Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 243 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 243 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.

I have a confession to make. I cyber stalk very productive people. In particular, I stalk authors who publish books every year without fail, content creators who never fail to publish a podcast, blog post or YouTube video every week (or more frequently in some cases) and business leaders who manage multinational companies and still have a private life.

I’ve also had an interest in the people in the companies I’ve worked with who were the top managers or salespeople.

I am fascinated with how they do it. How are they so productive with the work they do?

The truth is, they all share something in common and this week’s question relates to this commonality.

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 Martine. Martine asks: Hi Carl, you’ve mentioned in a few of your blog posts and videos that you get a lot of inspiration from highly productive people. What I want to know is, are there any special habits or tricks these people use that most people don’t?

Hi Martine, Thank you for your question.

You are right; there are a few tricks these people follow that the vast majority don’t. I suspect that the reason most people don’t follow these tricks are multifaceted, and they are not easy to follow.

First, there is an inherent human characteristic that will always prevent you from becoming more productive, and that is the need to be liked. We have this need to some degree or another.

The so-called “culture wars” are a great example of this. People are queuing up to be a part of their chosen tribe, and social media has given them a voice. They want to be liked by their tribe so much, that they will say increasingly wild things.

Left or right, there seems to be a rush to be the most outraged because someone had the audacity to disagree with something their tribe believes “passionately” about.

Yet, what makes humans so great is our diverse opinions. It’s fascinating to learn why someone believes the things they do. Learning about those beliefs and thoughts behind those beliefs has helped the human race to progress at an incredible speed.

However, this desire to be liked means we will sacrifice our dreams and goals and the things that are important to us, so we can be a part of the crowd.

I saw this a lot when I first arrived in Korea twenty years ago. I was told that family was very important to Korean people. Yet, when I arrived here, I discovered that the majority of married office workers thought nothing about staying late in the office because their boss and co-workers were staying.

Nobody would leave the office until the boss left. It caused me to stop and question how could their family be so important when they put being in the office until 10 or 11pm as a higher importance than getting home to be with their family.

Over time I was educated. These office workers (mainly men in those days), felt that earning their salary and getting promoted and ultimately getting more money was their way of taking care of their family. Nobody questioned this thinking back then.

Now, I should caveat this. This is generally no longer the case. The younger generations who have now come through into the workforce don’t do this in most cases. But in some small to medium-sized companies, that sentiment is still living and breathing.

It was another example of being a part of the tribe. The time was an extension of their family.

Now the most productive people I’ve met do not subscribe to this mentality. They are driven, focused and know precisely what they want out of the day.

A few months back, I watched an interview with Sylvester Stallone. While most of us see Sylvester Stallone as an action hero actor, he’s also a prolific writer.

Every day, he’s working on writing a script.

The thing that stood out for me about him was each day, he will spend four hours writing—with his phone switched off, and he’ll spend ninety minutes to two hours exercising. That six hours a day is taken up with the things he loves doing.

After that, he’ll eat with his family and socialise. But nothing gets in the way of the two things that are important to him.

John Grisham, the author, writes every day. He wakes up early, goes to his writing room and will spend the next four hours writing. Once again, no phone, no interruptions. From 6:30am to 11:00am nobody can reach him. He’s working on his next novel. As he gets closer to finishing the book, he wakes up earlier and earlier, often beginning his writing at 4am.

Stephen King, another great author, does something similar. He writes for a set period of time each day.

Now, when you analyse this, there’s nothing difficult about it. They know what they want to do, and they get on and do it.

I recently finished learning about Charles Darwin. He also had a set routine. He’d wake up early, go into his study, and for the next four to five hours, he would research and write. Nobody was allowed to disturb him.

Now for most of us, we may not have the luxury to spend our days doing the things we love in the same way Sylvester Stallone, John Grisham, Stephen King and Charles Darwin have been able to do. But, that misses the point somewhat.

What these amazingly productive people know is that if you want to produce work that you are proud of, you need to spend time each day working on it. No excuses. Thinking, planning and dreaming produce nothing concrete. It’s only by committing time each day to working on your craft that you will become incredibly productive. There is no other way.

Now for the majority of us, not answering a colleague’s email message within a few minutes or instantly responding to a text message would be unthinkable. I mean, what would you colleague or friend think of you if you didn’t reply instantly?

Then there are those people who believe their purpose in life is to wait around for the next contact by a client and to be instantly available for them—I mean, isn’t that excellent customer service?

Well, perhaps not. You see if you are constantly being interrupted, how will you ever be able to deliver the real service your client wants? Your client wants results—however, they interpret that—I mean, how many people say oh customer service is excellent, they answer the phone immediately?

Answering the phone immediately is not great service. Great service is delivering outstanding results for the client. If the client needs to wait an hour or two while you finish delivering real customer service to another client, they are not going to complain. They will have the confidence that you will deliver the same level of outstanding service for them.

It always amazes me that people with degrees, PH.Ds and MBAs see outstanding work as being measured by how fast you respond to an email or message.

No, that’s not outstanding service. That’s wanting to be liked by the tribe.

The first step to becoming more productive is to know, at a task level, what is important to you professionally and personally. It’s no good being one dimensionally productive—that is being productive at work and Never working on your own personal projects. It’s about knowing what’s important.

That could be supporting your kids in developing their sporting abilities by taking them to practice two or three times a week and being present—not sitting in your car responding to emails. Or it could mean taking your partner out once or twice a week to do something new. You know, being present with them and not doing it out of a sense of obligation. Doing it because you want to spend time with them.

It could be about dedicating Saturday to doing odd jobs around your home. Planning the week ahead and getting some fresh air. That’s being personally productive.

When it comes to your work, this means knowing what your core work is. It’s just like Sylvester Stallone knows his core work is to develop scripts and stay in good shape so he can continue to act. He knows he needs time each day for this work. There can be no excuses. If he does not do this core work, the work will ultimately dry up.

That same principle applies to you too. I know you are not Sylvester Stallone, or John Grisham or Stephen King, but you do still have core work. What is it? Make sure that however much time you need for this work, you protect that time. Allow no interruptions while you are doing it. After all, it’s what you are paid to do.

This means, when a colleague, a client or even your boss is messaging you, you don’t allow it to interrupt you. They have to wait. We are not ignoring them. We just know our priorities, and whatever your core work is, you get that done, then you attend to your messages and calls.

When I was teaching, I always made sure my phone was off. I was employed to teach. My boss could wait until I finished the class. Teaching my classes was my core work. It would have been wrong for me to stop my class while I took a call from my boss. It’s equally wrong for you to allow any interruptions while you are doing your core work.

Attending to your core work is not going to take you long. You could break things up. For instance, writing a blog post takes me around an hour. After I finish writing, I will respond to messages and process my email inbox. Then I get back into my next core task—planning this week’s YouTube videos or writing this script. What are we talking about here? Two hours tops before you need a break. Use those breaks to respond to your messages.

It might not make you the most popular person in your company, but you were not employed to be the most popular person. You were employed to do a job. Do that job first. You will always be judged on your results. Not by how nice everyone says you are.

The number of people I’ve worked with who lost their jobs and couldn’t understand why is countless. The usual cries of but I was always helping my boss and colleagues with their work. How could they fire me? Well, while you were helping all those other people, you were not doing the job you were employed to do.

So there you go, Martine, that’s the secret. Be selfishly obsessed with getting your core work done to highest possible standard. It won’t make you popular, but it will get you results.

And also never neglecting the important people in your life. Your work is one thing; your personal life is what stays with you. Make sure you are spending an adequate amount of time with the people that matter most to you.

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

Monday Aug 22, 2022

When is Enough, Enough When It Comes To Apps?

Monday Aug 22, 2022

How complex is your system? How complex do you need it to be? That’s what we’ll be looking at today.

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Episode 242 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 242 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.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I published a video on how I have my whole system set up. In that video, I shared how I bring all the apps I use together to get my work done.

I was rather surprised that a few people felt that my system was too complex. I didn’t understand why at first, and then it dawned on me. Of course, it looks complex. It was put together on a slide, and everything looks complex when it is broken down into small pieces and laid out in a diagram.

The truth is, it’s not complicated at all. It works beautifully, and I get everything I need into my system in seconds. There are no obstacles; I just know what to do when I need to add a task or collect an idea.

