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Episode 214 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 214 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Do you occasionally find yourself paralysed by decisions? Having too many choices and not knowing where to begin? I think a lot of us find ourselves in this situation and it can have negative effects on our overall productivity.

One of the things I have conditioned myself to be able to do is to quickly decide what needs to be done and where something should go. This takes quite a lot of practice but can be speeded up with a few simple questions.

Now before we get to the question, I want to give you a heads up about my weekly newsletter. If you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. This newsletter goes out every Friday and contains my YouTube videos, blog posts and podcast all in one convenient email.

In addition to my content, I share with you a couple of articles of interest from other people as well as some of the videos I have been watching that week. AND, I also share with you a short essay on a productivity or time management tip that I am sure will help you to develop your out systems.

The link to my weekly newsletter is in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks: Hi Carl, I follow the Time Sector System and it has really helped me to process my inbox much faster. However, I do still find myself not being able to decide where to put a task. How do you process your inbox so fast?

Thank you Alan for the question.

One of the reasons I developed the Time Sector System was because I found myself wasting so much time trying to decide where a task went. When I managed my tasks by project I would have twenty to thirty open projects in my projects list and while tasks related to specific projects were quite easy to process, there were a lot of tasks that didn’t neatly fit into a project.

Then I had to decide whether a new task was a project or not—based on the principle that anything requiring two or more steps was a project—if it did require two or more steps, I created another project to add to my already overwhelming project list.

It was crazy! I found myself spending so much time deciding what something was and precious little time doing whatever that something was. And don’t get me started on the time it took to review so many projects each week.

That’s how the Time Sector System was born. It came about because of frustration and when I analysed what was important about a task, I realised the only important factor was when I was going to do it, not what project it was associated with.

Basically, I removed a step—a step that was taking up a lot of time each day and week. Now the only decision I need make when I get a new task is when am I going to do it. There are no more grey areas because I’m not thinking about how many steps are required. All I am deciding is when I am going to do it.

My thoughts and ideas about a project are kept in my notes app. If I want to add information, ideas or a checklist of things to do on a project, I can jot them down in the project note and not worry about dates, labels or anything else you need to think about when you manage projects from a to-do list.

Many of the old style task management systems require you to make a lot of decisions, and as we now know, our ability to make decisions each day is limited. As the day goes on, our capacity to make good quality decisions diminishes. And, as most people are processing inboxes at the end of the day, it’s at that time when our ability to make decisions is at its lowest. This is why we struggle in this area. We get caught up in overthinking a simple decision: What to do next.

So what about those decisions I alluded to earlier? Well when you are processing your inbox—whether that is your task manager’s or email inbox, the first question to ask yourself is:

What is it?

If you are processing your email, there are many different types of email. There’s spam that got through your spam filter—of course you delete these immediately. Then there are those emails you were CC’d on, but you have no action to take personally and there are emails that do require you to take some action.

I’ve found this one question can eliminate as much as 50% of the email in my inbox because knowing what something is, tells me what to do with it. If it’s spam or has no interest to me, delete it. If it’s something I need to know, but not take action, I archive it and if it’s something I need to reply to, it goes to my action this day folder for replying to later in the day.

I apply the same question to my task manager’s inbox. Here is a little different because anything going into this inbox has been put there by me. There’s a reason it’s there. However, again, I am looking to eliminate and as I process my inbox, I am thinking: do I really need to act on this?

Often, as time has passed my enthusiasm for doing something has gone and I can delete it. That a positive result for me.

However, after deciding what something is, and that I will do something about it, the only question I need ask then is when will I do it? And with that a lot of the time the decision is already made. If I’ve been asked to send an invoice or receipt to a customer, I’ll do that within the next twenty-four hours. If I’ve added an idea for a future project, I will transfer that idea to my ideas list in my notes app or, if it relates to a current project, to the existing project note.

Deciding which projects to work on and what to do with those projects will likely form a major part of your daily decision making and certainly when it comes to managing projects, you will be making those decisions when you do your weekly planning.

The best criteria for deciding which projects to work on is time sensitivity. When is the project due? When’s the deadline? If the deadline is imminent, then that project needs to be worked on this week. If the project is a few months away, I can add it to my Next month folder. No need to be thinking about that project just yet.

However, the secret sauce in being able to process inboxes quickly is practice. The more you do it, the faster you become. When I am processing any of my inboxes it’s automatic. The questions about what it is and what needs to happen, can be answered very quickly.

But it wasn’t always like that. It was slow at first and it will be slow for you when you begin doing something new. Don’t expect to be fast immediately. You will be asking yourself what something is and when will you do it consciously at first. But over time, those decisions about a task or email will be almost automatic. You begin to see patterns in the different types of tasks and then you will be making decisions very fast indeed.

Now that should take care of basic decision making process for you. The next decisions you will need to make are what do I want to accomplish this week and what will I do today?

Now a quick tip here. Deciding what you want to accomplish next week, is best done Saturday morning before you do anything else. Remember our capacity to make good decisions diminishes throughout the day, so if you leave doing your weekly planning session to late Friday or Sunday, you will certainly not be in the right mood to plan next week and you won’t be making good decisions.

The best time to do a weekly planning session is Saturday morning. Get, make yourself a cup of coffee or tea (or whatever you favourite morning beverage is) turn on some of your favourite music and sit down for thirty minutes or so with your calendar and task manager open.

Then go through and decide what you want to accomplish based on how busy your week is going to be. You may need to refer to your project notes to see where projects are, but all in all you only need to move tasks from your Next Week folder to This Week, give them a date based on when you are going to do them and make sure you inboxes are clear.

Do that Saturday morning and you are going to get a lot more enjoyment from the weekend. Your week is planned, you do not need to think about your work and you can really settle in and enjoy the weekend.

But the most important thing about doing the weekly planning session is it makes the daily planning sessions so much easier. Because you did the hard work on Saturday morning, when you do the daily planning sessions, all you are doing is confirming what you planned is still the right things to be working on and adding in anything new that you picked up during the day.

Now how do you stop overthinking tasks?

Here, you need to ask yourself what is the result you want to accomplish from this task. Focus less on how you are going to do it, first ask what result you want.

More often than not, once you are clear on the outcome, the ‘how will I do it?’ Will take care of itself.

For instance, if you want to employ a new staff member, what’s the outcome you want? To get a fantastic new team member for the department. Okay, how will you do that? Now in this case if you work for a large organisation you may be lucky and have an HR department who can do a lot of the leg work for you. So the first step is to request assistance from your HR department.

If you are not so fortunate, and you have to do all the work yourself, then the next step would be to draft out a job description and what the ideal candidate will be.

From there, the next steps will take care of themselves.

You see the idea here is to only focus on the very next step. You don’t climb mountains in one step. You climb one step at a time. That’s also the way to complete your projects and goals; one step at a time.

I think of it this way, never leave a project without first deciding what the very next step is. You can then move that task to your task manager or leave it in your project note.

So there you go, Alan. I hope that has helped. Try to make your processing and planning as automatic as possible: what is it and when do I need to do it?

When it comes to individual projects, don’t focus too much on the process. Decide what the result is you want and then make sure you know what the very next step is.

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 Jan 10, 2022

The Best Productivity And Time Management Habits

Monday Jan 10, 2022

Podcast 213

This week’s question is about habits and more specifically the best habits to have for greater productivity and time management.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

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Episode 213 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 213 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Over the years I have been obsessed with time management and productivity, I have tried and tested multiple ways of better managing my time and my productivity. And from all that testing, I have learned that there are some hard and fast rules that, if followed, guarantees improvements in these areas.

I’ve spoken before about things like developing workflows, about making sure you plan the day the day before and keeping your task manager and calendar clean and tight. But of all the best methods, there is is one that stands out more than the others and that is the development of the right habits.

And that is what this week’s question is all about. What set of habits should you adopt so that better time management and productivity becomes a habit, rather than something you need to think about.

Now, before we get to this week’s question, if you would like to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Every Friday, I send out a newsletter that gives you all the links to things like my Youtube videos, my blog post and of course this podcast. Plus, I include one or two articles written by others that I have enjoyed reading as well as a couple of videos I have watched that have helped me develop my systems.

