Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 181

Hello and welcome to episode 181 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.

Last week, I pointed out that the most productive people—the people operating at a higher level—only ever have four or five tasks on their to-do list each day. The question is how do they manage to do that and get all their work done? That is what I will be answering today.

Now the starting point, as I explained last week, is you must know what you want. Most people are struggling with managing their work each day because they don’t know what is important to them. And when you don’t know what is really important, everything becomes important and then (bear with me here) nothing is important.

It’s similar to knowing the root meaning of the word “Priority”. Technically, we cannot have “priorities” because “priority” means one thing. There can only be one priority. You cannot make the word plural. Now about fifty years ago, the pluralisation of the word “priority” started and now most of us use the word “priorities”. But, if you really want to reduce your to-do list you need to treat the word “priority” as it should be treated. What one thing can you do today?

If you have not sat down and thought about your future, about what you want, how you want to live your life in five, ten and twenty years time, then you will find your task list becomes full of other people’s tasks and very few of your own. You will not be prioritising today what you need to be ready for in the future.

To give you a simple example, when I was a teenager, I got to know a gentleman in his 80s who was a very useful sprinter in his day. As got older he became a prolific marathon runner. Every three months he ran a marathon and he was in his mid-80s.

I was so inspired by this that I decided I too want to be running marathons when I am in my 80s.

The question is, how will I be able to do that. If I spend my life eating unhealthy food and sat behind a desk all day being stressed out by every little thing that came my way, I would soon find myself unable to run anywhere. I’d be too fat and too sick. To make sure I can achieve that goal in the future, I must take care of my health and stay fit today. How do I do that? I must be careful of what I eat and exercise frequently.

And that is what I have done. I exercise at least four times per week, I eat healthily and I make sure I do not spend all day sat down behind a desk. I move…a lot.

I know what I want to be doing in thirty to forty years time and at least four times each week, I do something that will enable me to do that.

And that is why it is important you first establish what is important to you.

Now here’s where you will face difficulties.

For most of us, we spend too much time worrying about the problems and difficulties we face today. We get caught up in the dramas of other people—our colleagues and customers for instance—and we lose sight of our long-term plans. That means you are living your life at a daily level and that is not sustainable. You need to operate on a level that grows and builds your future self. You need to understand that all great things—and life is a great thing—takes time to grow and flourish.

I work with a group of middle managers here in Korea who have dedicated their working lives to their companies. They are all now fast approaching the time where they need to think about their futures and they have nothing except a small amount of savings. They have no plans, and no compelling future and they are scared.

Their problem is they have dedicated the last twenty to thirty years of their lives serving a company that has its own goals and plans and those goals and plans are not going to include them in five years time. They have spent no time on their own future plans, largely because for most of those years they have been working, the future was tomorrow and the problems they will face at work tomorrow.

That’s why it’s important you make sure you have an exciting and compelling future designed for yourself now. You will never be able to operate at a higher level if all you are doing is adding tasks to your to-do list that benefit others and the things you feel you have to do today and not your long term future plans.

Okay, enough of the background. Hopefully, you get that now. Let’s imagine you do have a compelling future planned out for yourself. How do you reduce the number of tasks on your to-do list?

The first thing is to automate as much as you can. Now when I use the word “automate” here I do not necessarily mean use technology. For instance, every Friday I record my YouTube videos. To set up the “studio”, I have to move some furniture around. So, once I finish recording and before I put the furniture back, I always vacuum my office and shake out the rugs. It’s a ten-minute job, and it just makes sense to add that ten minutes to my recording time and clean things up before I move everything back.

I don’t need a task that says “clean office” because it will always happen when I record my videos. You could easily make cleaning up your home office for instance by including cleaning in your weekly planning session.

Similarly, you can use natural triggers. Natural triggers are those things you can see with your own eyes that something needs doing. Doing the laundry can be done when you see that the laundry basket is full, doing the dishes can be done as part of your eating ritual—you wash up immediately after you finish eating. Just like you know when your car needs fuel because the fuel warning light comes on. I actually take this one a little further, when I see that I only have half a tank left, I will fill up the car.

Triggers are like when you go to bed you always put your phone on charge, so the trigger is going to bed, you automatically put your phone on charge ready for the next morning

When there is a natural trigger you do not need to make it a task on your task list.

Paying bills, usually need to be done on the same day each month, so reminders for your bills would be on your calendar as an all-day event. This also has the advantage that when you do the weekly planning session you will see it in your calendar. Hopefully, you are also reviewing your calendar as part of your daily mini-planning session so you are not going to miss anything.

However, where possible you want to be setting bill payments up as direct debits or standing orders—these are where payments are automatically paid on a given date.

My car payments, credit card bills and Apple Music subscriptions are paid automatically for instance. I don’t need a task for these.

Now in your work, you must know what you are paid to do. Too often we allow ourselves to be involved in things that we are not paid to do. If you have done the Time Sector course, you will know all about your core work. The work that you are paid to do, the quality of which will determine whether you get that promotion you have always desired.

When I was working in car sales many years ago, I was employed to sell cars. My salary was dependant on the number of cars I sold each month.

Yet, for some reason I allowed myself to be sent out by my sales manager to clean the cars outside the showroom and make sure there were enough brochures in the brochure stands. I was not paid to do any of those things, but I did them because my boss asked me to do it.

