Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 233 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 233 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.

Procrastination ah the bane of all productive wannabes. No matter how motivated you are when you retire for the night to have a productive day the next day, that pernicious procrastinator steals the day, and you find you’ve achieved very little, but you know how everyone of your friends on Instagram are doing, and you can talk about all the funny videos you saw on Tick Tock as if you were a professor of the subject.

But what is procrastination, and why do we do it? Those are two questions we need to answer before we can start helping move anyone away from those dark depths to a more brighter, focused and productive light.

Now, to kick start things off and before the Mystery Podcast Voice reveals the question, let’s look at the definition of procrastination:

“Procrastination is the action of unnecessarily and voluntarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so. “

Now I want to give you another definition. That of self-discipline:

“the ability to make yourself do things you know you should do even when you do not want to”

Now the way I see procrastination is that it is the near opposite of self-discipline. Yet, no one wants to admit that—particularly procrastinators. The truth is is a little more complex than that, but it is a good starting point because these definitions can give us some clues on how to defeat procrastination.

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

This week’s question comes from Len. Let asks, hi Carl, I’ve been in full-time employment for over twenty years now, and I’ve always wanted to be more productive, but I’ve always failed. I’m never doing things that are important, instead I do the unimportant stuff. I think I am what some people call a “serial procrastinator”. Have you any ideas you could share that will help an old procrastinator like me stop?

Hi Len, thank you for your question and for being so honest.

Firstly, let’s deal with the “I’ve always failed” part of your question. Failure is not a finish line in itself unless you make it so by quitting. Failure is an education.

Whenever you fail at anything, you learn something—if nothing else, you learn what doesn’t work so you can start again with a different strategy. Failure has nothing to do with you as a person; failure at anything informs you what skills are missing, so you next time you try to can build those skills and strengths, so you don’t fail again.

I remember the first full marathon I attempted. I failed. I dropped out at mile 18. I just couldn’t go another step further. I was devastated. I thought there must be something wrong with me. But a little voice inside me said, this was only my first attempt, and I learned that I needed to set off slower and pace myself better, and I also needed to improve my strength and stamina on hills—you don’t run marathons around an athletics track. You run on streets, and they are rarely flat.

With that information, I spent the next six months learning to pace myself properly and did a hill session every week. The next time I entered a marathon, I finished it—with energy to spare! Did I fail? Of course not; I got knocked over, but I learned why and picked myself up and developed my skills and succeeded.

Remember, you never fail until you quit. You may get a few setbacks because the strategy you were trying didn’t work, but that is not failure. It’s a setback.

Okay, now on to your procrastinating.

I’ve seen a lot of clinical reasons why we might procrastinate, and I see many people in the media who will jump on these clinical definitions and tell every who procrastinates that it’s an illness and if you take this new super-drug, you will be cured. Well, I’m sceptical. I’m sure you can alter the chemical make-up of your brain to stop procrastinating and be more focused, but artificially altering your brain’s chemicals isn’t a long-term solution if you ask me.

But let’s go back to the definition of procrastination—delaying or postponing something you should be doing despite being aware of the negative consequences.

Why are you postponing what you should do? What are you doing instead? That’s where I would start. Let’s say that reading the news or going through Tick Tock or Instagram, is what you do, now here is the dilemma, Facebook (or Meta as they are now called) and ByteDance are big corporations that employ smart people to create a user experience that is designed to keep your eyes on their content. Much like soap operas and TV dramas—they want to keep you watching their content.

You are battling again with professional people who understand human psychology, and unless you remember this, you will always be sucked in.

It’s the same with the news today. The news media companies are in competition for your eyes and attention. They employ people to come up with click-bait headlines so you click their articles. For years journalism schools have been teaching students how to grab and keep your attention, and it’s very effective.

Now we mortal humans have not had any opposing training. There are no classes on how to resist click-bait headlines and the social media algorithms designed to keep us on their site. So, this battle is very much a one-sided one.

However, we do have one thing in our arsenal that is highly effective. And that is self-discipline. And the great thing about self-discipline is that it works very much like a muscle: The more you train it, the stronger it becomes.

By the way, if you want to see how developing self-discipline can transform your life, I highly recommend David Goggins’ book: Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds and Jocko Willink’s Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual. Both books lay it on the line what can be achieved by developing your self-discipline and destroying procrastination.

However, for the last forty years or so, our lives have become more and more easy. When I think back to my childhood and visiting my grandparent's house, whenever they wanted to watch something on TV, they had to be there at the time the show was on. There was no streaming or recording. You either watched it when it was on, or you missed it. And then, if you didn’t like the next TV show, you had to get up out of your chair, go to the TV and turn over the channel. No remotes back then.

There were no robotic vacuum cleaners, and if you wanted to learn something, you had to go to a place called a library. No picking up your phone and Googling something for the answer. If you wanted to read the news you had to go to a newsagent to buy a newspaper—unless you were lucky and you lived in an area where the newspaper was delivered to you.

And if you were hungry, you had to get up and cook something. No home food deliveries in those days.

Back then, every day we had to exercise our self-discipline one way or another. Today, we can run businesses from our sofa with a phone. We don’t have to move anywhere.

All these conveniences have been eroding our self-discipline silently and ruthlessly and it’s no surprise that the word procrastinate has become such a popular word in recent years. I’m betting if I asked my grandmother twenty years ago if she knew what procrastination was she’d have looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language.

So what can we do to strengthen our self-discipline? Well, one of the best ways is to develop a simple, healthy morning routine. There are three things a good, solid, healthy morning routine does. It first wakens you up. You can start off by doing a few stretches. Begin with your neck, then shoulders, arms, stomach and then legs and feet. Spend around two minutes stretching every morning as soon as you get out of bed. Then drink a glass of water with half a lemon squeezed into it.

You can make yourself a cup of coffee or tea as well. Then sit down somewhere relaxing and do ten minutes of meditation or journal writing. And finally, look at your plan for the day.

Three things. Stretching (and or exercise), reflection—meditation or journal writing and reviewing—look at your plan for the day. Make this not only a routine but something stronger. A ritual. Something you will not miss—ever.

My morning ritual lasts around 40 minutes, although I give myself 45 minutes. Yours might be thirty minutes or even an hour. The time it takes is not important. What is important is that every day, whether you are working or not, you begin each day the same way.

Then, before you start the day, make your bed and clean up the kitchen.

Make no excuses (there are none) for not doing this. Not only will you feel great having a consistent way to begin your day, you are also exercising your self-discipline.

Another way I strengthen my discipline is to always take the stairs and avoid escalators and lifts (“elevators” if you live on the other side of the Atlantic) I do have an exception here. If the floor is above the 10th, I will take the lift. But fortunately, it’s rare I need to go beyond the 10th floor.

Quite often taking the stairs is faster than waiting for a lift anyway and I gamify escalators by taking the stairs and racing the escalator to prove it’s faster to use the stairs.

It takes time to strengthen your self-discipline, but the time and effort is worth it because as you gain strength here, your procrastinating habit will be receding.

The next thing you need to do to stop procrastinating is be aware of what you do when you procrastinate and when you find yourself doing that activity stop immediately. Ask yourself: What am I doing?! In an aggressive voice out loud.

What this does is interrupt the pattern you have wired into your brain that causes you to procrastinate. Interrupting patterns of behaviour is a great way to overcome any bad habit. You could also slap yourself aggressively across your chest as well when you say “what am I doing?!”

This pattern interrupt will begin the rewiring of your brain to remove the bad habit of procrastinating and start reinforcing a new, positive habit.