But, to someone not familiar with the way everything works, it will understandably appear complicated. I’m sure if you broke down your system, I would feel yours was overly complex. However, it’s nothing to do with how many apps you use, it’s how you use your apps that matter, and that’s what we are going to explore in this week’s episode.

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 Stuart. Stuart asks: hi Carl. I saw your video on how you have your system set up, and I felt that you have a very complex system. How do you manage all those apps and still get your work done?

Thank you, Stuart, for your question.

Now, this is an interesting one, and it’s certainly a good example of why we should not be copying other people’s systems. What works for me is unlikely to work for you.

You see, everyone’s way of working will be different. Not only do we do different jobs, but we also have different expectations put upon us. However, the questions are how do you know what to do and when do you do the work?

As long as you know that, it really doesn’t matter how many apps or processes you have in the background. What matters is you are getting your important work done.

I noticed from some of the comments on the video that some people see Ulysses, my writing app, as a note-taking app. I suppose Ulysses could be used as a note-taking app, but it wasn’t designed to be a note-taking app. It was and always has been a writing app.

I’ve been using Ulysses for writing my blog posts, these scripts and all my newsletters for well over six years now, and in that time, I have everything I have written. That includes 250 thousand plus words of blog posts and over five hundred newsletters. There will be over a million words written in there, and naturally, there’s very little I don’t know about Ulysses.

A big part of my work is writing, I will write around 10,000 words a week, and I want a dedicated writing tool that will allow me to get on and write in a distraction-free environment with an app that has never let me down. Ulysses does that for me.

And that’s really the whole point of choosing apps that work for you and the work that you do.

I’m reminded of an analogy I wrote a few years ago: a carpenter doesn’t use a Swiss Army knife to build a table. They could do it, but a carpenter will always use the right tools for the job.

Another thing you need to take into consideration when choosing apps is how you will be using them. Theoretically, I could use Apple’s Pages or Google Docs for writing my blog posts and newsletters. And if I only used a laptop for writing, that certainly would be a consideration. But I don’t always write using my laptop.

There are a lot of times when I am in a coffee shop waiting for my wife, and I find I have thirty minutes or so. Now, I could sit there and scroll through social media, or I can open up Ulysses and continue writing the blog post I started on my laptop that morning. Ulysses on my phone is brilliantly simple. No menus, no distractions. Just the written words and a keyboard.

I remember when I did some extensive testing of Notion a couple of years ago. Notion was great on my computer but was a nightmare on my phone. This made it unworkable for the way I did my work. Now for those who largely do their work on a laptop, Notion works fantastically. For those like me who need a lot more flexibility in devices, it wasn’t good enough.

So when it comes to my system, I use Drafts almost exclusively on my phone for collecting. For those of you who are not familiar with Drafts, Drafts is a simple note-taking app that allows you to collect tasks and ideas and send them to pretty much any app you have on your phone.

For example, if I collect a task in Drafts, When I open Drafts, I am presented with a blank screen and the keyboard. I can then type immediately what I have in mind, tap a button at the top of the keyboard, and it’s directly sent to Todoist. The original ‘note’ is then deleted. This is three seconds faster than trying to add something directly into Todoist on my phone.

However, when I am on my computer, using Todoist’s keyboard shortcuts is the fastest way to get something into Todoist, and that is how I do it.

For me, speed is everything. The less time I spend collecting and organising, the more time I have for doing the work.

One thing I have learned over the years is the more features an app has, the slower it is going to be. Often that doesn’t matter too much on a computer, but in the mobile environment, the fewer features, the better and faster the app will be.

Now, for you, having a single app for all your tasks and notes could be your preferred system. There’s nothing wrong at all with that—if it works for you.

I recently tested that when I was looking at Craft—a relatively new productivity app. Within an hour or so of testing, I realised it didn’t fit comfortably with the way I work. While the desktop app was great, trying to get things into Craft quickly on my phone (or iPad) was not so good. It, therefore, failed my test.

Your testing could be different. You are likely to have different criteria for how well an app works.

Over the last week, I’ve reflected on the apps I use. Do I have too many? Could I streamline my system? On analysis, the answer is no. One of the most important parts of becoming more productive is to have a set of apps you are settled with. Sure, there are always going to be new, exciting apps appearing, but none of them is going to instantly make you productive. You will have months of learning a new way of doing something—it won’t be instinctive, and the time cost of moving all your existing notes and tasks to new apps is never going to be a good use of your time.

A few months ago, I looked at Obsidian. A great app, but I soon realised I would need time to learn the syntax. Obsidian extensively uses Markdown—a simple syntax method to quickly add bold, italics and links. Now, I do know a little Markdown, but it does not come naturally to me.

On the other hand, I have a few clients who are computer programmers or software engineers. Writing that way does come naturally to them, and Obsidian works great.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to find apps that work the way you work. Once you find them, stick with them. Learn everything you can about them. Find the fastest way to get stuff into them, learn how to search them and make sure you make the app yours.

You cannot do that in a few weeks. It takes time. Give it time. That patience, and yes, frustration at times, pays off in fantastic ways.

Sometimes, Evernote or Todoist don’t sync immediately. Over the many years I’ve been using these apps, I know this can happen from time to time. I also know exactly what to do to fix the problem. It may take me two or three minutes to get things syncing properly again, but that doesn’t mean I have to ditch the app and find something else.

Things will inevitably go wrong. Often, it’s not the app; it’s the device. If you are unfamiliar with an app, you won’t know the difference. You’ve got to give yourself time to learn these things.

With all that said, to get to the hub of your question, Stuart, I don’t think I use too many apps. I use apps for the jobs they were designed to do. Todoist manages my tasks. Evernote manages my long-form notes, such as research, meeting notes, client notes and my projects.

I do have specific uses for apps like Apple’s Reminders. That manages my family’s grocery list. My wife isn’t into productivity apps, so she prefers using Apple’s built-in apps. So, we use a list in Reminders for our grocery shopping. This does have its advantages for me too. While I am cooking, I can add items to the shopping list using Siri.

I will leave you with this thought. Using my iPhone every day is simple. I’ve had an iPhone since 2009. However, if I were to open the phone up and look inside, it would seem incredibly complex—It is. I’m pretty sure the only thing I would be able to recognise is the battery. But that’s not the point. The point is the phone works. It does exactly what I want it to, and it does that well.

I hope that has helped, Stuart, and thank you for your question.

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

Monday Aug 15, 2022

What Does Doing Look Like?

Monday Aug 15, 2022

This week, we’re looking at David Allen’s quote: “what does doing look like?”

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Episode 241 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 241 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.

In his book; Getting Things Done, David Allen uses the term: “What does doing look like?”. Now for those of you who have read the book, this quote probably washed over you in the excitement of learning about contexts, next action, ticklers and someday maybes.

However, these five words connect perfectly to a common issue many people face. We know we need to do something, and we have a reasonable idea of what the finished something is, but we are not clear on what we need to do in order to accomplish it.

This results in tasks that are unclear or seemingly too large to do, and we end up stalling and postponing the task.

So, this week, we’re going to look at this and see where we can get some clarity. And that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Joseph. Joseph asks, Hi Carl, I find I am avoiding doing a lot of my tasks because I am not sure what exactly I need to do. I might have a task to contact someone about something, but when I sit down to do it, my mind is blank, and I procrastinate and then don’t do it. How do you make your tasks doable?

Hi Joseph, thank you for your question.

That’s a good question, and it reminded me of David Allen's quote about knowing what doing looks like.

Essentially this means when you write a task, you need to be very clear about what action needs to be taken in order to complete the task.

I see this problem a lot when people are working on listing out their core work. One of a manager’s core tasks would be to manage a team of people. But what does managing a team of people actually mean at the task level?

You will see this also with a project manager’s role. “To facilitate successful conclusions to projects and to report progress to the responsible director”. Great, but what exactly does that mean at a task level?

This is an important area for all of us when it comes to getting our work done. If we are not clear about what our roles are within the company at a task level, we will find our most important work is neglected, and that can lead to all sorts of problems with our career.

The first step to breaking these tasks down into simple, actionable steps is to look for the verbs. For instance, if you manage a team of, say, ten people, perhaps one of your roles would be to have regular meetings with your team members to see how they are getting on and to make sure they are clear about their responsibilities.