My colleague, Claire, was a lot smarter than I. She knew, like me, she was paid based on the number of cars she sold. Whenever there was a car cleaning or aligning to be done, Claire was always missing. She was either on the phone following up with a customer or talking to a customer in the showroom.

Needless to say, Claire always sold more cars than me. When I pointed out to my boss that she did no cleaning or aligning or brochure refilling he said: “I don’t F’ing care. She sells cars!”—lesson learned. I quickly learned to prioritise selling over being ‘helpful’.

Being “helpful” may have helped me to be popular, but it did nothing for the quality of the roof over my head or food on my table or my long term goals. It helped Claire and my boss, but it did nothing for me.

Claire did not have “clean cars out the front” or “check to see there are enough brochures” on her to-do list. She had tasks that helped her to achieve her sales goals each month. She was terrible at admin, and the admin department did not particularly like her for that. Did she care? Of course not. She was not paid to have meticulously filled out documents and notes. She was paid to sell and selling cars gave her the salary she wanted to live the lifestyle she wanted. Being great at admin did not do that.

Now a lot of you forward actionable emails to your to-do list. Why? Nine times out of ten emails are requests for information that benefit the sender and not you. All they do is suck up more of your time and cause you to spend time on other people’s priorities.

Now, I am not suggesting you ignore emails, but you need to get very clear about important emails and exclude non-important ones. And you should not be sending these to your to-do list.

Instead, create a Folder in your email called “Action This Day” and dedicate a certain amount of time each day for clearing as many of these as possible. If you reverse the order these emails show up in your folder so the oldest is at the top, you will always be on top of your email.

I dedicate 5 pm to 6 pm for communications. That hour each day is for responding to my mail and messages. Once 6 pm comes I stop. Doing this every day means I am usually no more than 24 hours away from responding to my mail.

Essentially, what I am doing is “chunking” responding to messages and emails to one block of time each day. This way, for the majority of the day I can remain focused on my important work knowing I have time each day to keep on top of my actionable email.

And don’t fall into the trap of believing emails will carry “urgent” requests. Nobody uses email today for anything urgent. So stop treating email as urgent. It is not. If something was genuinely urgent you would receive a phone call or text message.

If you do respond to email quickly, you are setting an unrealistic expectation. Stop doing this and train your bosses, colleagues and clients to communicate genuine urgent matters in a more direct way.

If you need to be reminded of certain routine admin tasks then group all these tasks together into a dedicated “Routines” folder in your task manager. I have these pop up at the end of the day. The way I do that is to make sure any routines—tasks that do not move my projects or goals forward—are at the bottom of my to-do list.

Routines just need to be done and it rarely is a problem if I cannot do them on the desired day. As long as I have my important tasks at the top of my list, if I have time at the end of the day I can complete my routines, although you should try to find a trigger for your routines as much as you can so they do not need to be put into your task manager.

Finally, create morning and evening routines and keep these lists out of your to-do list for the day. I find after a few weeks these routines need no reminder. For instance, when I wake up, I put the kettle on, get my lemon water from the fridge and drink that while I wait for the kettle to boil.

I then make my coffee and as I wait for my coffee to brew, I do a series of shoulder stretching exercises. Once my coffee is made, I write my journal and drink my coffee and then process my email.

I don’t need any of these tasks on my to-do list because they are automatic. I have been following the same morning routine for three or four years now.

Likewise, I have a closing down routine that includes reviewing my task list and planning tomorrow. Again, none of these needs to be on my to-do list because they are automatic.

To reduce the number of tasks on your to-do list you need to be thinking in terms of elimination. It’s about removing unnecessary tasks, grouping things together and dedicating a small amount of time to do them in one go and being very protective of your time.

But, all these are just tactics. The most important thing you can do is to identify what your core work is and being crystal clear about what it is you want out of life and pursuing tasks, goals and projects that will take you there and eliminating anything that does not serve that higher purpose.

I hope these strategies help you reduce the number of tasks you have in your task manager and helps to focus your mind on what is important to you.

Thank you to all of you who gave me feedback on last week’s episode and also to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Monday May 03, 2021

How To Achieve The Next Level Of Productivity

Monday May 03, 2021

This week, we are looking at the advanced level of time management and personal productivity and asking how you too can reach that level.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 180

Hello and welcome to episode 180 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.

Have you ever wondered what super-productive people do that most people don’t do? How the likes of Dwayne Johnson, Robin Sharma and Tony Robbins manage their time and get their work done?

The thing is while these people may have a unique way to manage their time, and of course, they do have personal assistants doing quite a lot of the smaller tasks that many of us have to do ourselves, they do operate at a different level—they have to—but that level is attainable for all of us if we are serious about maximising our potential—because that’s what it is all about.

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

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

This week’s question comes from Adam. Adam asks: Hi Carl, I have often wondered how other people manage their time. I have read David Allen, yourself and many others on time management, yet I sense I must be missing something when I look at what people like Robin Sharma and Brian Tracey produce week after week. Is there a secret I am missing?

Hi Adam, thank you for your wonderful question. A question I have spent many many years searching for an answer myself.

