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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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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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Episode 233 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 233 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, now on to your procrastinating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Jun 05, 2022

How To Be Consistent.

Sunday Jun 05, 2022

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

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Episode 232 | Script

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Sean, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not working after 6 pm, becomes your philosophy.

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

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

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

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

Monday May 30, 2022

How To Prioritise Your Work With The Eisenhower Matrix

Monday May 30, 2022

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

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Where We Get The Eisenhower Matrix Wrong

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

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?

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Clear Your Email First Thing

Episode 229 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 229 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I do my expenses, taxes and admin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday May 02, 2022

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

Monday May 02, 2022

Podcast 228

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

The guilty article:

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Monday Apr 25, 2022

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

Monday Apr 25, 2022

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

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Episode 227 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 227 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Jade, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Apr 18, 2022

How To Make Your Productivity System Work

Monday Apr 18, 2022

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

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System