

Instead, what do you need to do about your mum’s birthday? Do you need to organise a family dinner? Buy her a present? Or something else?

Make sure when you write a task like this you include what you need to do. For instance, “Call my brother and sister to organise a family dinner for mum’s birthday”. Sure, it will take a few extra seconds to write a full task, but doing so will save you so much time later when you come to doing the task. You won’t be wasting time trying to remember what you need to do.

When you next do your weekly planning session, go through your tasks and make sure they are written out in a way that makes immediate sense to you.

If you are like most people there will be a lot of tasks that have been in your task manager for a long time. If they are not written out in a way you would immediate know what to do, either rewrite the task or delete it altogether.

That one trick will turn your task manager from a hodge podge of random tasks into a set of meaningful activities you can do something with without trying to remember what needs doing.

A way to remember this to make sure you have an active verb in your task. If there’s no active verb, it does not belong in your task manager.

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

Monday Oct 31, 2022

How To Manage Your Digital Files

Monday Oct 31, 2022

How best to organise all your files, documents and articles? That’s what we’re looking at this week.

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Episode 251 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 251 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, we have seen a lot of wonderful ways to organise our stuff. Elaborate notebook and tag structures in Evernote, Complex folders on our computers organising every facet of our lives.

And all that’s great. It’s a fantastic way to get things organised and gives us the motivation to clear out our stuff—which is no bad thing. We do collect too much stuff anyway.

However, are all these wonderful organisation methods the best use of our time? You see, getting all our stuff organised is a great idea, but that’s a one-time task that may take a few days or even weeks, but long-term we have to maintain this new structure and therein lies two problems.

The first is it will take time for you to develop the natural muscle memory to move stuff to their rightful place, and in my experience, most people have enough on their plates as it is. And secondly, the deeper the organisation structure you build the longer it will take to move the stuff you collect in the future—which will mean you won’t do it. After all, you likely don’t have a great deal of free time as it is, so adding a new process that takes time is not going to solve any problems.

So what can we do? Well there are a few things you can do and that is what we will look at this week. However, before we do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks: Hi Carl, I am a professor at a large hospital and I not only have patients to see, I also teach. On top of that, I need to stay up to date with the latest research. This means I have a lot of papers to read, review and study. I really struggle to keep all these things organised and wondered if you have any tips and tricks that might help.

Hi Janine, thank you for your question.

This is the dilemma that has been creeping up on us over the last ten to fifteen years. More and more digital stuff has been replacing what typically would have been paper.

I remember in the late 1990s, I had a filing cabinet in my study that held all the important papers and documents I needed to keep. My car and house insurance, a file folder for gas, electric and water bills as well as bank and credit card statements oh, and a place to keep my running magazines and Law Society Gazette.

And because if I didn’t file these papers away almost immediately, they would be left sitting on the dining table, there was a constant reminder that these papers and documents needed to be filed.

Today, most of these documents are now online or in digital format. I don’t get bank or credit card statements through the post anymore. They are all digital. I no longer have a filing cabinet in my office. I am now largely paperless—save for documents such as my passport, residency permit papers and such like.

I can keep all these important documents in a single drawer in my office.

However, the problem isn’t really just about these important documents. The problem now is we receive so much more digital clutter than we ever received paper. Largely because it is so much cheaper and easier to send out a digital document than a paper one, we get exponentially more digital stuff.

So, how do we manage all this stuff.

First I would recommend you establish some basic rules. Don’t put files and documents in your notes app. Over time, this will slow down your notes app. It’s far better to put receipts, documents—such as your medical and teaching documents—into dedicated folders in the cloud.

Now it doesn’t matter whether you use Google Drive, Microsoft OneNote, Dropbox or iCloud. What matters is how you structure your folders. My structure is based around the work I do. For instance, I have a folder for my Online courses, YouTube, and Company documentation, which includes my receipts. Inside those folders the relevant parts are added as sub-folders.

For example, inside my company folder, I have all the company registration documents, invoices I need to keep for my accountant, salaries and other such administrative documents. These are inside appropriately titled folders.

For you, Janine, you would structure your folders as Medical and Teaching and then inside of those folders you would have the different areas. For instance, you would keep documents related to the different subject matters you teach inside your teaching folder under their relevant topic.

Now one piece of advice I would give you here is to try where possible to use your computer system’s drive. For example, if you are using a Windows computer, use OneDrive or if you are using Apple’s OS, use iCloud.

The reason for this anything on OneDrive will be searchable through your computer. Similarly, anything in iCloud will be searchable through Apple’s Spotlight search tool.

I know that is not always possible, but where it is. Stick with your computer’s system cloud storage system. It will just make your life a little bit easier.

Now, before we go any further, what about all your articles that need to be read (or you want to read). Use a read later service such as Instapaper or Pocket.