Finally, always have a plan. Sometimes we slip into procrastination because we do not know what we need to do next. Or, our to-do list is so long, it’s overwhelming and trying to decide what to do next causes so much anxiety we slip into procrastination.

Your plan does not need to be a micromanaged plan. All you need are a few real, meaningful objective tasks to be completed that day. Knowing what you need to get accomplished each day prevents procrastination because you feel the pull of your plan. It’s when you don’t have a plan you feel you are having to “push through” the day and that’s exhausting. Instead, have a plan. The plan will pull you through the day and that is far easier than pushing all the time.

I hope that has helped, Len. Thank you for your question. Remember, you are not failing, you are learning what doesn’t work. I hope knowing that all you need to do is to strengthen your self-discipline muscle and have a plan for the day and you will soon find yourself procrastinating less.

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

Sunday Jun 05, 2022

How To Be Consistent.

Sunday Jun 05, 2022

What is your philosophy for life and work? That’s the question we are exploring this week.

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Episode 232 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 232 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One of the most influential people in my life has been Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn was active in the 1980s through to the early 2000s and taught personal development through changing people’s philosophy on life and emphasising the importance of taking responsibility for your own life.

One of Jim Rohn’s main teaching points was to develop your own philosophy for the way you live your life and do your work. This means having a set of rules for how you will execute your work and be present with your friends and family. For instance, a simple example would be when having a family dinner, you put away your phone and be interested in how your family spent their day.

This week’s question is linked to this as it’s a question based on how I manage to stay consistent with my output. I’m nothing special, I just took on board what I learned from Jim Rohn’s books and videos—which most are available on YouTube now—and built a few simple philosophies into my life.

It’s not easy to do this and it takes time. But if you do not have a set of philosophies (or rules) that you set for yourself, you will find yourself living your life by other people’s philosophies and rules— which are rarely going to do much for your life. There is always something driving our lives. Either we take control or we allow other people or society in general to control us.

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 Sean. Sean asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following you for some time now and I’m impressed with how you have consistently uploaded content over many years. How do you do that? Do you have a team of people helping you or is there something else?

Hi Sean, thank you for your question.

Firstly, I should say that I do not have a team of people working with me. It’s all me. I have toyed with the idea of hiring a team to help me with video editing and social media publishing, but so far, I have not seen the need as I can manage to do my work each week without much stress and certainly without overwhelm.

However, I do have a set of ‘rules’, if you like, that I follow that enables me to stay focused on what is important each day.

And this is linked to my 2+8 Prioritisation Method (or what I used to call my Golden 10) this is a process by which I determine what needs to be done each day.

Several years ago, now, I realised I could not do everything in one day. I’m sure you also have discovered that, and having an open-ended to-do list, left me feeling stressed and overwhelmed. It often felt that as fast as I did my tasks, new tasks would be coming in. There was never a net gain.

This had to stop. So, at the end of each day, I began selecting ten tasks that I would work on the next day, two of which were must do’s. Whatever else happened that day, those two “objective” tasks would get done.

It was this methodology that transformed my output. Every morning when I began the day I know precisely what needs to be done and what I would like to get done.

Ten tasks are my optimum number. If I try to add more, I leave myself with no flexibility to deal with anything urgent that may come up on the day.

My rule is, that when I stop and close out the day before I turn off my computer, I will open my task manager and go through the next day’s tasks. I will use the flags to indicate which ten tasks will be my 2+8 for the next day. This is now a non-negotiable rule. And funnily enough, I have been doing this for several years now and it feels very uncomfortable to go to bed not knowing what my ten tasks are for tomorrow.

I noticed on a recent trip, that even though I was not working, I still found myself opening my task manager before going to bed to see what needed to be done the next day. To prevent myself from doing work (I was taking a break), I made my objective task to relax and enjoy the day.

This is probably the biggest most impactful philosophy or rule I have adopted over the last ten years that has seen a dramatic improvement in my daily and weekly output.

Just to give you an example, before I went to bed last night, I made writing this podcast script one of my objectives for the day. When I woke up this morning, I was ready to begin writing. There was no hesitation or procrastination. Writing this script is a must-do today and the sooner I start writing the sooner I could move on to other, possibly more urgent, things for the day.

And that brings me back to what I learned from Jim Rohn all those years ago. “Success is a few simple disciplines practised everyday”. It’s that philosophy that is tattooed onto my brain (as Robin Sharma would say).

And this philosophy works with anything you want to do. Exercise, for instance, takes consistent effort to achieve whatever results you want. You can’t lose weight or run a half-marathon if you only do activities to achieve the result you want when you feel like it. It has to be a disciplined practice to eat less and healthier or do your exercise for the day.

My closing down for the day activities takes around ten minutes, it’s just ten minutes out of 1,440 minutes each day. Is that really so difficult? Now based on how I feel when I don’t do it, it’s not worth missing. I’d rather have ten minutes less sleep and know precisely what needs to be done the next day than run the risk of having a stressful and overwhelming day. It’s a small discipline practised every day.

But there is more that will help you to make sure you are doing the right work every day. I’ve talked a lot about your core work—the work you are paid to do or are responsible for. This is the work that must be done for you to do your job well—and that’s the same whether you are in full-time employment, a stay at home parent or run your own business. There are a number of tasks you must do each day and week to uphold your responsibilities.

These tasks must be scheduled and once scheduled they get done at their scheduled time. Skip these or ignore your calendar and you are shirking your responsibilities. You are in effect doing what Jim Rohn calls practising failure, which is: “a few errors in judgment repeated every day”. And that’s what you need to tell yourself. Nobody wants to be irresponsibly so you need to make sure you are responsibly doing what you know you must do—that could be collecting your kids from school and driving them to their rugby or swimming practice. Or it could be calling ten new prospects each day.

These are the few simple disciplines that if practised every day will ensure you are leading a successful life. You become dependable, and consistent and in a world of inconsistency, that is something refreshing.

A question to ask yourself is what rules do I want to live my life by? Now, this does not mean boxing yourself in so you live a miserable life. What it means is you choose the rules by which you will live a fulfilled life. For instance, I know if I do a little exercise every day, my energy levels remain high, I feel great and it puts me in a positive mood. I also know, that if I do not exercise every day (an error in judgment), I feel lethargic and my mood is bordering on the negative.

Similarly, I feel fantastic when I get to help people. Putting out my content each week, allows me to help thousands of people. Whenever I hit publish, I get a buzz knowing that this piece of content, whether it is a blog post, newsletter or YouTube video, will help someone somewhere become less stressed and more in control of their lives.

But I cannot press publish if I don’t have anything to publish. So the work has to be done. It’s funny, as I write or record, I feel I am having a conversation with someone—someone I don’t know, have never met and possibly never will. But if I help just one person become a little more disciplined, or a little more focused, perhaps I might have helped them achieve the life they want for themselves. Nothing beats that feeling.

So, sitting here at my computer, writing this script, is a must. This is my chance to help someone.

That is why every week, I will sit down and write my blog posts, and record my podcasts and YouTube videos. It’s not only a discipline, it’s my philosophy.

So, Sean, if you want to lead a fulfilled life, the secret is to create your own philosophy. What ‘rules’ do you want to live your life by? What could you do a few minutes each day that over time will build into something very special? What habits, do you need to change?

The thing is, unless you start with what you want, you won’t know what needs to change and what habits you need to develop.