PLUS… I also write a short essay each week that is exclusive to my newsletter that will give you tips and tricks to optimise your own productivity set up. And of course, it’s all FREE. All you need do is sign up, which you can do from the link in the show notes.

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question

This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia ask, Hi Carl, I read Atomic Habits by James Clear over the Christmas break and that got be thinking about the best habits to help me become better at managing my time and getting more of my work finished. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Hi Julia, great question! Thank you for sending it in.

Firstly, may I just say, Atomic Habits is one of the best books you can read if you want to transform your life as a whole, not just your productivity. I remember a few years ago I was struggling to fix my morning routine and make doing it consistent. After reading Atomic Habits I discovered the piece I was missing—something called “habit stacking” which was the missing piece to making it consistent.

Essentially habit stacking requires a trigger—in my case turning on the kettle in the morning to make my coffee, and then a sequence of little actions steps. So in the case of my morning routines, the turning on of my kettle leads to me doing my shoulder stretches while the kettle boils, which then triggers me drinking a glass of lemon water while my coffee brews, and once I have my coffee, I sit down either at my desk or on the sofa and write my journal for ten minutes.

I’ve got to say it really does work.

Now, let’s look at some habits you can develop that will massively improve your productivity.

Let’ start with a simple habit. The habit of consciously closing out your day.

What do I mean by “closing out your day”? This means that at a specific time each day you stop and close down the day. It’s where to put a hard border between your work life and your personal life.

While technology has done a lot to make our lives eminently more convenient and comfortable, it has also blurred the lines between our work life and personal life. This is not good for our mental and emotional wellbeing. There needs to be a time for work and a time for our personal activities. That could be doing some exercise or meeting up with friends. It’s often these essential parts of our lives that get sacrificed on the alter of career development and business growth.

So, closing out your day is about drawing a line underneath your work and projects for the day so you can move to giving yourself some time.

A good closing down habit is to stop working on whatever it is you are working on. Then clearing your task manager’s inbox. Then spending a few minutes planning out what needs to be done the next day. That involves looking at the tasks you have scheduled for the next day and your calendar for your appointments. You can prioritise your tasks and make sure you have sufficient time to accomplish everything you have planned for the day at this point.

Now, the benefit of this habit is you avoid worrying about what you have missed and what you have to do tomorrow. Just a few minutes at the end of the day going through what you collected in your inbox and looking at what you have scheduled for tomorrow calms your mind and allows you to properly shut down the work side of your life for the day.

What I notice about not closing out the day and planning the next, is your brain will randomly throw up thoughts about your work long into the evening and if you are particularly busy, it can have a negative affect on your sleep. You try to sleep but you are worrying about what you may or may not need to do the next day.

It’s far better to get that sorted out before you finish the work day.

So habit number one - get into the habit of closing down the work day. That one habit alone will massively improve your productivity AND your focus.

The next habit I would recommend is to start the habit of journaling. A lot has been written about the benefits of journaling, but the biggest benefit for me is the focus and clarity I get from writing out what’s on my mind.

If you include ten minutes of journaling in your morning routine you will get several benefits. The morning is when you are likely to be at your most creative—even if you are a night person—because as you begin to write you create a connection between your subconscious mind and the page. I cannot count the number of great ideas I’ve had from those ten minutes I write.

Now, I must confess, great ideas do not come every day—perhaps once or twice a month—but when they do, I often find myself switching from my journaling app to my notes and collecting the idea there.

But, perhaps the greatest benefit is the way journaling focuses you on the day. If you use a dedicated journaling app such as Day One, you can create a daily template. For me, my daily template includes a place where I can put my two objective tasks for the day—these are the tasks that I must complete that day, it also gives me a place to track my morning routines. For that I have a checklist to confirm I have completed my morning routines.

The benefit of this is I have record of what I have done, AND not done, so if I ever feel out of balance, I can go through my journal and see where the imbalance may have occurred. It’s usually because I am not doing something important to me.

My journal is also my accountability buddy.

Last year was a torrid time for my exercise consistency. I really struggled to get back into my exercise routine after a Christmas break. Things did not start well. I strained my calf while out on my annual New Year’s Day run which stopped me from running for two weeks. And we had moved house and the new environment caused me to drop out the habit of doing exercise in the afternoons.

I found I was berating myself almost every day and promising I would get back into my exercise routines the next day. This constant reminder eventually pushed me to solve this problem and by April I was getting back into the habit. By July I was back to where I wanted to be.

So habit number two; start journaling. It can be a little strange at first, but if you stick to it, eventually you will find you always have something to write about. Don’t worry if in the early days you only write out the weather forecast or some news item. We all start there. Once you start doing this consistently, you will soon start writing out your thoughts.

Habit three is to write everything down. This has saved me so many time from missing something important. How many times have you agreed to a meeting and not written it down believing you will remember and at the appointed meeting time you get a call asking where you are? It’s so easy to forget these things if we are not writing them down.

But it’s more than that. If we don’t have a trusted method of dealing with information our brains will try and do the job for you. The problem is our brains were never designed to store factual information in this way. Our 200,000 year old brain evolved to recognise patterns—it’s what kept us alive on the open savannahs thousands of years ago. We recognised the pattern of some predatory creature stalking us for lunch. The crack of a twig or the russell of long dried grass.

If you think about all the information coming at us every second of the day through sounds, smells, sight and touch. It’s impossible to be consciously aware of every information input. Pattern recognition is a far more effective way to alert us to danger or opportunity. Our brain automates the process and if a number of informational inputs come together at the same time that corresponds to a known danger or opportunity, you brain will make you consciously aware of it.

One the best things our ancestors have left us are their journals and notebooks. From Leonardo D’ Vinci to Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. People who changed the world captured every little idea and hypothesis into notebooks. We can go and see these notebooks and see how amazing ideas and inventions developed over time.

Now whether you collect everything in a paper notebook or a digital notes app doesn’t matter. Choose something that works for you. Just make sure that you develop the habit of collecting everything. You can discard things later when you close down your day and clear out your inboxes.

I think of all the productivity tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years. Developing the habit of capturing everything has been the one that has had the biggest impact on my overall productivity. I would say I probably delete around thirty or forty percent of what I collect, but it very rare I miss something. If I do miss anything it was because I didn’t write it down.

I’ve set up my phone and Apple Watch to be little collection tools. I use an application called Drafts which is a very powerful collecting tool available on all Apple devices (I’ve even done a series of videos on using Drafts for collecting)

Anything from my shopping list to tasks and notes are collected using Drafts or Siri in the case of my shopping list.

So the third habit I would suggest you develop is collect everything. Once it’s written down and in a place your brain trusts you will look at later it will relax. Once you are in this habit, I can promise you you will find your stress levels reduce and you feel a lot more relaxed.

So there you go, Julia, three habits worth developing as we begin this New Year. Create a habit of closing down the day, begin journaling and collect everything in place you trust you will see later.

Those three little habits will give your productivity, mental well being and overall sense of accomplishment such aa positive boost.

Thank you, Julia for the great 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 Dec 20, 2021

How To Practice The Art Of Elimination

Monday Dec 20, 2021

Podcast 212

This week’s question is all about getting your task manager clean and tight and ultimately more functional.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 212 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 212 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 problems many people face with their task manager is the volume of tasks that appear on their today lists. And even if you are vigilant about when you add a date to a task, there often is still far too many tasks on the daily list.

So, this week, I want to address that and share with you a few ways you can eliminate rather than accumulate tasks.

Now before we get to the question, this will be the final episode for a couple weeks. Don’t worry, we will be returning on the 10th January.

And, if you don’t want to miss out of all the productivity and time management content I produce each week, sign up for my weekly newsletter where every Friday you will receive all the content, PLUS a short essay with a tip on improving your overall productivity, time management and goal setting.

The link to sign up is in the show notes.

Okay, it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Gary. Gary asks, Hi Carl, I saw your recent video on how you have Todoist set up. I noticed you have very few tasks on your today list. Is that for real or was that just for show?

Hi Gary, thank you for your question and yes, that was for real.