One of the downsides to being able to save articles we see on the web is we save articles into our notes apps and then never read them. Often I see people saving these articles into a “read later” folder in their notes and then never go in there to read those articles. Soon they have hundreds of articles saved that never get read and just clutter up your notes app.

Use Instapaper or Pocket to filter out articles you will never read. My system is simple. Any article I want to read, I will send to Instapaper and then, only after reading it, if Want to keep it for future reference, I will then send it to my notes app.

One thing that has happened over the last five years is Microsoft, Apple and Google have realised we are terrible at organising our stuff. For years these companies left it to us to organise our stuff how we want to and we failed. I know some people have created good, clean organisation, but most people haven’t. Just look around your colleagues’ desktops. They are full of documents, PDFs, Presentation files and so on.

Unfortunately, what happens then is we waste time searching for something we need.

So, Apple, Microsoft and Google have started to take that responsibility away from us and have developed excellent search tools. Apple’s Spotlight for instance, will search iCloud for any document I have with a keyword, date range or type of document. It doesn’t mater whether I am on my phone, MacBook or iPad. It will find those documents.

This means, once you get comfortable with how the system search works on your device, the only responsibility you have is to make sure the title of your document is something you will find.

For that I would suggest you create a format you use for all your documents. To give you an example, I use the same file naming convention for all my documents. This is The date to document was created or downloaded, the type of document. That could be invoice, receipt, or company I am creating a presentation for. And then the title.

What this does is helps me to quickly find what I am looking for directly from Spotlight.

For instance, if I need to find a presentation file for a presentation I did for a company last year, All I need do is type the company name into Spotlight and I will see from the list of results what I am looking for. I can see the date, so I know I am choosing the right document and I know it is a presentation.

Another thing that Google, Apple and Microsoft have done in recent years is to keep like documents together. This means if you have an Excel file, you can keep it inside Excel. Now the document itself is kept in OneDrive, but when you open Excel, you will see all your documents in one place. Google does this with its Docs, Sheets and Slides and Apple does this with Pages, Keynote and Numbers.

At first I resisted this sticking to my old-fashioned ways of moving these documents to separate folders. However, over the years I’ve trusted Apple to organise these for me and it’s so much easier. If I am looking for a Keynote file, all I need do is open Keynote and I can quickly find the file from the start menu.

Google is even better at this, if someone shares a Google Doc with me and I open it, it automatically gets stored in my Google Docs folder.

What I’ve learned over the last few years is don’t fight the system. All these companies are making it easier for us to find out stuff. If we stubbornly stick to our old ways we are making it harder for us to do our work productively. If we allow our computers to worry about how we organise things, we are saving ourselves a lot of time.

We don’t need elaborate organisation systems anymore. All you need is a loose folder structure that covers the different areas of our lives. This will help to keep things neat and tidy. Apart from that, let your devices worry about the organisation and start trusting your computer’s system to find what you need.

Incidentally, this also applies to email. In the past I’ve had a lot of complex folder structures. Now, all I have is four folders: An inbox, an Action This Day folder for emails that need some form of action from me, an Archive for stuff I may need later and the trash. That’s it.

Email search is incredibly fast and easy. I can search by person, date range, keyword or title. I have no need at all for elaborate folders that only slow everything down.

I hope that has helped, Janine. My advice is keep things simple, let your computer do all the hard work and focus you attention on getting your work done.

Thank you for you 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 Oct 24, 2022

How To Fit Goals Into An Already Busy Schedule

Monday Oct 24, 2022

This week’s podcast answers the question: where do goals fit into a task manager?

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Episode 250 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 250 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 are told that setting goals for yourself is important, and, yes, I would agree with that. But the question is, once you have set yourself some goals, where do the activities you need to perform come in? If you are already close to your limit in terms of what you can do each day, how will you find time to add more stuff?

Now I think of goals as milestones on the road of a much longer journey. The destination of that journey is the same for all of us: death. Sorry to be so melodramatic, but that is true. Nobody gets out of life alive. It’s a very predictable end.

The good news here is that we all have a degree of flexibility and freedom to choose what road we take. The difficulty we face is there is so much choice. So many paths we could take and trying to decide which path to follow is scary. Which is why it is all too easy to make no choice and just follow the ebbs and flows that life throws at us—which unless you are extremely lucky is not going to lead to a fulfilled and happy life.

So, this week, I will share with you ways you can build your goals into your daily life so they become less of a task to be completed each day and more of just something you do, because that is who you are and what you do.

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

This week’s question comes from Adrian. Adrian asks; Hi Carl, I recently saw that you opened a new course on goal setting. I would love to have some goals, but I just don’t have the time to fit them in. I’m sure I’m not alone with this dilemma. Do you have any tips on fitting goals into an already busy life?

Hi Adrian, thank you for your question.

You are right to be concerned about adding more stuff you an already busy day, but there is a difference with tasks or activities related to our goals.