Being a good parent, means you need to spend quality time with your kids each day. What does quality time mean to you and what could you do to make that happen? It’s surprising how little effort you would need to put into it. For instance, it could be you make it a rule you will not work after 6 pm so you can be there to help your kids with their homework or take them out to the park on a lovely summer’s evening.

Not working after 6 pm, becomes your philosophy.

It’s rare that we need to have to do a fundamental overhaul of our lives. Most people, and I guess you listening to this podcast have already made the decision you want to improve aspects of your life. That improvement is a philosophy—it’s what Tony Robbin calls Continuous and Never Ending Improvement (CANI). That is a great philosophy to have. How can I be a better spouse, parent, salesperson, taxi driver, or friend? What do I have to do each day to be more organised, better prepared and more fulfilled?

All great questions and questions that when answered have the potential to become your philosophy.

I hope that has helped, Sean. Good luck on your journey (for that is what life is—a journey) and thank you for your question.

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

Monday May 30, 2022

How To Prioritise Your Work With The Eisenhower Matrix

Monday May 30, 2022

This week, we’re diving deep into prioritisation and learning how to use the Eisenhower Matrix to make it easy.

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Episode 231 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 231 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One of the most common challenges people face is how to prioritise their work and personal tasks. With so much being thrown at us, not only do we need time to process all that stuff, we need to make sure that we are allocating sufficient time to the tasks that are important.

However, that means we need to also make decisions about what is and is not important and that is where the biggest challenge will be.

So, this week, I will be answering a question on how to do that effectively.

Now, before we get to the question, I would like to give you a heads up that this week, I have launched my summer sale. For this week only you can get 15% off my individual courses, 20% off my coaching programmes and 25% off my bundles. Full details can be found in the show notes.

Don’t miss out on this incredible offer. My sales are rare, so this is your chance to build your skills over the summer so you are ready and prepared for whatever the world throws at us next.

Okay, 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 Margarida. Margarida asks, Hi Carl, I recently cam across something called the Eisenhower Matrix. I think I get it, but how does this fit in with how you prioritise your work?

Thank you Margarida for your question.

I first came across the Eisenhower Matrix when I read The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey a very long time ago.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the Eisenhower Matrix, this is a matrix of four squares that divided between urgent and important, not urgent and important, urgent and not important and not urgent and not important.

By the way, if you want to see this matrix, you can head over to my website, carlpullein.com, and my latest blog post has an illustration for you. I’ll also put the link in the show notes for you.

The idea is you spend most of your time in the top two squares. The important and urgent and the important and not urgent.

Now, as with all systems there are difficulties and the Eisenhower Matrix is no different. The second square (or quadrant 2) the important and not urgent tasks is where you need to be dedicating more of your time. The type of tasks in here are planning tasks, anticipating potential problems, taking care of your health and your relationships and getting some rest and relaxation.

Now, I am sure as you listen to those words you know they are important but how often do you prioritise them? The chances are you only prioritise them once they become urgent. A visit to your doctor informs you you are pre-diabetic and urgently need to lose weight and start an exercise programme. This is where a quadrant two task moves into quadrant one (urgent and important).

The same can happen if you neglect your relationships, because maintaining relationships is rarely an urgent task, we tell ourselves we’ll deal with a relationship issue later. The problem is “later” is not defined and when something is not defined it slips down our list of priorities. It’s only when you are served with divorce papers that a task like this gains the urgency it needs.

One thing I learned a while ago is, if you want these important, not urgent tasks to remain non-urgent you must schedule time for them. This means you schedule planning, exercise and time spent with your nearest and dearest. Ie; blocked out on your calendar.

But, here lays another issue, what are your quadrant two tasks? What do you define as a quadrant two task?

Most people never sit down and decide what is important to them and what needs to happen to maintain them. Ultimately, actions speak louder than words. And that means if you are to make sure you are taking care of these important areas of your life you need to know what they are and what you need to do to maintain them.

For instance, I know my relationship with my wife is important. This means each week, I make sure we have at least one day out together. Often we’ll drive over to my parents in law for dinner, or we’ll take day trip to the beach. One thing I do know though is that day spent together is far too important to miss.

We are both busy people, but in the almost fifteen years we’ve been married, our weekly trips have been rarely missed.

I find it interesting that car owners are generally very attentive when it comes to getting their cars serviced and engine oils changed. I know I am. In fact, my car begins to warn me a service is due a few thousand kilometres before the due date.

Now if you don’t get your car serviced on time, there may not be anything that goes catastrophically wrong as soon as it’s late. You may even be able to go another year without any serious harm. But sooner or later, that neglect, will cause trouble and it will be expensive.

The same applies to your quadrant two tasks. Miss doing what needs doing for a week or two, perhaps even a month or two, and nothing will seem wrong. But neglect of any of these areas and you will soon face problems. Now a quadrant two task has become a quadrant one task and that is never good.

This is why not only do you need to know what your quadrant two areas are, you need to know what tasks need to be completed each day or week and get them scheduled on your calendar.

What about quadrant one tasks—the urgent and important? These are tasks related to your core work. The work you are paid to do. If you’ve taken the Time Sector Course, you will know all about these important tasks. These are the essential tasks that need to be done as part of your employed work. Neglect these are you will soon find yourself out of a job.

On a day to day basis, it’s these tasks that take priority, after all, they are urgent and they are important. But here again there are problems. As with quadrant two tasks, most people never define what they are. If you never define what your quadrant one tasks are, your quadrant three tasks (the urgent, not important tasks) will sneak into quadrant one and overwhelm you.

For instance, some emails are quadrant one, most are quadrant three. Yet, if you never define which emails are quadrant one, all emails will become quadrant one. When that happens, you waste a tremendous amount of time on low-importance emails.

Once again, here you need to take a little time out to define what is what. Let’s say you spend three or four hours working out what is important to you and what your core work is. That time investment will be repaid multiple times because once you know what is important, your decision making becomes so much faster.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I can process 100 emails in around twenty minutes. That’s not because I have any special abilities. It’s simply because I know what emails are important and what are not. Customer and client emails are the highest priority. Emails from companies asking me to advertise their products are my lowest priority and are instantly deleted.

Each day, I know what my core work is and I know I have time allocated to making sure that work gets done. Again, that does not take any special talent or ability. All it takes is a few hours establishing what my core work is and what is not and therefore low-value work.

And that’s what you need to do, Margarida, take a little time out and establish what is important to you and what your core work is. Once you know these, you will be able to make the Eisenhower matrix work for you. The secret power of the matrix is to customise it for your life and not try and fit your life into other people’s examples of hoe they use the matrix.

Now the final parts to the Eisenhower Matrix is to establish what your quadrant three and four tasks are. These are generally easy to work out. These are the things that often cause us to procrastinate.

Now there is a warning here. You may find playing video games in the quadrant four list of many people’s examples. This may not always be the case for other people. I know many people who use playing video games as a way to relax. If you do find activities like playing video games are a good way to relax, then they can be a quadrant two task. However, mindlessly going through YouTube videos and aimlessly watching TV, is most certainly a quadrant four task and should be avoided at all cost.

I use YouTube as a way to learn new things. That, for me, comes under self development, and therefore is a quadrant two task. However, if I ever find myself aimlessly watching something, I will quickly recognise it for what it is and stop.

Quadrant three is the difficult one to define. The truth is most emails and meetings you attend are quadrant three, but they are clever as they can disguise themselves as quadrant one. This is another reason why clearly defining what a quadrant one task is is so important. Allowing quadrant three tasks to sneak through into quadrant one will lead you to stressed out and overwhelm.