To give you a direct answer: yes you are. People like Robin Sharma and Brian Tracey do do things differently and it is something we can all do. But, it involves a lot of risk, immense focus and a clear vision of what you want to achieve, not just in your professional life, but in your life as a whole.

Let me start with Elon Musk. Elon Musk’s lifetime goal is to colonise Mars. Right now, when you talk to people about colonising Mars, most people dismiss it as a goal that would be unachievable anytime soon. And that may be true. After all, currently to get to Mars would take you almost a year, the winter temperature can drop to as low as -180 degrees Fahrenheit (almost -120 degrees celsius) and there are frequent dust storms with wind speeds over 100 MPH (160 KPH). Why would anyone want to live there?

But that does not deter Elon Musk. His total focus is on developing solutions to any problems that humans living on Mars may encounter. From building electric cars for transportation to developing rockets that would get humans to Mars quickly and safely. Everything Elon Musk is doing is geared towards that one goal.

Now ask yourself, what is my life goal? What is my purpose?

My guess is you don’t have one. And if you do, it will likely be to save sufficient money for your retirement or to buy a dream home. Most people’s life goals are related to material things, money and themselves.

That means, most people are focused on their jobs, their salary and their status in society. And that is what restricts people. It means they will never take the kind of risks that are required to reach a much higher purpose and it generates fears around what other people think about them (something you will never have any control over anyway), how they fit into society and have a job—any job that means receiving a salary.

When I was teaching English, I taught business people. And I saw first hand the difference between those stuck in middle management and those populating the executive suites. The most successful executives I taught, were not concerned about where they lived, the car they drove or the clothes they wore. They were intensely focused on getting to the top of their organisations so they could directly change the world for the better. These people would live in a cardboard box if it meant that would get them to the very top so they could change things.

They were not trying to win popularity contests or to be the most liked person in their organisation. They had no fear in saying “no” to opportunities they felt would not contribute to their higher purpose.

Now you might think someone like Dwayne Johnson can’t have a higher purpose like Elon Musk and his purpose to colonise Mars, but you would be wrong.

Dwayne Johnson’s purpose in life is to entertain and motivate. He wants to bring joy to the world and to the people who watch his movies. Now Dwayne Johnson knows that his box office appeal is partly his physical fitness and his charismatic personality. Watch any interview or conversation with Dwayne Johnson and you cannot help but warm to him.

This is why, no matter how busy he is, Dwayne Johnson will get up and do his time in the gym—or as he calls it; “the Iron Paradise”. 3, 4 in the morning Dwayne Johnson will be in the gym six days a week.

How many of you are willing to wake up at 3 AM to work out? Probably very few of you. How many of you, after a ten-hour flight across the world, would go to the gym before checking into your hotel?

These are just some of the sacrifices people like Dwayne Johnson are willing to make to achieve their purpose in life. It’s not about them, it’s about what they give to the world.

People who are operating at this higher level do not have tasks like “Return sweater to Uniqlo” or “take dry-cleaning in” on their to-do lists. None of these tasks contributes to their overall goal. The only things on their to-do lists are tasks that take them towards their objectives, complete their projects and achieve their goals.

So, you are probably beginning to see where this higher level of productivity comes from. It comes from your overall purpose in life. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve from life and more importantly, doing it for others.

You see, when you really know what it is you want out of your life, you become incredibly focused. Everything you do goes through the prism of “how will this contribute to my overall goal?”

When that goal becomes an obsession and excites you, you will not languish in bed, you jump out of bed ready to start the day, you will burn the midnight oil and you have no fear saying “no” to anyone if whatever they are asking you to do does not contribute towards your goal.

That’s what a higher level of productivity looks like and most people are not willing to make that kind of sacrifice and that’s okay. We are free to make our own decisions and spend our time doing whatever we want to do.

This is why I encourage people to download my Areas of Focus workbook. It’s a free workbook designed to help you find want is important to you. Those areas of focus are your foundation on which you can build your own purpose in life. They are based around eight areas we all share. Those are; Family and relationships, career or business, financial wellbeing, health and fitness, life experiences, spirituality, personal development and life purpose.

Once you know what these mean to you, you are going to become a lot more focused on your life. Now, these areas will have different levels of importance to all of us. It largely depends where you are in life. If you are in your twenties your career and education—personal development—may be the most important. As you get to your fifties, you likely now know you are not immortal so health and fitness will be higher and perhaps your financial wellbeing.

Now it does not mean you have to have a single obsession like Elon Musk, but you do need to know what is important to you and what is not. Without that knowledge, you will gravitate towards making other people’s priorities yours and that is going to make you feel miserable and depressed.

Other people could be your boss or your customers. If your goal is to make these people happy so they don’t get upset with you, or cause you to lose your job, you will be unfulfilled and miserable as well as stressed out. Your happiness at work is conditional on something you have no control over—the feelings of your boss or customer. You have no control over how much sleep they got, whether they had a fight with their partner or some other external event that caused them to be angry or upset.

Your focus is on your own wellbeing, not making the world a little bit better. Doing things for others so they like you—that’s not doing something for other people. It’s dong something for you so you can be popular and liked.

