Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 194 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 194 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.

These days, there are so many fantastic articles and videos to watch that even if we took a week off, we’d still not be able to catch up with our reading and to watch lists. So, two questions come to mind: where can I store these and how can I find time to read and watch them? And those are what I hope to answer for you this week.

Now, before we get to the question and answer, just a quick heads up that if you like the content I share with you in these podcasts and want to learn more, I do have a YouTube channel dedicated to productivity, goal planning and time management, as well as a weekly blog. Plus if you sign up for my learning centre, you receive exclusively a weekly learning note designed to help you with your productivity and goals journey.

All you have to do is get yourself enrolled in my FREE COD course (Collect, Organise and DO) and you will receive the weekly learning note. Full details, as usual, are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Barry. Barry asks, Hi Carl, I have a lot of articles to read and videos to watch and I find myself consuming these when I should be doing more important work. Are there any tips you can share that will help me to manage these better?

Hi Barry, thank you for your question.

This is certainly a problem many people struggle with. There are so many fantastic videos and articles out there that could help us improve our overall time management and productivity, yet there is precious little time available to watch or read these.

Before we get into how to save these and when to watch or read them, let’s first look at where they are coming from.

Many people subscribe to newsletters that come to us through our email. But how many of you actually read these newsletters? If you look at the statistics on newsletters, for instance, the average open rate is less than 30% and the click rate—the number of times a link is clicked—is less than 5% of those that open the newsletter. If you are not opening a newsletter, and statically that means at least 70% of you, then you need to unsubscribe from that newsletter.

A few years ago, I found I was subscribed to over 30 newsletters. It meant I was getting at least five newsletters per day and it was impossible to read them all. I had to do something to reduce this list. What I did was monitor over one month, which newsletters I opened and which ones I skimmed through—just looking at the headlines.

At the end of the month, I found I only read around five of these regularly and the rest were just taking up digital space and pretty much were deleted almost the moment they came in. So, I unsubscribed from the twenty-five I was not reading. Even to this day, I only have five newsletters I subscribe to.

There is a problem we all face and that is FOMO—the Fear Of Missing Out. We feel if we are not reading these newsletters, we are going to miss something. The reality is you are not missing out on anything. You’re not reading them anyway and If something was important in your industry or company, someone would tell you and if you needed to, you could ask them to send you a copy of the relevant article or newsletter.

So, first up, stop worrying about what you may be missing out on. If you’re not reading something consistently, then unsubscribe from or junk the email.

A quick tip here. I’ve found unsubscribing to some newsletters results in more unsolicited mails arriving. I believe this is because when we click the unsubscribe button we confirm our email is active. I’ve found a better way to manage this is to send the email to your junk folder. Modern email apps, very quickly learn when an email is junk and will automatically junk the email for you. This way you are not confirming your email address to unscrupulous actors.

Next up with this is to set a reading deadline. By this I mean if you haven’t read the newsletter within a specified number of days, you must delete it. Let me give you an example of this:

I subscribe to James Clear’s 3,2,1 weekly newsletter. It usually arrives in my inbox around 11pm on a Thursday and by then I am usually in the middle of my closing down routine. So, I send the email to my action this day folder.

Anything in there needs to be dealt with in less than 24 hours, so this means I have 24 hours in which to read the newsletter. If I don’t do it, I have to delete the email. That little rule ensures I don’t leave this newsletter laying around collecting dust. From the moment I move it to my actionable folder, it must be read within 24 hours.

The worst thing you can do is to have a “To read” folder in your email. I haven’t met anyone who has been able to control this folder for very long. Pretty quickly they become a dumping ground for emails you will never read, but think one day you might do. You won’t. So get rid of that folder. It will not work for you. Instead, if you do get something you think you will read, put it in your actionable email folder and if you haven’t read it within say, 48 hours, delete it.

Next up, what about articles you find online that you want to read later?

Well, if you’re using a notes app such as Evernote or OneNote, you have a web clipper that will save the article to your notes app. This is a fantastic feature full of inherent dangers similar to a “to read” folder in email. You’re going to clip a lot of articles you never read.

The problem here is your notes app quickly becomes overwhelmed with a lot of stuff. There is also the problem with these articles disappearing under a lot of other notes you are collecting each day. Plus, there is no filter.

What I mean by there being no “filter” is we dump these articles into our notes app, some of you may process them and save them into a “to read” folder and then never have the time to go into that folder. Soon, you will have hundreds of unread articles. The question is: when will you sit down and read them? The reality for most people is, never. We are just too busy.

So what can you do here?

My advice is to use a read later service such as Instapaper or Pocket. These services are designed to save articles you want to read in a simple text-based format (fewer distractions). This is great because there’s no rush to read these articles and it gives you an opportunity to filter the articles first. If you like what you read, you can then save the article into your notes app for reference later.

I’ve been using Instapaper for years and before I shut down for the day, I usually give myself twenty to thirty minutes to read through my articles. I have it set up so the oldest article is at the top, which makes sure no article goes unread for very long.

And this is the trick. To keep on top of these, you want to be setting aside twenty to thirty minutes each day for reading. This way, these services are never likely to become overwhelming. Perhaps you like to read in the morning, if so, make reading through these articles part of your morning routines. Or, like me, you like to end the day reading. Whichever way you do it, a small amount of time dedicated to reading through your collected articles will help you to say on top of them.

Next up, what about videos you want to watch.

The issue here is they can be difficult to discover. Some may be sent to you via a newsletter—one of my top newsletters is Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory newsletter. In this newsletter, I get to see who Tom has been interviewing this week. I can then decide if that is something I would want to watch. If so, I open the video and save it in my watch later list.

I do the same with YouTube channels I subscribe to. I review these every few days and if there is anything I want to watch, I click “add the watch later”.

I like to end my day with around thirty minutes of learning and often I use YouTube for this. All I need do is open my watch later list and watch whatever video I feel like watching that day. Because I am doing this in my final thirty minutes before bed, I rarely watch for too long. I am tired and so thirty minutes or so helps me to unwind and relax before going to bed.

I also have a catch-up night each week where I give myself permission to watch whatever I like for two to three hours. It's a great way to unwind and stop thinking about work—unless I want to.

If you have a bad habit of watching videos well past your bedtime, I would suggest you set an alarm to remind you to stop and go to bed. You need not worry, the video will still be there tomorrow.

Just remember to clear out any videos you have watched so the list doesn’t become overwhelmed.

When should you be reading and watching all this content you have saved?

Here I’ve found the best way to read and consume all this content is to set aside time for it. It doesn’t have to be every day. As I said about watching videos, I allow myself two to three hours of vegetating on the sofa on a Saturday to catch up with anything I want to watch. This could be a movie, a comedy show or some of my favourite YouTuber’s videos. It’s completely free.

For reading, I like to read while I eat my breakfast. So for me, I do intermittent fasting and my first meal of the day is at 12pm. That’s when I read through any articles I’ve saved. It’s 30 minutes or so and it’s a nice break from writing or recording something.

If you can find thirty minutes or so each day, you will stay on top of your reading list. The most important thing to remember is if you are just collecting and not doing anything with it—why are you collecting it in the first place?

For a lot of things like exercising, reading, doing an online course etc, you are going to need time. If you’re not scheduling time for it, you are not going to do it. You need to escape from thinking that ‘one day' you’ll have time. No, you won’t. If reading articles and newsletters or watching videos is something you want to do, you need to schedule time for it.

Reading these articles and watching these videos is, for the most part, learning and education. I know a lot of what I watch and read each week are articles around time management and productivity as well as achieving goals, so for me, this is important time. It’s part of my self-development area of focus and so, I have time set aside for it each day. I certainly don’t feel guilty about doing it.

So there you go, Barry. I hope that has helped. The biggest thing you can do to ensure you are reading these articles and watching these videos is to set aside time for doing it. Early in the morning, lunchtime or evening are good times. But whenever you decide to do it, be intentional and consistent about it.

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

Monday Aug 09, 2021

HowTo Build Your Own Productivity System

Monday Aug 09, 2021

This week, it’s all about building a system that works for you and then making it stick—probably the more difficult part.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 193 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 193 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 show gets a lot of questions around the topic of productivity systems and apps and this week’s question comes from this same topic. So strap yourself in for a little more advice on creating your own system and overcoming some of the more common traps you will encounter as you develop your own system.

Before we get to the question and answer, I want to say if you do have a question or you are experiencing some difficulty creating your own system, then all you need do is email me at carl@carlpullein.com and I will be more than happy to try and answer your question.