Here, I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to define what your quadrant one tasks are. Once you are clear about these, your ability to quickly decide what you need to do about something and how much time to spend on it improves. Most advice for quadrant three tasks is to delegate as many of these as possible, and if you can do this, do it. However, for most of us, that is not really possible.

The best advice I can give you is the advice former Israel Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir who said… And I quote:

“Take my advice: take everything you’ve received today and put it away, don’t touch it for a week. Urgent, not urgent—leave it, don’t touch it. Come back to it after seven days, ten days. This is what you’ll see—ninety percent will take care of itself, and the ten percent that didn’t—that’s probably what you need to deal with.”

I’ve always loved that quote and it’s what I have used for dealing with quadrant three tasks. Leave them for a week. I’ve found that it’s true, 90% of them take care of themselves and the remaining 10% I can elevate to quadrant one.

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

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

Monday May 16, 2022

How To Get Good At Capturing Digitally

Monday May 16, 2022

Podcast 230

This week, we’re looking at how to collect more efficiently and, more importantly, more consistently

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Episode 230 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 230 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.

When we first start out building a productivity system for ourselves, one of the first things we need to master is collecting. This is how we get ‘stuff’ into our system that gets processed and organised and ultimately done. If you’re not collecting stuff to put into your system, then you don’t have a system at all.

Collecting needs to be fast, with as few steps as possible, and we need to learn to be consistent with it.

It’s not the sexy part of building a system; this is the messy bit in the middle that Robin Sharma often talks about. It’s fine-tuning, stepping back and rethinking and more often than not, we have to repeat this process of testing and fine-tuning before we finally have something that works intuitively and consistently.

And it’s this bit I shall be explaining in this 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 Baz. Bad asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently undertaken a project to update my twenty-year-old system to a more modern-day one. Over the last twenty years or so, I’ve always written things down on a notepad I kept on my desk, but now I want to make this digital. Do you have any tips for making this an easy transition?

Hi Baz, thank you for your question.

One of the first things you are going to need to get used to is typing out your tasks, ideas and anything else you want to collect instead of writing things down, and this can be more difficult than you might imagine. You see, it feels very natural when you are in a meeting or with someone else to pull out a pen and notepad and write something down. People understand you are writing something important down.

Unfortunately, because of the bad press our mobile phones, tablets and laptops have today, typing something into one of these devices makes us feel self-conscious. We fear the other person or people think we’re responding to email, checking our Facebook feed or searching for big tractors. (People in the UK will understand that one)

The thing is we need to get over that self-consciousness as quickly as possible. I know when I first went digital I needed to explain to people what I was doing with a “hang on while I write that down”. Typing into your phone and writing on a piece of paper is the same thing in this instance. I know it takes some getting used to, but it’s part of the process of going completely digital.

To lessen this self-consciousness, we need to make digital collecting as fast as we can. How do you do that?

This is where the digital tools we use have a big impact. And this starts with the applications we choose. A mistake people make is to look through YouTube and watch what popular YouTubers are using. Thomas Frank uses Notion, Steve Dotto is a big Evernote user and Matt D’Avella uses Apple Notes.

Now the thing to remember, these people are not you. They are content creators who likely rarely have meetings with customers and clients. Their productivity needs will be very different from you. Thomas Frank, Steve Dotto and Matt D’Avella will make extensive use of notes apps to plan out videos and collect future topic ideas. If you are in sales, for example, your digital notes needs will be very different.

Perhaps you need to keep details of when you last spoke to a customer, have a list of potential customers and information on the products you sell. Information that is very different to a YouTube content creator.

So, before you go out and find a tool based on the recommendations of others, stop and ask yourself what your needs are.

The next thing to consider is where you will do most of your collecting. Prior to the pandemic, most of my collecting was done on my phone as I was travelling to see students and clients. Today that has changed. The vast majority of what I collect is collected on my laptop. It’s here where you need to do some thinking.

Collecting needs to be fast and intuitive. For me, I have a keyboard shortcut to collect a task. It does not matter where I am on my computer: whether I am in full screen or not, whenever I activate the keyboard shortcut, I get an input box in the middle of my screen where I can type whatever task I need to be reminded of. Likewise, if I have an idea, I can initiate a keyboard shortcut which will bring up a quick entry box for getting the idea directly into Evernote. Apple Notes has become even easier if you are on an iPad or laptop, all you need do is swipe up from the bottom right of your screen, and you get a new note ready to collect the idea.

So, whatever digital tools you decide to use, make sure that collecting stuff into those tools is fast and easy. See if you can create a keyboard shortcut on your computer, and whatever mobile device you are using, make sure at the very least the apps you use for collecting are in your dock or home screen. You don’t want to be swiping from left to right trying to find your notes app when you have the next big idea, or you need to simply write down a person’s email address.

The next step is to turn collecting into a habit. Now, the way to do this is to consciously collect everything that comes to your mind. Anything and everything needs to be collected. A lot of this stuff you collect will be deleted when you process, but you don’t need to worry about that at this stage. Hitting the delete key is far better than missing something important.

What you are doing here is developing a habit. You can do your filtering when you process. Just get into the habit of using the keyboard shortcuts or pulling out your phone to collect. It’s this you need to turn into a habit and learn the necessary muscle memory.

Now a quick tip here is if you do find yourself not collecting using your tool of choice, make a point to stop and do so when you remember what you should be doing. This helps to interrupt a pattern in your brain, so next time you will be more aware. It’s developing these habits that can be difficult. We’ve got used to collecting (or not as the case may be), and we have to change that habit. That’s difficult. To do that, you have to break the old habit—interrupt it—and replace it with the new habit. That’s why even if you do write down the task or idea, make sure you consciously take what you wrote down and add it to your digital system.

Once you have set up your system. You’ve got the apps you’ve chosen on your phone—most likely to be your primary collection tool—and you’ve set up your keyboard shortcuts, which you now want to be fine-tuning. To do that you should frequently ask yourself “how can I do this better?”. It’s an incredibly powerful question, but it also helps to make sure your system is at its most effective and efficient.

One thing I’ve learned is the fewer barriers there are to collecting something, I am more likely to collect it. This is why I’m always checking to see what has been updated in my collecting apps when they update their apps. Have they found a faster way to collect?

I do remember when Apple released their Shortcut apps; I spent many an evening experimenting to see if I could activate my collecting using Siri. I never really found anything satisfactory or better than what I currently use, but I have found that the fastest way to get something into my system now is through the use of my Apple Watch. That’s always on my wrist, and so, even if I am out running and think of something, I can still add it to my system quickly using just my voice.

What you will find is as technology improves. There will be better and faster ways to get things into your system. If you have Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s HomePod, that gives you additional ways to collect stuff.

I recently bought an Amazon Echo and was impressed with how I could interact with Alexa so that my tasks could be added directly to Todoist. This means as I am walking around my office, all I need to do is tell Alexa to add something to my to-do list. It’s fast and surprisingly intuitive to talk to a device. Perhaps this is where the future of collecting will grow.

The key to collecting is not to overthink it. Choose a digital tool, set it up so that you have quick access to the inbox and make sure you use it consistently. That part can be hard; you will slip up from time to time; that’s part of the process of learning. Make a mistake, recognise it, and try again. As long as you are persistent, you will soon break through and collecting digitally will become second nature.

Thank you, Brad, 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 May 09, 2022

How to Love What You Do

Monday May 09, 2022

Podcast 229

This week’s question is: what does “Love what you do” really mean?