Now there are two ways of doing this. The first is to have regular recurring tasks that say: “set up a meeting with Joanne” or “set up a meeting with Joe”. These tasks are clear, and it’s obvious what you need to do.

Alternatively, you could arrange to meet with Joanne on the first Tuesday of every month and Joe on the second Tuesday. And spread out meetings with your other team members throughout the month. Fix these meetings in your calendar, and you have clear tasks.

To write a blog post, I have four tasks. Plan this week’s blog post, write this week’s blog post, edit this week’s blog post and finally, post this week’s blog post. These tasks are spread out over three days.

I’ve been doing this every week for seven years, and I know precisely what needs to happen with each task. The planning takes around twenty minutes; writing will take an hour, editing thirty minutes and posting fifteen. Each task is clear, and that means I never procrastinate. When I plan my day, I will see the task, and all I need to decide is when in the day I will do those tasks.

And that’s an important part of making sure your tasks are clear—when a task is clear, you can anticipate the total amount of time required to complete the task without guessing, which will help you with your time management.

But how do you know what doing looks like?

This involves thinking about what you have to do. “Contact important customers”, might sound like a well-written task, but how will you contact your important customers? Email, telephone, text message? And who are you contacting? Where’s the list of names? Without establishing these two simple parts to the task, you will procrastinate when you see the task on your list.

The verb you use is “email” or “call”. And you make sure the list of important customers is accessible. Perhaps link the list to the task in the notes section of the note or turn the task into a clickable link (as you can do with apps like Todoist)

Now, this is the same with projects. Most projects begin with an abstract idea that is not as clear as we would like it to be. Even something as clear as update my Time And Life Master course”. Okay, I know I need to update it, but what do I need to do at a task level to update the course?

I know the first step would be to list out all the updates I want to make to the course first and to do that, I will need to find time to go through the course class by class, so I can make notes on any changes I want to make.

So, a simple “update Time And Life Mastery course” might seem clear, but at a task level, there are a number of things I will need to do. So, in this example, in my This Week folder, I do have “go through Time and Life Mastery Course and make notes on new update ideas”. I have this task set to recur every day this week, and I know if I spend an hour a day on it, I will have gone through the whole course by the end of the week.

I don’t need to add the next task to my task manager because, at this stage, all I need to do is go through the course. When I do my weekly planning session on Saturday, I can add in the next step. Which at this moment would be to outline the updated course, although that could change as I am going through the lessons.

This is why I don’t like to plan out projects in minute detail at the start. Too many things can change—and often do—and so all that planning time was a waste of time. I know what my project outcome is: a completed update to the Time And Life Mastery course, and I know my deadline. So, now all I need to know is what needs to happen at a task level this week.

Brainstorming next actions at the start of a project might seem like a good idea; in practice, though, all this is guessing what needs to happen and often leads to an overwhelming task list. Instead, look at the project’s objective, and decide what you need to do to get the project started.

From there, the “real” next steps will occur to you as you are working on the project, and they can be added to the project note.

A lot of the work we do is recurring work. Whether you are a salesperson, dentist, doctor or teacher.

Salespeople need to be communicating with their customers and potential customers. What does that look like at a task level?

It could involve getting a list from your company’s CRM system every morning and giving yourself time each day to contact people on that list.

A dentist or doctor perhaps needs to know what patients they will be seeing that day so they can prepare any equipment they need prior the seeing the patient. For instance, if you have a patient returning for a crown fitting, where is the crown? Is it ready for when the patient arrives?

And teachers will need time to prepare classes as well as teach their classes. How much time do you need to prepare your classes, and what tasks are involved in preparing them?

These types of tasks are recurring tasks—they are part of your core work. If you set them up as recurring tasks and ensure you have time in your calendar for doing them, they get done.

It’s no good saying I don’t have time to do these tasks. They are your core work—or part of it—you will have to do them at some point in time. Making them fixed recurring tasks takes the decision-making out of it because you know you must do them. Plus, your colleagues, students and customers soon work out your routines and are much more likely to leave you alone so you can get this work done.

Understanding what doing your work looks like prevents procrastination because each task is clear, and you know precisely what needs to be done. It’s when we are not clear about what exactly needs doing that we procrastinate and reschedule tasks.

And here’s a great tip for you. If you find you are repeatedly rescheduling a task, stop and ask yourself what doing that task looks like. The chances are, as the task is written, it is not clear, and that is why you are not doing it. Rephrase the task, and make it crystal clear what you need to do. That’s the way to ensure the task gets done.

I hope that has helped, Joseph. 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 Aug 08, 2022

Too Many Tasks Not Enough Time.

Monday Aug 08, 2022

Do you find you frequently run our of time but rarely run out of tasks? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s episode.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Episode 240 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 240 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.

I’ve been coaching people for around five years now and in that time one problem comes up again and again. That is there does not appear to be enough hours in the day to get everything done.

Well, the truth is, there is enough time—there’s always enough time—the problem is on the other side of the equation; tasks and appointments.

If you fill your tasks manager up with an unrealistic number of tasks when you have several meetings on the same day, the problem is not enough time, the problem is you are not prioritising correctly.

For most of us, appointments—whether they are business meetings or personal appointments—are the priority. They are on our calendar, confirmed and someone else is relying on you to turn up and be present. Tasks, on the other hand, while they may need doing, are less of a priority. Tasks can be done at anytime in the day be that the morning, afternoon or in the evening.

Problems start to happen when you have five or six appointments for the day and a task list with 40 Plus tasks. There’s no way you are going to find the time to do all those tasks. So what do you do?

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

This week’s question comes from Bryan. Bryan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed the Time Sector System for over a year now and it’s transformed my productivity. However, one problem I continually face is I rarely complete all my tasks for the day. I generally have between two and five meetings each day which take up a lot of time. This means when I get to my tasks for the day, I feel overwhelmed. Is this normal or have I missed something along to way?

Hi Bryan, thank you for your question.

Don’t worry, it’s unlikely you are doing anything wrong. Part of the problem is the world we live in today. So much to do, so little time to do it.

However, that said, if you do find yourself rarely completing your tasks for the day, there are a few things you can do to sharpen up your prioritising that will help.

When it comes to your tasks, the strategy I advocate is begin with your areas of focus. These are the eight areas we all share that mean something to us. Things like our family and relationships, health and fitness and self-development. Once you have established what each of these eight areas mean to you, and you know what tasks need performing to keep them in balance, you will know where your priorities for the day are.

Areas of focus are also important because it is these that will give you your goals. Meaningful goals you set will all come from your areas of focus. Imagine you have become aware that your savings are not where you want them to be. This will come from your finances area and you can decide what savings goal to set for the next twelve months. Or it could be you notice your waistline has expanded a little over the years and you want to do something about it. You could set the goal to lose a few pounds over the next six months.

Now, you don’t necessarily need to have an actionable task from each of your eight areas. For example, the spirituality area of focus may mean you just need to attend a spiritual retreat once or twice a year, or you go to the Synagogue or Mosque every morning. These are not tasks, these are things you just do. They become a part of who you are. You routine if you like.

When I look at my areas of focus, I have around five or six tasks each week that come from these. Exercise for example, is not a task, it is an event on my calendar. I make time each day for some form of exercise. It’s a non-negotiable part of my day.

Once you have established what your areas of focus are, the tasks and events are in your task manager and calendar, you can then look at everything else.

Work is where most of out daily tasks will come from during the week and it’s here were you need to get smart.

Start with what you are employed to do. Are you employed to sell product, teach, manage a team or create designs? What is the core work involved here so you are hitting your targets?

For example, I have a few clients who’s core work is to manage clients. Their role is to develop relationships with clients, new and old, and give outstanding customer service. Now, that’s something to work with. Begin with what “manage client relationships” actually means for you and your company.

What are the measurable results you and your company want from this?

That could be a given target for referral business, it could be numbers from a customer satisfaction survey or a given number of client contacts each quarter. I know that sounds a bit cold, but you do need to be able to measure something. If you cannot measure it, how do you know you are doing a great job?

Like areas of focus, you need to set up your core work as tasks (or events) so that these high priority tasks are being taken care of each and every day. These become your priorities.

I consider myself a content creator, I create content that helps people become better organised and more productive. But what exactly does that mean on a day to day basis?