I remember watching a Tony Robbins 5 day live event and although Tony was on stage (so to speak) at 11 AM, he stayed up until six in the morning reading participants’ social media comments about the event so he could make the event even better the next day. His complete and total focus was on making the event as educational as he possibly could for the participants. He didn’t worry about getting enough sleep so he would look and sound better on stage. He was at the next level—searching for ways to make the learning experience of several thousand people better.

Do you think he was worrying about how many emails were in his inbox, or whether he’d put the garbage out? Of course not. He was completely focused on making the learning experience the best he could for his participants.

That’s higher-level productivity. Being completely focused on what’s important. Blocking five days out on his calendar so he did not have to worry about anything else other than teaching people to lead better lives.

For those of you who have taken the Time Sector Course, you will know about your core work and why knowing what that is crucial to ensuring you are doing the right things. Your core work is the work you are employed to do.

You were not employed to reply to emails within an hour. You were not employed to attend mind-numbing meetings that achieve nothing and have no objective. And you were certainly not employed to keep your boss happy. Sure, if you want an easy life, do those things. But you will ultimately feel unfulfilled and unhappy because everything you do is to make other people like you—something you cannot realistically control anyway.

Knowing what your objectives are for the day—what you want to accomplish today that will take you a step further towards your goal and then doing it that’s what will bring you fulfilment. It’s that that people will respect you for and it’s that that will inspire other people to be better versions of themselves. That’s what will bring you fulfilment and pleasure.

None of this is easy and there are immense sacrifices that have to be made. You are trying to achieve a long-term vision that will not bring you any instant gratification other than knowing you are moving along the right path. That’s why so few people ever achieve it.

But it really comes down to knowing what you want to achieve in life. People like Elon Musk, Tony Robbins and Dwayne Johnson are crystal clear on their objectives. That’s why they are achieving what they are achieving. The vast majority of people are not and that is why they are where they are today.

None of this is difficult, but it is very risky, you are going to upset some people and many others will not understand you because you are living a life they think is not normal. But then why would anyone just want to be “normal”. I think being normal is a horrible life. A life controlled by other people’s feelings and emotions.

No, if you really want to take your productivity to the next level, then get clear about what is important to you. Be focused on what you want out of your life and stop trying to fit into a blueprint designed by others.

I will leave you with the inspiring words from Apple’s Think Different campaign from the early 2000s:

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

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

Monday Apr 26, 2021

How To Get Your Work Done Stress Free

Monday Apr 26, 2021

This week, we are digging deeper into the benefits of creating workflows and processes to ensure your most important work gets done on time every time.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 179

Hello and welcome to episode 179 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.

Becoming better organised and more productive is a process. It’s not going to happen overnight and there is a lot of trial and error.

The first step is to get a system in place: one that ensures nothing is being missed and all your new tasks, events and ideas are being collected. In many ways, it is a bit like learning to walk then run. As a child, our first steps are slow, hesitant and there is a lot going on in the brain telling us to put one foot in front of the other while shifting our body weight from one side to the next.

Over time, this ‘process’ of walking becomes fixed in our brain and we no longer need to consciously think about doing it. We stand up. We walk. The only thought we have is I want a glass of water from the kitchen. We don’t need to plan out each step.

Well, the same applies to becoming better organised and more productive. Our first steps are hesitant. We have to think consciously about what we are doing and that can seem very counterintuitive if our designed goal is to have to think less so we can do more.

In this episode, I am answering a question around that process and development and hopefully what I say will give you some encouragement if you are finding the whole process of becoming more productive cumbersome and time-consuming.

While on this subject of building an unconscious process, just a little reminder that if you haven’t already got yourself the free areas of focus workbook, I highly recommend you do so.

This workbook was created to help you create that automation in your life by building in the things that are important to you so you have a lot less thinking to do on a week to week, month to month basis. Once you know what is important to you and what you need to do to maintain these daily, weekly or monthly actions, you will find yourself feeling a lot more in balance with your life as a whole.

The link to download the workbook is in the show notes.

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 Jason. Jason asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed your COD and Time Sector systems and I love them. The problem I am having is it feels like a lot of effort just to keep everything up to date. I feel like I am spending too much time just writing things into Todoist and my calendar and not really doing my work. I enjoy it, but I know I need to spend more time doing work and not managing my work. How do you get your work done more efficiently?

Hi Jason, thank you for your question.

You didn’t say in your email how long you have been doing COD and the Time Sector System, so I will assume you are relatively new to these systems.

So, as I mentioned in the introduction, when we change our way of doing things—particularly if we have been doing something in a certain way for a very long time the new system can feel like it is taking a lot longer to do our work done.

Part of the reason for this is we have to consciously think about each step, whereas our previous system was just automatic. Even if you felt you did not have a system before, whatever you were doing to get your work done, you did it automatically. An urgent email came in, you panicked, and replied immediately leaving the original email in your inbox. That might not be a very effective way of managing email, but it worked, you replied and you got the job done—in the short term.

If you change the way you manage your email and instead of panicking when an urgent email comes in you consciously move it to an action this day folder, you a) have to think about it, and b) you have to consciously resist the temptation to panic and reply immediately.

Remember, nobody treats email as a form of urgent communication today. Your neighbour wouldn’t email you to tell you your car was being stolen, would they?

So, sure this new way of doing things will feel like it is taking more time…at first. Once, it becomes habitual not to panic when an urgent email comes in and you have confidence in the way you are doing things, it will feel a lot more effective and efficient.