Your questions help me to find solutions to difficulties around goal planning, time management, and productivity and they also help me to grow and improve my skills. I love helping, so if you feel I can help or answer any of your questions, please get in touch.

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

This week’s question comes from Monica. Monica asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the content you produce. I wanted to ask you if there is a way to finally get myself organised and get my work and chores under control. I’ve spent years trying to organise myself but each time I try a new system, I stop using it after a week or two. Is there a secret I am missing or something?

Hi Monica, thank you for the question.

Now, first up, you are not alone, Monica. I think everyone goes through this process at one time or another. I know I’ve been through it and it’s just a part of the journey.

There is a lot of advice out there—most of it great advice—such as write everything down, plan your day and use a to-do list. The trouble with a lot of this advice is, it is not necessarily going to work for everyone.

There are too many variables. Some of us spend a large part of our day driving between clients’ offices and so for a lot of the day we are unable to reply to emails or read important documents. Others, work in customer-facing jobs where there is no fixed time to do any focused work during the working day. So when it comes to productivity and time management systems it really is a case of one size does not fit all.

That said, there are still some fundamentals that should be put in place before you develop anything else. You need a simple, easy and quick way to collect everything. Your tasks, ideas, and commitments. Fortunately, your phone is likely to have something like Siri or Google Assistant, or if you are at home, Alexa. These voice-activated tools, are a great way to collect things while you are driving, cooking, or doing something else that prevents you from using your hands.

Wherever you are on the productivity learning curve, I would always advise people to look at the way you collect your tasks and notes and ask yourself if there is a better and faster way to do this. The harder it is to collect things, the less likely you are to collect and that means even before your start there is a big hole in your system.

Next, make sure you spend around ten to twenty minutes before you end the day and organise what you collected and then plan out the next day. This just needs to be turned into a habit.

Now for both of the two basics above, there should not be any excuses. No matter what work you do, you can always look at the way you collect your stuff and see if there is a better, faster way and everyone can find ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to organise and plan.

If you don’t do these two very basic, simple things, it’s not a problem with your system, it’s a problem with you and your self-discipline and if you do have a problem with self-discipline you can fix that by buying yourself a house plant that requires watering every day.

The daily practice of watering your plant develops discipline. If you do not consistently water your plant, it will die and you get to see the slow destruction of life when you don’t exercise self-discipline.

The next thing to understand is that no one system is necessarily going to work for you. The act of collecting and organising is not a system, they are the absolute basic fundamentals of ALL systems. Everything else you may do is likely to be some system or another.

The biggest problem I find with most people struggling to develop a system is they never give any system enough time to work. Whether that is David Allen’s Getting Things Done, Time Crafting, or the Time Sector System, none of these systems will work for you until you give them enough time to embed and work.

Getting Things Done, for instance, is likely to take at least six months to become fully functional. There are a lot of moving parts and you will be experimenting with where to keep your project materials as well as developing your contexts.

With the Time Sector System, you are going to be over-ambitious about what you can accomplish each week to start with and so there is a fair amount of adjusting to find the right balance.

However, with enough time, a little adjusting, and resetting, whatever system you decide to use will eventually begin to bring you the desired results. You just have to give it time.

Another mistake people make is they think an app will transform their time management and productivity. No, it won’t. The only tool that will transform the relationship with time is a calendar and whether you use Google, Apple, or Microsoft for your calendar is does not matter. All these calendars have pretty much the same functionality. They show you the same information in almost the same format.

The task manager or notes app you use does not matter one jot to your system. There may be differences in the way each app collects and organises and that means the only thing you need to decide is how you want to organise and see your stuff.

I usually advise people to pick an app they like the look of and then spend as much time as they can really learning how to use it. That’s the secret to finding an app you like.

Frequently changing apps because the latest app looks nicer is the most damaging thing you can do to your overall productivity. Every week I get emails from app developers asking me to take a look at their new app. I don’t. I understand apps have nothing to do with whether you become better at managing your time and more productive. It’s the system you use that does that.

There are thousands of apps trying to tempt you to use them. Don’t be tempted. The best way to avoid being tempted is to stop looking.

Let me tell you a secret, these developers who ask me to review their products are usually offering to pay me to do so. If my YouTube channel or this podcast was used to make money, it would be very tempting to take the money and tell you that this product or that one is the new app everyone should be using.

Don’t worry, I won’t do that. But if I am being offered money to preview products, how many app reviewers are you watching ARE taking the money to tell you how great a new product is?

When it comes to organising your stuff, this is one of the most personal things you are going to have to do. We all have a different way we want to see, collate and manage our work. What works for one person is not going to work for you. You likely do a different kind of work and have very different personal stuff to manage and think differently.

I began my working life in the 1990s, which means when I began work, everything was filed alphabetically in grey filing cabinets. That’s what I got used to and that is what still works for me when it comes to filing my documents in iCloud.

My Evernote is tagged alphabetically. Although over the many years I’ve been using Evernote, I have developed a system for finding things using keywords and titles.

If I am looking for an article I saved on the blue blazer Roger Moore wore in The Spy Who Loved Me, I would search Evernote for “TSWLM, Blazer” (I code all James Bond Movies using the letters of their title) and that would find exactly what I am looking for—I know, I just tested it.

And that’s the ‘secret’ if you like. Over time, as you get used to the apps you are using, you will develop your own way of doing things and because you developed them, they WILL work for you.

But you have to understand that it takes time for that to happen. Often it will take years to find a settled method and it will continue evolving.

One way to ensure your system grows with you and continues to develop is to do a three-monthly review. Everything three months, I ask myself if there is a better way? I look at how I am collecting—can I make it faster? Often a small tweak somewhere can speed things up a little. And I also look at how I am planning the week and day. There I am looking to shorten the process as much as possible.

Email is a good example. Over the years I have been doing videos, blog posts, and podcasts on productivity, the amount of email I receive each day has increased. This means I need to refine and try and find ways to make managing email more efficient and effective.

This looking for continuous improvement has resulted in me being able to process an inbox of 100 emails in around fifteen minutes.

So, if you want to improve your mythology and develop a system that works for you, Monica, then begin with the basics. Look at how you collect and organise your tasks. Then look at how you are filing your documents. Where are you putting them, how are you categorising them, and make sure you follow your own guidelines.

Following these simple steps will ultimately lead you to create your very own way of doing things and that is the one that will consistently work for you. Other people’s system may give you a few pointers, but in the end, whatever system you develop it must work for you.

I hope that helps, Monica. Good luck with your productivity and organisational journey because that is what it is—a journey.

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

Monday Aug 02, 2021

The Tools I Use To Get My Work Done

Monday Aug 02, 2021

Podcast 192

This week, I have a slightly different kind of question to answer about the various tools I use to produce my work each week.

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The Tools I use Blog posts

2018

2019

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 192 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 192 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

A question that occasionally arrives in my inbox is one asking about what tools and apps I use to do my work, so I thought it was about time I answered this question.

Now, I have written a couple of blog posts over the years about this, and I will put those in the show notes so you can see how often I have changed my apps over the years. I should warn you though, I am boring. I very rarely change the tools I use. I’m inspired by people who’ve been using the same tools for years. It seems that with this approach you become one with the app or tool and it just becomes a part of who you are and what you do. It means you focus more on the work and less on how to do something with the app you are using.

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

This week’s question comes from Ricardo. Ricardo asks: Hi Carl, would you tell us what apps and tools you use to do your work. I know about Todoist and Evernote, but what other apps do you use every day?

Hi Ricardo, thank you for the question, and I should say thank you to all of you who have emailed me with this question before.

Okay first up, as you say, Ricardo, I use Todoist and Evernote as my main productivity tools. I’ve been using Todoist now for just over eight years and Evernote’s been a part of my life for twelve.

These two apps are the backbone of my whole productivity system. Todoist tells me what tasks I need to perform each day and what my objectives are. Evernote manages my project work, goals, my content ideas, and notes and is pretty much my “second brain” as the current term appears to be.

All my research, quotes, and articles of interest are kept in Evernote. At the last count, I had over 8,000 notes in there. The great thing about Evernote is you are not restricted by how much you have in Evernote, you are only restricted by the amount you put in there each month. I have the Personal Account—what used to be called pro—and that gives me 10 GB of uploads per month. I’ve never come close to hitting that limit.

Todoist manages my tasks and I use the Time Sector System for organising my tasks. That means my tasks are organised by when I will do the task: This week, next week, this month, next month, etc.

However, Todoist and Evernote are not the first apps I open in the morning. That honour goes to Day One, my journaling app. Back in January last year, I decided to experiment with digital journaling for a year. Previously I had a hit and miss journaling habit with a paper-based system, but found whenever I was away on a trip I rarely opened my journal. So, I thought I would try digital journaling and chose Day One to be my digital journal. I liked the idea I posting a picture every day and the journal being searchable by tags.