Goals are not something you do, and once complete or accomplished; you stop doing. A goal’s purpose is the create change. Once that change has happened, you don’t want to be returning to where you were before you started the goal. That would not be a clever move.

I remember in my twenties, many of my friends (and myself, I have to admit) would hit the gym in the spring and try to lose our ‘winter weight’ ready for the summer holidays so we could strut confidently up and down the beach. Once the summer was over, we’d pile the weight back on.

Looking back now, I can see how ridiculous this form of yoyo dieting and exercise was. Now I am older (and allegedly wiser), getting into shape should not be something you do for a particular time of the year; it should be an ongoing thing. Keeping your weight down and exercising regularly is a necessity if you want to enjoy a robust, healthy life.

So, today, I am careful about what I eat—no refined carbohydrates and plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. I also exercise pretty much every day, whether that is a session in the gym, a run or a gentle walk with my dog.

It no longer feels like a task. Spending an hour on exercise is an investment in my future. It’s built into my daily schedule, and I use it as a break from sitting at my desk all day doing work. I see exercise as something that assists my productivity rather than as something that needs to be done.

The same applies to financial goals. If you’ve read Dave Ramsey’s book; Total Money Makeover, he gives you five strategies to build a safe and healthy financial plan for you and your family. None of those strategies involves a lot of work. For instance, paying down your debts is a single action each month. Once you get paid, you use a percentage of your salary to pay down one of your debts.

Equally, a second strategy is to build an emergency fund that would cover your expenses for a given amount of time if you were to lose your job. For something like this, it’s simply putting a little money aside each month into a savings account. That would be around five minutes a month (or less if you were to automate the payment)

The goal here, for example, maybe to clear all your debts over the next three years. That’s a simple task. You send money to the debt each month until it is clear. You have a timeline (three years), and you have an action (send money somewhere).

However, the bigger goal here is to change your behaviour from one of spending to one of saving. Once that becomes a behaviour, it is not something you ever need to think about again. You just do it as part of who you are.

When you set a goal, whatever that goal may be, there is an initial stage where you need to be consciously taking an action. That stage will usually last around a month or two. Once you have been consistently taking action on your goal for that time, you find it becomes something you automatically do.

For instance, today, I know I will be going to the gym at 2:30pm. This means when I planned today, I knew I had around three hours of focused work plus a couple of meetings before I needed to go to the gym. That gym time has given me structure to my day. I know when my calls are, and I know what focused work needs to be done before I go to the gym. I have a purpose from the moment I wake up.

The way to look at a goal is to treat it as a waypoint. It tells you that you are moving in the right direction. I use fitness goals to make sure I don’t go stale. The habit of exercise is built into who I am. I am a person who exercises every day. However, like most people, I can quite easily become bored with doing the same thing over and over again, so I set fitness goals every three months.

These could be to run a certain distance or to run a half marathon in under two hours. Alternatively, I might decide to focus on strength for three months and set a target weight to bench press or squat. I mix it up depending on the season. I use the goals to give me focus and direction.

If you were to set a goal to complete a master's degree, what would be the behaviour or habit you need to develop? It would be to spend some time each day studying. The habit of working on your own self-development (an area of focus) should already be something you are doing. Whether that is spending thirty to sixty minutes a day learning something new or being more focused and setting yourself some study days each week doesn’t matter. Developing yourself by learning means you are growing mentally. Something important if you want to feel fulfilled and accomplished.

So the goal to complete a master's degree becomes the waypoint—the signpost—to give you something to focus on and to push yourself beyond your comfort zone.

You see, the real reason why we need to set goals is to prevent us from stagnating. Whether we like it or not, the world is constantly changing. It’s changing around us and we either change or we will get left behind.

During my time teaching English, I worked with many middle management people who refused to learn the new technologies that emerged from the smartphone revolution. Within five years, they were trapped in middle management no-mans land. They were passed over for promotion, and rather than staying where they were, their jobs were downgraded or removed altogether. They had become too comfortable with the way things were and resisted the changes that were happening around them.

The onus is on us to make sure we have time to learn new things. To stay ahead and to keep pushing our boundaries, so we continue to grow. The good news is the world changes at a slow pace. We can change at a faster pace, and that’s where goals help us. They pull us towards changing ourselves for the better.

Now one tip I would give you here is to not set too many goals all at once.

The way to use goals is to step back and look at your life as a whole. Where do you feel you need to improve? Are your skills giving you an advantage in the workplace? How is your health? Are you moving towards the vision you have for yourself in the next ten to twenty years? What do you need to change in order to feel more fulfilled in life and work?

To set strong, motivating goals, you need to do quite a lot of self-reflection. You need to find people who are already doing what you want to do and research them—a kind of healthy cyberstalking. Find out what they did to get where they are and see what changes you can make to follow a similar pathway.