For me, it means each day I need to create content. It doesn’t have to be a 2,000 word article or a recorded and edited video. It could be creating content, idea development, planning and writing outlines. As long as I am doing something each day related to content creation, I know I am doing my job.

When I start the week, I know I need to write a blog post, prepare and record a podcast episode, plan and record two YouTube videos and write two newsletter essays. You could say these are my weekly deliverables.

This means, when the week starts, I need to have the time to create this content scheduled and blocked in my calendar. To make this easier, I fix these in my calendar as repeating blocks of time. It means I don’t have to plan them out each week. I also know when I begin the day on a Tuesday, I have a three hour block in the morning to write. Likewise on a Friday morning, I have a two hour block for recording YouTube videos.

I don’t want to be trying to find the time every week. Once it’s fixed in my calendar, I am not going to be tempted to schedule meetings or allow meetings to be scheduled over these blocks.

Now, you may not have the freedom I have to block fixed times each week for doing your core work, but you will have some degree of flexibility. However, you will not be able to do that unless you know what your core work is. This is why spending a little time thinking about what it is you are employed to do and pulling out the actionable tasks that need to be done in order to accomplish your targets and key performance indicators—your KPIs—will pay you a huge dividend.

Next up is to get smarter about your calendar and task list. In the hierarchy of things, your calendar takes precedence over your task list. Events on your calendar are things that need to be done at a set time on a given day. Meetings, for instance, are fixed so we can have everyone involved at the same place at the same time.

Tasks, on the other hand, can be done at anytime in the day. Clearing your actionable email can be done mid-morning or late in the afternoon. Putting the final touches to the presentation you are delivering on Friday can be done first thing in the morning or after lunch. As long as it’s done, it doesn’t matter when you do it in the day.

This means, when you look at your calendar and see you have four or five meetings, you do not want to have thirty to forty tasks on your task list for the same day. You will not complete all those tasks. This is where you need to make sure you do your daily planning.

So what does daily planning look like?

All you need do with your daily planning is look at your calendar and task list and ask yourself if that is a realistic day. If you have several meetings that take up a large portion of your work day, reduce your task list to accommodate it.

Start by removing tasks that can be done another day—when you look at your list objectively you will find a lot of the tasks on there can be pushed off to another day. A key tip here is to look again at your calendar and find a day where you have less meetings scheduled.

If you are getting close to the end of the week and a lot of tasks are building up, look for time on your calendar you can block out for focused work. If you feel you are going to need more time than time available on your calendar, you may want to consider rescheduling some meetings. Don’t be afraid of this, all you need do is ask.

Sending a message to a colleague asking if you can postpone a meeting until next week because you need to finish some important tasks is not hard. What’s the worst that could happen? They tell you; no. But in my experience, most people are happy to reschedule a meeting, and if not, what have you lost? Nothing.

Daily planning puts you in control of your day. It will help you to stay focused on the things that are important to you. How long does a daily planning session last? Well, for the most part it’s going to be less than ten minutes. All you are doing is looking at your calendar and task list for tomorrow and asking yourself if this is a realistic proposition. If you feel it is not, reduce your task list.

If you are new to daily planning, it may take a little longer at first. We are also susceptible to over scheduling ourselves. We think we can do far more than we can in a day. This is where consistency and experience will help you. You will inevitably over-schedule yourself at first. It’s part of the learning process.

In those first few weeks pay attention to what you are getting done and what types of tasks you find you don’t get round to doing. It’s those tasks—the tasks you don’t do each day—that are your natural low priority tasks. You might tell yourself they are important, but if you are consistently not doing them, no matter what you tell yourself, they are not priorities. If they were, you would do them.

Try to eliminate these tasks.

I see people putting tasks like “do a mind-dump” each week, but they rarely ever do them. If you constantly skip these kind of tasks remove them. Mind-dumps don’t want to be done each week anyway—you have enough work to do. Mind-dumps, should be done every three months or so, or when you feel overwhelmed and you need time to get whatever it is overwhelming you out of your head.

You might think they are important, but if you never do them, drop them. All they are doing is cluttering up your task list and giving you a false reading on how much you need to do.

I hope that has answered your question, Bryan. Thank you for sending it in.

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

Monday Aug 01, 2022

How To Live A disciplined Life.

Monday Aug 01, 2022

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on how living a disciplined life brings an abundance of benefits. This week’s question was inspired by just that blog post.

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Episode 239 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 239 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.

So, what is living a disciplined life? Well, it’s not living a regimented life—that’s a kind of life that is very restrictive and doesn’t allow any flexibility. A disciplined life is a life lived with a few core tenets that provide the building blocks for a healthy, productive day. As Jim Rohn said, “Success is a few simple disciplines practised every day.”

This is very much in contrast to living an undisciplined life where anything goes and can, over time, lead to the destruction of careers, marriages, health and dreams.

The great thing about living a disciplined life is you feel great about yourself. It builds self-confidence and self-respect and is the foundation to living a successful life because those little things you do every day move you closer to living the life you dream of living.

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

This week’s question comes from Cindy. Cindy asks, Hi Carl, a few weeks ago, I read your article on living a disciplined life, and it got me wondering about what would you consider being the right sort of things to bring to a disciplined life. A few pointers in the right direction would really help me.

Hi Cindy, thank you for your question and for reading my article.

The great thing about building a disciplined life is that we have a blank canvas on which to draw up what we want to focus on. In many ways, this will start from knowing what your long-term, life goals are and what your areas of focus.

If you have taken the time to establish what you want from life and what is important to you in terms of your career, relationships, finances, health and lifestyle expectations, creating a disciplined life around these will give you a fantastic platform on which to build.

For example, if your long-term goal is to build a beach house so you have a place to go for long holidays, then you will need to be disciplined about your finances. To build (or buy) a beach house, requires money. Leaving this to chance is not going to work. Sure, you may buy lottery tickets every week, but the chances of you winning a sufficient amount to purchase a beachside property are very slim. You will need to be deliberate with your savings. How much you spend today, will have an impact on your future goal.

You will have to become a saver instead of a spender.

Now imagine you have a long-term goal to travel the world when you retire. Aside from the money, you will need, you will also need your health. If you let your health go now, when you retire, you will find many of the places you want to visit will be inaccessible to you. For instance, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to see the sun rise over the African savanna or visiting the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, both of which require a reasonable level of health and fitness to access.

I don’t know any people whose long-term goal is to spend their final years in and out of hospital waiting for the next heart attack or stroke.

Statistics from the American Heart Association state that almost half of American adults have some form of cardiovascular disease. This figure is probably similar for most other western countries. People need to take notice of these statistics.

Cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer in the developed world today. But it’s not that you are shortening your life expectancy that’s the real problem here. The biggest problem is most people have dreams and goals that they are waiting for—living an active retirement, being able to walk their daughter down the aisle or being able to play games with their grandchildren. If you are not disciplined about what you eat and how you exercise, none of those dreams will happen.

Living a disciplined life is about getting the basics right and being consistent with them. Having a healthy eating habit that ensures you get the right nutrition and doing some form of exercise every day. A thirty-minute walk each day would be enough. If you can do more, then the better.

I think the biggest problem with the word exercise today is we associate it with running or going to the gym. That’s just a modern concept. Not everyone likes going to the gym or going out for a run. Exercise simply means movement. Walking, taking the stairs, doing housework (a great form of exercise), doing a little gardening each week or taking your kids out on a bike ride every weekend. All these activities are exercise.

So what are the basics? In theory, these will differ from individual to individual, but your health is certainly one area you should be disciplined about. Finances would be another. Working for thirty to forty years and having nothing saved for your retirement would be a disaster. I’m no financial expert, but you should be saving at least 10% of your salary each month for your long-term future.

I like the way Jim Rohn puts this—see that 10% as a tax for your future. If the government decided to raise income tax by 10%, you’d grumble—perhaps get angry—but you would pay it. Stop finding excuses, and start putting a minimum of 10% of your income away each month.

Another essential would be planning the day. Let me give you an example.

Each day I have a few core activities that must be included in my day. These are writing my journal (for my mental health), exercise (for my physical health) Taking our little dog out for a walk with my wife (for quality time with my wife and little Louis) and creating something to help people improve their lives (linked to my purpose in life).

This means when I sit down at the end of the day to plan the next day, these activities are built into my day. There can be exceptions—for instance if my wife is away or we are on holiday—but on the whole, these activities are scheduled on my calendar and are non-negotiable.