Over eighteen months later, I haven’t missed a day and I’ve posted a picture every day too.

So, When I wake up, I begin my morning routines. This involves drinking a glass of lemon water and brewing my coffee. I use a Chemex coffee maker and there’s an art to making the perfect coffee with a Chemex. (I researched it for hours on YouTube) So, while my coffee is brewing, I do my shoulder stretches. Once my coffee is brewed, I sit down at my desk and open up my iPad, and hit a shortcut I have pinned to the Home Screen that opens up a new entry in Day One and for the next ten minutes, I write. I use a template that has a number of little checklists so I can monitor what I am doing and making sure I am following the right habits.

Once I have my journal written, I open up the email app on my iPad. I use Apple mail (I’ve been using that app since 2001 when Apple launched Mac OS Ten) and clear my inbox. Most of my emails come through the night. So when I open Mail, there are likely to be about 100 to 150 emails. So, for the next 20 minutes or so I go through these, clearing them and moving them to where they need to go. Either Action This day, archive or delete. I practice the principles I teach in my Email Mastery programme and I can promise you, those principles work.

After I’ve completed those tasks, I usually have a couple of hours of calls. These are usually run through Zoom.

Now I have an M1 MacBook Pro, that I bought back in February and it's an amazing computer with one flaw. The built-in camera is terrible. So, I have a Logitec Brio 4K video camera attached to my LG 27 inch 4K monitor that I use for all my Zoom calls and workshops.

Once my calls are over, I exercise and shower, and then sit down to do the day’s writing. For writing blog posts and newsletters—like my Learning Centre’s weekly Learning Note, and the script for this podcast, I use an app called Ulysses. This is a fantastic writing app that puts everything out of the way while you are writing. As the filing system uses iCloud as its backend, I keep all my writing in here.

I have been using Ulysses for just over five years and I have hundreds of blog posts, all my podcast scripts, and newsletter essays in here. At a quick glance, there are over a thousand pieces of content in here. WOW! That’s a lot of words written over a five-year period.

One of the great things about sticking with an app is you learn how to use it properly and proficiently. I know all the keyboard shortcuts, I know how to quickly add tags, move drafts to my different folders without having to think about it. When I am in Ulysses, all I need to think about is my writing. I’m not wondering what this feature des or that one. It’s set up exactly how I like it so when I begin writing, that is all I need to focus on.

I do have one other writing app I use though. For the books I write, I use Scrivener. I’ve written every book using Scrivener because it’s purpose-built for book writing. My first book was a book I wrote on Presenting in English way back in 2009. So, I must have been using Scrivener for twelve years now.

It’s not the prettiest of apps, but it does the job, and like Ulysses, when you are writing all the functions disappear and you can focus on your writing. I am currently using it now to write The Time Sector System book.

The biggest advantage of Scrivener is when you are ready to publish, it will create all the formats you need. Word documents if you are sending the book to a publisher, Kindle format if you want to publish on Amazon, and ePub if you are publishing to Apple Books. All the formats are built-in.

While on the topic of writing, I use Apple Pages for my formatted documents. For instance, I write feedback for all my coaching clients after their calls—it’s a summary of what we discussed and the next steps they can take to improve their systems or achieve their goals. All these are written in Pages and I have a saved template for these documents.

Likewise, for tracking sales, my coaching clients, and anything else that requires a spreadsheet, I use Apple Numbers and for all my presentations for workshops and seminars, I use Apple’s Keynote.

As I say this, I realise I’ve been using Pages since it was launched in 2005— so that’s been in my toolbox for sixteen years. Numbers was released in 2007 so, that’s been in my toolbox for 14 years and Keynote since 2003, so that one I’ve used for nearly twenty years! WOW!

I should say, I prepare my online course outlines using Numbers and I have a template set up for this. When I am updating a course, such as my recent Time And Life Mastery course, I pull up the outline from the previous version and work from that. That tells me which parts need updating and which can be left alone.

Now for the other category.

I use Asana for tracking my weekly content. I produce around six to eight pieces of content each week and they are all in different states of readiness. So to track where each is, I use a Kanban board in Asana and move these along as they are developed. I use a simple column system of planning, in production, post-production, scheduled, and posted.

The calendar I mainly use is Apple Calendar, but the back end is Google Calendar because of the integration with Zoom. I do have Fantastical on my computer and I pay for the premium service, but I really only use that for setting up group meetings and using the little dropdown calendar on my desktop for quick reference to see when my next call or appointment is. I’m probably not using Fantastical to its full potential, but Apple Calendar on my desktop is a dream to use. It is simple, and once again I’ve been using it for a very long time—almost 20 years.

Safari is my browser of choice, although I use Chrome for more work-related tasks such as accessing Asana and uploading YouTube videos. For reading, research, and watching videos though, I use Safari.

I also have some little helper apps. The most commonly used one is TextExpander. TextExpander allows you to create little snippets of text that you can call up using simple text. For instance, if I want today’s date in the British format—my preferred format—I type E Date and the date will magically appear.

I also use it for my filing conventions. I file all my documents using YYYY-MM-DD format and by typing F Date, that will give the date in that format.

TextExpander is also used for emails I regularly reply to or send which saves me a lot of time.

On my phone and iPad, I use Drafts a lot. This is a simple text app that allows me to collect tasks, notes, and pretty much anything else related to text and I can then send it to either Todoist or Evernote.

I use Apple Reminders for my grocery list and this is shared with my wife so we can both add to a single list. I love how I can use Siri from my Apple Watch by saying something like “Add broccoli to my shopping list” and boom it’s added.

I also use Goodnotes for any courses I take. I like that it doesn’t turn off my screen when I am taking notes during a course. I can also upload the course’s workbook and then use that as my guide adding note pages.

I used Goodnotes a couple of years ago when I was in Singapore at Tony Robbins’ Unleash The Power Within event. If you’ve ever done a live Tony Robbins event you know that the day is long and my iPad’s battery (a 2018 iPad Pro 11 inch with Apple Pencil) coped remarkably well even though the screen was on a lot of the time.

The great thing about using my iPad in those types of courses, I can take a picture of a slide and instantly annotate the picture in Goodnotes.

For my design work and editing videos, I use Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Photoshop seems to be permanently open (another piece of software I’ve been using for a long time—about fifteen years!) and Premiere Pro makes an appearance every week.

For cloud storage, I mainly use iCloud—I have a 2 terabyte iCloud account so everything I work on goes in there except when I am collaborating. Then I use Google Drive.

I also have Dropbox, but that is only used for backing up my book projects as Scrivener seems to only support Dropbox storage for backups.

And that’s about it. That’s all the tools I use to get my work done. Hopefully, you will have noticed that I’ve been using most of these tools for years. I know the damage caused by app switching. Yes, it might be cool to be playing with the latest shiniest app on the market, but this means you have to transfer all your old data and learn a new app. To me, that’s a complete waste of time. You will never find the “perfect” it does not exist and it never will. So, stick with one app, learn it so it becomes a part of you and then you will find your productivity improves. You are no longer thinking about how to do something and instead, you just do it.

I hope that has given you some insights, and I know I have finally answered a question that keeps popping up on my podcast questions list. So thank you, Ricardo.

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

Monday Jul 26, 2021

How To Make Your To-Do List More Effective

Monday Jul 26, 2021

Do you feel that your to-do list is just managing the day to day and you don’t have time for the things you feel are important? Well, that’s the issue I am answering this week.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 191

Hello and welcome to episode 191 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 get a lot of questions about to-do lists and why they become lists of urgent and short-term and unimportant tasks, leaving you with little to no time for doing work you want to do. It’s a big problem for many people and often leads people into quitting a system or wasting time trying to find new apps. Fortunately, there is a fix and that is what I will share with you today.

Before we get to the question, I would like to say if you don’t already know, I have a YouTube channel with almost a thousand videos on Todoist, Evernote, and productivity and goal planning tips and tricks. It’s really where my productivity coaching and teaching began. I also have an extensive blog on my website that is likely to have answers to your many questions.

So if you are looking for answers to productivity, goal planning, and time management problems, check out these places. I’m sure you’ll find a lot of answers there.

All the links to these sites are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Oliver. Oliver asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the content you provide. It’s a treasure box of information. I have a question. I started using a to-do list about six months ago, and in the early days, it worked. But now, I find I spend all my time just checking off low-value tasks given to me by other people and I just don’t have time to work on my goals. Do you have any tips on making my to-do list work better?