We are building a life, and a big part of the pleasure we get is the journey to achieving that life. The goals you set form part of that journey; they ensure you are moving along the right path and tell you when you need to adjust your direction. The old phrase: “if at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again” is very apt when goal setting. There will be a lot of failures. A lot of adjusting, and with that you learn so much more about you.

I remember a few years ago I decided to do Robin Sharma’s 5AM club. I loved the idea of waking up early and having a series of activities that were dedicated to me and no one else. And for eighteen months I was pretty consistent with it.

However, as my coaching practice developed I found myself working alter and later into the evening and it came to a point where waking up at 5AM was no longer practical. For a few weeks I fought on, but in the end I “failed” to maintain the consistency.

I reviewed the goal and realised that what I really wanted was the empowering morning routine. The waking up at 5AM was nice, but it wasn’t the main purpose. The purpose was to have an hour or so for myself every morning. I revised the goal and set it to being consistent with my morning routine no matter what time. Woke up.

That adjustment began three years ago and there has not been one day since that I have not written my journal, done my stretches and drank a glass of lemon juice.

Now, I don’t even think about it. I just do it.

That’s what goals are there for. They change your habits and behaviours so you adopt better living practices that fulfil you and leave you feeling happy, accomplished and focused on what’s important in life.

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

Monday Oct 17, 2022

To Multi-Task or Not To Multi-Task?

Monday Oct 17, 2022

This week, it’s all about multiple projects and tasks—all in one day.

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Episode 249 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 249 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.

How do you manage running a new business, or even running your own department with multiple things happening each day and projects that need to be got off the ground, or maintained. It a real challenge and leave you feeling exhausted, and more importantly, stressed out about what you may or may not have done.

This is one of the many reasons why getting yourself organised and being consistent with your daily and weekly planning is so important. It’s this planning that gives you an edge. It elevates you above the fray and keeps you focused on the bigger picture.

Without a plan for the week, you will inevitably get sucked into the daily churn of low and high important tasks. It will feel endless and it doesn’t lead to a great outcome. Sure, you may have a reasonably successful business or department, but you, as an individual, will be exhausted, tired and stressed out and that leads to poor decision making and mistakes.

Now, before we get into the question, I just wanted to give you a heads up that I have just launched my latest mini-course. The Goal Setting course will give you a blueprint to build the life you want to live by developing the vision of what you want, and then using goals to make sure you are moving along the right pathway.

It’s an exciting course that will inspire you to grow, develop and start making the changes you need to make to become the person you want to be.

Full details of this mini-course will be in the show notes.

Now, on with this show 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 Cara. Cara asks: Hi Carl, I run a growing start up business and have found managing multiple tasks and projects each day is a real pain point. How would you suggest we manage multi-tasking to keep the business running and developing new projects?

Hi Cara, thank you for your question.

Now, we better first deal with the concept of “multi-tasking”. Straight up, don’t ever do it. Or rather try to do it. It’s impossible, never works and only leads to mistakes which will need correcting later.

Slow down. There is more than enough time each day to work on the important things. You don’t have to do everything in one day. I know our minds are telling us it has to be done today, but really? Does it?

When you step back, take a breath and look at what you have on your list of things to do, you will see that many of those tasks don’t really need to be done today. It might be nice to be able to do them, but it would not be the end of your business if you rescheduled the less important tasks to later in the week.

Now, there’s a good reason for rescheduling less important things to later in the week and that is most of these will not need doing anyway. They are what I call “reactive” tasks. Tasks that seem important right now, but with a little time resolve themselves and can be discarded.

I’m reminded of a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who would put aside his letters and memos for ten days before reading them. What he found was 90% of the issues resolved themselves and the remaining 10% was where he needed to put his attention.

Now, in today’s world things move a lot faster than they did in the 1980s, but the principle still remains, most of what comes into our inboxes will resolve themselves, there is no need to rush. You can put aside most issues for twenty-four to forty-eight hours without any problems. When you do come to them, it’s likely many of them will have resolved themselves.

I’m always surprised at how many emails I get asking a question, only to find an hour later the same person writes to tell me they’ve resolved the issue. That taught me to slow down and not rush into a response.

Of course, there are some issues that do need dealing with straight away. But most don’t. Learn to slow down. You will thank yourself for that later.

Now, I mentioned in the opening about the importance of planning. Planning is the key to staying on top of everything being thrown at you. You need some time each day and week to step back and evaluate what is important. What needs to get done about all else.

For instance, last week, my priority was to launch my Goal Setting course. I still had my core work to do—content and coaching client feedback—but aside from that work, my priority last week was launching the course.

Now, this was not the first course I have launched, so I have a process for launching courses. However, that process still requires a lot of time. This meant, each day last week, I made sure my core work was done early. For instance, on Monday, when I wrote the blog post, I started my day by getting that written. Once that was written, I blocked out two hours to work on the course.