This is an example of living a disciplined life. These core activities form the non-negotiable part of my day. When I woke up this morning, I wrote my journal. Writing this podcast, is how I can help people and once this script is finished, I will be heading out for a run at the local park. After dinner, my wife and I will take Louis out for his daily walk.

In total, these activities will take up around three hours of my day. That leaves me plenty of time to deal with my email and other work related matters. I have enough time to eat and sleep and perhaps have a little time at the end of the day to relax and learn something. I don’t feel stressed or overwhelmed. I feel comfortable, relaxed and I know at the end of the day I will feel great because the important thing in my life have been given time and attention.

If you flip that and look at an undisciplined life. The day starts with no plan. There’s no consistency and no reason to wake up except to get to work. This means wake up time is often decided on how much time it takes to boil the kettle and brush your teeth before heading out the door to go to work where you spend all day being told what to do, where to stand or sit.

Lunch is whatever everyone else is having, be that pizza, fried chicken or a highly processed pre-packaged sandwich which leaves you feeling tired and mentally drained all afternoon.

When you get home at the end of your work shift, you feel so fatigued and worn out, all you can do is crash on the sofa and binge-watch whatever you can find that may be interesting on TV or mindlessly scroll through your social media feeds being triggered by whatever opposing political view you happen to read—which then puts you in a foul mood for when you finally fall asleep.

You repeat that every weekday. I know which kind of life I want to live.

Living a disciplined life is about making decisions that are in your best long-term interests. Discipline is like a muscle, the more you exercise it the stronger it becomes.

It’s that discipline that makes each day feel constructive and meaningful. It prevents you from feeling you are wasting your life and it leads to better relationships because you are dependable, solid and inspiring to other people.

One of the interesting things about following a disciplined life is that after a few months, living that life becomes easy. It becomes something you just do. I write my journal every morning. It feels effortless, to make a cup of coffee, sit down with my iPad and write for ten minutes. I write about how I feel, what’s going well and what’s not going well. I write about my dreams, how I would like to live my life and where I feel I can improve. It’s just who I am. I write a journal.

To begin living a more disciplined life needs to start small. It could be something as simple as doing the washing up before you go to bed, or it could be you make your bed before leaving to start work. Once that becomes something you “just” do, you can then expand that something else. For instance, going out for a thirty minute walk after dinner—a fantastic way to help control your blood sugars by the way—or perhaps sitting down after your walk and spending ten minutes planning what your objectives for the next day will be.

I should say, planning my objectives for the next day is one of my favourite times of the day. It gives me a sense of control over my life. Instead of waiting for things to happen to me, I feel I am making things happen for me. It gives me a focus for the day and when I complete those objectives I get a wonderful sense of achievement.

The key to living a more disciplined life is deciding what you want out of life and finding a few little things you can do each day that will move you a little closer towards achieving those things.

I’ve seen so many people destroy their lives because they lived an undisciplined life. People who can no longer say yes to doing new exciting things because of health issues, or relationships breaking down because of a lack of attention and unreliability.

Don’t be one of those people. You can take control of your life and build amazing things with a little discipline. It’s how we humans thrive, flourish and grow.

It can be hard to become disciplined; I understand that. This is why you want to be thinking long-term. Start small. Develop your self-discipline strength and think of it as building a life you want to live small step by small step. I can promise you once you get started, and you begin to see results you will continue to grow.

Thank you, Cindy 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 Jul 25, 2022

Why Bother Setting goals?

Monday Jul 25, 2022

Why set goals? After all, most people fail to achieve them and for those lucky few that do, what then? What do you do after you’ve achieved your goal? Find out in this week’s episode.

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Episode 238 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 238 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

It always surprises me that many topics come round in cycles, and suddenly I am inundated with questions and queries about that topic. And that’s what happened with this week’s question. I got a podcast question and then a few emails about the subject, and then it came up in two of my coaching sessions.

Now I suspect the goals question has come up because of the realisation we’ve just gone past the halfway point of the year, and when we look at the list of things we wanted to do this year—our goals and projects—we discover we are way off achieving the things we wanted to do, and our goals appear on our radar again.

So, why do we set goals? What’s the point? With a statistic that claims only 8% of you will achieve your goals, it suggests even attempting to go after a goal is going to result in disappointment for 92% of you.

Well, this statistic hides the real purpose of a goal—it’s not about achieving the goal; it’s about what you have to change about yourself to achieve that goal. And that is what we are going to look at in a little more detail today.

So, I guess that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Liam. Liam asks, hi Carl, I recently went through my goals for 2022 after your recommendation in your weekly newsletter, and I realised I am miles away from achieving them. If I am being honest, I haven’t really done much about them at all. What can I do to stay focused on my goals? I do this every year, and it’s really frustrating.

Hi Liam, thank you for your question and please don’t worry. You are certainly not alone. Most people will find themselves in the same position as you are right now.

Okay, first, let’s look at what a goal is for. Setting goals gives you a roadmap—a direction, if you like—to help you grow and flourish as a human being. Without a goal or a set of goals, we drift. We will be pulled and pushed towards what everyone else wants for us, and that’s never usually what we desire or want. Without that direction, you are setting yourself up for a very disappointing life.

I remember reading Bronnie Ware’s book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying several years ago, and it scared me. I realised I was heading in the same direction as many of the people in that book. Who knows when we will leave this world? All we do know is there will come a time for us to depart. So the only question we need to ask is what would I like to do with my short life?

And that’s the key here. What do you want? If you don’t have an answer to that question, you will drift through life and become another dead being, having achieved nothing and done nothing. Sorry to be so dramatic. I hope that scares you, it should do. It scares me.

So now we’ve dealt with the morbid part; let’s look at the bright side.

Having a few long-term goals gives you a sense of purpose and a pathway to follow. You can change that pathway at any time if you feel you no longer want to pursue the direction you were going, but at least you have a direction, and you are growing and developing while you are on that path.

If I look back at my early life, I wanted to be a police officer, a Royal Marine, a vet and a physiotherapist—these were all goals I had while I was at school. However, like all teenagers, I changed my mind and went in a different direction. But each one of those occupations were goals at one time or another that I abandoned. But the abandonment was not in vain. I learned what it takes to become a police officer and a marine. I also learned a little about animals and human physiology.

Now, as I am older, my goals are more refined and more long-term, but I still have them. My goals don’t change much. Indeed, they haven’t changed much at all over the last ten years. I wanted to build a business—which I’ve now done, and now I want to grow that business. One change I have had to make about myself in the last ten years is to change my mindset from an employee one to a business owner. That was a lot more difficult than I expected, but it has been a wonderful journey.

And that is where having goals brings its the biggest benefit. You have to change. If you don’t have to change, then there’s no goal.

For instance, a lot of people set themselves the goal of losing weight. Great, with two-thirds of the western world population overweight or obese, that’s a good goal to have. However, the goal is not really to lose weight. Anyone can lose weight. Skip dinner tonight and weigh yourself tomorrow morning. You will have lost weight. But skipping meals long-term is not sustainable. Instead, what a weight loss goal needs to do is change your eating habits and lifestyle.

A weight loss goal is a lifestyle change. Most of us eat too much of the wrong types of food and develop painful, debilitating diseases as a result. So, the goal is to change our eating habits, move more and keep the weight off so we can live a healthy, active long life.

If your only purpose is to lose a few pounds, you’ll likely lose it, but if you are not changing your habits at the same time, you will quickly put that weight back on.

One of my biggest current goals is to buy a piece of land and build our family home to our specifications. Right now, I do not have the money to buy the land, but the habit I needed to change to achieve this goal is to become less of a spender and more of a saver. I have cut out a lot of my expenditure, and I save a lot more money now than I did before. I became aware of just how much I was spending and was able to reign that spending in.

If we choose to abandon that goal in a few years' time, it won’t matter. What matters is I now longer spend frivolously. I have become a saver, not a spender. My whole identity has changed.

So, what about you, Liam? What do you want?

For you to achieve what you want, what do you need to change about yourself?

We humans can achieve almost anything we want to achieve. Millions of people before us have achieved incredible things. How did they do that? They did it by first learning what they need to change and then dedicating themselves to changing.