Hi Oliver, thank you for your question.

This is a common problem and one that can occur when we start using digital to-do lists. In our enthusiasm to get stuff into the to-do list, we throw all sorts of things in there. In many ways, this is important because we need to make collecting a habit.

I remember, when I first started using a digital to-do list on my phone. It felt strange picking up my phone in a meeting to add a task. It got a little better when I began using an iPad in meetings, but even that was uncomfortable at first, because being an early adopter, many people in the meeting looked at me with weird faces.

Adding a lot of unnecessary tasks to your task manager is almost a right of passage for anyone wanting to master to-do lists. It’s impossible to know what tasks we will remember and which ones we will forget. So we need to collect everything.

Indeed, to become more effective at processing, we need to practice and the only way to practice is to throw everything into your to-do list right?

However, as you say, Oliver, eventually, this method leaves us with to-do lists that are overwhelming and often focuses our attention on the latest and loudest tasks, and these tasks don’t necessarily move much forward.

So, how do you make your to-do list more effective?

Well, you need to step back and develop your goals and areas of focus.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that if you are planning on doing a summer reset, you should use the opportunity to step back and think about what you want—your long-term goals—as well as your areas of focus.

You see, these need to be the foundational tasks that go into your to-do list. The tasks and action steps you need to perform regularly to move you towards achieving those goals and also maintaining and growing the things you have identified as being important to you—your areas of focus.

Without identifying these you create a vacuum. You see human beings are actually human doings. We thrive when we are doing things. That could be repairing a bicycle, pottering around in the garden, or planning a trip. We love doing. If you have ever spent all day lazing in bed watching TV or scrolling through your social media, how do you feel at the end of the day? It’s never a positive feeling, is it? We usually feel guilty for wasting a day, and have a headache and just feel physically bad.

This means that your to-do list will always want to be filled with something. We will always want to put something on there. And the truth is, there will always be far more we want to do or have to do than we realistically have time for. In many years to come, you will be laying on your deathbed and you’ll still have things to do on your to-do list.

So, when it comes to filling the vacuum, you have a choice. Either you fill it with other people’s tasks—tasks that come from your boss, colleagues, and customers, or you start with making sure you fill it with your own goals and areas.

Your work tasks are likely to form the biggest block of tasks, but you want to be very careful to make sure that block is not the only block of tasks you have on there. Yes, your employed work is important. If you are of working age, it’s likely to fill up a large percentage of your tasks. But your work is not your whole life. It is a part of your life and your to-do list needs to reflect that.

You may have career-related goals—I know I have—but they are not your only goals. You will have many personal goals too and each goal has its own set of tasks that need to be repeated each week in order to keep them moving forward.

It’s these tasks that should take centre stage in your to-do list.

Now, while your goals and areas of focus should be at the centre of your daily tasks, there will be times when work or your personal life requires you to focus all your attention on something specific. That’s perfectly normal. You just have to deal with these when they arise.

Problems will arise if this is happening every day. It means you need to look at the way you are doing your work.

Doing your everyday work effectively means you need to develop processes to make doing that work as efficiently as possible. For instance, if your work involves a lot of emailing back and forth, you are going to find it very difficult to remain focused for long periods of time to do work that requires you to focus.

I’ve worked with salespeople who spend all day jumping at any email arriving from a customer as if it’s a hot rock. Now, I don’t know anyone today who treats email as a method of urgent communication. If a customer emails you, I can promise you it’s not urgent. If you are replying to their email within minutes of its arrival, what message are you sending your customer? Some may think it sends a message that the customer is important to them when in reality the message relayed is you don’t have very much work to do. Obviously, because you reply to emails so fast. You can’t be working any anything important if you jump on an email the moment it arrives.

Delaying your reply by an hour or two sends the message you want to convey. The email is important, but so is your work. If something was important, you’d get a phone call. Not an email.

I’ve recently been studying how pilots do their work. In one video entitled: A Day In The Life Of A First Officer, The pilot, began their day by getting the flight’s manifest via email and expected combined passenger and cargo weight. They need this to calculate the amount of fuel required for the flight. They then get the weather forecast for their flight to anticipate any potential dangers and to know if they are likely to have to divert from their flight path—again impacting the amount of fuel that will be required.

Once they arrive at the airport, there is a flight briefing conducted by the captain and then after boarding the plane, they get the final weight figures and flight path plus updates on the weather.

Everything a pilot does is checklisted. It’s a process they follow every flight. Nothing is ever missed and everything is recorded.

With such attention to detail to the process, a pilot’s work is made much more efficient and it’s largely the reason why there are so few plane accidents caused by pilot error.

Now, I’m not suggesting you need to checklist your work, but you want to be looking for ways you can turn your work into a more efficient process. For instance, if you usually have people to follow up, create a tag or label in your to-do list and make sure you add any follow ups there. This keeps your follow ups all in one place. Then all you need do is set aside time each day to clear that day’s follow ups.

However, there are a lot of benefits to check listing your day. For one you’re unlikely to miss anything important and for another you are going to become a lot more efficient at doing your work because you’re not having to decide what needs doing next because your checklist will tell you.

Another way to make sure your to-do list is working for you rather than against you is to follow the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. For those of you who are not familiar with this method it is a way to prioritise your day. You select two tasks (your objectives) that MUST be done today, and eight other tasks that you should do. Make sure you have a way to highlight these and you decide on them the evening before.

Then when you begin the day, you only focus on these tasks. If something important comes up through the say you can assess it’s importance against your 2+8 list, and make a decision. But for the most part you want to stay focused on clearing these ten tasks as quickly as possible.

This is a superb way of making sure the important things are being done each day.

Make sure this list of ten tasks are not just work tasks either. You want to be looking for balance. Now Monday to Friday, may be more focused on your work, but that does not necessarily mean they should all be work related. As a guide, I usually have one work objective and one personal objective each day and six other work tasks leaving two slots, if you like, for personal tasks. It helps to keep my work and personal goals moving forward.

Now this does not mean you only do ten tasks each day. I would not include my regular routines in this list. Routines just need to be done, but they are not moving goals or projects forward so they are relegated to the end of the day unless they are time specific.

So, if you want your to-do list to be more effective, begin building it from your long-term goals and areas of focus. Make these tasks the core of your day. Then build everything else on top of that.

Look for ways to build processes and checklists. The more you repeat something the better and faster you will become at doing them. As they say practice makes perfect, but do be on the look out for making the process more efficient.

And one final tip. When you build a process for doing your work, try to fix the work you are doing in your calendar. For example, I have a communications hour each day for when I deal with my messages and emails. This avoids me having to be constantly looking at my email all day. I also have blocks of time for writing and recording so that I know each week I have sufficient time to deal with the work that MUST be done each week.

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

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

Monday Jul 19, 2021

How To Motivate Yourself For A Weekly Review

Monday Jul 19, 2021

This week, what stops you from doing a weekly planning session, and how to make sure you are doing one every week.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 190 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 190 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 recently received a number of questions on weekly planning sessions and how to overcome the fear and dread of seeing all those incomplete tasks. I answered those questions individually, but I realised that my answer to these questions needs a wider audience because I know so many of you are not looking at these sessions in the right way.

Now before we get to the question, I should point out that the weekly planning session I will talk about in this episode is the Time Sector System planning session, and not the GTD (Getting Things Done one) although I will refer to the differences.

The TIme Sector System’s planning sessions are simple, quick, and are more focused on what you are going to do next week, rather than reviewing what you have and have not done this week.

And of course, if you have not joined the Time Sector Course yet, now would be a good time to do so. The course is at a very low price of $49.99 (that is four times cheaper than an equivalent course) and will give you a time management system designed in the 21st century for the way we work today.

There’s enough complexity in the world as it is, the Time Sector System keeps thing simple and focuses your attention on what needs to be done now, and not what may or may not happen in two weeks or two months time.

Full details of the course are 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 Dodge. Dodge asks: Hi Carl, I think many avoid the planning session because it can be discouraging to have to face unfinished tasks from the week before and stressful to realize you have more you need to do in the upcoming week than is realistic but can’t figure out how to drop things.

I know this is more internal than external, but do you have any suggestions to make it more attractive?

Hi Dodge. Thank you for the question

What you describe in your question is something I know a lot of people worry about. It’s horrible to go into your task manager at the end of the week and see just how much you have not done, that a week ago you decided must be done. It didn’t get done and you feel guilty.

Now, with this, you need to give yourself a mindset shift. Nobody is going to consistently get everything done they planned to each week because there are far too many unknowns that will come your way once the week gets underway.