As I have mentioned before in this podcast, the first habit you must develop is to collect. Most people only do this when they consciously think about it so they may collect around sixty per cent, the other forty per cent of stuff coming their way is still kept in their heads. Hopefully, by now you know this is not a great strategy.

Once you automatically collect everything into your trusted place—a task manager, notes app or notebook—you can move on to the next habit to develop. That is the organising. Where are you going to put all this stuff you have collected? And of course, that depends on how you have your system set up.

But beyond that, how do you make sure everything is working automatically?

Well here comes the advanced level—the part that goes beyond the basic structure.

Firstly you must know what your core work is—the work that pays your bills and earns your income. That work must be scheduled on your calendar and the micro-tasks involved in your tasks manager. Doing this work, whether it is calling ten prospects per day, writing 1,000 words of your next article, designing the images for the next marketing campaign or reaching out to five potential speakers for your next conference must have time allocated to it every day.

To give you an example of this. Let’s say you get a lot of important email and Teams messages each day and you calculate you need around ninety minutes each day just to stay on top of that, then wishing those emails and messages would go away or somehow you will miraculously find that time is not a great strategy. Getting realistic about how much time you need each day and allocating that time on your calendar for communications will ensure you have enough time every day and knowing you have time will take a lot of stress out of your day.

This, by the way, applies also to your core work. This is why it is essential to define what that work is. Artists create art, designers design, salespeople sell and teachers teach. There’s the clue to your core work. It’s the art you create, the designs you design and the sales you make. You must make time for doing that core work every day and that means you get it on your calendar.

Once you have a consistent schedule of work, that’s when things start to work smoother. That’s when you only need to make decisions about new stuff coming in and how that new, extra work will fit “around” your core work. And, that’s an important point there—this new, additional work must fit “around” your core work, not replace it.

Always keep at the front of your mind that your core work is what puts food on your table and keeps a roof over your head—a lot of this new additional work is work that will not directly affect your core work.

This only starts to happen when you are consistent with your work.

Let me give you an example of this in play. I grew up on a farm and I still have an interest in farming methods. When I was very very young, my father had a dairy farm. Now the cows had to be milked at 6 AM, so my father and his brother would get up, get the cows into the milking parlour and start the milking at 6 AM. That happened every day, seven days of the week.

Between 6 AM and 9 AM, it was milking time. Once the milking was finished, the cows were let out into the fields for the day and the rest of the day was spent ensuring the milk that was collected was prepared ready for the milk wagon (as we called it) to collect it.

There were never any meetings with National Milk Board representatives or machinery salespeople between 6 AM and 9 AM, no impromptu gossip time or checking that morning’s mail. It was getting on with the work, Collecting that milk was my father’s core work. It’s what ultimately allowed him to put food on the family table and keep a roof over our heads.

Time for meeting with Milk Board officials, salespeople and reading that day’s mail and news, was done once the milking was done.

That’s how you make your system work for you. Establish what is your core work. What work must you do every single day? Make those tasks recurring and get them fixed on your calendar.

This is how successful productive people become successful at what they do. They first identify their core work and the tasks that make sure that core work gets done. Things like prospecting for new customers, doing the design work and seeing patients and fix that before allowing other, non-core work into their workday.

Warren Buffett identified reading the financial news for several hours a day as how he would stay on top of the latest stock market and business trends. Guess what he does every day?

Your system starts to work when these core work tasks become just something you do. When all the people you regularly interact with know that you will be unavailable at certain times in the day—including your customers and bosses—because you are doing important work.

But to get there takes time. All new ways of doing things take time. I remember learning to play golf. Just to learn how to swing a golf club properly took several one-hour lessons with a golf pro. I didn’t just walk onto a golf course and hit the perfect tee shot. It just many hours to automate the swing.

And that’s what’s happening here, Jason. You’re learning to swing. It will take time, but through consistent practice, the results will be a much more effective way of managing your work, a lot better structure to your days and a lot more of the important work getting done and being delivered on time.

Once you have identified your core work, those tasks will become recurring tasks, so you are not having to write them out every day. You write them out and they repeat when they need to repeat.

The only tasks you will need to write out are the new tasks coming in and again you will soon get faster at doing it. You quickly learn the best way to write your tasks so they are meaningful and clear about what needs to be done.

So be patient. Stay consistent, you will soon get faster and many of the things you are thinking about when you write out your tasks, will soon just become automatic.

Thank you, Jason, for your question and thank you to you all for listening.

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

Monday Apr 19, 2021

Why Your Planning Doesn't Work (And The Myth About Waiting For Tasks)

Monday Apr 19, 2021

Podcast 178

This week, what can you do when your plan for the week is destroyed and your waiting for list get out of control.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 178

Hello and welcome to episode 178 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, you’re finally doing your weekly planning session, you have your focused work times blocked on your calendar and you are confident you will be able to get all your important work done that week.

Then, one email from your boss late Monday afternoon throws everything out. You have to ditch the plan and all the things you have been waiting for are required right now.

How do you manage that? Well, hopefully, in this episode I will give you some strategies to help you stay in control.