Twice a year I show how I have evolved how I use Todoist, and in this videos I share my real Todoist account. Normally, I use a demo account.

So, how I achieve that is by focusing on elimination and being very very strict about what gets into my system.

Now, I should be careful here because I still collect a lot of stuff into my inbox. However, I am very strict on what goes from my inbox into my time sectors. This is where I practice the art of elimination. Let me explain.

Firstly, I am obsessed with avoiding duplication. I hate it if there is a piece of work or a task in one app and I copy it over to my task manager. That act of copying it over to my task manager creates a duplicated task.

For example. Like most people a lot of my tasks come from email and in the past I would forward these to Todoist’s inbox. That would easily generate fifteen to twenty tasks per day in my inbox. This meant I had the original email in my email system and a task for that email in my task manager which created duplication.

Then when it came to processing my Todoist inbox, I had all the other tasks plus those emails to process. This meant those email tasks had now been processed twice and I still had done nothing about acting on them—which is crazy.

I realised, if I created a folder in my email called “Action This Day” and any email that required me to do something was put in there, I only needed a single task in Todoist that recurred every day to remind me to clear that folder. This meant I no longer needed to go from Todoist to email, back to Todoist and then email again. It was a lot of unnecessary extra steps just to reply to a single email.

Moving email within the email app itself is a lot easier and faster and I eliminate a complete step. It also means now all I need do is allocate a block of time later in the day to clear my action this day folder and all my email commitments are dealt with for another twenty-four hours.

Another area where accumulation and duplication appears is throwing all your project tasks into your task manager. A lot of what needs doing on a project is obvious. If you’re preparing for a big important presentation, adding tasks such as: decide theme, get figures from accounts team, find images etc are superfluous. None of these really get the presentation done.

Opening up PowerPoint or Keynote and laying out the outline of your slides and and, once the file is complete, rehearsing it are the only really important tasks.

So for me, I have tasks such as: Continue working on presentation file and practice for tomorrows presentation.

My thoughts, ideas and sample slide layouts will be in a project note and that is also where the deadlines, milestones and instructions from the event organiser and anything else relevant to the project will be. You really don’t need to duplicate all that in your task manager. Again, all you have done is wasted a lot of time moving things around but done nothing to actually move the project forward.

It’s obvious what needs doing next once you open the document or the project note.

This is also why I am not a big fan of waiting for labels or tags. If you are waiting for something you have an incomplete task. For instance. If I create a task such as “Get last month’s sales data from Jeff” and I send Jeff a message asking him for the info, all I have done is ask Jeff for the information. I still do not have the information, so the task is not complete.

As the task is not complete and Jeff tells me he will send it tomorrow, then I reschedule the task for tomorrow.

If I decide to buy a new video camera for Zoom or Teams calls and I order it from Amazon, the act of ordering the camera is not completing the task. The task is I want a new video camera. So I order it on Amazon and the confirmation email is added to a waiting for folder in my email. I then have a single task in Todoist that comes up every Saturday to remind me to check that waiting for folder.

If you are buying three or four things on Amazon every week, adding three or four tasks to follow up on something seems superfluous and you can easily replace those with a single task reminding you to check you waiting for folder in email.

I should say, though, if you’re ordering things and you need a reminder about everything you’ve ordered, you’re probably ordering far too many things.

Another area I look for is what I call natural triggers. Natural triggers are objects or events that will naturally remind you that something needs doing. Simple examples of this would be you know when to take out the trash because your trash bin is full. Likewise you know when your car needs refuelling because the fuel warning light will come on, or if you leave it long enough you run out of fuel—probably the best reminder to do something.

I’ve also set up a shopping list in Apple reminders so I can use the convenience of my Home Pod Mini and tell Siri to add something to my shopping list while I am showering or cooking. I only need look at this list on days I go to the supermarket, which is usually Tuesday and Friday. I don’t need to be reminded to go the supermarket. It is just something my wife and I do.

Another reason why I am able to keep my today list clean and tight is because I know what my core work is. I know what needs doing each day. For instance, today, I have a task telling me to record this podcast. I also have a task that tells me to edit my YouTube videos and write my coaching clients’ feedback. These three tasks are my important tasks for the day and they are at the top of my list.

Anything else that comes up will not take priority over my core work unless it is a genuine emergency—and genuine emergencies are rare. I’ve only had one in the last five years.

Underneath these tasks are my routines for the day including clearing my email action this day folder and daily admin. Clearing my action this day folder takes around forty minutes and my daily admin around thirty minutes. These tasks are performed every day, and although I probably don’t need them on a list for the day, it does act as a reminder on those days when it has been chaotic or I have been away from my office.

In total, if you include my routines, when I begin each day I will have between fifteen and twenty tasks for the day and the important tasks are at the top. If I see I have more than twenty tasks during my daily planning session, I will eliminate the less important ones. And again, I am very strict about this.

If you do not know what your core work is—the work you are paid to do, or in you run your own business, the work you do that generates your income, then everything will be a priority and you will feel compelled to add everything to your task manager.

I’ve seen things like iron shirts, take dog for a walk and take medicine on a task manager. Seriously? Ironing shirts should be a part of a home cleaning routine—it doesn’t need to be in a task manager. And as a dog owner myself, you should never need reminding to take your dog out for a walk. That is a part of the commitment you take on when you decide to have a dog—and dogs have a way of telling you it’s walkie time.

For medicines, use your phone’s reminder system if you must. Setting a recurring alarm reminding to take your medication will work far most effectively than using a task manager.

Ultimately, if you are putting everything on your task manager it means you don’t trust yourself and you need to start trusting yourself. Daily and weekly planning sessions are a key part to this because it ensures you do not miss anything. Skipping these prevents you from trusting that your system will work for you.

When you do a daily and weekly planning session you gain the confidence that you have everything under control. You know nothing has been missed and if it has it’s unlikely to be important. Not doing these is like trying to push a wheelbarrow with a square wheel up a steep hill.

So there you go, Gary. The trick is to have the mindset of elimination not accumulation. Remove the unnecessary and what’s left will naturally be the necessary. You can then focus all your attention on getting those done and not worry about everything else—you don’t need to because they inevitably will not be important.

Have a wonderful week, a fantastic Christmas and I’ll talk to you all again the New Year.

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

Monday Dec 13, 2021

How To Do An End Of Year Productivity Clean Up

Monday Dec 13, 2021

This week, we are cleaning up our productivity systems and getting ready for the new year.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 211 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 211 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.

Something I’ve been doing for a long time is cleaning up my productivity system during the end of year Christmas break. I’ve found it’s the best time of the year to do this as there are very few new inputs coming in. Most of my work comes to a screeching halt because, while not everyone celebrates Christmas, most companies and people do have an end of year holiday.

So while it’s quiet over the final two weeks of the year, you can take advantage and clean up your system so it’s ready and waiting for you when your new year starts.

So where do you start?

The best place to begin is with your task manager. Over the year you will have added tasks that have disappeared into the deep dark depths and there are likely to be tasks you have completed but have not checked off. Go through all your folders or projects and make sure all the tasks in there are still relevant. If not, delete them or check them off.

Next up, is to review your routines and recurring areas of focus. By the very nature of these folders, you don’t spend much time in there because they are set up to recur. However, through the year it’s likely some of these will have become irrelevant while others may have become a little boring. Now’s a good time to remove the irrelevant ones.

Now, these irrelevant ones are the ones that you have turned into a habit. For instance, I used to have a recurring task in my areas of focus to do my exercise. This was added at a time I was being inconsistent with exercise and I needed the prompt to make sure I was at the very least reminded to do my exercise.

Once I got the consistency back, I just added a single task as part of my weekly planning session to schedule my exercise for the week on my calendar. I no longer needed the daily prompt.

Now for the boring ones, what I mean by these are you have seen the tasks every day for a year and you’ve become a little numb to them. Find ways to change the verb. To give you an example here, I used to have a task in my routines that said “Empty my Action this Day Folder”—this is the folder I have in email for all my actionable mail. The goal is to empty that folder each day.