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Clear Your Email First Thing

Episode 229 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 229 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 received an interesting question the other week about how to love the work that you do. Now, this was sparked from an article I wrote where I pointed out if you really hate the work that you are doing and dread Mondays, then perhaps you need to reconsider your career options.

For those of us past the age of 45, you will have likely come to the conclusion that life is not just short, but brutally short. By 45 you’re about halfway through your life and all those goals, ambitions and experiences you said you would do one day suddenly seem to fade into long lost opportunities.

And life being so short, why would you want to subject yourself to 35 years of misery spending the majority of your prime years doing something that does not bring you any pleasure or satisfaction. it just does not make any sense.

So that brings us back to the question, how do you love what you do? That is what I will try and answer today and hopefully give you some ideas about how to change a career that no longer brings you joy or any satisfaction.

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

This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, recently I read an article on your blog that said that if you hate what you do you should change your career. I know that sounds like the obvious answer, but what if you can’t change your job for whatever reason, how can you change the way you think about your job?

Hi Phil, thank you for your question (and for reading my blog)

Now before we get into the heart of this question, I should point out the two versions of this quote or expression: “love what you do” and “do what you love”.

One is possible for all of us, the other is often unrealistic. The unrealistic one is “do what you love”. Now that does not mean it is impossible. I was recently sat next to a pilot on my flight back to Korea and he was telling me he chose to become a pilot because since he was a little boy, he’d been fascinated with all things to do with flying. He was well into his fifties and still loved flying.

So, while doing what you love is often unrealistic, it is certainly not impossible. But if what you love doing is sitting on the sofa watching movies every night while eating ice cream, it’s likely you will struggle to find a career that will support you. (Although perhaps becoming a movie critic for a news media company might be a good path to follow.)

These days, however, doing what you love does have more doors that can be opened. For instance, when I was teaching English, I did have a number of students whose dream job was to become a travel writer. With sites like Medium and SubStack, there are now opportunities to turn your passion for a particular activity into a side project, that over time could become your full-time work. And of course, YouTube has opened up possibilities for people to record and publish their take on any number of topics.

But what about the second one. “Love what you do”?

Now this one is an interesting one. I love writing, I also love recording and producing videos. But, I do not like the admin that comes from running my own business. If I were to spend all my working time writing and recording, it would be ‘perfect’. Sadly, life gets in the way. We still have to do admin. I still need to do my expenses and my taxes. I hate doing that kind of work. But it has to be done.

Now a question that has helped me in the past with doing the things I do not like doing is “what would happen if I stopped doing the work I did not enjoy?” Well, if I don’t do my expenses and my taxes, it would not be long before the tax authorities would be knocking at my door. There is also the other side to this, in that neglecting an important part of life (admin) would leave me feeling unfulfilled. Part of my personal identity is that I am organised and know what’s going on in my life. So, not doing an essential part of my work would leave me feeling guilty and unhappy with myself.

So, I do my expenses, taxes and admin.

However, there is something you can do here. Turn doing the work you don’t like into a competition with yourself. For instance, if you hate clearing your email’s inbox, time yourself. See how fast you can process 100 emails. (To help you here, I recently cleared 120 emails from my inbox while sitting at Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport in 33 minutes. (Beat that!) I was a little disappointed, though, I wanted to do it in less than 30 mins.

Now it’s rare I would have 100+ emails in my inbox, I average around 80 emails in a morning when I start the day. But next time I get 100+, I will beat that 30 minutes.

What’s happening here is you are taking the emphasis off the boring part of the process—deciding what an email is and what, if anything, you need to do with it—to something completely different—how fast can you clear your inbox?

Now the work I don’t like doing, I’ve turned it into a project to find the most efficient way to complete my expenses. I’ve created my own spreadsheet and I look for ways to automate it as much as I possibly can. My expenses are not the typical lunch or dinner receipts. Most of my expenses are monthly subscriptions for services I use such as iCloud, website hosting and such like. these are recurring, so I’ve managed to set up a system where I can duplicate these payments automatically in my spreadsheet and then the spreadsheet will do the currency conversion automatically. I loved coming up with that idea.

What about a whole job you don’t like doing. Well, first of all, do you hate all aspects of your work? If so, you really do need to stop and ask yourself what you would like to do. If you hate everything about the work you do, then really the best option is to leave that career altogether and find a different one.

But, in my experience, hating everything about your work is very rare. I remember my first job was cleaning the changing rooms in a health club. Not the most pleasant of jobs, but I did find it fascinating seeing the members working out and being able to judge what was needed if you were to be fit and healthy all your life.

I remember one member, who must have been in his seventies, with a body of a Greek god. Not an ounce of visible fat and not overly muscular. I think people would describe him as looking very athletic. I watched his workout routines every day. I noticed he didn’t lift particularly heavy weights at all. His routine was to start on the running machine for twenty minutes or so, then he spent twenty minutes lifting free weights (not machines) followed by around ten minutes stretching and finally he would do lengths in the pool for around twenty minutes.

I remember asking him one day how he stayed in such good shape and he told me he’s been working out every day in some way or another since he was at school. Almost thirty years later I am still inspired by that gentleman.

Another job I did in my early working life was as bar staff in a local pub in England. Being on your feet for six to eight hours a day and coming home stinking of cigarettes and alcohol was not pleasant. But the job itself taught me how to communicate with people. I am not by nature a people person. But working in the bar, taught me to communicate and I met some incredibly interesting people.

Sure, there were days when I got soaked in beer when changing a barrel, I also cut my fingers many times when cutting lemons and many broken glasses. But it was an experience I will never forget and I know how to pull the perfect pint of bitter and Guinness. What a skill to learn.

There are always parts of a job you will not like. You need to identify these areas and ask yourself how you could learn to make them less unpleasant. When I worked in a law firm, I hated dealing with angry clients. But I realised that learning to handle upset customers (clients) was always going to be a key skill in life. So, I offered to help my colleagues if they ever had an upset client. I made it an objective to master the art of handling upset clients. Not sure if I ever did master it, but I no longer fear it.

But if you really are at a loss with your career choice and feel it impossible to change direction now. Stop. There’s absolutely no reason why you cannot go back to school and learn a new vocation. There are so many opportunities now to take online courses reasonably cheaply. You can even do a Masters degree online today.

The first step, though, is to give yourself some time to think about what you would like to do. Perhaps do some reading and research. Discover where your passions are now. That’s your starting point. Then do the research. From there, you will soon find what the next step will be.

There you go, Phil. I hope that has gone some way to explaining what you can do to turn around an unhappy career choice. You have some amazing opportunities today, the only thing you need to do is to take the first step and decide what you want to do.

Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listing.

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

Monday May 02, 2022

How To Manage Email (and Other Messages) With Francis Wade

Monday May 02, 2022

Podcast 228

This week, I have a very special episode for you. It’s all about managing email with Francis Wade.

The guilty article:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

[Follow Francis here >]

Monday Apr 25, 2022

Once You’ve got Yourself Organised, How Do You Stay Organised?

Monday Apr 25, 2022

This week, we’re focusing on doing the work instead of organising the work.

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Episode 227 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 227 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.

Most productivity advice, tips and tricks focus on how to organise your work. And while this is important to some degree, it is the least important part of the three areas—collecting, organising and doing.

You see, you can have the best organisation structure and still be unproductive. That’s because in order to keep everything organised you spend far too much time organising and adjusting. You might feel good while you are collecting all your files and notes and moving them into an organisational structure, but you won’t be getting anything done.

Obsessively organising your stuff is another form of procrastination because it means you are not getting your work done.