For those of you who don’t know, your core work is your most important work—the work you are employed to do. If you are a salesperson, your core work is any activity that results in a sale. If you are an analyst, your core work is any activity that involves analysing. Everything else (email replies, meetings and admin work) is secondary to that.

When I finished each day, I gave myself ten minutes to go through my task list to see what I had on for the next day and prioritised two things: my core work and the course. I then looked at my calendar to see where I could fit those tasks in.

This month I have two courses to work on. That’s unusual, not only do I need to launch my Goal Setting mini-course, but I also need to work on the update to my Apple Productivity course. It would be easy to stress myself about the Apple Productivity course, but what’s the point? I can only work on one course at a time, so the only question is which one do I work on tomorrow?

Now that the goals setting course is launched, I can turn my attention to updating my Apple Productivity course. My work is much more manageable and realistic.

If I had tried to do both at the same time, I would be stressed out and inevitably make a lot of mistakes that will need to be resolved later.

The key is to focus on one project at a time. Of course, you may have multiple projects going on at the same time, but given that you cannot work effectively on two or more projects at the same time, you need to decide, at a weekly level, which projects you will focus on that week.

One thing that has worked for me, is to allocate time each week for certain activities. I also know a lot of business founders have also found this method effective. That is to block time out each day of the week for certain activities.

For instance, email and communications. These come in every day and it’s unlikely you will be able to stop them. This means, you need time each day for managing your communications. For me, I need around forty minutes a day to stay on top of my communications. So, I have a one hour block each day between 7 and 8pm for responding to my actionable messages.

Find an appropriate time in the day and block it out on your calendar for managing your email.

Other activities you need to do regularly, for example, prospecting, accounting, admin and your personal life need time allocating to them. You could dedicate Mondays to prospecting, Tuesdays to admin and Fridays to accounting. Wednesday and Thursday could be dedicated to project work.

Knowing you have time allocated to prospecting, admin and accounting leaves you feeling less stressed and it makes it easier to decide when you will do something.

I would add, that it helps to keep one day each week as free as possible for catching up when you have fallen behind with something.This is one of those inevitable things in life that our carefully laid out plans will get disrupted by an emergency. Knowing you have a reasonably free day later in the week for catching up helps to keep ion track with the things we need to do.

Finally, as a start-up business everything will be new and so you won’t have any settled processes in place. It’s important to be looking for the process for doing your work. I have a number of admin tasks to do each day. When I first began collecting the information, it would take me around ninety minutes each day. I focused on building the process and now, three or four years later, I still have the same admin tasks to do, but it takes me around twenty minutes to do.

Because I have settled processes, I know how to start, where to look for the information and can do the work in a lot less time.

If your projects are similar in nature—in my case creating or updating courses—you can develop checklists and processes there too. This makes doing project work a lot easier. You know where to start, have a reasonably good idea how long each part will take and you can build that time into your calendar.

Essentially, it all boils down to giving yourself time each day and each week to look at what needs to be done and planning out when you will do the work. If you are not planning out when the work will get done, your brain will convince you that you don’t have sufficient time—when you do—and that’s where stress and anxiety will come from.

Make sure you are planning the week. Identifying which project, or projects, you will work on each week. On a daily level, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to plan the next day. What will be your priority the next day and make sure you have the time blocked out in your calendar so you know you have the time to work on it.

I hope that has helped, Cara. Thank you for your question.

And thank you to you too for listening.

Don’t forget, if you want to learn more about my brand new Goal Setting course, the links are in the show notes.

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

Monday Oct 10, 2022

You’re Not Going To Complete All Your Tasks, And That’s Okay.

Monday Oct 10, 2022

This week, we’re looking at why you don’t need to worry if you cannot complete your planned tasks each day.

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Episode 248 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 248 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.

Do you feel you have to complete your daily task list every day? How do you feel if you don’t manage to complete your list of tasks? Most people become disillusioned when they end the day with several tasks left, and that can lead to a rabbit hole of app and system switching—which is never the solution.

Quite often, what will happen is those tasks that didn’t get done today will be automatically pushed off to tomorrow, which, rather than solving the problem, only exasperates it because now you have more tasks to do tomorrow on top of the inevitable disruptions, emergencies and distractions.

So, this week, I will hopefully give you some strategies and tips to eliminate this problem and give you the confidence to accept sometimes you will not be able to complete your tasks, and that’s okay.

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

This week’s question comes from Simon. Simon asks: Hi Carl, for many years, I have used a task list—from using a paper planner in the early 2000s to now being digital. One problem I have always faced is not being able to complete all my tasks. I always end the day with tasks still on my list. Do you have the same problem, and if so, how do you manage it?

Hi Simon, thank you for your question.