Earlier this year, I changed the verb from “empty” to “clear”. It’s a very small change, but it keeps things fresh. You can change this to things like: “reply to all actionable email” or something similar. It is a small change, but it helps to prevent things from becoming boring.

Now before you finish with your routines folder, ask if there are any other things you really should add in here. Do you need any reminders to clean different parts of your home or car? Do you need a reminder to renew any subscriptions—or consider renewing subscriptions. Setting up tasks to remind you about upcoming renewals can help to keep you on top of your commitments. The thing with these is don’t set them up on the day of renewal. Set them for a few days before so you have time to make sure there’s sufficient money in your account.

The final action to take on your task manager is to make sure you are happy with its structure. Over the course of a year, you are likely to have experienced folder creep. You may also have tested new apps but found you don’t really use them. Clear these off your computer and mobile devices. They only take up digital space and can be a distraction.

Hopefully, you are using the Time Sector System and with this, you should really only have six folders—your inbox, This Week, Next Week, This Month, Next Month and Long-Term and On Hold folders. If you’ve added temporary project folders or anything else, now’s the time to consider their value to your overall system.

If you are not using the Time Sector System, and have a more traditional setup with projects, clean these up. This is one area where folder creep can become overwhelming and you are likely to find you have a lot of projects that either have been completed or are unlikely to complete for whatever reason.

Now, before you finish with your task manager, ask yourself if it is working for you. Does it show you what you need to see when you need to see it? If not, make any necessary changes to make sure it does. For me, I want to make sure that what comes up on my today list are tasks I will do or must do. I don’t want tasks coming up that I know deep down I am going to push off to another day.

And, if you are taking a holiday at the end of the year, go into your routines and recurring areas of focus and forward date tasks you know you will not be doing over the holidays. I will be setting a lot of my routines and recurring areas of focus to stop coming up until the 3rd of January when I return to my full working schedule.

Now, what about your notes app?

This is likely the place where you have a lot of stuff you no longer need. After all, it’s your notes app that you open quickly to capture those little ideas that come in a flash and when you look at them later you wonder what you were thinking at that time.

Now it does depend on how much time you are willing to spend here and how many notes you have. I have around ten to twelve thousand notes in Evernote and to go through all of those would take days if not weeks.

So, I do a search for all notes created in the last twelve months and start there. Then I change the order of the notes collected to the oldest first and that way I can begin in January and work my way through. I usually make sure the note is held in the right place and is appropriately tagged as I go through them.

I find doing this I will delete around 20% of what I collected and it only takes an hour or so.

If I want to go further, I just filter notes to any note created in the last five years and repeat the process. Fortunately, I’ve been doing this every year for around six or seven years, so this deeper clean up is very quick. Anything older than a year will already be tagged correctly so all I am doing is making sure the note is still relevant.

A final exercise with your notes is to review your structure. Is the way you are structuring your notes still serving you. These days it’s rare I would change the way I structure my notes, but in the past, I’ve played with multiple ways and found a lot of them didn’t really serve me. Now’s a good time to do any restructuring.

Okay, so that’s taken care of your productivity apps. What about the folders in your cloud storage system and your computer. Well, hopefully, you are not using your computer to store files. Aside from the risk of losing everything if your computer died (and they do still die) flies stored on your computer’s hard drive are not available on your other devices.

It’s really up to you. I keep files and folders for up to two years. So, anything I created this year will be stored in a parent folder called 2021. Then anything new will be created as and when required. I do have some folders that stay around for instance my company’s certificate and VAT documents which I need quite frequently.

I also go into Pages, Keynote and Numbers and clear out anything I no longer need. If you use Google Docs or Microsoft Office online, then take a. Look and clean up anything you no longer need.

Okay, that’s a good annual clean up of your productivity tools. Now for the final step: dealing with app creep.

Let’s be honest, we are all sucked into trying new apps and forgetting they are still on our phones and computers. The end of the year is a good time to purge these and to also look at what you are using and make sure the apps you use are still doing the job you want them to do.

It’s funny, if I am being honest, over the last two years Evernote has been on my “at-risk” list, but as I was never able to find a worthy replacement, I stuck with it. This year, Evernote is off the “at-risk” list. It’s vastly improved over the last eighteen months and while this year they have brought out a lot of features I don’t need or would use, it still does the job I want it to do reliably and with speed.

But I did look at Obsidian this year and was underwhelmed by all the fuss. It’s gone—I’ve already deleted that one, and that was the only one I was tempted to look at this year. However, in years gone by, I have looked at a lot of apps and forgot they were taking up space. So I purge.

One final area to clean out is your to-read list. Let’s honest here, if you have a list that’s well over a hundred articles to read, you’re not going to read them all. Purge that list, my friends. Clean it out so you start the year with a list of things to read you are going to read.

And that’s it. If you spread this out over the end of year break, you will begin the year with a refreshed set of productivity tools ready to see you through another year.

Have a fantastic week and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Monday Dec 06, 2021

What Are The Best Productivity Apps Today?

Monday Dec 06, 2021

This week, why your system or process is more important than the apps you use.

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Episode 210 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 210 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.

This week, we’re talking about the system versus app and why with the right system it doesn’t matter what apps or tools you use, you’ll always be productive.

I remember when I first read David Allen’s Getting Things Done book many years ago, I salivated at the chance to learn what apps would be recommended and where I could buy them from (there were no app stores in those days). I was disappointed after reading the book to learn that David Allen didn’t recommend anything other than a label printing device for all the folders I would be creating for my projects.

Then in 2015, the revised updated version of Getting Things Done came out and I rushed to buy my copy believing this time, as we were well and truly in the new digital world of apps and app stores, David would be recommending some new apps I hadn’t tried. Again I was disappointed, The same label printing device was recommended, but no apps or tools.

And yet, David Allen was teaching me a lesson. Being productive has nothing to do with the apps or tools you use. They are just cosmetic and do nothing to make you more productive. Everything that makes you more productive comes from the system and daily process you use. And that is what this week’s question is all about.

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

This week’s question comes from Philip. Philip asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently come across your content on YouTube and this podcast and hoped you could help me. I’ve been searching for the best apps for managing my daily to-dos and notes. I feel I’ve tried them all but I still feel like I am burning out trying to get everything done. Do you have any app recommendations?

Hi Philip, thank you for your question.

I think a lot of people struggle with this one largely because there are a lot of applications and tools now that promise to make you more productive and organise your life for you. The truth is no application or tool will ever do that. No matter what application you are using, you are still going to have to put the work in. You still need to input your information, your tasks, and collect all your files together and organise them in a way you can find them later.

I’ve seen some apps try and do some of this hard work using machine learning or AI, but technologically we are not there yet. For that to work, a machine or app will need to know how your mind works and for most of us, we don’t even know how our minds work, so there’s little chance an app or piece of complex software is going to be able to do that.

At best, these apps guess based on algorithms and, as we know from US congressional hearings into Facebook and Google algorithms, these are not exactly perfect by a long way.

And that is really where you need to start. Understand that whatever tools you choose, you will still need to input your data.

Now, When I created my system I began with the question: what do I want to see each day?

What this question is does is elicit the information I need on hand for me to complete my work to a satisfactory level each day. It also implies that there is quite a lot of information I do not need to see. For instance, I do not need to see tasks or appointments I have next week. I might need to know I have a workshop to prepare or if I have a holiday coming up, but I only need to see that when I am planning the week.

For instance, if I have a workshop to deliver on Monday, I will need to know that this week, because I will need to prepare for it. But that is just a single task that says “prepare for next Monday’s workshop”. Once that is is on my list for this week, I don’t need to know anything else.

From that, I can open the Keynote file or the Pages document for the workbook and get on and do the work. I may have a few notes related to the workshop in my notes app, and that note will be linked to my task.

So, let’s say on Wednesday, I see I have a task that says “prepare for Monday’s workshop” that task will be linked to the project note in my notes app and all I need do is click the link, and I’ll be taken to the project note and I can do a quick read through to see where I am and decide what needs doing next.

So, within five seconds I am ready to begin work.

However, to get to that point, I first need to make a number of decisions. First, when am I going to work on the workshop—I decided Wednesday—and what work will I do that will ensure I have the workshop prepared for.