And that’s what this week’s episode is all about.

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

This week’s question comes from Jade. Jade asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently finished your From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course, and now I feel organised (I now know where everything is), but I don’t feel productive. How do you keep everything organised and get your work done?

Hi Jade, thank you for your question.

Congratulations on completing the Disorganised To Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course. I know with that course you now have everything you need to build a great system.

And you are now ready to move to the automation part of productivity. You see, when we start doing something new—such as having all our files, documents, notes and everything else organised and in a place where we can find them, it will mean that you will need to consciously think before you do anything.

You will need to think about where you will put something and that takes time.

However, this is just a part of the learning process. You’re changing old habits for new ones. The key here is to consistently do some organising each day. This will likely involve processing the files and documents on your desktop into their rightful place. It will also entail clearing your inboxes and making sure everything is in its rightful place.

When you first start doing this, it will take quite a lot of time. However, if you are consistent with this, you will get faster.

Now a lesson I learned years ago when I was in sales. During my induction training with one company, they sent me out with one of their salespeople for a day. That day coincided with the expense reporting day and I vividly remember the salesperson training me pulling up in a car park after lunch and suggested I go for a walk for a couple of hours.

She then opened the glove box and out poured what seemed to be hundreds of receipts. She had to transfer those receipts from that glove box onto an expense reporting form.

That taught me a valuable lesson. Don’t pile work up. Do a little every day and instead of it taking you two to three hours up close to a deadline, it will take you less than ten minutes to add that day’s receipts to the expense report.

To give you another example, many years ago, when I first began using a digital task manager, it could take as much as forty minutes to clear its inbox each day. When you tagged on all the notes I had written, I was spending more than an hour just organising my stuff.

However, I stuck to it. Over time, my clearing time dropped. I learned what to collect, what could be added directly to a project note during meetings and what didn’t need looking at every day. Now, I can clear ten to fifteen tasks in my inbox in around five minutes.

When it comes to clearing my notes’ inbox, I generally do this once a week. Notes are less urgent, so do not need processing as frequently as tasks do. And if I did collect a note that related to an active project, I could easily add that to the project notebook when I next work on the project.

And that’s really what it’s about. Find effective and efficient ways to manage the work that is coming in. Over time, you will also learn what to say “no” to, which will reduce the number of inputs coming into your system.

The biggest benefit to getting everything organised is the time saved trying to find stuff. However, your new organisation system is going to take time to become second nature. It’s only then that you will feel the “system” itself is in the background so you can now focus your attention on what’s in front of you.

However, with all that said, something you could ask yourself now is where do you feel your system is slow? Where do you find you spend most of your time when you are organising? Here we will all be different. For some, how they manage and organise their email is a bump in the road. Getting quick at clearing your inbox and making decisions such as what is it? And what do I need to do with it? Takes a little time to become automatic.

Again, with consistency, you soon learn the patterns and can make decisions about whether you need to take action on an email or not. Likewise with those bigger requests from bosses or clients. The requests that will need an afternoon of deep focus. What do you do with those?

When we first begin, we will hesitate and likely think too much about these kinds of requests. As you apply your system, though, they become much easier to make and, more importantly, you become faster at making those decisions.

Now there is one area I haven’t spoken about and that is learning how to search your devices and your apps. Search has come a long way over the last five years or so. Long gone are the days when a downloaded file would disappear somewhere on your hard drive and would take hours to locate. Now, as long as you know roughly the date you downloaded it, a title or keyword: within a second or two, you’ve found the file. This is again moving you towards automating your system.

It’s always difficult to change old habits, and one of the worst habits to have is to go through all your file folders looking for files and documents. A far quicker way is to trust your computer. It knows where everything is. On a Mac, all you need do is hit the COMMAND key and Space bar, and you get a little search box. Type in what you are looking for, and boom! You have what you are looking for.

I’m not entirely sure how this works on Windows, but I know Windows does something very similar. Learning how to do this will dramatically speed up your work.

Another part of feeling productive is in what you are completing each day. If the majority of what you are completing are low-value tasks, you are not going to feel very productive at the end of the day. This is where daily planning comes in. When you do the daily planning, make sure that you have one or two meaningful tasks on there that will move a project or goal forward.

You do not want to be overloading your task manager with high-value meaningful tasks—that’s likely to leave you feeling stressed out and overwhelmed, and you will not be able to do everything in one day. But, choose a project that needs working on and create a task that says something like “work on Project X”. That gives you a lot of wriggle room. Often you will find all you have done is planned out the next steps.

For instance, if I find a project has stalled for whatever reason, just going into the project note and reviewing my notes, I will soon see what needs to be done next, and I can add that ‘next action’, if you like, to my task manager. It’s a quick, satisfying way to get projects moving forward.

But what are meaningful tasks, and where do they come from? Generally, these tasks will one from one of three places. Your goals, your Areas of Focus or projects. As long as you have a good mix of tasks that comes from these three places, you will find that you get to the end of the day and feel fulfilled and satisfied with the day.

If you fill your days with low-value admin type tasks, you are going to feel unfulfilled and unhappy with what you have done that day.

Now, I’m not saying you fill your days with high-value project or goal tasks, that would leave you with a lot of admin being neglected, and that will always come back and bite you. It’s about the mix. Let me give you an example.

If you made sure you had two to three hours each day for high-value important project work, an hour for dealing with your communications and perhaps thirty minutes for admin, you would soon find yourself being very productive at work.

If you then added forty-five minutes for daily exercise (a good walk is enough), some time for your family and friends and a little time for your own personal development, you would still have time for a good night’s sleep.

You don’t need to fill every hour of every day with activities. You just need to identify what’s important to you and make sure you have sufficient time each day for those activities.

I hope that has helped, Jade. 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 Apr 18, 2022

How To Make Your Productivity System Work

Monday Apr 18, 2022

This week’s question is on the subject of optimisation and process. Two parts of the productivity mix that rarely get talked about.

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Episode 226 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 226 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

There’s a lot of information on creating a system or method for better managing your time and being more productive, but how do you improve those systems and methods once you have them in place?

More importantly, how do you repair broken systems when they fail? (And they always fail in the early days) Because there’s less information about these situations, a lot of people quit trying or wander off looking for another new system.

That’s the wrong way of looking at it. As long as the system you adopt covers the three basics: collecting, organising and doing, then the system can be made to work for you. Your system is a little like when you buy a new mobile phone.

When you first get the phone, there are a number of preinstalled apps. If you tried to live your life with these limited apps you wouldn’t get the most out your mobile phone. You need to customise the phone for the kind of lifestyle you have. It’s no good having the English Premier League app installed when your sporting love is rugby and cricket. So we add and remove apps according to taste and that’s the same with your productivity system. You will at some point need to customise it to maximise the effectiveness of your system.

That’s what I’ll be talking about in this episode.

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 Andrew. Andrew asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried a lot of time management programmes and methods over the years, but I can never find one that works for me. There’s always something missing and a lot of features I’m never likely to use. I am curious how you have made things work for you.

Hi Andrew, thank you for your question.

The reality is no system, programme, or method will ever work perfectly straight out of the box. You see the difficulty is all these methods are developed for humans and humans are not machines. We all think differently, prioritise different things and work different jobs.

And even in our own lives, our priorities will change. In our teenage years is all about getting an education. In our twenties, it’s about learning to handle the responsibilities of being an adult and intimate relationships. And as we get older, there’s likely parenthood, career and eventually retirement to manage.