Now before I do that…

Don’t forget, you can save yourself over $200 when you buy The Ultimate Productivity course bundle. This bundle gives you six courses for just $175 including the Time Sector System, Your Digital Life 3.0 and Time and Life Mastery.

With this bundle you get everything you need to build your personalised productivity system at your own pace. And that is important. It takes time to piece together a system that works seamlessly for you and that’s what this bundle of courses will enable you to do.

Taking one course each weekend over the next six weeks will give you the knowledge, the know-how and the tools to put together a system that will stick.

So, if you want to finally nail down your time management, goal planning and productivity so you have every part of your life in balance, start today and get yourself the Ultimate Productivity bundle.

Full details and more information are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Melissa. Melissa asks: Hi Carl, This year I have done really well on doing a weekly review every Saturday morning and I get my week planned and organised. But, I find most weeks, by the time I get to Wednesday, I am far behind on my plan because I get given other work from my boss, I am waiting for my colleagues to get back to me with important information and my customers are always contacting me asking for help. How do you stay with your plan when so many things keep forcing you to change everything?

Hi Melissa, great question and I am sure a lot of people find themselves in the same situation as you do. I know it happens to me more often than I like.

So, firstly, it’s fantastic to hear you are consistently doing the weekly planning session. That’s important because it keeps you on top of your bigger picture direction and helps to avoid missing anything important. A lot of the reasons why people find themselves overwhelmed and directionless is because they don’t spend any time stepping away and reviewing where they are with their projects and goals.

If you don’t know where you are, how will you ever know what you need to do next to get the project or goal completed?

And let’s be honest here, a weekly planning session takes no more than thirty minutes if you are doing it consistently every week. If you are not doing it consistently, then, sure, it’s going to take you a lot longer because you will inevitably have a lot more to review.

Now, no matter how well you plan the week, unless you are hidden away in a log cabin high up in the mountains with no connection to the outside world, things are going to change your plan. When your plan for the week comes face to face with the week, sparks are going to fly. It’s as Mike Tyson put it:

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”

However, understanding that things are going to change—you just don’t know what is going to change—is a great place to start.

The key here is to build in flexibility. It’s no good trying to meticulously plan out your week based on what your next week calendar looks like on Saturday morning with time blocks for every hour of the day. That will never work. There are too many variables.

Instead, establish what your important work for the week is. What are your “must dos”? These are your non-negotiable tasks—if you like, they are your red-lines. No matter what, these tasks, meetings and appointments must take place.

It is these that go on your calendar—after all, you have decided they are your non-negotiable tasks.

Your non-negotiable tasks are not just about your work either. Your family and friendships, time for exercise, rest and personal development should form part of your non-negotiable plans for the week.

For instance, if making time to have dinner with your family every day is part of your areas of focus, then you make sure that happens and never schedule work related calls at those times. It’s the same with your exercise time. We all know by now you need to move. You body was not designed to spend all day sat down. You need movement. So, make sure that some form of exercise each day is scheduled. That could be a twenty minute walk after lunch and a thirty minute walk after dinner. Exercise is a personal choice. You do not have to go to a gym. Just make sure you have time for movement every day.

Now, hopefully, once you have your non-negotiable, must do tasks in your task manager and the required time to complete these are blocked out on your calendar there should be enough blank space for you to manage any emergencies that will inevitably come your way.

Now, here’s a tip. Start the week as if you expect the week to turn crazy.

What I mean here is front load your week with your most important work. If a crisis or an emergency is going to happen, you want to know that you have already completed your most important work for the week—or at the very least started doing the work.

There’s no way any of us can predict when things will go wrong. The only thing we can predict is that at sometime in the week something is going to happen that will require us to find some unplanned for time.

Knowing this, if you can, block out Monday for your most important work.

In my experience, Monday’s are the least likely days for sudden emergencies to happen. Most people spend Monday catching up with what they need to do that week, gossiping about what they did last weekend and telling anyone who will listen how much they hate Mondays.

Take advantage of this. Make Monday mornings your deepest focus work time.

Getting your most important work done early in the week, means you have the time and space to deal with all those unexpected requests, crises and emergencies later in the week, safe in the knowledge your most important tasks for the week have already been done.

I actually, block both Monday and Tuesday morning for my most important work. Monday is the day I try to get all my writing for the week done, and Tuesday is when I plan out the content I need to create later in the week—it’s the content planning time that takes up a lot of my time when creating content. So, I want that done early in the week so no matter what happens later, the hardest part of the creation process is done.

The rest of your week needs to be kept as flexible as you can make it. If you can, try to make Wednesday or Thursday your flexible day. By that I mean keep your work time blocks to a minimum.

Knowing you have space on a Wednesday or Thursday to deal with any unknowns that come up earlier in the week, takes the pressure off from worrying about finding time to work on whatever needs working on. It also means you have the space to catch up with anything that has fallen behind.

It also helps to review your plan for the week on Wednesday too. This acts as a method to refocus you on what your objectives for the week are. It also means you can reschedule less critical work if necessary.

Last week, for instance, I had a few unexpected emergencies come up with a seminar I was doing for a company on Thursday. This meant, Tuesday was spend dealing with tech issues to make sure I could connect to the company’s Microsoft Teams system—I understand security is important, but perhaps IT departments need to understand that no company is an island. Employees do need work with people outside the organisation from time to time—anyway just a thought.