Planning the week is in many ways a guessing game. You have to try and guess what emergencies will happen and how long they will take to sort out. Even the most experienced practitioner is going to find that almost impossible to accomplish.

Instead, we want to be looking at the weekly planning session as a learning process. Each week we will identify a number of tasks that at the time of the planning session we feel must be done next week. So we give them a date and hope we will have the time to complete them.

At the end of the week, we find a quarter to half of those tasks we thought had to be done have not been done and we feel guilty and it can erode our confidence in the system.

When this happens, it does not mean you have failed. It means you have likely been a little over-ambitious (and there’s nothing wrong with that) The key thing is you learn and become a little more strict about what goes into your this week folder.

Going a little deeper with this, I would suggest you give yourself a few minutes to look at the tasks you didn’t do and ask yourself why. What was it about these tasks that caused you not to do them? After all, a week ago you felt these were tasks that must be done. They did not get done, so they clearly weren’t must-do tasks. What made you think they were? What changed in the week that relegated these tasks to “should-dos?

You’ll find these questions uncomfortable at first, but be patient. Over time you will learn the patterns and once you know the patterns of what causes your must-do tasks to turn into should-dos, you’ll be able to approach things differently. It’ll also teach you what you may think is a must-do task, is not.

The most common reason for this is something changed in the project that demoted the task. Or something else came up that was more important. In that analysis, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s life happening and is, in many ways a good thing.

However, there is another reason tasks don’t get done. That’s because you erroneously thought it was an important task and it was not. That’s a sign you haven’t got your prioritisation up to scratch. Now the thing about prioritisation is this is a learned skill - it is an art. There’s no science here. If you are new to having a time management system, you are not going to be great at prioritisation. That’s a given. Learning to prioritise is a skill that needs to be learned and more importantly, you need to have identified what your core work and areas of focus are.

I often find people struggling with prioritisation, skipped the section in the TIme Sector Course on identifying your core work. If you are not absolutely clear what your core work is, then everything thrown at you, while at work, will become a priority. You’ll be doing tasks to impress your boss that has no relation to your core work. You’ll be focusing on the wrong things—a salesperson who focuses on having perfect admin will never be a good salesperson.

If you have not identified your areas of focus, you are going to find prioritisation difficult because your areas of focus and your core work are where your priorities come from. If you do not know what these are, then everything in your task manager could potentially be a priority.

So, what do you do if you have a lot of uncompleted tasks at the end of the week? Well, first don’t beat yourself up. These things will happen and clearly not doing them the world hasn’t ended. All you need do is renegotiate with yourself when you will do them.

I find looking at my overdue and uncompleted tasks as an opportunity to assess whether I really want to do them. Some of those tasks will need doing—project work for your boss or client for example, but often you’ll look at a task and realise you don’t really need to do it, or you could delegate it to someone else or modify the task.

Once you’ve done that, rescheduled the tasks that need to be done you can look at what else needs doing. Here you want to be realistic. There’s an expression “biting off more than you can chew” and we are all guilty of this from time to time.

If you are consistently not completing your tasks it means you need to reduce the number of tasks you are trying to accomplish each week. Now, you may say; ‘I can’t I have to do these tasks’, but the thing is you’re not doing them. Either you are going to continue to delude yourself or you are going to get realistic. My advice is get realistic. You’ll feel a lot better if you do.

Your weekly planning session needs to be something you look forward to. Now one of the problems I used to have with the Getting Things Done weekly review was firstly how long it took. To review everything Getting Things Done advises you to review took me between 1 and a half and two hours. I dreaded sitting down doing that each weekend and often skipped it altogether.

The next problem I had with the GTD weekly Review was I was reviewing what I had done instead of planning ahead. Sure, there was some planning, but it always felt more retrospective rather than forward looking.

When I changed my approach and focused on what I wanted to accomplish, the weekly review became a lot less negative—being reminded of how little I had accomplished. This also changed my mindset about the weekly planning session. I now looked forward to it. It’s almost become a little competition with myself. If I exercised five time this week, I will challenge myself to exercise six times next week and make that an objective. If I wrote 5,000 words of my book this week, I’ll challenge myself to go for 6,000 next week.

But the biggest change, for me, was instead of losing around two hours on a Sunday afternoon, I now spend thirty minutes on a Saturday morning planning out the week ahead. Once completed, I start the week with anticipation and excitement to accomplish the things I have set myself. I often don’t accomplish those, but that just gives me more motivation to have another go.

The best thing about not accomplishing what I set is I get a lot of information about myself, how I manage my time, and I can use that information to change my approach and do a better job next week.

And that means, I am in a state of constant and never ending improvement. And I can assure you feel you are improving, it energises you. It pushes you to do it better next time.

Now one more thing about planning sessions. Make sure you are doing a daily planning session too. This is important because with the Time Sector System it is not necessarily about doing your tasks on the exact day you assigned them. You will often find, because of events outside of your control, you will have tasks you were unable to complete on a specific day. The daily planning session gives you a chance to reschedule those tasks to later in the week, or, if they have changed priority, to push them off to next week and beyond. Never be afraid to do that. If a task’s priority changes, then push it off to a time in the future.

What this does is it takes care of a lot of tasks you thought had to be done this week, but now no longer do before you get to the weekly planning session.

The weekly planning session should never be about beating yourself up. It’s a chance to reset the week, to plan out what you want to accomplish next week. Know what needs to be done and, more importantly, what does not need to be done next week.

It should energise and educate you. When you see it as a learning experience, you are going to continuously improve your prioritisation skills, you learn what is genuinely important, and what is not. And it refocuses you on what is important to you.

I hope that has helped, Dodge. Thank you for the question and thank you to you for listening.

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

Monday Jul 12, 2021

How To Do A Productivity Reset

Monday Jul 12, 2021

This week, how to reset your whole productivity system during your summer holiday.

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The Ultimate Productivity Course Bundle

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Episode 189 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 189 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.

From many of the emails I am receiving these days, it appears many of you have decided to do a productivity system summer reset. Now, I know how easy it is for our systems to become bloated and not run as efficiently as it perhaps should. SO, this week, the question I am answering is on how to do a complete reset when you have a few free days t focus on doing it.

Before we get to the question, I just want to give you a heads up to say that my Ultimate Productivity Bundle of courses is possibly the best value bundle I have ever done. In that bundle, you get four of my top courses including the newly updated Time And Life Mastery. It also includes Your Digital Life 3.0 which on its own includes my updated Email Mastery course as well as The Ultimate Goal Planning course.

In total, you get six courses for less than $200!. If you were to buy all six courses individually, it would cost you $420. You’re saving yourself $219!

So if you are planning on doing a productivity and time management reset over the summer break, then this bundle is THE bundle to buy. It’s going to give you everything you need to create the best productivity system for you.

Full details on how to purchase this bundle are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Evan. Evan asks, hi Carl, I’m going on vacation in the last two weeks of July and I plan to take a few days to rebuild my whole system. I feel my current system is not working for me as well as it could. Do you have any tips on how to go about doing this?

Hi Evan, great question. Thank you for sending it in.

Now, if you do have a few days to review and rebuild your whole system then my first tip is to start with the end in mind. What I mean by that is start from where you want to be in ten to twenty years' time.

You see, all great productivity and time management systems begin with where you want to end up, NOT where you are today. The stuff you do today won’t matter very much in ten years' time—it won’t matter very much next week.

When I see most people's task managers it is filled up with trivial little tasks that serve other people and do nothing to serve your own interests and goals. This is why so many people feel stressed out and overwhelmed. It’s because they spend ninety percent of their days running around doing stuff for others.

Now that doesn’t mean you need to become selfish. What it means is all those little tasks for your boss, your colleagues and customers and clients may well have to be done, but most of those tasks have come about because you said the worst thing you could say. You said “yes” without thinking about other, more important things. Things such as spending time with your family, your kids, and your elderly parents. Working on your health and fitness and preparing for those bigger projects that have much higher importance, but may not necessarily be as urgent.

Now the thing is, if you don’t know what it is that you want, then it’s much easier to say “yes” to requests from others. It keeps you busy and it makes you feel important. But that is the wrong way to build any productivity system. You need to turn that on its head and begin with what you want out of life. Begin with your longer-term goals and the things that are important to you.

If you haven’t downloaded my FREE areas of focus workbook yet, then I recommend you do so. You can get that from my downloads page on my website. That workbook will take you through the eight important areas of life we all have in common. Family and relationships, finances, career and business, health and fitness, spirituality, personal development, lifestyle and life experiences, and finally your purpose in life.

Once you know what these are, what each means to you individually and you have pulled out a few action steps to keep this in balance you are well on your way to building an effective, purpose-driven productivity system.