How do you write a book? You have to dedicate an amount of time each day to doing focused writing. To do that, you need to learn how to focus and do deep work without distractions. You need to change your habits. Rather than sitting down and consuming, you need to change to be a creator.

If you desire to be the CEO of a leading company, you need to change from being a follower to being a leader. Again, it’s not easy, and you will need to learn about leadership by reading about leadership and learning from the greatest leaders.

There’s a concept that Tony Robbins teaches. It’s called CANI (C-A-N-I), which stands for Continuous And Neverending Improvement. As humans, we thrive and grow when we are continuously improving ourselves. We can do that by learning—reading, and studying. We can do that through exercise if we want to improve our health or by learning more about the food we eat.

There has never been a better time to apply CANI. We have an abundance of resources through YouTube and blog posts to be in a state of continuous improvement.

And finally, a word about failing. You never really fail unless you quit. Altering your goals, refining them or changing them completely is fine. Quitting is not. However, if you start down a path and struggle, you are not failing; all you are doing is gaining data points.

Failing is a part of achieving goals. The failure gives you data you can use to adjust your approach so you can try it a different way. This is part of the fun of having goals.

My first attempted marathon was a complete failure. I remember the day well. It was a hot, humid day, and the marathon I was attempting was ten times up and down a large hill. Stupid of me to try this as my first marathon, but there you go. I managed to do half the course before pulling out.

However, while I was disappointed, I learned I needed to change my training. I needed to add a few long runs of around eighteen to twenty miles, and I needed to get off the flat ground and start adding a few hills to my training runs.

I changed my approach, and three months later, I ran my first full-course marathon.

Did I fail at the first one? of course not. It turned out it was a training run (although, at the time, I treated it as a proper race). I learned a lot from that first attempt and was able to make adjustments so I could complete a full course marathon three months later.

So, I urge you, Liam and anyone else listening who has struggled with their goals to focus on what you need to change about yourself to achieve your goal. What is it that has prevented you from achieving them before that you could change and start to achieve your goals?

Remember, if you write 500 words a day for 120 days, you will have written a 60,000-word book. That’s just four months. Develop the habit of writing.

If you cut out soft drinks full of sugar, refined carbohydrates and fast food, in three months, your blood sugars and LDL cholesterol will have returned to normal (or close to normal). Make some minor changes to your diet, and you’ll be a lot healthier.

A goal is less about accomplishing the goal. It’s much more about who you become in the process of achieving the goal.

Thank you, Liam, 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 Jul 18, 2022

How To Optimise Your Productivity System

Monday Jul 18, 2022

Is your time management and productivity system optimised so you are always focused on doing the right things? That’s what we’ll be looking at today.

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Episode 237 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 237 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.

If you are like me, you will be reading, watching and listening to anything on time management and productivity. And there’s a lot of content out there.

Now, I must confess, I’ve been consuming this content since I was in middle school and I’ve tried a lot of ideas, systems and structures over the years. In the end you realise there are a few fundamentals that work and many that don’t.

Most of the ones that do not work are the things that look great in a blog post or YouTube video, but when put into daily practice involve so much maintenance, doing the work becomes secondary to keeping the work organised—a sure bet that the new idea is not going to work.

And so, this week, we’ll be looking at how to optimise our systems so that we are pointed towards the right things every day. It’s also a good time to be doing this because we’ve recently crossed the year’s half-way point and this a great time to be a half-year review.

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

This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks, Hi Carl, I want to make my system better but I don’t know where to start. I took your Beginners Guide To Productivity years ago and I love how everything comes together, but sometimes I feel my system has become boated and slow. What do you do to keep things fresh and fast?

Thank you, Scott for your question. Good question and it got me thinking.

I know it’s very easy to keep adding to our systems once we feel it is working. What we do is add something new, and while that might be a small change when you add, the problems start when those small changes add up.

This often begins in adding more and more project folders to our task managers. This is often where things start to go wrong because the more project folders you have in your task manager, the more folders you need to review when you do your weekly planning.

This can also happen in our notes app where we add more and more categories and sub-categories. Eventually, it becomes a mess and we do not enjoy going in there to find what we need.

Generally, I look at my system as a whole every three months or so. However, there is a key question I use here: what can I eliminate?

It’s easy to accumulate plugins, extensions and apps. I do it all the time. I become curious about a new app everyone is talking about and install it on my computer and ‘take it for a test drive’. In 99% of cases I don’t see how it would improve my overall system, but the app sits there on my phone or computer. This three monthly clean out keeps these out of my system and out of temptation’s way.

If you are relatively new to this world of productivity and time management, it’s going to be hard to stop looking at these tools. The best advise I can give is by all means go looking and playing, but after three months do a clean out. Remove apps, plugins and extensions you’ve accumulated and no longer use.

But let’s start at the beginning. How are you collecting your tasks, ideas and notes? How fast is it? Do you find yourself sometimes resisting to add something because of the effort it takes to get something into your system?

How you collect your stuff needs to be easy. Keyboard shortcuts on your computer, and widgets and long presses on your mobile devices. There needs to be as little resistance as possible. I like to think of it as like a Formula 1 racing team always searching for that extra hundredth of a second in speed. This is my approach to my collecting. Speed is key.

The problem is we don’t have ideas when we want to have ideas. Ideas come at us at the most inopportune times. I could be in the middle of a run and an idea comes to me, I need to be able to get that idea into my notes app while breathing heavy, sweating and not wearing my glasses.

Next up is how you organise everything. Now in the last five years or so, Microsoft, Google and Apple have been helping us here. You may have noticed that we are getting more and more stuff coming at us each day. Newsletters, books and articles we want to read, reports to review and of course messages and emails. It’s a lot of stuff. Where do we put all this?

Well, Microsoft, Apple and Google’s engineers have obviously experienced this problem too and so they’ve done a lot of background work into their search features. Now, I don’t use Microsoft tools, but I know you can do a system search and find pretty much anything on your computer. Apple has Spotlight which in the last year or so has become brilliant, and Google, is the king of search.

This is one area where I have significantly changed my system over the last few years. I remember six or seven years ago I was advocating a hierarchical tagging structure in Evernote. Today, I rarely use tags and my notebooks are a simple structure called GAPRA - Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive.

To be honest, because search is so powerful today, you really don’t need many folders or notebooks. A simple structure called personal and work would work. It would also be fast because you don’t have to think too much about where to put something.

The only thing you need to make sure is the titles of your notes and files are recognisable to you. For example, I use a simple meeting note title. I put the date first in the year, month, day format and then the word “meeting” and finally the person’s name I am meeting with. This way, I can search my notes via date, type of note (meeting) and/or person.

Next would be to look at your calendar. How are you doing against your “perfect week” calendar? I did a video on this a few months ago where you create a blank cleaner and call it “Perfect Week”. Then you add everything you want time for each week. This would include your social time, your exercise, family time and any else you want time for.

Ideally you would also break down your work. For example, if you would like to have two or three hours each day for doing focused work, then you would add that to the calendar. Likewise adding an hour each day for communications.

Every three months or so, turn that calendar on and compare it with your current week. How are you doing? Are you merging the two calendars? That’s the goal.

When I last did this, at the end of last year, I realised I needed more time for sleep. I wasn’t getting enough and I had just finished reading Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep book. So, I made sure there was a gap of at least eight hours from when I finished my day and when I began the next.

I’m not doing great here, but I am getting closer towards my sleep time goal.

Now, a quick word on your task manager. All those project folders are holding pens. They don’t drive your day. Your day comes from your Today list. That’s the list of tasks that you have decided needs to be done today. Now the question here, is are you trying to do too much. How frequently do you complete you list for the day.

Here, is where you need to optimise things. When you know what you can reasonable do each day, that becomes your daily number—or rather the maximum number you will allow on your list each day.

When I include my daily routines, that number for me is twenty. I will not allow more than twenty tasks on my daily list. I know if I ever have more than twenty I am not going to complete them all, so I can optimise my day by only allowing a maximum of twenty tasks. It helps me to eliminate the less important tasks.

And the final piece is how consistent are you with your daily and weekly planning sessions? I recently heard that those people who follow GTD (that’s Getting Things Done system) less than 5% do the weekly review consistently (and that means every week). That astonished me. The GTD book, the bible of modern day productivity systems, repeatedly tells us to do our weekly review. The weekly review is glue that brings everything together.