These issues thew me out of my plans for the week. However, I always have Wednesday morning free so I can catch up if necessary and that is exactly what I did. By Wednesday afternoon I was back on track and I made the necessary adjustments to my planned tasks for the week.

Now what about all those waiting for tasks? Here’s the thing about waiting for lists. What is the outcome here? I’m pretty sure the outcome you wanted when you requested whatever you requested was not to sit and wait for something to happen. That objective would be bizarre. No, the outcome you wanted was to receive whatever you requested.

So, anything in a waiting for list is an uncompleted task. You have not got what you requested, therefore the task is not complete. Moving a task to a waiting for list after you sent the request is just shuffling tasks from one list to another. It’s not completing the task. The task is only complete once you receive the information you wanted.

So, if you want to complete that task, you need to do whatever it takes to get the information you are waiting for. Whether that means you pick up the phone and scream and shout at the person not supplying you with the information or you send a polite, but firm email. Remember the objective is to get the information, not necessarily to build friendships or popularity.

You want to reduce your waiting for list? Get tough, get nasty and do whatever it takes to complete the task. And yes, that means you need to get tough and nasty with your bosses if it is they who are not giving you the information.

Look, when it comes to your annual evaluation and the person doing the evaluation gives you a poor score because you are not completing your targets and KPIs, it will sound pretty pathetic if you try to justify yourself by blaming others for not sending you the information you needed to complete your KPIs. So stop seeing waiting for tasks as somehow being different from the original task. If the original task has not been completed then it’s not complete and you just have to reschedule whatever it is to another day when you do have the information in order to complete the task.

Focus on the right outcome and do whatever you need to do to clear you waiting for lists. There should be almost nothing in there.

Hopefully, that helps you, Melissa. Try to front load your week where possible and keep the mid-week as flexible as possible for dealing with the emergencies and crises and review your plan too.

There’s nothing wrong is rescheduling tasks. We all have to do that a lot more than we would care to admit. But life will always throw you off track, that’s just life. Ships are constantly battling winds and seas pulling them in different directions. But as long as you know where you are going you will always find the right port. That’s the same in life. There are constant pulls and distractions trying to pull you away from your planned course.

Just make sure you have a little time each week to review your plan, and readjust where necessary.

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

Monday Apr 12, 2021

How To Prioritise So You Consistently Work On What's Important

Monday Apr 12, 2021

Podcast 177

This week, I’m answering a question on how to prioritise your work and avoid getting caught up in the trivial, low importance tasks

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 177

Hello and welcome to episode 177 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 quick apology to those of you who were listening to this podcast on Spotify. Last February I upgraded the quality of this podcast and Spotify stopped updating the episodes. It turns out Spotify will only accept the lower quality versions of podcasts which are MP3 files. I was using M4A files as part of the upgrade,

However, I will reinstate the MP3 versions so Spotify will begin accepting this podcast once more.

Okay, on with the show.

This week, it’s all about prioritising and knowing what to prioritise and what to ignore—yes, I said that right, “what to ignore”.

You see, the problem is there are far more tasks to do each day and week than time available and we are not machines. We are apt to feel tired, lethargic and distracted at times and for most of us, these times are unpredictable.

So while we may think we are managing time, we are really better off managing our energy levels. Understanding that concept can really help us to prioritise our days better.

So, before we get to the question, just a little reminder that I have a new bundle of courses available that will give you four of my best courses PLUS two bonus courses, which will give you a time management system that will take the stress out of everything you have to do, and give you the tools and know-how to bring in your goals and dreams.

The Ultimate Productivity Bundle is priced at an amazing $175.00 which saves you 55% off the price of buying all four courses individually.

If you want the complete package with lifetime access, then this is the bundle for you. You save yourself $110 and you get everything you need to build an amazingly productive and fulfilling life.

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 Paul. Paul asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of tasks coming at me every day and I struggle to know which ones to do. Most of them really are not that important, but I always feel I have to do them when I probably don’t. Do you know of any strategies I can use to better prioritise my work so I am working on the important things more often?

Hi Paul, thank you for sending in your question.

I am sure this is a common issue for many people. There is so much being pushed on us, that it can be very hard to know what to work on.

The most important part of prioritising though is planning. You see, if you are not planning then everything will seem important because you have not taken the time to look at what’s on your plate without the day to day rumble of emails, tasks and messages. It’s like you need to get off the road for a moment, climb the hill and look at your landscape and see where you are going. Without that bigger view, you will likely be travelling down roads that will take you nowhere near where you want to go.

So, strategy one is to plan the week. Now, this does not mean spending an hour or two going through all your projects as some productivity systems recommend. You know what projects need your attention—or at least if you are paying attention to what going on in your life you should do.

At the very least you need to know what projects are due this quarter. This bigger picture view will give you the knowledge of where you should be spending most of your attention next week. It also means that any project not due in the next three months can be ignored for now. You do not need to be wasting valuable time going through those projects. They are not due yet and you need to put your focus on projects that are due in the immediate future.

To use the car analogy again, you would not be worrying about what to have for dinner at lunchtime when your car is low on fuel. Your priority needs to be getting fuel in your car, not dinner tonight. Find the petrol station, and worry about dinner once you are refuelled.