This means I need to input the data at some point. I will need to input the task, and collect my notes and ideas and create a presentation file.

None of these things requires expensive, complicated applications. In practice, all of this could quite easily be done using a pen and piece of paper. The Keynote file and workbook will need software, but the process of knowing what to work on and when does not need anything elaborate.

Over the last ten years or so, I’ve played around with a lot of different tools. From Evernote to OmniFocus and in recent months Notion, ClickUp and Obsidian. And yet, while many of these apps may be pleasing to the eye very few of them actually help to get my work done any better or faster. In fact, I found Notion and ClickUp actually stopped me from maximising the work I got done each day because I wasted too much time trying to get the app to look nice.

So a question to ask yourself is what do you need your productivity apps to do for you?

Well, the answer to that question is you want them to tell you what needs working on and why and then to get out of the way except when you need to collect something into your system.

This means, the best productivity apps—the ones that will help you become more effective and allow you to focus on your work—are the most boring apps. Boring because you will not be tempted to keep rearranging things: changing fonts, colours and layouts. All these are distractions. They stop you from doing your work.

In many ways, Apple Notes is possibly the best notes app today. I know it’s only available for those who work in the Apple Ecosystem, but when you look at it, it has everything you need and nothing else. It has folders to organise your notes into categories and it allows you to collect notes very easily whether that is by using Siri or using the new Quick Notes feature. Its search is phenomenal and you can tag notes for fine-tuning your organisation.

When it comes to customising things. Nope. Not a chance. While it is possible to change text colours and fonts on macOS, you cannot do that on an iPhone or iPad. Apple Notes does what a notes app is designed to do. Manage your notes and nothing else.

The way to look at this is, the less time you spend inside your productivity apps and the more time you spend doing the work that needs doing, the more productive you will be.

This means you want to be optimising your system and not looking for another app.

To optimise your system look at how easy it is to get your tasks and appointments into your task manager and calendar. Make sure the task manager you use has some form of quick entry and for your calendar you should be able to type something like “meeting with George on Monday at 9:30 am” and your calendar will know to add that to the right place whether it is typed or spoken via Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri.

Once you have your to-dos into your task manager, you want to be able to quickly decide what needs doing and when and then to be able to add dates (if necessary) and move the task to its appropriate folder. If you cannot drag and drop a task on a desktop from your inbox to the right folder, your task manager is not fit for purpose.

This rule applies to your notes app too. Whatever app you choose, make sure there is some form of quick entry on all your devices. You should also be able to add relevant emails to notes and collect websites, PDFs, images and such like. I found when I tested plain text notes apps, they fell down when it came to that part of the process. While some could do it, it was fiddly and time-consuming and that defeated the purpose. Quick entry is vital.

The final part of any good system is down to planning. If you are not planning the week and your day, you will always feel overworked and busy. Not planning your day leaves you at the mercy of other people’s demands.

If you are not making a commitment to work on specific projects each day, you will find yourself saying yes to anything that comes your way. When you know when you start the day what you want to get accomplished, if anyone asks you to do something else, you are much more likely to say no.

For instance, today, preparing this podcast was one of my objectives. However, this morning, I got an email asking if I could jump on a quick call to discuss a “great new proposal”, and it was easy for me to say no. I had already decided that the most important use of my time today was to prepare this podcast, do my exercise and get all my writing done. Talking about how I could help someone else with their ideas was not a priority for me today. I have times available for that, and today was not one of those times.

Not having a plan for today, I would likely have said yes because I would then feel I was doing something.

When you begin the day with a clear plan, any new commitment requests can be assessed based on what you have planned. When you begin the day with no plan, you have nothing to assess, so you’re likely to say yes to the new commitment request and then find yourself overwhelmed with everything you didn’t do.

So, Philip, forget the tools and apps. Pick something you like and stick with it. Focus on making sure you collect everything quickly. Organise what you collected at the end of each day and make sure you have a plan for the day. When you do that, you will soon find yourself being more productive and a lot less stressed.

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

Monday Nov 29, 2021

How To Turn Plans Into Goals

Monday Nov 29, 2021

This week, as we begin the final month of the year, it’s time to lay down your plans for 2022 and to set yourself up for a very successful year.

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Episode 209 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 209 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 have followed along with this podcast as well as my YouTube channel, back in October, I recommended you begin a two-month brainstorming session where you gave some thought to what you would like to accomplish next year. Well, that two-month session is almost over and it’s time to turn your attention to what you WILL do next year.

Now, before we get to the meat of this week’s podcast, just wanted to give you a heads up to let you know that my 2021 holiday sale is currently on. This year, you can save 20% on all my coaching programmes as well as up to 25% off selected courses. Full details of the savings are in the show notes or can be found on my website: carlpullein.com.

Okay, let’s get back to turning ideas into reality.

Now, a lot of what you will have written out during the brainstorming session will not be possible next year. And that’s okay. The purpose of the exercise was to open up your thoughts to possibilities. For instance, one of the questions to think about is what would you like to change about yourself? Now, most people tend to think about their weight, or their relationships, but you may have gone deeper and felt you would like to change your attitude to events outside of your control.

I remember, back in 2016, when Donald Trump was running for the Republican nomination for president, the media seemed to turn very negative and tribal. It felt the media sucked any remaining positivity out of the news and focused only on denigrating, lambasting and doom-mongering. Reading the news every day, as I had done since I was in middle school, no longer felt like an education. Instead, it felt like media organisations were trying to trigger me into a negative mood.

I decided that from 2017, I would no longer read the news and instead subscribe to my favourite blogs on topics I was interested in and to get a news summary email every morning from the BBC to let me know what was going on in the world.

This was a small change, but one that left me feeling a lot more positive about the world and people.

Another example, at the end of 2017, I decided that I could become more productive if I could reduce the number of private classes I was teaching face to face and instead focus more on digital classes. This was before the pandemic, but through 2017, I wanted to move towards a more working from home arrangement and learned how to use Skype and FaceTime. Now, of course, most of us are using Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but that change in the way I did my work, enabled me to produce more content and still continue to teach.

So the purpose of brainstorming ideas through October and November isn’t to develop a list of things you feel you must do next year, it’s about developing ideas about how you want to live your life and then choosing a few of those ideas and looking for ways to make small changes to your daily life.

And that’s the point I really want to share with you this week. It’s not about making big changes as the more traditional New Years resolutions would have you do, it’s about looking for those small tweaks to your habits and way of going about your day that will, over the course of a year build into significant changes in your life.

I remember in the days when I was teaching English here in Korea I often would have a student telling me they wanted to lose weight in the new year. I would ask them how they were going to do that and the answers typically involved joining a gym and some elaborate new diet fad.

Now, in Korea, it is common for people to each a bowl of rice for breakfast lunch and dinner every day. I suggested that instead of eating a full bowl of rice, they could reduce that to half a bowl each time and move a bit more. Take the stairs at work instead of the lift. Go for a twenty-minute walk after lunch instead of gossiping in a coffee shop etc.

Making these small changes would bring some dramatic results after only a few months, yet they would not be asking too much of themselves. You could still do the things you like to do, you can still eat with your colleagues and all you would be asking of yourself is to commit to a twenty-minute walk every day.

And that’s the thing. When you give yourself enough time to consider what you want to change and improve, you have the time to come up with some action steps that will not be such a drastic shift in the way you have always lived your life. It’s when you try to change things too much that you fail.

Humans are change-averse. We like routine. This is why we generally wake up at the same time each day. It’s why we eat at the same time and why we come home and do the same things each evening. We feel safe with a familiar structure to our day. When we try and change that too dramatically, our whole psychology will fight to return to the familiar.

Often, if you really want to make big changes, the best time to do it is when you move house or change your job. It’s then that a new environment will help you to make other big changes.

But for most of us, we do not have the luxury of being able to move house or change our jobs every year. Instead, if you want to succeed at making changes and successfully achieving your goals, making small changes to the way you run your day are the best way to stick to your goal and to come through successfully.