Firstly, let me say it’s perfectly normal to end most days with tasks uncompleted. You are not a machine—you are a human being, and we have a tendency to overestimate what we can do in a day. Added to that, there are always going to be disruptions, emergencies and things going wrong that you cannot plan for. When these disruptions and emergencies arise, we just need to deal with them as best we can, and that means some things you had planned for the day will have to be missed.

That’s a normal day for most of us. Disruptions, emergencies and things going wrong. Welcome to the real world. The solution is not to change your system or apps. The solution is coming to terms with these disruptions and emergencies.

Now, if we dig a little deeper, our daily task list will be a mix of three types of tasks:

Tasks that must be done,

Tasks that should be done

and tasks that can be rescheduled if necessary—these are what I would describe as the hope to do tasks.

If you look at your task list for today, you will see this mix.

Now, the strategy is to be very clear about what must be done. These tasks are your top priority for the day, and where possible, you should start your day with these tasks—before disruptions and emergencies occur. I know that is not always possible, and when it is not possible—perhaps you have an early morning meeting or you are travelling somewhere, you need to schedule the time in your calendar, so you know you have the time to do it.

Now when these emergencies and disruptions do occur, you need to accept them—embrace them, if you like—analyse what you have control over, and if you do have some control, make a decision on what you will do.

Often, if you just step back for a minute and analyse the emergency or disruption, you will find there is an easy solution. Panicking will not help you. The only way to deal with these is to stop. Look at the emergency or disruption, and decide what you can do about it. That might be a telephone call, or it could be delegating the problem to someone better suited to sorting the problem out.

Sometimes the emergency is so big you have to drop everything and just deal with that emergency. This happened to me a year ago. I was woken at 7 AM, and the emergency was staring me in the face. In that moment, I realised I had to deal with the emergency in front of me, and that was an easy decision to make.

I had a lot of work planned for that day. My task list was carefully curated, and when I went to bed, I knew exactly how I would start the day. That emergency stopped that. It was an easy decision to make.

Later in the day, when I had a few minutes, I went into my task list and checked my tasks—looking for the must-dos. Fortunately, there were no “must-do” tasks. I cancelled appointments for the following day as I knew I would not be able to make those appointments and completely ignored my email. When you are faced with a genuine emergency, it’s surprising how low-value things like emails become.

Once I had rescheduled my appointments and doubled checked there was nothing urgent on my task list, I didn’t look at the list again that day.

It was only when I got back home the next day, did I open my task list and begin rescheduling my tasks for other days.

Now, most of the emergencies we face are not going to take up the whole day. It’s likely that a quick call to a client or customer, or colleague will resolve the issue or at least remove the urgency. It’s better to deal with that now rather than let it destroy your concentration.

Now of the tenets of the Time Sector System is to learn how many tasks you can comfortably complete each week. Because we are managing our tasks by when we will do them rather than by project, you have a lot more control over just how much you do each week.

For me, I know that a realistic number of tasks each week, including my core work and areas of focus, is between thirty and thirty-five. This does not include my routine tasks; these are the meaningful, project or goal-moving forward tasks.

This means when I do my weekly planning, if I see I have more the thirty-five tasks in my This Week folder, I need to go in and push off some tasks for the following week.

Now, I get asked, but what happens if all those thirty-five-plus tasks have to be done? Well, even if they have to be done, I know I cannot change the time I have available, so whether they have to be done or not is irrelevant. The thing is, my limit is thirty-five tasks. After that, I will run out of time.

It would be very rare for you to be in a position where all your tasks “have to be done” that week. Many can be renegotiated; some dropped altogether.

The thing to remember in the time management equation is the time side of the equation is fixed. You get twenty-four hours a day. The only side of the equation that is variable is the activity side. That’s the only part you have control over. So either you drop tasks or you renegotiate deadlines, so you have the time and flexibility to manage your work.

This is why I stress the importance of establishing what your core work is. The work you are employed to do and are ultimately paid for. Once you know this, you have essentially created your priorities. Your areas of focus and core work will always have priority over your “volunteered” work.

Now, another way to look at this is if you have fifteen tasks to complete today and you only manage to complete ten, is that really a problem? To me, no, it isn’t as long as you managed to do the most important tasks. You made progress. That’s what is important. Having a 66% success rate is better than a 0% success rate.

You are not going to be perfect. There will always be things you don’t get done. On the day I had my big emergency last year, I still managed to complete a couple of tasks. I probably had a 5% success rate; to me, even a 5% success rate is better than zero.

If you have implemented my 2+8 Prioritisation method—where you select your two most important tasks for the day and make them your “must dos” and eight other tasks you should do. You will know that your two must-do tasks should be completed each day, and for the remaining eight, you will do everything you can to complete them, but it would not be the end of the world if you cannot.

Today, my two must-do tasks are to write this script and do my exercise. I have other tasks I want to do today, and I will get most of them done, but the most important thing on my mind when I began my day today was to make sure I wrote this script and get my exercise in.