These action steps are often very simple, yet we neglect them because we are exhausted from all the other, less important to us, tasks we commit ourselves to each day. The only thing you are fit to do when you get home at night is collapse on the sofa and complain about how exhausted you feel. In that state how are you ever going to have the energy to play with your kids, go out for a run, or to the gym?

Now it’s easy to blame your boss or your company or your clients. But remember you said yes to doing these things. You did not draw a line in the sand and say “no, after 6pm my time is for my family and myself.”

So, establish what is important to you and get the time required to work on those things blocked off in your calendar now. Make sure any tasks you need to complete that are related to your areas of focus and longer-term goals are in your task manager and set to recur whenever they need to recur.

From now on this time—the time you’ve blocked out on your calendar for these important things for you—is non-negotiable.

How do you think people like Dwayne Johnson, Terry Crews, Tina Turner, Sylvester Stallone, Frank Grillo, and Jennifer Aniston, despite their age, are in such fantastic shape? Because they have prioritised their exercise time and it is non-negotiable. They are not super-human or have any special genetics. They are human beings just like you and me. The difference is they know what they want and they make sure that every single day they do the work required to make what they want become a reality. It’s fixed on their calendars and it just what they do.

Next up, when doing a reset is to go through your task manager and clean out any task you know you are not going to do. Now, What I mean by this is tasks such as “send Peter a thank you note for taking us out to dinner”, when that task has been sitting in your task manager for six months. It’s too late. You didn’t do it, so stop keeping these types of tasks around. Delete them.

There’s also likely to be a lot of old project tasks hanging around that disappeared deep into your system that either you did and didn’t check them off at the time, or were not necessary and the project was completed a long time ago. Clear these out too.

I would also suggest you look at your recurring areas of focus—for those of you using the Time Sector System—and refresh the wording of your tasks. As time goes by, we become numb to a lot of tasks and they don’t inspire or excite us anymore. All you need to do is change the wording. Tasks like: “call mum and dad” can be changed to “catch up with mum and dad” and “do exercise” can be changed to “get out and exercise”. Doing this every three to four months, by the way, is a good habit to get into. It keeps your recurring tasks fresh and it can be fun thinking of inspiring ways to write these tasks.

Now, take a look at your apps. Do you really need three notes apps and four cloud storage services? Probably not. Which of all these different apps could you get rid of? A lot of the issues I get in my coaching calls is where a person has inadvertently found themselves with multiple apps doing pretty much the same thing. For instance, do you really need to have Todoist AND Microsoft ToDo? Wouldn’t it be easier to just bring everything into one app? There’s less of a chance you would miss something if everything was in a single place.

How about your notes apps? I mean do you really need Dropbox Paper, Evernote, and Obsidian? Why not consolidate them all into one app? It’ll make your life a lot simpler having everything in one place.

Now, I know a lot of people will say well I need to use Dropbox paper (or OneNote) for work and Obsidian for my personal life. And in theory, that sounds okay. But you may already have found that life is not so black and white. There’s a lot of grey there too and you will find yourself wasting time trying to figure out where something should go.

Just use one app for each purpose. One calendar, One task manager, and one notes app. Seriously, you’ll find life a lot simpler that way.

And that’s really all you need do, Ethan. Begin with what you want, get that fixed into your system first so that those tasks and events become a priority over everything else. Once you have those in place, you will find your life is much better balanced and you will be a lot less stressed out and overwhelmed.

Clean out old, not longer required tasks, notes, and other digital stuff and consolidate as many apps as you can. The fewer apps you use the faster your whole system will become.

Thank you for the question and thank you for listening too.

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

Monday Jun 28, 2021

How To Manage Digital Distractions

Monday Jun 28, 2021

This week, how to get control of your digital distractions

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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The 2021 Edition of Time And Life Mastery

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 188

Hello and welcome to episode 188 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.

Before we get started, just a heads up if you are a regular listener to this podcast, next week the show is taking a break. We will be back, though in two weeks time.

Okay, on with the show.

Do you find yourself distracted by all the digital inputs coming your way every day? There’s email, of course, and then digital news, social media and now we are inundated by Slack and Microsoft Teams messages. If we don’t control it, it’s non-stop and just looking at your phone’s Home Screen is enough to set off anxiety, stress and overwhelm. It’s not healthy and we do need some strategies to get control of this.

Well, that’s what we will be exploring in this episode.

I just want to give you a heads up about the early-bird discount on my Time And Life Mastery course. The special offer will be ending today, I will keep it on for a few more hours for you. I would not want to you to miss out on getting yourself enrolled in, what I believe to be, my most comprehensive and best course.

This year, I have re-recorded the Time Mastery part and it now includes lessons on how two being your goals and long term plans in the Time Sector System.

It’s a brilliant course and I do hope you join me. The special offer ends in the next few hours, so don’t delay. More details on the course and how to get enrolled are in the show notes or you can head over to my website—carlpullein.com.

Okay, let’s get on and dive deeper into ways to overcome all these digital distractions and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.

This week’s question comes from Sadiq. Sadiq asks: Hi Carl, do you have any tips on managing all the messages and emails I get each day. It’s got the to point where I don’t have any time to do my work because of all the messages I get. Please help.

Hi Sadiq, thank you for your question.

So, let’s look at where most of our digital noise comes from. To do this I want to look at the Hierarchy of Communication. This is the order of importance of your communications.

First up is face to face communication. If you are in front of the person you are communicating with, nothing and I repeat, nothing should ever distract you from speaking with that person. It does not matter if it is the checkout assistance in the supermarket or your boss. If you are in a face to face situation, the person you are communicating with takes precedence over everything else. Full stop. No negotiation. If you cannot, or will not, accept this rule, stop listening. This podcast is not for you.

Incidentally, I would go so far as to say this also applies to Zoom and Teams video calls. Again, you are talking to a person in real-time and they deserve your undivided attention.

Next up are phone calls. This is similar to face to face. You are talking to a real human being in real-time. It is just plain rude to not give this your full attention.

Phone calls are becoming increasingly rare these days, but if do receive calls, you need to treat them appropriately.

Third in this hierarchy are text messages. These are different from social media messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and What's App. Now, I would include your Slack and Teams messages in this list too because these are messages from either your work colleagues or boss.

These are likely to be important, but less important than face to face and phone calls.

Up next comes email. Now, these days emails are never urgent and you should never treat emails as urgent. As I have mentioned before, if your house was on fire, your neighbour would not email you to tell you.

Finally, social media messages and comments come right at the bottom. You just do not need to respond to these immediately. They are not important.

There is a bigger problem with social media comments and that is their potential to create a negative emotional response. There is a lot of bad in the world—there always has been. But I can promise you there is a lot more good in the world than bad.

Unfortunately, the good in the world is not newsworthy and so it does not get a lot of coverage. This means we end up focusing on the bad and that does nothing for your mood or emotional state in which to get your work done.

Jim Rohn said: “stand guard at gates of your mind” and you should be very careful with the news and social media posts you read. All this bad news is never going to put you in the right state to do amazing work.

A quick tip here is to find a neutral newsfeed you can subscribe to. By neutral I mean politically neutral. That way you can stay on top of what’s going on in the world without getting drawn into other people’s inflaming opinions. You can also find some of your favourite journalists and follow them. I have a number of journalists I have been reading for years and I subscribe to their newsfeed so I only get their articles.

Okay, what can you do right now that will help you to clear the noise? Well, one piece of advice I often hear is to turn off all notifications on your phone. Now, this does sound like wise advice, but in my experience, I find it a little impractical. If my wife or parents text me, I want to know. So I would advise you to be selective. Turn off your social media notifications for sure. These are never important.

With your email notifications that’s up to you. I keep them on, but then I don’t treat email as urgent, but it is good to know what’s coming in. If my learning centre went down, for instance, I am likely to first hear about it through email and that is something I want to know about.

But with all that said, what are the underlying causes of digital distraction. Well, in my experience when a person is very clear about what it is they want to accomplish each day, they are rarely distracted by anything other than what it is they are trying to accomplish.

The reason we are so easily distracted is because we have no sense of purpose. We don’t have a plan for the day and we are not clear about what it is we are trying to accomplish. When you begin the day with a clear set of tasks to complete before the day is finished, you don’t get distracted.

I coach a lot of people who are incredibly successful. The one thing they never struggle with is distractions. They are incredibly focused on what it is they want to accomplish. Do you think people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos waste hours of their day sifting through social media and the news? Absolutely not. They’re focused on their goals for the day.

