Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

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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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

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.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

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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Episode 234 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 234 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

A lot has changed over the last two hundred years or so when it comes to how and why we work. For most people living two-hundred years ago, there was a purpose to work—to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. Life wasn’t fair, crops were destroyed by drought, floods and wars, but we had a purpose every morning when we woke up. To ensure our family were fed.

Today, there are multiple reasons why people work. The truth is, despite everything going on in the world, we are living like emperors and empresses. The vast majority no longer need to worry about where the next meal will come from. For most, their biggest worry now is their mobile running low on battery power.

With all this luxury, it can be very hard to find our purpose. We have everything we need. Food, clean, running water and, for most of us, a safe, stable environment in which to go about our lives. Why do we even need to work? Great questions and ones that all come from this week’s question.

Speaking of which, I think it’s time now for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Jesper. Jesper asks, hi Carl, I recently lost my job and I’ve found myself struggling to find the motivation to construct a system to find another job. Instead I am waking up later each day and instead of working on my CV, I read news and look for new productivity apps. Is there a way to help me be more productive now I don’t have a boss telling me what to do?

Hi Jesper, firstly I am sorry to hear of your lost job. I hope you find a new job quickly.

Now, let’s deal with how you structure your day when hunting for a job. A myth I need to remove is the myth that you need to spend all day hunting for a new job.

One of the benefits of not having to go to an office or place of work is you no longer need to commute and sit in meetings all day. Instead you can concentrate your time. This means you no longer need to be “working” on your job seeking activities eight to ten hours a day. Instead you can do the required work on less than four.

This is great when it comes to structuring your day.

Now, I don’t know how long you have been working for, but if you have held down a job for the last five or more years, now is a good time to do some deep personal thinking. Many people get a job based on advice given to them by teachers and professors who may know about a student’s academic credentials, but have no knowledge of their individual motivations.

It could be that you were good at chemistry while at school and so you were pushed towards a career in science. But that might not be where your motivation is. Your motivation could be entrepreneurial or legal and studying law or business is really what you wanted to do.

A loss of a job, while devastating, it’s also a great time to reflect. What was it about your work you enjoyed? What was it you did not enjoy? That’s going to help you to find your own motivation. It’s unlikely it will be the money. Money is a poor motivator in the long-term. People are not motivated by money. People are motivated by what they think money can do for them. What is much more likely when you reflect on your previous job is there will have been parts of that work that excited you, motivated you and gave you a buzz. And there will have been parts of your work that did the opposite.

Look at these first. This will give you a starting point for what to look for in a new job.

Now, if money is tight, it’s often worth swallowing your pride and going to work in a coffee shop or other job below your skill level, temporarily. You do not want to let money get in the way of choosing the right career or job for you.

I remember, I lost my job when I was in my late twenties and was struggling to pay the rent. I wanted to get into law at that time and so I worked in a bar five nights a week so I could pay my rent and have food to eat. It was an unpleasant five months, but it was worth it. Had I let me pride dictate the course of action, I would never have worked in a law firm and instead gone back into selling cars. Who knows, I might still be doing that today, had I not taken that part-time bar work for a few months.

Once you know what you liked about you previous job, you now have a list of things you want to do. You also have list of things you don’t want to do.

Next up is your skills. What skills do you possess? We all have skills, often we are unaware of them, but we all have them. Take some time to think about what you are good at. Don’t worry at this stage is some of the things you are good at are things you do not enjoy doing, just list out the things you believe you are good at. A good way to determine this is to think of things you do with ease that other people find difficult.

Are you good at talking to strangers? Organising events? Delegating? Leading teams? Where are your skills? Write them down.

Next comes the fun part: matching your skills with a job. Find a job vacancy site and read through the listings. See which jobs match your skills. This is going to lead you down avenues you may not have ever considered. Once you’ve done this, what are the jobs that match your skills?

Okay, now the hard bit. It could be that the jobs that jumped out at you were jobs that required professional qualifications. Qualifications that currently you do not have. Here’s where you need to decide whether it’s worth going back to school, even part-time, to get those qualifications.

Now, when you look at the process to get to where you want to be, do you really need to be spending eight to ten hours a day searching? Not likely.

So, while you were in full-time employment, what did you miss out on? What were the things you wanted to do, but could not do because you were stuck in an office or wherever your workplace was?

Do those things now.

You will be back in full-time employment again soon and these opportunities will disappear. Take these opportunities now. Get plenty of rest, do a lot of reflection, exercise and give yourself four hours a day for job searching.

That means, if you prefer to wake up later in the day do so. Do your job search work in the evenings or the afternoons. You have complete freedom now.

And here’s the thing. While there is a lot of debate around how we should be working. Working from home, working in an office or a combination of both, learning to structure your time during the day is going to be a new skill we all require. And structuring your day is part planning and part self-discipline.

Planning because we need to set up our work sessions and self-discipline because we need to stick to our planned sessions whether we like it or not.

The final piece, is to begin the day with an objective. What do you want to accomplish today? What one meaningful task could you do today that will leave you feeling satisfied and fulfilled.

Now, this does not need to be related to job seeking. It could be you decide that today’s the day you clean up you home from top to bottom—it’s surprising how good it feels when you’ve spent all day cleaning and you sit down at the end of the day and look at your work.

Related to your job search, you may decide you will apply for seven positions today, or you will complete a summary of your skills. Pick something. That something is going to give the day a purpose. It’s the purpose that will pull you through the day.

Remember, Jesper, losing a job can be awful, it can be stressful, but it also gives you a chance to reflect, reset and rediscover your passions. Don’t let that opportunity go.

When I look back through my career, losing a job has always turned into something very special. It gave me a chance to look at what I was doing, to do some self-reflection and to accept my weaknesses. On the flip side it gave me the chance to reconnect with what I enjoy doing, to learn new skills and to find a job or vocation that ignited my energy.

It was losing my job back in 2002 that caused me to fly to Korea to teach English for a year. Within three months I discovered my passion for teaching and knew, deep down, I would spend the rest of my life teaching. And today, twenty years later, I am more passionate about teaching than I have ever been.

A job loss can be soul destroying, but it can also be a catalyst to something much greater, something more special and a change within ourselves that starts us on a journey that we never tire of.

Good luck, Jesper, I hope you find what you are looking for. Remember to structure your day, make sure you know where your skills are and maybe, you will discover something so much better than what you were doing before.

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

Monday Jun 13, 2022

How To Beat Procrastination.

Monday Jun 13, 2022

This week’s question is on defeating the habit of procrastination (and I have some rather brutal truths to reveal).

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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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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

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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Where We Get The Eisenhower Matrix Wrong

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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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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

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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