I’m guessing those of you who follow the Time Sector System very few of you are consistent with the weekly and daily planning sessions. Yet, like GTD, it’s the glue that brings everything together. You need to know what’s on your plate for the following week. You want to be eliminating the things that do not need doing next week and making sure you are attending to the things you have identified as being a part of your areas of focus.

Similarly with the daily planning, you need to know what your objectives are for the day. They are the tasks that will pull you towards successfully accomplishing your goals and projects. Without that clarity, other people’s dramas will get in the way and you’ll quickly become overwhelmed and that’s what you are trying to avoid by becoming more productive and better with your time management.

Your weekly and daily planning sessions do not require a lot of time if you are consistent with them. Twenty to thirty minutes for a weekly session and ten minutes for a daily session. It’s less than 1% of your total weekly time.

Now, I do know it’s easy to skip it and it’s unlikely there will be any immediate issues. But if you are not consistent and you skip these sessions a lot, something will eventually slip through the cracks and then the whole system falls like a house of cards. That’s when those thirty minutes you didn’t do turns into several hours of fixing a problem that should never have occurred in the first place.

The final part to optimising your system is to look at how much time you are spending on doing the work versus planning and organising the work. The goal should be 95% doing and 5% planning and organising.

I spend around five minutes a day cleaning up my desktop of files, screenshots and other digital stuff I have collected through the day. I do my ten minutes planning—although as I am consistent with this it often takes less time—and I clear my task manager’s inbox—around another five minutes. So, in an average twelve to fifteen hour working day, I spend around twenty minutes planning and organising my work each day. That’s around 2% of my working time spent organising and planning.

So there you go, Scott. I hope that has helped and given you some ideas on how you too can optimise your system. Remember, the goal is elimination, not accumulation and that includes minimising the amount of time you require for planning and organising. If that is an area where you are spending too much time, I would suggest you start there.

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 Jul 11, 2022

Getting Back To Productivity Basics

Monday Jul 11, 2022

This week, the question is all about how to simplify your system so there’s less maintenance and more doing.

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Episode 236 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 236 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 last ten to fifteen years, we’ve been blessed with a lot of fantastic digital applications that have made managing our tasks, goals and notes easy. We can start a note on our mobile phone and finish it off on our computers when we get to our desks. We can add tasks to a task manager while out hiking when we remember we need to do something and it will be there waiting for us on any device we choose to use.

However, what started out as a simple idea—use a device we carry with us everywhere to collect tasks, notes and ideas—has now become an ocean of complexity.

How do we organise all this stuff?

Where do I put this quote I want to keep for a presentation I may have to do in six months' time?

What do I do with all my bank statements?

And true to form, we humans have come up with increasingly complex ways to manage all this stuff. We now have elaborate digital filing systems—The alphanumeric system we’ve successfully used for hundreds of years isn’t good enough anymore, of course. And the humble task manager that started out simply telling us what we needed to do today, now has thousands of tasks hidden away in project folders often three or four levels deep.

What all this complexity does is slow us down. We end up spending more time organising than doing. We waste hours looking for answers to our problems on YouTube or in blogs (or podcasts) and yet, the answer to these problems is staring at us in our face. Reduce the complexity and get back to basics.

And that is what I will be looking at in this episode.

So, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Eric. Eric asks, hi Carl, last year I decided to get myself organised and to start using my computer and mobile phone to organise my life better. Unfortunately, I really struggle to keep on top of everything. I often can’t find something I’ve saved (I know it’s somewhere) and my task manager has hundreds of projects which take a long time to clean up each week. Is there a better way to manage documents, files and projects?

Hi Eric, Thank you for your question.

You are certainly not alone with this one. With a lot of my coaching clients, this is one of the first areas we need to sort out. Cleaning up their basic system so that managing it is simplified and the focus can return to accomplishing the work.

Let’s start with the task manager.

All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you must do today. Everything else is a distraction. This means the only list that matters each day is your today list. The list of tasks you have decided needs to be done today.

On a daily basis, everything else is a distraction. If you find yourself having to go into your project folders each day to look for something to do, your system is failing you.

Now, this might not be because of the apps you are using, it could be you are not doing a weekly or daily planning session and I have talked a lot about the importance of these in previous episodes. Basically, the weekly planning session is where you look at all your active projects to see what needs doing next week and add a date to when you anticipate doing those tasks.

Once you have that done, you can ignore all those project folders. They are just holding pens for tasks you think you need to do at some point in the future, but have not yet decided when they need doing.

On a side note, one of the reasons I don’t like having individual project folders in my task manager is because they often fill up with tasks that don’t need doing. You just add these tasks because you don’t want to have an empty project folder.

Creating a new online course, for example, could have hundreds of tasks in a project folder in a task manager. But ultimately there are only a few things that need to happen.

Write the outline,

Record the course

Edit the videos

Publish the course

Tell people about the course.

Five tasks. If you look carefully at these tasks, the outline needs around two to four hours, recording the course needs a full day, as does editing the course.

Uploading and publishing the course will require around four hours and telling people about the course will need another three or four hours.

My task manager will not help me much here. All these tasks will need to be on my calendar because I need sufficient time to work on them. My notes will be where my ideas and comments will go.

All I need my task manager is to tell me to “continue working on the course”. There may be a few little tasks such as write course description, but until the course is outlined and recorded, I am not going to be able to do that.

I certainly don’t need a project folder for something like this. I do need a note somewhere for my ideas and the outline will be in a spreadsheet.

Your focus needs to be on doing the work, not organising your work. And that leads me to the next problem.

For apps to be attractive they have to lure you in with more and more features. And rather than simplifying your workflow, all these features add complexity. And it’s this complexity that slows you down.

It might sound great that your new task manager can connect to your Google Calendar. But then every few months you’ll waste thirty minutes or so having to reconnect the calendar to your task manager. All that does is cause you to lose trust in your system—which again means you will be checking that events and tasks are moving as they are supposed to between your apps—another waste of time.

Now, what about all those files and documents? Well, there is some good news here. Apple, Google and Microsoft have, in recent years, been working very hard on their system search. What this means is as long as you know a keyword, a date range or a title, you will be able to find a document whether it is on your computer, or cloud service (if you are using iCloud, OneDrive or Google Drive).

You no longer need to develop complex folder structures for your files and documents. For example, If you create a Word, Google Doc or Pages file, you are encouraged to leave the file within the app’s file saving system.

What this means is if you write a Word document, the document will be automatically saved in Microsoft’s Word documents folder. This applies to Apple’s Pages folder. All your documents are contained within the apps folder.

You can then manipulate how your documents are listed. By date created, modified, title, size etc. You no longer need to create folders within folders for all your different projects.

And as all these documents are essentially saved in the cloud, you can use your system search on any of your devices to find any document. Plus, this means you have a URL link which you can copy to your project notes so any relevant document can be found quickly via a single click or tap.

When you focus on keeping your whole system as simple as possible, you will spend a lot less time having to go through folders looking for something to do.

But again, it comes back to planning. Knowing what you want to get done the next day.

If you maintain a simple system—a system based on when you will do your work rather than project tasks—the only thing you need to decide when planning the day is what needs to be done today?

A daily planning session is not about going through your projects to see what needs doing next—that’s what the weekly planning session is for—a daily planning session is about deciding what you will do tomorrow based on your appointments in your calendar, and what your priorities are for the day and week.

Of course, if you are not doing a weekly planning session, then your daily planning will become a weekly planning session and that will take up a lot more time.

Seriously, all you need is thirty minutes on a weekend for weekly planning and ten minutes at the end of each day to plan the next. A total of around 90 minutes a week planning. —around 1% of your week.

If you struggle to find that amount of time each week, you have a serious time management problem— or, as is more likely, a big self-discipline problem.

The problem is the consequences of not doing these planning sessions. Not doing these sessions will result in you wasting so much time each day just trying to figure out what to do next—often what you end up doing is other people’s work. It’s much easier to say yes to someone’s request when you have no plan for the day.

When you have a plan for the day, you’ll find you’ll say no to frivolous requests from your colleagues. You will also gain a lot more respect for your time from other people because they will see the results you are getting.

The bottom line is if you want to be more productive and get more out of your time each day, you need to keep things simple. Stop wasting time trying out new apps in the hope they will make you productive. They won’t.