The reality is, a system you developed to manage your education is not going to be as effective when you want it to manage your career and family life. It will have to change and evolve as you change and evolve.

Now the mistake I see most people making is thinking that as their priorities change they need to change their whole system and that’s not true. Rather than changing a whole system what really needs to happen is the existing system you use needs to be adjusted.

So what does that mean?

Well, let’s look at the three parts to a good productivity and time management system. There’s a task manager, a calendar and a notes app. Now the only thing that’s changed here over the last ten to twenty years is we’ve gone from a paper-based system (diaries and notebooks) to a largely digital system.

The biggest change there was the separation of our task list and notes. Twenty years ago, we wrote our to-dos in our notebooks (or on PostIts!). Now, for most people, they are two different apps.

But, the basics still apply. To ensure we are working on the things that matter we need to be clear about what needs to be done. Whether those tasks are written out on paper or in a digital system doesn’t matter.

The same applies for writing out our goals and plans. Whether you write these out on paper or digitally doesn’t change things. You still write them out (externalise them) and review them (hopefully).

This means if you are struggling with “systems” it is not likely to be the system itself, it’s more likely something is not working within the three areas (collecting, organising and doing)

With collecting, the emphasis is on writing down all your commitments and ideas and not trusting your brain to remember them. That’s simple enough. But, the question here is: are you collecting all your commitments and ideas? Do you sometimes skip this part?

Problems here are usually in three areas.

The first is there’s no habit to collect, so we ‘forget’ to write things down or we believe we will remember—which often we don’t. Plus, if you don’t collect everything you don’t get a sense of how much you have to do, so you end up with a false picture of what commitments you have.

The second is there’s a lack of trust in the tools you are using. If you don’t trust that your task manager or notes app will safely store what you put in there, you will continue to try and remember everything in your head.

Trusting your tools is a big step for many people, and it becomes a lot harder for those who are always switching their tools. Whenever you start using a new tool (or app), there will always be an element of doubt that what you collected went where it was meant to go. It takes time to build that trust.

And thirdly, the tools you are using make it very difficult to add new tasks or ideas. If there are too many ‘clicks’ or taps to get something new into your task manager or notes app, you will not consistently add stuff.

It’s important when choosing tools, you test out how easy it will be to get stuff into the app. If there are too many clicks or taps, then stay well away from the app.

What I’ve noticed here is a lot of people are attracted to the latest, shiniest tool, so they are looking at the aesthetics of an app or what popular YouTubers are telling them. Just remember, a lot of these YouTubers are paid to review these apps and they are not necessarily reviewing things objectively.

Now when it comes to organising, I find a lot of people’s organisation system is either their downloads folder or their inbox. There’s no structure and so it’s almost impossible to find anything.

These days you don’t need a complex hierarchical organisation system. The computers we use have fantastic search capabilities, but you do still need some form of basic organisational structure or you will become overwhelmed when you go searching for something you cannot remember the name of.

How you organise your stuff really depends on you. No one person will be the same here. My notes, for instance, are structured around GAPRA—Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and an archive. This gives me a place for all the things I collect.

When I shared this organisational structure on YouTube, I got so many questions about where I think something some be stored. I couldn’t answer a lot of those questions because I didn’t have the kind of notes I was being asked about. In this area, we will all have different types of collected notes. This is where you have to trust yourself and think about how you would naturally look for something.

My file folder structure, for instance, is divided into two parts Personal and Professional. That’s because I use a single computer for both my work and my personal life. I have a lot of clients who have a computer for work and a computer for their personal lives. In this situation, my structure wouldn’t work.

For my professional work, I run my own company. This means I need folders for tax, company regulations, expenses, employees and admin. If you are an employee, things like HR, admin and taxation are likely things you don’t need.

Doctors and lawyers are required to do continuous professional education which means they need a way to keep all of these educational materials somewhere. Project managers may be managing several projects all at once and so need a way to manage these materials.

Hopefully, you get the point. No one person is going to have the same file and note organisational structure. It’s very important to spend some time developing your own so you can find what you need when you need it.

When it comes to how you manage your task manager, here, all you need to see is what needs doing now. Something that needs doing in six months’ time is not relevant today.

I find the problem with the way people manage their task managers is overthinking things. The only thing that’s important today are the things you need to do today. Tomorrow’s tasks are not relevant today.

This means, that the most crucial part of a day is when you ask yourself “what needs to be done today?” Now, ideally, you will do this the night before, not the morning of. You want to be very clear when you start the day what needs to be done. If you leave the daily planning to the morning of the day, you waste so much valuable focus time trying to decide what to do.

When you do the daily planning the night before, you can step back and look at the big picture and anticipate what’s coming at you. You will also find you are more engaged with your family and friends because the next day is planned and you are not worrying about things you may have missed.

I don’t buy into the excuse that there’s no time to do the daily planning the night before. It’s a ten to twenty minute daily commitment. If you cannot find ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day, then you have serious problems. Nobody is genuinely that busy.

No, if you are not doing a ten to twenty-minute daily planning session, you are just being lazy. Pure and simple.

How difficult is it to look at your calendar and your task list for tomorrow? Seriously? You don’t have time for that?

And if you don’t want to look at it because you don’t want to be thinking of work when you are not working, you need to question your career choice. If you hate your work that much, you cannot bear to look at your calendar and task list for a few minutes before you end the day, you’re in the wrong career.

And finally, when it comes to doing, how are you managing your time? Are you maximising your “doing” time or are you spending too much time organising?

Now here it’s about learning when you are at your most focused. Again, we will be different. Some people are more focused first thing in the morning, while others find their focus is better later in the day.

Now, I understand that a lot of people don’t have a great deal of control over their calendars when at work, but you can still look at ways to make sure you are blocking time out for the more difficult work at a time you are likely to be most focused. Okay, you may have a meeting at 10:30am, but what are you doing at 9:00am? That’s still a good hour and fifteen minutes where you have a block of focused time. If you know before you start the day what the big task is for the day, you can get started on that first thing.

So, Andrew, rather than looking at different methods, programmes and systems, look at the three foundations of collecting, organising and doing. How are you in each of these three areas?

Whether you are using David Allens, Getting Things Done, the Franklin Planner or my Time Sector System, if you are not consistently collecting, don’t have a clean, workable organisation system and have no plan for doing your work each day, nothing will work.

You will be constantly looking at different methods and tools and never finding what you are looking for because you are looking in the wrong place. Look at yourself first. Decide what you want to see each day and how you prefer to get things done.

Then build on that.

I hope that has helped, Andrew, and thank you for sending in 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 Apr 11, 2022

What’s Important Here?

Monday Apr 11, 2022

This week, we’re looking at how to identify your most important thing.

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Episode 225 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 225 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’m sure you’ve noticed there’s a lot of stuff flying around in our lives that demand attention right here. Right now. Messages from WhatsApp, email and social media that need responses. Colleagues, family and friends as well as clients and bosses ask us to ‘help’ them. Homes and cars that need cleaning, bills to pay, accounts to sort out and consolidate and, of course, summer holidays to plan. The list is endless.

And because this ’stuff’ is non-stop and endless, the truly important things in our lives get pushed aside in favour of what’s urgent that masquerades as important.

So what can we do about this? Fortunately, there are a number of things we can do that will give us some perspective on things and guide us through the days so that the things that do matter to us, can still take centre stage.

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 Frank. Frank asks, Hi Carl, thank you for all the valuable content you publish. You’ve really helped me to get a grip on my life.