Now, this does not mean you isolate yourself from the news and social media, all you need do is set aside time each day for reading news and social media feeds. I go through my Facebook feed after dinner for twenty minutes or so—the time it takes me to drink my post-dinner cup of tea. I like to see what my friend is doing. But I don’t need to be checking it every minute of the day.

All you need do is give yourself ten minutes at the end of the day and plan out what you will do the next day. Hopefully, you are now operating the 2+8 Prioritisation Method for your planning: Deciding what your two must-do tasks for the next day are and the eight other tasks that should be done.

When you have this list ready for you every morning, you are much less likely to be distracted by all the digital stuff coming at you each day. You have a plan and that is what you need to focus on. If you do get your tea tasks complete, great, you can allow yourself to be as distracted as you want.

If you do find all the pop-up notifications distract you, turn them off on your computer. You are likely doing focused work while sitting at your computer and the last thing you need when you are focusing on something important is seeing pop-up notifications out the corner of your eye.

One tip I can give you here is to check your messages and emails between sessions of work. It acts as a way to close one piece of work before you start with another piece of focused work. When you do this you do not need notifications at all. Most focused work sessions last less than two hours and so, nobody’s going to be upset with you if you respond within two hours—seriously. They will not be upset with you.

People are far more understanding than you imagine. Even your impatient boss!

Ultimately, Sadiq, you need to know what it is you want to accomplish each day and that needs to be linked to your longer-term goals both professional and personal. It’s that sense of direction that will keep you focused.

And there is one final message I want to share and it is a quote from Brian Tracy:

“You need three key qualities to develop the habits of focus and concentration, which are all learnable. They are decision, discipline, and determination.”

Decide what you want to accomplish each day—have a plan for the day

Be disciplined in making sure you follow that plan and Be determined to stay on track.

It’s true, these three “Ds” are all learnable and to do that all you need to do is practice them every day.

The most disciplined people are the ones who never allow themselves to be distracted. You can do that too.

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

Monday Jun 21, 2021

What Should Not Go Onto Your To-Do List

Monday Jun 21, 2021

This week, what should be going on your to-do list and what should not.

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Episode 187

Hello and welcome to episode 187 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

So, what exactly should you be putting on your to-do list? This might seem an obvious answer, but I can tell you it is not.

When you put a lot of the wrong things into a task manager, you will become overwhelmed with tasks you have no intention of doing because they mean nothing to you and they’ve been hanging around in there for years.

This week, I will explain what should be in there and what you should not be putting in there.

Now before we go any further, over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a number of videos over on my YouTube channel around the difficult subject of prioritisation. It can be very hard to pick the right things to work on when there is so much being thrown at us.

One part of your life that should always be a priority is your goals. If you are not working on your goals, you’ll be unconsciously working on someone else’s goals. That could be your boss’s or the shareholders of the company you work for and that is never going to work for you long-term

Now, as we enter the post-pandemic world, would be a great time to re-evaluate your goals, ensure they are clear, that you have a strong, personal reason for achieving them and a definite action plan. And to help you with that, I have completely updated my Time And Life Mastery course

The 2021 edition of Time And Life Mastery will not only show you how to turn your goals (and dreams) into reality, it will also get you to think deeper about what you want and give you the strategy to make sure you have the time to work on them every day using the Time Sector System.

Don’t get left behind, start today and build your goals into the heart of your daily to-do list. Joining the course now will give you an early-bird discount of 20%.

Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Debbie. Debbie asks, Hi Carl, I’ve noticed in your YouTube videos that you don’t have many tasks on your to-do list. I have hundreds of tasks and I can’t help feeling I am doing something wrong. Is there a reason why you don’t put many tasks in there?

Hi Debbie, Thank you for your question. Your task list is all about elimination, not accumulation and I feel that is where so many people go wrong.

The biggest mistake I see people making is putting tasks into their task manager that should not be there. Now, I think this comes from a misunderstanding about what a task manager does.

Let me explain it this way. Your task manager is there to trigger you to do the things that need doing. For instance, complete a presentation file, work on a client proposal or prepare for a management meeting. It is not there for individual follow-ups, email replies and phone calls.

Now, I can hear expressions of outrage as I say that but hear me out.

Let me take emails as an example. Email comes into your email app’s inbox. And inside your email app, you have space to create folders to hold your important emails. In a way, your email app is a to-do list itself. You can create a folder called “action this day” for any email that requires action (replying, reading and reviewing or acting on). If you send your actionable email to your task manager you have just duplicated yourself. Now you have a task in two places.

The same goes for following up prospects. In this case, most companies have some form of CRM—customer relationship manager—and all the prospects or customers that need following up are held in there. These CRMs are purpose-built for this job. If you also create tasks reminding you to follow up with Miss Smith and Mr Jones, you’ve just duplicated yourself.

The same goes for Slack and Teams messages. You don’t need to send all the messages that need replies to your task manager.

Instead, you could create single recurring tasks that remind you to clear your actionable emails, reply to your messages and check for customers that need following up. That’s three tasks instead of thirty in your tasks manager. After all, each of those tasks is compartments of work.

If you compartmentalise those tasks so when you work on email, your work on email, when you work on following up clients and prospects you work on doing follow-ups, you are going to be less likely to procrastinate or be distracted.

You see, the problem with throwing everything into your task manager is you create a monster. And once it becomes a monster, you stop using your task manager and, of course, when that happens what’s the point of having a task manager?

For your task manager to be effective it must be clean and tight and that means whatever you put in there must be meaningful and be a genuine task. Having tasks reminding you to read a book will be ignored. You don’t need a task manager reminding you to read a book. You just need to keep the book in the place you would normally read a book. You might read for twenty minutes first thing in the morning, or lunchtime or just before you go to bed. Reading is a habit, not something you should need reminding about.

I mean, you don’t need a reminder to tell you to eat, so why would you need a reminder to feed your brain?

For those of you who have read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or taken my Time Sector course, you already know that the details of a project need to be kept outside your task manager. Your task manager is a terrible project manager. In Getting Things Done, you have project support folders that contain all the work that needs doing on a given project. The only thing you have in your task manager is the next action. Your project plans, future tasks and milestones are in your project support materials.

The same goes with the Time Sector System. The only items in your task manager are the items related to what you will be working on this week. All the details of your projects are kept in your notes app—a modern-day version of project support folders.

Unless you are working on a project that you have done many times before, there is no way you can guess accurately what all your next actions will be. There are too many unknowns.

I remember when I bought a car last year, I made a list of all the things I thought I would need to do after buying the car several months before I actually bought the car. When it came to buying the car around 80% of the things on that list were not necessary. In fact, the only thing I remember I did need to do was get my sunglasses lenses changed to prescription lenses.

The dealership I bought the car from anticipated what was needed and included everything in the package. Sadly they didn’t anticipate my poor eyesight. In the end the list I spent hours developing was a complete waste of time.

Now there are things that you may need reminders for and for those you create a folder called “routines”. These are the little things that you would forget if you didn’t get a little nudge. The common examples might be to take the garbage out or pay your bills. These little nudges just pop up at the bottom of your daily list when they are due.

The goal with any task manager is to eliminate not accumulate. The less you put in there, the more effective your task list will be. To achieve this, you want to be very strict about what gets into your system. In a way, when you process is the first filter.

I collect around ten to fifteen tasks a day in my inbox. Of those around five to eight will manage to get through my processing filter. My first question when I process a task is: Does this task really have to be done?

Many of these tasks are likely to be done without getting into my system. For instance, today, I received a payment from one of my English students. They require a receipt for that payment so I added the task “Do student’s receipt” to my inbox. When I got back to my desk later, I saw that and as the task was a two-minute task, I did it straight away. No point in letting a simple task like that get into my system.

There’s a psychological thing going on here. If you start the day with a list that goes off your screen you are going to immediately feel anxious. As you scroll down the list that anxiousness will only increase.

Instead, you want to start your day with a list that looks doable and contains tasks you know must be done that day. You want to look forward to reviewing your list for the day so you can get started feeling confident. That’s the goal.

If you begin the day rescheduling all the tasks you didn’t do yesterday and then try to figure out what are the most important tasks for that day, you are never going to feel good about the day, are you?

Your planning needs to be done the evening before. Any rescheduling should be done then not at the beginning of the next day. Starting your day like that just destroys your day.

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of those ten minutes at the end of the day to clean up and plan the next day. Not doing that, will result in you regularly having to reset your system and that always take far too long. You don’t have time for that, but you can find ten minutes at the end of the day—seriously if you cannot find ten minutes at the end of your day you have much more serious problems than your productivity.