Reduce your folders, you really don’t need them. Things to read can go into things to read folder, your documents can be kept in their documents folders. All you need to make sure is they have a recognisable title so you can use keywords to find what you are looking for by using your computer system’s search features.

Make sure before you end the day you give yourself a few minutes to decide what needs doing tomorrow and never skip the weekly planning session. That is the foundation on which all productive weeks are built.

I hope that has helped, Eric. Thank you for your questions.

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

Monday Jun 27, 2022

What Do I do With This email?

Monday Jun 27, 2022

What do I do with this email? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s episode.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 235 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 235 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.

Email. Possibly the most revolutionary new form of communication in the business world over the last thirty years. It’s transformed the way businesses communicate with each other and speeded up aspects of our work that in the past took days if not weeks to do before its advent.

However, as with all great new things, it can be abused and email has likely been one of the most abused innovations. Now, things that could have waited until the next meeting, are often quickly written down in an email and sent to the other side of the world, with an expectation of an almost instant reply. And that is where many of the issues with email rest.

But, another problem for us today is where do you put important emails that do not need a reply, but do need to be kept for informational purposes or just in case? That is what we will be exploring this week.

And 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 Anna. Anna asks, hi Carl, I get hundreds of emails each day, many of which do not need a reply, I just need to keep them, and I struggle to know where to put them. I don’t trust sending them to the archive, so I have a huge list of folders that are now overwhelming me. Do you have any tips or tricks to better manage email?

Great question, Anna, thank you for sending it in.

The key to getting on top of email is to understand the basics of what you need. Let me explain:

The inbox is for collecting email. It is where all the messages that are sent to your address will come in. It’s the collection point. The archive is for emails that you’ve either dealt with or want to keep for future reference and then there’s the trash for emails you no longer need to keep.

Now, on their own, those folders could work in a system. But I feel there’s one folder that bridges the gap between the inbox and the archive and that is a folder for emails you need to take action on.

I call this folder the “Action This Day” folder. Any email that requires action from me, will go into that folder. That could be emails I need to reply to, emails I want to read such as newsletters or reference emails with information I want to transfer to a project note.

Over the years, I’ve seen some pretty elaborate structures in email with long lists of project folders or folders for bosses and colleagues emails. These are still the most common ways for people to organise their email. It can work—up to a point. It stops working once the folder list becomes so long it takes forever to find a folder to save a mail message.

And there lies the “secret” to better managing email—speed.

As with most things related to productivity, the less time you spend organising your tools and stuff, the more time you can spend doing the work. All these folders you created, Anna, work if the volume of email you receive is low—less than twenty to thirty mails per day—when you receive over 100 emails a day, this system is going to break. It will slow you down so you spend far too much time organising it instead of dealing with it.

A question I would ask you, is why do you not trust archive? The archive is a great place to store your non-actionable, reference mail because it is searchable via sender’s name, keyword, topic or date range. As long as you know at least one of those search terms, you will find anything in seconds.

Now if there is a fear you will lose it in archive, always remember, if you receive an email there will be a copy of it somewhere. If you replied with an acknowledgement mail (a thank you for sending that mail) then you also have a copy of it in your sent folder. There’s nothing wrong in asking someone to resend an email they sent you. I am sure people would prefer that to someone simply ignoring their mail.

Search within email has come a long way in the last five years. All top email services have excellent search. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail are fast and have multiple ways to find a mail.

There are thousands of articles and videos online explaining how to get the most out of search on these services. This is where we can develop our skills and learn how to search our email effectively. Just type a search query in Google for “How to search Gmail, or Outlook, Apple Mail” etc. Then set aside an hour or two to study.

It will take a little while to become competent at search, but once you learn the basics and apply what you learn, your confidence in your archive will grow and pretty soon you will be able to let go of all those folders.

Now, what about managing your mail. What do you do with it? Well, there are a number of different types of email. The easiest to deal with are all those newsletters you receive that you don’t read.

Often these are newsletters from industry bodies you feel compelled to read because they are about your industry. Now if you read them, great. When they arrive, put them in your action this day folder for reading later in the day.

If you don’t read them, unsubscribe from them.

Here’s an interesting thing, there will always be someone who does read them and if there is anything interesting they will tell you. You can always ask them to forward them the email. Alternatively, you can resubscribe at any time.

The problem I’ve seen is people who subscribe to these newsletters and never read them. They place them in a dedicated folder and pretty soon they have thousands of unread newsletters. Seriously, you are never going to read them. Let them go.

All those mails are taking up digital space and slowing down your mail. You want mail to be fast and efficient. With thousands of unread newsletters clogging up your system, you will be slow.

Get real, and be honest with yourself. If you are not reading these mails, let them go. Unsubscribe.

Actionable mails get dropped into your Action This Day folder for acting on later in the day. These are easy to deal with when you are processing mail. If you need to reply, drop it in your Action This Day folder.

Now those emails that contain a paragraph or two that are relevant to a project but do not need a reply—the CC’d emails. What I do is rather than send the whole email to my project notes, I copy and paste the relevant parts of the email directly into the project note and link back to the original email. If your email app doesn’t allow linking directly to a mail, then copy and paste the title of the email together with the date the mail was sent into your project notes. That way, if you do need to reference the original email again, you have your search terms.

There is a class of mail that doesn’t need a reply immediately but does require a lot of work. This to me is a project and therefore I would treat the email as an instruction to begin a project. That means I open up a project note in my projects folder in my notes app, paste the email and add the link back, then I will add a task in my task manager’s inbox. I can decide later when I will begin work on the project.

The original email is then archived. I have a link back to the original email, and the relevant instructions are now in a project note.

For linking back, Gmail, of course, is the best at this as each email you receive will have its own unique URL. Apple Mail allows you to drag and drop emails into notes that generate an in-system link back, and With Outlook as long as you are using OneNote as your notes app, any email sent to OneNote will also have a track backlink.

And that’s a good point, I know there are a lot of great notes apps around, but you are only making things harder for yourself if you are using Outlook mail and a third-party notes app that doesn’t allow you to link back to an email. Apple Mail and Apple Notes work fantastically together. My advice is don’t make life harder for yourself than is strictly necessary.

Now, what about emails you are waiting for a reply on. This one is interesting because in many ways if you don’t trust the person you sent the email to reply to you, then there’s an issue with trust, not an issue with email. It’s easier to blame mail, a lot harder to blame your own lack of trust.

However, there are some emails you may need to keep as you wait for a response. One of which would online orders. I keep the order confirmation email in a waiting for folder, just in case there is a problem with the order. However, emails I sent to a colleague or client, I would add a note in the relevant project to tell me when I sent an email.

The problem with waiting for folders is they don’t automatically clean themselves out. What I mean is when you get what you asked for, we forget to remove the sent email from our waiting for folder. Pretty soon, that folder fills up with things you are still waiting for and stuff that you received a reply to weeks ago.

This is about minimising what you are keeping. It’s more effective to add a note to the project note with a date you sent the email than it is to add another mail to a waiting for folder.

Another issue I have with waiting for folders is if you have a task that says “get presentation materials from Jane”, and you send the email to Jane asking for the materials, you have not completed the task. You do not have the materials from Jane, therefore the task is not complete. The task was not “send email to Jane” it was to get the presentation materials. Don’t complete the task, reschedule it a day or two in the future. That will be the reminder to you that you still have not received the materials.

Managing email can be simple or complex. Which one you choose will have a big impact on how effective you are at dealing with mail. The truth is we’ve always received a lot of mail. Even before email. The trick is to develop a system that filters out the necessary learning only the necessary to deal with.

One final point. There are two parts to managing email. Processing and doing. Don’t mix up the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as possible. It does not involve doing email—even if it would take two minutes or less. Just clear that inbox as fast as you can. Then set aside an hour at the end of the day for dealing with your actionable mail. Doing it later in the day avoids email ping pong because it’s unlikely you will get a reply on the same day. Reply in the morning and you’ll be doubling up your email.

I have a course on managing email called Email Mastery. I have put a link to that in the show notes for you.

SO, there you go, Anna. I hope that has covered most of the types of emails you receive. 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 Jun 20, 2022

How To Productively Conduct A Job Search

Monday Jun 20, 2022

Why does doing your work feel overwhelming and so hard? That’s what we are looking at this week.

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Where We Get The Eisenhower Matrix Wrong

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