One of the best things you can do to become better organised and more productive is to give yourself thirty minutes before you close out the day and clean up your desktop. Delete old screenshots, move files to their rightful folders and then allow yourself ten minutes to look at your tasks for tomorrow and your calendar to sketch out a plan.

It’s just thirty minutes a day, but those thirty minutes will do so many things for you. First, you will begin the day knowing exactly what you want to get accomplished and secondly when you do start the day, you begin it with a clean desktop, and a distraction-free work environment. You get all that from twenty to thirty minutes. It’s really a no-brainer.

What about your bucket list? Are there any things on there you could do next year? Now, I know for many of us there is still the uncertainty of the pandemic, but that will end soon. What could you do next year from your bucket list?

Now usually, the things we have on our bucket lists are things that excite us, are a little far outside our comfort zone, and yet, if we picked something, thought about how to make it happen and then took the first step, you would find it happens. Let’s take one of my bucket list items. I want to take my wife to Goldeneye, a resort in Jamaica where all the James Bond books were written.

Now, Goldeneye is an expensive resort, and we would need to save a lot of money to make it happen. But what I can do is go to the bank in the new year, open a new bank account and call that my Goldeneye account. Then each month, send any spare money over to the account. I could set a monthly target, let’s say $1,000 a month, and that way I know if I curb my spending in the early part of the year, that would begin the momentum. If I found by June I had saved $6,000, I would start to believe that with a little push, we could very easily have sufficient money saved up to be able to go in September or October.

The only thing I need to focus on is making sure I am sending money over to the account every month how much time does that take? Five minutes?

You see, whatever it is you want to accomplish or change in 2022 doesn’t require a lot of time to do. You first need to identify the habits and behaviours you will need to adopt and make sure each day or week you schedule sufficient time to make sure it happens.

Developing habits requires an extra effort to start with. For instance, I drink a glass of squeezed lemon juice in water every morning. When I first began doing that, I had to consciously think about it every morning. I even had a little alarm set on my phone to remind me every day for the first month. After about two weeks I no longer needed the alarm.

What you will find is you make a few modifications over time too. For my lemon water, I used to squeeze a lemon into a glass of water every morning. I found that wasn’t the best approach. Now, I prepare a bottle of lemon juice every three days and keep that in the fridge. That way, when I wake up in the morning, turn on the kettle to brew my coffee, I can reach into the fridge, pull out my bottle and pour my lemon juice and drink it while. Wait for my coffee to brew.

The same goes with changing your diet or building exercise into your life. There’s a lot of experimentation in the early days while you find the best approach. That’s fine. If you keep tweaking and modifying you will soon find the right approach for you.

I have spoken about the time I followed Robin Sharma’s 5 AM club routine. That’s where you wake up at 5 AM and do 20 minutes of exercise, 20 minutes of planning and 20 minutes of studying. I was able to do that for eighteen months, but I began doing coaching calls between 10 PM and midnight and it became exhausting to do those calls and wake up at 5 AM.

In the end, I realised it wasn’t so much about the time of day you woke up, it was all about what you did in the first hour that mattered. So, I adjusted my wake up time. I now wake up around 7 AM and use the first hour of the day to work on myself. I write my journal, do some light exercise and stretching and review my schedule and plan for the day. It works fantastically, and I get enough sleep.

So, as we head into December, start thinking about what you would like to do and change for yourself in 2022. Then work out what small steps you could take each day that will gradually build up to you achieving whatever it is you want to do in 2022.

It works, it’s a great way to feel fulfilled and successfully accomplishing these goals will generate incredible momentum to achieving things you currently think would be impossible.

Have a wonderful week and thank you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast all you need do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I’ll be happy to answer it for you.

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

Monday Nov 22, 2021

What‘s The Difference Between A Project And A Goal?

Monday Nov 22, 2021

What’s the difference between a project and a goal? That’s the question I am addressing this week.

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Episode 208 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 208 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.

With the introduction of my GAPRA notes organisation system—GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas Of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive—I’ve received a number of questions about the difference between a project and a goal and on the surface there is little difference. Both have a desired outcome, a deadline and a set of actions that need to be performed before the outcome is achieved.

However, there are a few subtle differences that I will explain this week as well as explaining why I began organising my notes using GAPRA.

Now, before we get to this week’s answer, just a heads up to let you know if you are enrolled in my Apple Productivity course, you now have the 2022 update ready and waiting for you. It’s a free update and this year, it has extra lessons on GAPRA and how to build that into Apple Notes.

If you are not already enrolled in the course, you can still do so at the early bird discount price of $49.99 for just 12 more hours. The early bird discount will be ending at midnight today (22 November)

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Johnny. Johnny asks: HI Carl, I’m struggling to understand the difference between a goal and a project. Could you explain how you distinguish between the two?

Great question, Johnny and thank you for sending it in.

Okay, let’s start off with the similarities. Projects and goals share a lot in common. There’s a desired outcome. For instance you may have a project to redecorate your bedroom and a goal to lose 10 pounds in weight. You will also have a deadline date for both of these. So in this example, you may have a deadline to complete the redecoration of your bedroom by the 24th December and to lose ten pounds by the end of the year.

So far, very similar.

However, where they differ is in what happens once you have completed these. Once your bedroom is decorated, you have completed the project. It’s over. There is nothing else for you to do except to enjoy the freshly painted room.

With your goal of losing weight, the next step is to keep those ten pounds off. That means you need to change the way you eat and move. There’s no point in losing those ten pounds only to put them back on again right?

Goals are about changing you as a person for the better. They are about improving yourself and moving towards a higher purpose.

How did you feel when you last successfully achieved a goal? Happy? Ecstatic? How long did you feel like that? A few days? A few hours? Minutes?

You see the problem with achieving a goal is the satisfaction that comes from achieving goals is short-lived. All goals by their very nature are just one step towards a higher purpose. For instance losing that weight, is about becoming healthier. If you lose those ten pounds and within a few weeks regain the ten pounds, then you completed a project. You did not complete a goal. A goal would be to keep those ten pounds off or go further and lose another ten pounds.

Let me give you another example. Each year I set my company an income goal. This is a goal because the purpose here is to establish a new standard. The underlying goal is to continue to grow and improve my company. So, ultimately, the goal of the company is for constant and never-ending growth. However, each year I need to set a new goal to accomplish to achieve that.

By pushing the goal further each year, the company grows, I get to help more people while at the same time I improve as a teacher—after all, for my company to grow I have to also improve as a teacher. For me to help more people become better organised and more productive, I also have to improve my skills.

I remember watching a Jim Rohn seminar on YouTube a few years ago and he said you should set the goal to become a millionaire, not for the money, but for who you have to become to achieve that goal.

To become a millionaire, you will have to change your mindset and your habits. Most people limit themselves because they believe their income is set by the company they work for. And in the past, if you chose to be an employee, that was likely to be true. The only way for anyone to become a millionaire twenty years ago was to start your own business. Today, that is not true. We have unlimited opportunities to build side-incomes. Creating online courses, or a YouTube channel. Even writing blog posts now can earn you income through sites like Medium.

But, to do that, you will need to break free of your 9 til 5 mindset. You will need to change your thinking from consuming entertainment to consuming education. Learning, growing and being obsessed with generating income. That’s how you become a millionaire. You will learn that if you spend all evening going out with your friends or watching Netflix, you will not change anything. You will stay stuck where you are.

If you spend your evenings on your side project—write, produce videos, sell products through Amazon or Ebay, then you put yourself in a position where becoming a millionaire becomes possible.

I remember back when I was in my early 20s I worked in our local pub as a bar tender. One of the regulars was a gentleman called Albert. Albert had been a millionaire three times and lost it three times. I remember talking with Albert one quiet Monday evening and he told me making the first million is the hardest thing you will ever do. But once to have achieved your first million, earning a million a year is easy.

I didn’t understand what he meant back then, but over the years, I’ve realised that once you know the mindset and develop the skills to earn your first million, if you ever lose it, you don’t need to worry. You know what it takes to become a millionaire and you can repeat the process over and over again.

The key to understanding goals is to know that the goal is less important that the changes you have to make in order to achieve that goal.