With the 2+8 Prioritisation Method, there is an implied acceptance that you will not complete everything, but the point of the method is to train you to know what your priorities are. When you do this every day, you develop a keen sense of priorities, and you naturally make the decision when you do your daily planning.

When you accept that you may not be able to complete all your tasks each day, you will sense a huge weight coming off your shoulders. It’s liberating to know that it’s okay not to complete everything.

However, one mistake you want to avoid is automatically rescheduling those incomplete tasks to the next day. You need to look at what you did not do, and based on what commitments you have the next day and your other tasks; you reschedule these tasks to the days you will likely be able to do them.

There are days when I have to write my blog post as a task, yet for various reasons, I either don’t get around to doing or finishing it. Before I reschedule the task, I look at my calendar and look for the next available day. For example, if I fail to finish writing this script today, I know already I will be away tomorrow, not returning home until late in the evening. My next available day, looking at my calendar, is Friday. This means I will reschedule the task for Friday. It’s not perfect, but at least the task gets done.

Just because I don’t manage to clear my task list for the day doesn’t mean my whole system has failed. All it means is I didn’t allow sufficient flexibility for the unknowns. The truth is, over time, you learn how much flexibility you need to leave in your day. You may not be right every day, but the experience will teach you.

And that really the final piece to the puzzle, if you like. You will not be “perfect”, ever. There will always be days when you don’t complete all your tasks, and that’s okay. It means you’re human, you care, and it isn’t the end of the world. Just give yourself a few minutes at the end of the day to look at what you didn’t do, reschedule what needs rescheduling, and if necessary, renegotiate deadlines with the appropriate people.

And most of all, be patient. It takes time to build confidence in your system. You will make a lot of errors, and yes, you will overestimate what you can do in a day. The important thing is you learn. Debrief yourself and instead of criticising yourself, look for ways you can adapt and make the necessary adjustments.

Thank you, Simon, 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 Sep 26, 2022

The Essentials of Personal Productivity.

Monday Sep 26, 2022

What elements do you need to have productive days consistently? That’s the question I’m exploring this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 247 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 247 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.

One part of the productivity mix that rarely gets talked about is personal maintenance. By that I don’t mean the organising, structuring, apps or systems, but the deeper maintenance areas that are generally neglected, yet in the end have a bigger impact on your productivity than anything else.

For instance, how effective are you when you don’t get enough sleep? I know from my own personal experience if I get less than six hours sleep, my productivity is terrible. I generally can do an hour or two of focused work in the morning, but after that I find it difficult to focus, I often have to take a nap and my mood and energy levels are low. That’s certainly not a great place to be if have a lot of deadlines to meet.

This week’s question is about the non-obvious productivity essentials that when in balance, helps you to stay organised, focused and calm no matter what is thrown at you.

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

This week’s question comes from Jenna. Jenna asks, Hi Carl, I’ve read a lot of your blog posts and I understand the importance of using a task manager, a calendar and notes, but I often find myself wondering if there is something deeper or bigger that is also important for being productive. Is there something I am missing?

Hi Jenna, thank you for your question.

Yes, you are right. There is a deeper, more personal part to being more productive than just using task managers and calendars. The task managers and notes apps you choose to use is the sexy part of productivity, yet really when it comes to measuring your effectiveness, the tools you use will have very little effect.

What will have an effect are less sexy, so don’t get talked about enough. Let me begin with sleep as I have already mentioned that.

We know that getting a good night’s sleep leaves you feeling great. You have more energy through the day, you can focus better and your mood is positive. According to Matthew Walker, a renown sleep scientist and author of the book: Why We Sleep, get less than six hours sleep and all sorts of problems will manifest themselves. For instance, a lack of sleep effects your appetite. Your body will tell you you are hungry when in reality you are not. This will lead you to snack, and more likely snack on the wrong kind of foods—donuts, bread, cookies and other sugar rich foods.

Not only does a lack of sleep contribute to weight gain, but because of the types of foods we crave when suffering from a lack of sleep, we get the post meal slump, which leaves us feeling tired and unfocused.

Then in the evening, when you should be spending some quality time with the people you care about, your mood is not great. You’re tired, have a serious lack of energy and will be uncommunicative. Over time, this will put a strain on your relationships which in turn will result in you being focused on the problems that causes instead of the work that needs to be done.

Now, how much sleep you need at a personal level will be different from other people. I know from my own experiments, I need around six and a half to seven hours, other people need closer to eight.

To find out how much sleep you need, you can do a simple experiment. For seven days, sleep with no alarm. Let yourself wake up naturally. This might not be possible when you are working, but it is a great experiment to do when you are on holiday or taking a vacation.

Make a note of how many hours sleep you got, and then average it out once you have seven straight days of data. That will give you your daily sleep requirement.