I’ve completed your Areas of Focus Workbook and followed the guidelines. The problem I have is I have so many other things to do for my work and general chores, that I don’t have any time to do the things I want to do for my areas of focus. Is this normal or am I missing something important?

Hi Frank, thank you for sending in your question.

Now, it sounds like you are in transition. This is quite common when we have spent a lifetime working for other people’s agendas. It’s hard to take back control because we’ve become conditioned to give up all our time for other people. So, when we take some of that available time away and dedicate it to ourselves, we feel guilty and selfish. The truth is, you are not being selfish at all.

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard the analogy from the airline safety announcements at the beginning of a flight—put your oxygen mask on first before helping small children—and there’s a good reason for this. You are not going to be able to help anyone if you are unconscious. The rule is you make sure you are fine first so you can then help other people.

This is the same with life. If you are breaking down if your health gives out and you have to spend a prolonged period in hospital. Or if you are stressed out, burnt out and depressed, how helpful are you going to be to those around you?

If you want to be there for the people that matter in your life, you must take care of your own wellbeing first.

What does that mean?

Well, in terms of time it doesn’t actually involve a great deal. Let’s begin with the basics.

In order for you to keep in touch with your wants and needs, you need some time each day to reflect and think. The best time for this is first thing in the morning. Rather than staying in bed until the very last moment, wake yourself up thirty minutes earlier and make those thirty minutes time dedicated to you.

Make yourself a cup or glass of your favourite morning drink, then find a quiet spot for some time alone. Now, what you do in this time is entirely up to you. For me, I like to spend a little time in my journal and write my thoughts and feelings and review my objectives for the day. The key with these thirty minutes is to spend some time with yourself. Treat it as a time to stop, reflect and think about your needs.

The act of writing a journal gives you a way to empty your head of things that might be worrying you. Or it might highlight some area of your life you feel is out of balance.

Now, in your case, Frank, you have already completed your Areas of Focus workbook so you know what each of the eight areas means to you. This gives you a reference point to refer to that will help you to see where things are going well and where things might not be going quite so well.

By completing the workbook, what you have done is to externalise the things that are important to you. This makes it so much easier to see if everything is going well.

For instance, health and fitness is quite high up on my list and while my diet and exercise have been very good for a number of years, one area I have neglected is sleep. I haven’t been getting enough and I realised I need to make some changes to my day so I give myself every opportunity to get the required seven and half hours of sleep I need each day.

This meant reviewing my calendar, adjusting my available coaching times and moving my daily admin time to earlier in the day.

The funny thing was when I first realised my sleep was not good, I could not see where I would be able to find the time. But writing about it, reflecting and thinking about solutions over a couple of weeks, I soon found a way to accommodate more sleep time into my schedule.

While it was running around in my mind, it became a huge problem. When I sat down to think about it objectively and look at the resources I had available, I soon found the solution was in my own hands and a few small adjustments to my calendar solved the problem.

One of the great things about giving yourself some time for yourself is you have an opportunity to look at what is on your mind and to come up with solutions so they are removed from your mind.

Our brains are incredible things that have evolved to keep us alive over hundreds of thousands of years. And that is where our brains fall down. They are designed to keep us alive and not necessarily evolve and develop us as individuals. This means even the smallest of problems will become amplified until we become stressed out and worse, stuck in a cycle of worry and anxiety.

By giving yourself thirty (or more) minutes each day for yourself, you can occasionally ask yourself a series of simple questions. Questions like:

What work issue/project is most on my mind?
What health issues are bothering me?
What area of focus feels out of balance?

Now, most days, there will likely be nothing, but from time to time, there will be something, and this allows you time to externalise the problem (write it down) and to let your intelligent brain consider solutions.

Now, there are two parts to your brain. There’s the conscious brain—this is where your survival instincts lay. This is the brain responsible for making your stressed, anxious and on edge. Now, this is a good thing because it allows you to stay away from imminent danger. It’s what has kept us human beings alive. It’s the flight to fight part of our brains.

So, running away from your angry boss or upset customer. Or avoiding calling the bank to talk about your unauthorised overdraft is all controlled by your conscious brain. So, is ignoring your expanding waistline, your constant fatigue and the pain in your back that won’t go away. All of these ‘decisions’ are controlled by your conscious brain.

If you never stop to reflect and think about you, you never engage your more intelligent part of the brain—your subconscious brain.

Now, I like to think the subconscious brain is where your knowledge and life experience mingle and develop unique solutions to all your problems. The problem is, that you need to give your subconscious brain time to do its stuff.

Your conscious brain is designed to make quick decisions such as running away from an angry mother bear and avoiding calling that upset client.

Your subconscious brain is where you will find all the resources you need to solve all your problems. It might not be very helpful if you come face to face with a charging, angry mother bear protecting her cubs, but for most of our everyday problems, it is by far the best part of your brain to engage when you want to bring a sense of calm and control in your life.

The reality is, that there’s always something on our minds. Something that doesn’t feel right. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

You can choose to ignore the problem, or you can externalise it and reach into your subconscious mind for the resources that will give you the solution.

Just some of those resources would be:

Ask someone who has the knowledge to help you. That could be a doctor, a dietician or a fitness instructor. It could be a friend, a boss or a colleague.
You could read some books or articles or listen to podcasts etc.
And of course, you have your own experience. What have you learnt in the past about this particular problem that could help you solve it?

All these resources are in your subconscious mind, but if you do not give yourself some time alone to stop and think, you will never gain access to this amazing resource.

Over the years, I’ve leant not to be afraid to ask myself what’s bothering me right now and what can I do to get it off my mind? It’s when I go through that process I find that the things that are bothering me are not as bad as I imagine them to be and that a simple fix is often just a small amount of time away.

On my recent flight back to Korea, I knew I was not going to get any sleep on the overnight bus ride to Dublin Airport, but I reasoned that as I was going to be on an eleven-hour flight from Paris to Seoul, I would have time to get some sleep on the plane. And as I was going to be very tired, I would not have much of a problem getting to sleep.

What I didn’t bank on was to be sat next to two lovable small boys who once the flight attendant dimmed the lights after our meal, would start fighting and screaming. So much for being able to settle down to a few hours' sleep.

Initially, my conscious brain reacted. I began to feel anxious and annoyed. But then I stopped. Externalised the problem—I was extremely sleep-deprived and these two boys were making it impossible to sleep.

Once I pushed the problem to my subconscious brain I calmed down and realised there was still eight hours left of the flight and these boys were not going to be able to carry on fighting and screaming for all those hours.

And sure enough, after about ninety minutes, they got tired and fell asleep. Cue seat back and sleep.

Okay, I didn’t get as much sleep as I had hoped for, but by calmly waiting for the boys to get tired, I wasn’t stressed—one way to not be able to sleep—and I got around five hours. Enough to get me through the long flight.

So there you go Frank. If you’re missing something it’s giving yourself time each day for yourself. To look at the big picture of what’s going on in your life and to externalise (ie write down) any issues or problems you feel you may have.

Your subconscious brain may not give you the solutions immediately, but if you give it enough time it will.

Life was never designed to be smooth sailing. It’s a journey, and they will be plenty of rough seas and storms. The ‘secret’, if you can call it that, is to give yourself time to reflect and use your natural resources to calm those seas and break those storms. This is where you will find the important things, and then you can prioritise them and make sure that is where you spend most of your time each day.

Good luck Frank with your journey and thank you for your question. And thank you to you for listening.

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

Monday Mar 28, 2022

Why The Backend Work Matters

Monday Mar 28, 2022

This week, why must we do the so-called backend work if we want to be more productive.

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