So there you go, Debbie. It really comes down to first compartmentalising your work. Project work, communications, follow-ups, and all your other work. Use natural inboxes such as your email inbox and process those into folders for action. All you need then is a simple task in your task manager to remind you to clear those folders.

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

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

Monday Jun 14, 2021

How To Find Time To Start Your Business

Monday Jun 14, 2021

2021-06-10-WW Podcast

This week, how to turn your ideas and dreams into reality.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

Email Mastery 2021 Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 186 \ Script

Hello and welcome to episode 186 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.

How do you turn dreams into reality? It’s an easy question answer, but a difficult one to execute. Today, I’ll share some ideas you can try to start moving towards those dreams and higher goals you’ve had lying around for a long time.

There’s a lot I can share with you on this one as it’s something I’ve been wrestling with for many years. How do some people live their dreams and others don’t? Is there a secret or a strategy we can all follow?

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

This week’s question comes from Iqbal. Iqbal asks, hi Carl, I’ve followed your work for a long time and I know you sometimes talk about goal setting. I’ve had a dream since I was a teenager to start my own business. I have a tonne of ideas, but I just don’t have any time to work on them because of my job. Are there any tips and tricks you can share that will help me to do something with these ideas?

Hi Iqbal, thank you for your question.

When I read your question, I was reminded of a quote I heard many years ago: “Most people trade their dreams for a salary” There are variations to this quote along the lines of “how much did they pay you to give up on your dreams?”

You see, if you really want to start your business, you have to start your business. Thinking, planning, coming up with ideas etc, are all well and good, but they are not starting a business. Starting a business is creating a website, buying premises, selling a product or service and quitting your salaried job.

Now, these days, quitting your salaried job is not always necessary at first. A lot of businesses can be started online and if, for example, you make leather phone cases, you can do that in the evening and sell them through Etsy or Amazon.

I started my productivity business while I was still a full-time teacher.

The first thing you are going to have to do is make sacrifices. Before I started my productivity business, I used to enjoy watching TV shows in the evening, and at the weekend I’d go out for a few beers with my friends and colleagues. When I decided to start my productivity business, I had to stop watching TV and going out at weekends. I reasoned I needed at least twenty hours each week to work on that business. As I was already working around forty hours doing my full-time teaching job, the only way I could find the time to start my own business was to stop watching TV and going out at weekends.

I suppose the question is, how much are you willing to give up to start your business, Iqbal?

You will never start any kind of business if you are not going to give it enough hours each week. Businesses do not magically appear from an idea. They need development and time. So step one is to decide how much time you will need to build your business and see what you can sacrifice in order to find that time.

Look at things like how much time you spend on social media—that’s a huge time suck—how much TV do you watch each day? There’s another one and of course, you will need to clear your weekends.

I remember when I started doing my online courses, I would look ahead in my calendar for public holidays and block them out so I could spend all day recording my courses. At weekends, I would spend writing and outlining new courses. If I remember correctly the only vacation I had in 2017 was a trip to visit my parents at Christmas at the end of the year. It was 350 days of work, work, work.

Businesses do not build themselves. You have to do the work.

Next up is clarity. You must know exactly what it is you want to build. Like you said in your question Iqbal, you have a lot of ideas. Well, you need to pick one of those ideas. You will not be able to build multiple businesses if you can’t even find the time to build one. Pick one of your ideas and run with that.

No business stands still. When Hyundai, the car company, started, the founder sold rice in the streets around Seoul, and Samsung began as a sugar company. Apple began life as a computer company, yet today their biggest market is mobile phones, music and apps. Whatever business you start today will be different in ten years time. So, pick one idea, develop it and build that business.

Ideas are great, but they can stop you if you have too many. By all means, keep your ideas in your notes app—I have loads of ideas in Evernote for future businesses, but right now I focus on the one I am in.

Next up is courage.

The one thing that separates people who have started their own business and the ones who dream about starting a business is courage. The courage to step outside their comfort zone and the courage to screw up and be embarrassed, laughed at and be ridiculed by family and friends.

That’s the biggest barrier I have come across when coaching or helping people find the time to start their own business. It’s never that they don’t have time—we all have time—it’s that “I don’t have time” is a convenient excuse that hides the real reason they won’t start and that is they are afraid to fail.

I’ve got news for you… You will fail. That’s a given. Look at any company and you will see far more failures than successes. Again look at Apple, how many time did they screw up cloud services. From the original .Mac accounts to MobileMe. They really were bad. And Google with Google Plus and Google Mailbox—which was meant to be the future of email. Then we have Microsoft with the Zune. I could go on but you get the point. Failure is an inevitable part of starting your own business.

The best advice I ever received was: “get comfortable with failure”. I did and I no longer fear screwing up. I see failure as a lesson because while an original concept might fail, there is always something in that failure that did work and I can apply it to the next product or service. You never really fail, you learn something and you move on.

You only fail when you give up. So, don’t give up.

If you ever hear yourself saying: “I don’t have time” or “I’m not ready yet”. Stop and ask yourself why? Never accept those excuses. You do have time and there will never be the right moment. You could start by buying your website domain today and outlining the product or service you are going to sell. From there, you will see what needs to happen next.

And that’s really the next thing. Build momentum. Momentum is only built when you start doing something other than planning and thinking. As I mentioned, buy the domain name so you can make a start on creating your website. Contact potential suppliers, or draw up the outline for your online course or digital service. Then do the very first step. You will find the first step is a lot easier than you imagine.

Let’s take the phone cases idea—order the leather, thread and needles and make a prototype of your first case. That will give you far more information than sitting behind a computer screen looking at what other people are doing and making. It will tell you how much leather you need for a case, how much time it will take to make and whether or not your case works with your phone.

If you are an artist, create your Instagram account, get your art out there in front of people. If nobody knows about what you do, you have nothing. You need people to support you. To share your work and tell the world what you do. The same goes for consultancy. It’s great that you want to share your experience with other people, but if nobody knows about you, your skills and your experience how will you ever get clients?

You need to be building your social media presence now. Not when you have a finished product or service. Start writing blogs, share your illustrations, photography, designs or whatever it is you will sell as a business.

Getting your message out into the world is not a single blog post announcing your product either. It’s consistent content day after day. This is why you need to sacrifice your evenings and weekends.

And so, now you have that information, I have a simple question. How much do you want to start your own business? Are you willing to make sacrifices—giving up your evenings and weekends for at least the next five years? If so, then you know where to start.

If not, that’s fine. Take the salary and work so someone else can achieve their dreams because that’s the way I see it. If you are not willing to make sacrifices, then take the Monday to Friday 9 till 5 job. It’s safe, it’ll pay you some money—put food on your table and a roof over your head, and although the concept of a job for life may have disappeared, you are much less likely to lose everything and will maintain some stability in your life.

And that brings me to probably the most important part. You must have a strong desire to start your own business. In his book, Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, in the introduction, tells the reader that contained in the book are two secrets. Most people miss those secrets, but I can tell you that one of the secrets is desire. It’s not enough to “want” to start a business, you must have a burning desire to do it.

It’s not easy. Unlike working for someone elsewhere you may have a finance department, HR, marketing team and admin support. When you start your own business you have to do everything at first. You are sales, marketing, HR, admin and customer service. If your desire is not strong enough you will quit. It’s hard. If you think working eight to nine hours a day five days a week is hard, then don’t start your own business. You will be working sixteen to eighteen hours a day seven days a week for many years. It’s only when your business grows to a level where you can employ people to do the finance, admin, HR and marketing for you that you will be able to take some time off and perhaps reduce your hours a little.

But, it’s not all doom and gloom. Starting your own business and seeing it grow from nothing to something is possibly one of the best experiences you will ever have. If you can endure the long hours, the disappointments, and the embarrassment when things go wrong, you will make a great business person.

Dreams become reality when you are prepared to do whatever it takes to make those dreams happen. It’s hard—very hard—but I can promise you, you will never ever regret doing it. You will learn so much not just about business but about yourself. You will very quickly learn what your priorities are and become incredibly focused. You will no longer feel you spend your day doing boring mundane work, you’ll be doing inspiring work you love doing.

The funny thing is, I used to hate doing my admin when I worked for a company. Now, I love doing it. I designed the forms, the spreadsheets and decide what I track. Everything I do today is making dreams come true for my family and myself and I hope, I inspire many others to step outside their comfort zones and do the things they’ve always dreamed of. You can do it, Iqbal, you just have to start.

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

Monday Jun 07, 2021

What's The Best Productivity System?

Monday Jun 07, 2021

This week, I talk about the best productivity system ever developed and explain how you can use it too.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Email Mastery 2021 Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System