Once you know your sleep requirement, build that into your daily schedule. For example, I generally need to wake up around 7 AM, and I like to read in bed before going to sleep, so my bedtime is 11:30pm. This way, I can read for thirty to forty minutes before going to sleep.

Your sleep time needs to be protected. It’s huge part of being effective every day, so compromise of what you each day, but never compromise of getting your sleep requirement each day.

Next up is physical exercise. Now, we are not talking about going to a gym every day or running every morning. Of course, if that’s what you like to do, do it. But exercise really means movement.

Human beings are designed to move. We are not designed to sit around all day.

So what does this mean, how much movement do we need each day. Well, this is difficult to measure, but for most people we need to be doing at least thirty minutes walking each day. Those thirty minutes should be strung together.

Now, if you are over thirty-five you need to be doing a little lifting each week too. From around the age of thirty, you will be losing between 3 and 8% of your muscle mass each decade, which increases exponentially after sixty. That might not sound very much, but over time this is going to make you weaker and less effective with your daily activities.

Again, this doesn’t mean you need to be going to a gym. But you can take advantage of cleaning chores. I wash my own car for example, it has me moving my arms, shoulders, squatting and lifting. I also clean my office twice a week. I will move the chairs, sofa and tables to get the vacuum in, all designed, not only to keep my office clean, but to get some movement in.

You were designed to move, so move.

Another area to look at is your diet. We know what you eat has a huge effect on your health and well-being. Eat a diet rich in processed foods and refined carbohydrates, and your health will decline to a point where your future self will not be spending time doing activities you enjoy, but rather spending it in and out of hospital. Is that the vision you have for your later years? I hope not.

What we want is to live an active, healthy life and that involves enough sleep, a little exercise and a good diet.

There’s a lot written on diet and eating well and I’m certainly no expert in this area. However, my wife and I decided to remove refined carbohydrates from our diet earlier this year and it’s been amazing. I no longer feel hungry through the day. My energy levels remain consistent through the day and I feel fantastic. No more headaches, indigestion or fatigue.

If you want to learn more about what to eat and when, I would recommend books by Dr Jason Fung, particularly the Obesity Code and Dr Mark Hyman. These doctors have done a lot of research into what to eat for optimal health and will open you eyes to how a lot of the food we are eating is damaging our health and well-being.

So, there are three foundational areas where, with a little attention, we can build a strong support system to our productive ways.

Ultimately, you will be at your most productive when you are well rested, physically fit and supported by the right kind nutrition.

However, that takes care of your physical well-being, what about your mental well-being. Something that has gain a lot of attention in recent years.

Part of the problem here is society has become a lot more do, do, do, with little time for rest, rest, rest. However, we need time for ourselves, to reset, think and reflect.

This does not mean hours spent watching mindless TV shows and escapism. What it means is pursuing activities that bring us joy. For instance, doing puzzles, spending ten minutes a day meditating and reflecting.

How can we bring these elements into our lives? Well, create a personal morning routine. You only need thirty minutes, but those thirty minutes are packed with setting you up for an amazing day.

To give you an example of a morning routine. I start my day by making coffee, while my coffee is brewing, I do two minutes of stretches. Nothing strenuous, just some light shoulder and core stretching to get my blood flowing.

Once my coffee is brewed, I sit down and write my journal for ten to twenty minutes. This has become my favourite time of the day. I get to reflect on how the day went yesterday, capture my thoughts and brainstorm ideas that may have come to me through the night.

I end my journal writing by listing out my two objectives for the day. Then my day begins.

I would also recommend you have an evening closing down routine. This does not need to be a lot of time. For me, it’s really about deciding what must be done tomorrow and a quick look to see what appointments I have the next day. In all, I would say my closing down routine takes around five to ten minutes.

Finally, give yourself thirty minutes or so with the people you love and care about. One thing my wife and I have done pretty much since we began dating over twenty years ago is to chat for at least thirty minutes each day. We both live busy lives, but no matter where we are in the world, we will alway have our thirty minutes.

We humans are social animals. We need that connection. No matter how busy you are, you will always be able to find thirty minutes or so to connect with the people you love. Make it a part of your day. You will never regret it.

So, there you go, Jenna. Many of the things I’ve mentioned here, I know is common sense, yet so many people neglect these basic areas. It’s why I have written and spoken about designing your “perfect week”. This is where you create a bank calendar in your calendar app, and pollute it with the activities and routines you want to adopt. Doing it this way you will surprise yourself how much time you really have.

I hope this has helped and thank you for your question, Jenna.

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

Monday Sep 19, 2022

How To Develop Your Productivity System For Success.

Monday Sep 19, 2022

So, you’ve created a fantastic system for keeping yourself organised and on top of everything being thrown at you, and you’re happy with the apps you have that support you. Now, how do you stay consistent using your system?

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System