A project is static, it does not move. Once you complete the project it’s over. You archive the project and move on to the next project. A goal is fluid, it moves with you. As you improve your abilities, develop new skills, strengthen weak areas you, as an individual, are improving. When you complete the goal, the question becomes what next? How can you continue to grow and improve?

And that leads me nicely onto why I developed GAPRA. All GAPRA is is a way for me to organise my notes by importance. I want my goals at the top because they are the drivers of my continuous improvement. If I am in any doubt about what I should be working on today, I know my priorities will always be with my goals.

Then comes your areas of focus. The eight areas of life we need to keep in balance. These are your family and relationships, your health, your finances, personal development, career or business, spirituality, lifestyle and life experiences and your life’s purpose. These are all important to us but their importance changes depending on where we are in life.

Then your projects. For most working people, our projects are likely to come from our work. But as we move through life, become home owners, parents and take on more responsibilities we will be adding more and more personal projects.

Then we have resources, this is where we keep important information. I keep things like where I buy my clothes from and my sizes. I have a note called my “Anchor Note” where I keep important links and other useful information.

And finally we have the archive where old project notes and other stuff I have finished with but are not ready to delete yet go.

When you organise your notes in this way, you have everything organised by importance. In the past, I’ve found I’ve ignored my goals because often my work projects take up a lot of time. But if I want to grow as a person, become better at what I do and feel fulfilled, I know I will only find that in my goals. So, when I open my notes app in a morning at the top of the folder list is my goals folder, I am reminded every day of what is really important.

It also makes doing my weekly planning session easier. I start at the top and work my way down to projects. So, I can ask myself what I can do to move closer to my goals first, then check my areas of focus are in balance and finally make sure I have sufficient time each week for keeping my projects moving along.

If you want to learn more about why the goal itself is the least important part of the goal planning process, I recommend you listen to my interview with Damon Cart. Damon did a fantastic job explaining that our goals are a vehicle to attaining what we really want. For instance, when someone tells you they want to earn a lot of money, earning the money might be something measurable, but really what people want is the thing that they think money will give them. A nice car? And nice home? Well, again, it’s not really the car or the home they want, it’s the feeling they think a nice car or a nice home will give them. That’s the ultimate goal.

Now the problem with material things is they never bring you the feeling you think they will. Nice houses and cars don’t impress people as much as you may think. But if the goal is to put yourself in a position of financial security so you have the freedom to do the things you want to do, you are setting the right kind of goals.

So there you go, Johnny. I hope that answers your question. The reality is goals and projects are very similar. The difference is that once a project is complete it’s done. Finished. A goal, on the other hand, is about changing and improving you as a person. It’s just a step towards a much higher purpose.

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.

Sunday Nov 14, 2021

How Does It All Fit Together?

Sunday Nov 14, 2021

Podcast 207

This week, I have a question about how everything should be working together and why when you do bring everything together, your daily life will seem so much more focused and, more importantly, relaxed.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 207 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 207 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I’ve been writing and producing videos for a few years now and over the years I have introduced a number of concepts that are designed to help you better manage your time and become more productive in what you do.

It can be quite confusing if you picked things up a little ad hoc. This week’s question is about how to bring it all together so it is seamless and logical.

Now before I get to the question, the 2022 edition of my Create Your own Apple productivity course is now available, If you are enrolled in the course, this is a FREE update for you and if you are not, but would like to enrol in the course you can do so this week for an early bird discount price of $49.99 (it’s normally $59.99)

This course will show you how to build your own productivity system using only Apple’s Productivity tools: Reminders, Notes, Calendar and iCloud. It’s a great course and one, if you are in the Apple ecosystem, that will give you so much benefit. And the course includes how to set up the Time Sector System as well as my new GAPRA notes organisation system.

All the details are in the show notes.

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Beth. Beth asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed your podcast for a while now and I know a lot of the things you teach. I was wondering if there is a particular way you apply would use each of those ideas? I get a little confused sometimes about the differences between some of them.

Hi Beth, thanks for the question.

There is a logical sequence for many of the principles I teach and when I saw your question I thought this would be a great way to explain how they all fit together.

So. Let’s begin with COD, that's Collect, Organise and Do. This is the foundation of all great productivity systems. If you are not collecting stuff—things like your tasks, your events and ideas, you are going to keep them in your head and that is when you will find yourself swamped and stressed out by the number of things you are trying to remember. Our brains are not very good at remembering things like that.

You will then need some time, preferably each day, to organise what you collected. Asking some straightforward questions such as what is it? What do I need to do about it? And when will I do it? Are all parts of this process.

When I describe organising in this way it seems like it will take a long time, but you soon become very quick at processing tasks using these questions. Just to give you a benchmark, I will collect around ten to fifteen things each day, and to process those at the end of the day takes me about five minutes. If a task, for example, doesn’t need doing this week, all I need do is drag it to my Next Week or Next Month folder.

My focus each day is then on doing the work I have assigned myself for that day.

So where does the 2+8 Prioritisation fit? This is the daily planning process. The average person will have around twenty to twenty-five tasks per day including routines and regular work. If all of those had the same level of importance you would freeze. There’s no way you can do that many tasks each day unless they take less than fifteen to twenty minutes to do.

So, we need to get smart and choose the ten most important tasks for the day. Now the 2 parts of this refer to your two “MUST DO” tasks for the day. These are the two tasks you will do everything you can to complete. Now What these depend on the day and what you are currently working on. For instance, when I prepared this podcast, preparing the podcast script and doing my exercise were my two must-do tasks for the day. Yesterday, I had upload the videos for my Create Your Own Apple productivity course update and clean out my office (it really needed it).

What you’ll notice is that my objective tasks are not exclusively work-related. Sometimes they are, but I try to balance things. Now you might argue that cleaning out an office is not a priority, but we have a 12-week old puppy running around the house and I wanted to make sure there were no bits of paper or other such things hiding away on the floor. Puppies have a bad habit of chewing everything.

The eight other tasks are the tasks I should do that day. These tasks come from my core work and my recurring areas of focus. For instance, posting my social media posts and responding to student questions are a part of my core work. Every day these tasks will come up here. There can be other areas where tasks drop into here. The most likely place would be project work.

Again, to give you a benchmark figure, I will complete these ten tasks 90% of the time. It’s usually weekends where I occasionally don’t manage to complete them all. But, the two objective tasks have been completed every day. That is just what I do. It is who I am. I do my objectives every day.

And that is the way you need to look at your two objectives. They are non-negotiable. You just do them.

So when do you do your 2+8 Prioritisation planning? This is done before you end the day. Now, again when you first start this it will take longer than normal. For me, it takes around five or ten minutes. But that is likely because I never miss doing a weekly planning session. It is during the weekly planning session I set out what needs to be done that week and when I will do it. More often than not I will just be confirming that things are still relevant when I do the daily planning.

Why the evening and not the morning? That’s because what you want to be doing when you start the day is the most important work for the day. You do not want to be trying to plan in the morning—this is when you are at your freshest so knowing what you are going to start the day with is going to set you up for a great day. It starts the momentum.

Now for me, I’ve been doing many of these actions for over ten years and on those days when I have not been able to do them, I feel very uncomfortable. For instance, I cannot go to bed without knowing what I need to do tomorrow. I just wouldn’t sleep well.

I know when I fly to Europe—a ten-hour flight—but with travel to the airport, and then catching my connecting flight I am travelling for around 18 hours, it throws me out. However, my flight from Korea to Amsterdam is at 1 am, so once we have taken off it’s sleep time and when I arrive in Amsterdam I have a three-hour wait for my connecting flight, so I find myself a quiet corner, get a cup of coffee and do my planning and processing. Of course, when I am travelling it’s rare I would have anything important to do. Often it’s just to process my email’s Action This Day folder and answer student questions. But, I still do it. It brings a sense of control to my day.

I see it as who I am. It is just what I do.

So when you look at it, a well organised day doesn’t really involve a lot of additional work. The problem for most people is getting things organised in the first place. Often when someone embarks on building a productivity and time management system they have a lot of things all over the place and the hard part is getting that organised.

Then there is developing the habits of collecting everything and giving yourself a few minutes each day to organise that stuff. That can take a few weeks.

But, if you want to feel in control of what you are doing each day and would like to live a more intentional life, you will have to change some things. Living an intentional life where you have time to do all the things you want to do, will not happen by accident. You have to change, your habits have to change and change is difficult.

I remember learning to drive a car, when I first started I had to think about every step to get the car moving forward. Now, when I jump in the car, there’s no conscious thought at all. I just open the door, sit in the driver's seat and before I know it we are moving. How did that happen? It was all habit.

And that’s where you want to be focusing your attention. Building the habits. Set a time for doing your daily planning, make sure you automatically collect everything that comes your way into your inbox and make sure at some point over the weekend you do your weekly planning session. Once you have these habits embedded, it’s easy. You just do it.

I can promise you, Beth, that once these habits are embedded, you’ll feel so much more in control and when you begin each day you know exactly what you will be doing.

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

Monday Nov 08, 2021

When You‘re Stress Out And Overwhelmed

Monday Nov 08, 2021

Podcast 206

This week’s question is about managing overwhelm and stress.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 206 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 206 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

I’ve received quite a lot of questions over the last few weeks about feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. Not just the occasional feeling, but a general, constant feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it.

If this state lasts too long it can turn into something very bad, so it is important to recognise it and take action. Nobody wants to be depressed or experience a breakdown. Fortunately, if you do recognise the signs, you can do something about it.

Now, before we get into this week’s question, I’d like to remind you that we are now almost at the halfway point of November. We have around three weeks left to brainstorm ideas about what you would like to do next year.

If you haven’t already downloaded my FREE annual Planning Template, you can do so from my downloads page on my website. carlpullein.com/downloads. This is a wonderful time of year to evaluate what you did, and didn’t do and what you would like to change and do next year.

Okay. Time to welcome back the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks: hi Carl, every day I feel stressed out and feel helpless when I look at my to-do list. There is so much on there and I know I cannot get it all done. It feels like every day the list gets longer, not shorter and I am at my wits end about what to do. Can you help?

Hi Tom, thank you for your question and I am sorry you feel the way you do.

The first thing I am going to do is tell you to step back. You are going to fight me and tell me you don’t have time to step back, but I can promise you this is the only way you will regain some control and get on top of that to-do list.

You cannot go on doing what you are doing right now. If you do not step back, take a breath and spend some time going through that list, you are going to find your feelings of stress will continue to climb and that is not going to lead anywhere nice.

So, stop for a morning at the very least. Or if you can, take the next weekend, gather up everything in your to-do list and hide yourself away for two days while you get on top of what you need to do.

What this is going to do is to put a stop to new things coming in. You need this to breathe and to take stock of where you are with everything.

Next up, do a run through your task manager and delete any task you do not need to do. You will find there will be a lot of these. We have a habit of throwing stuff in there that we would “like” to do but don’t need to do. We need to clear these out.

In the past, I’ve suggested people move these tasks to their notes app as a single note, but I realised this does not fix the problem. It only moves things from one place to another. Instead, I find if we delete these tasks, if they are important at some future date they will come back up on your radar and you can re-add them to your list.

Doing this pass through on our task manager will clear around 25% of what’s in there. You’ll also find a lot of tasks that are well past their due date and completed tasks. We need to eliminate these.

Watch out for those emails you have been meaning to respond to for over a month. Sorry, but it’s too late. Delete these. Seriously, if you haven’t responded for over a month, it’s going to look very unprofessional to reply now. What does that say about your priorities?

I should tell you I’ve had people do this and they’ve removed well over 50% of their tasks. That brings a huge sense of relief.

Next up we are going to have to do some thinking. What are you actually employed to do? This relates to your core work. The work you are evaluated on and are paid for.

This needs to take priority in the short term. We must reengage with what we are paid to do, and that means we need to remove the work that we have volunteered for. I know this can be difficult because we will feel we are letting others down. But you have to remember, you don’t have time to do all this stuff. Something’s got to go and unless you want to lose your job, the first place to look is at is the stuff you have volunteered for.

Any committees you’ve allowed yourself to be on, any outside work commitments such as parent/teacher associations or community projects. If you want to get your life back, start to feel more in control of what you are doing each day, then these have to go.

Now for the next six months, you only allow yourself to focus on your core work. Do not allow yourself to be pulled into anything else.

This, by the way, also applied to those of you who are self-employed. You have core work too. What is that work? Make sure you strip away anything additional to that core work. You don’t have to do this forever, but we do need to do a reset to get things back on track.

If you are self-employed, one of the things you can do is look into employing a virtual assistant to deal with the admin. Admin can very quickly build up and take a disproportionate amount of time to deal with. Your talents and time need to be spent elsewhere.

Now, once you have taken these first two steps you will start to see some light at the end of your task manager. You will have not only slimmed down your task manager, you will also have freed up some time.

The next step is to re-establish what is important to you. Often when we get bogged down with tasks, we lose sight of what is important to us. We often think family and friends will always be there when we need them, and while that may be true, to some extent, the last thing you need right now is problems in your relationships.

Likewise, your health and fitness need to be taken care of. Neglect that and you’ll no longer have the energy required to do a great job, be there for your family and if your health fails, your task manager and everything else no longer matters.

With health and fitness, you don’t have to be going out for a run or join a gym. All you need do is move. Humans are designed for movement and when we move we improve our overall mood. We feel less stressed and a lot happier. So make sure you are moving. Take walks at lunchtime and after dinner. Get up and walk around for ten minutes or so between periods of focused work. And the best thing… Always take the stairs. Never take escalators or lifts (elevators for my American friends) Escalators and lifts are the enemies of your health and fitness.

Okay now you have taken these steps, it’s time to turn to your calendar. With all the remaining work you have to do, the question is: when are you going to do it?

Now, this is likely to be dictated to us by time sensitivity. What’s due next? Do that.

Time blocking is a great way to make sure you have sufficient time to get your work done. However, all too often people misunderstand what time blocking is. It is not micromanaging your time each day. Elon Musk might do that, but most people do not need to do it.

What time-blocking means is you look for gaps in your calendar you can block off to do focused work. That means working on the projects or tasks that MUST be done. For me, that usually means two to four hours per day for focused work. And, while I have meetings and calls each day, I can usually find those two to four hours no problem.

One way to do this is to block out 9 to 11 am for your focused work. I’ve found that to be the best time. You are still mentally fresh and it’s a lot easier to focus when you are mentally fresh. This means, where possible, you avoid meetings and other commitments at that time. Turn off email and notifications on your phone and computer and focus. Don’t worry, nobody will be upset with you if you do not reply for an hour or two. If you think they will try it out. If they get upset explain what you were doing and why it is important you do it.

Now, the only thing you need to think about is what you will get done this week. Next week does not matter today. You might need to prepare for a meeting or a presentation next week, but this week that’s all you need to find time for; preparation.

The final piece of this fix is to commit right here and now to do a weekly planning session at the end of the week. You need time each week to stop, look at what needs doing and plan when you will do it. As long as you are doing these weekly planning sessions, the only things you need to concern yourself with are the things that need doing this week. Next week can be taken care of when you do the planning session.

Taking these steps, Tom will go a long way to putting you back in charge of your tasks and commitments. Once you know what you need to do this week, just do one thing at a time, take a break then start the next thing. With that focus, you will soon find yourself feeling a lot less stressed.

Now, of course, if your work is causing you stress not because of the volume but because you are unhappy at work or you have a bad boss, that’s a different thing altogether. I would still recommend stepping back and looking at that and then thinking about what you could do to change things. Perhaps you could get a transfer to another department with another boss, or maybe you need to search for another job. Only you can decide that though.

I hope that helps, Tom and thank you for your question.

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

Monday Nov 01, 2021

Goal Planning The NLP Way With Damon Cart [Part 2]

Monday Nov 01, 2021

Podcast 205 / Interview with Damon Cart

This week is the second part of my chat with NLP Expert Damon Cart and in this part, we dive a little deeper into setting goals and making sure that whatever goal you are achieving is growing you as a person and leading you towards a greater sense of long-term fulfilment.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Damon’s Website

Damon’s YouTube Channel

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System