So, spend twenty or thirty minutes at the end of the week and go through your projects for this month and next. Clear out your inboxes and get your email cleared. Review your calendar for appointments and deadlines next week and plan out when you will do your most important tasks.

Now, a quick warning here, when you do your first weekly planning session it will take you longer than thirty minutes. You’re going to be fumbling around trying to find things and thinking more about the process. Don’t give up. After a few weeks, it will become much more natural and you will think less about the process and will get faster.

Again, with the car analogy, when you first learn to drive a car, it takes you a little longer to get the car started because you have to think about the process. But after a little, while you no longer need to think, you just jump in, push start and off you go. It’s the same with weekly planning.

The next strategy I would suggest is to think in terms of outcomes not tasks. Most people focus far too much on the tasks that need to occur to complete a project, yet quite often a lot of those tasks do not need to be done. Outcome thinking is far better than process thinking and always focuses you on the right priorities.

Imagine you need a copy of a report to complete your project. So you email the person who has the report you need, but they haven’t replied for two or three days. Now ask yourself—what’s the outcome you want? Well, it isn’t to send an email, is it? No, it’s to get a copy of the report. So if you really want the report and your email was not responded to, what do you do? Call them? Drive to their office and get the report? There are far better ways to get the report faster than telling yourself—well, I sent an email. Sending the email was not your outcome. Getting the report was.

So, focus on the outcome you desire. That way you will always be able to ask better questions such as: how do I get a copy of that report this afternoon?

You also end up prioritising your action steps. Instead of just going through the motions, you taking what Would describe as direct action to achieve the result you want.

This all links back to knowing what your priority projects are. If you know what your most important projects are and you know the desired outcome, then you will know what to do, rather than getting caught up in tasks that you know will not take you closer to achieving that outcome.

You can ask simple questions such as “will doing this task take me closer to accomplishing my outcomes?” If your answer is “no” then consider what will happen if you don’t do the task. Will there be any consequences?

What do I mean by this? Well, if you get a message from your boss asking you for some details, what would the consequences be if you did not drop everything you are doing right now to answer a question you know your boss could easily find out if she opened up her laptop and looking for the answer? Likely very little.

Of course, these are your calls. When I was working in an office my priority was my clients, Not my colleagues or boss and I never got fired. I still got my bonuses each year and I increased my performance time and again because I prioritised the right thing—my clients, not impressing my boss.

Now another strategy is to be her-aware of what your areas of focus are. I’m surprised how few people know what is important to them. If you were looking at an Eisenhower Matrix, these would be your Quadrant 2 areas. The important but not urgent things.

So, things like your health, your finances, your relationships etc.

Why do people like Tim Cook, Satya Nadella and Dwayne The Rock Johnson wake up early to do their exercise? Because they know these areas are important. They know if they neglect this important area of focus their immense abilities would soon decline. And it’s the same for you. If you are not prioritising your health, and your relationships you will soon find yourself drowning in overwhelm and stress. You need to make sure your areas of focus are in balance and you are not neglecting them.

If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to download my free areas of focus workbook. In there you will find a step by step guide to establishing your own areas of focus so you can build a set of daily routines that keep these front and centre of your life. These are where your daily priorities need to be.

Once you have these three strategies in check, you will find knowing what to work on will become almost second nature. You will automatically know what something is and whether it deserves any of your time and attention.

However, there is one more area you do need to know and understand before you can go confidently into the day knowing you are working on the right things and that is your core work. What is your core work? What are you actually paid to do?

Now I’m pretty sure you are not paid to reply to email and Slack messages all day. You were employed to do something fundamentally more important than that. So what is it?

If you are in sales, you are employed to maximise your sales, not to be completing sales reports and other associated admin. Likewise, if you are a doctor, your job is to treat patients, not fill out patient forms. Always remember your core work.

I remember back in the day when I was in sales, the worst salespeople—the people who were always at the bottom of the sales league were the best at doing sales admin. Funny that. The best salespeople were hated by the admin department because their sales documentation were terrible. But the company didn’t care. They got results in the work they were employed to do—selling.

So what are you paid to do? That is where your priorities must be every day. If you are a sales manager, then your role is to serve your sales team is such a way that they maximise their sales. It is not to be constantly bothering them for updated sales reports. How does that improve your overall sales?

So there you go, Paul. I hope that has given you some food for thought and give you some ways that will help you prioritise your day more effectively.

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

Monday Mar 29, 2021

How To Manage Your Daily To-do List

Monday Mar 29, 2021

Podcast 176

How overwhelming is your to-do list? Do you find yourself not wanting to look at the list of things you have to do each day? It seems you’re not the only one.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 176

Hello and welcome to episode 176 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, you have a system in place. Your areas of focus and routines are filtering into your daily list and your calendar is supporting you by managing your available time each day. That’s great. But now, you find your daily list looks horrendous. It’s huge and leaves you feeling uninspired each day. What can you do about it? Well, that’s what I will be answering this week.

Now, before I get to the answer, just a quick heads up, if you don’t know already last week, saw the launch of my 2021 edition of my Email Mastery course. Now the course is in glorious HD, it’s updated for the way we are managing emails today and I’ve added a few new lessons on processing your emails—a feature requested from the previous version.

So, if you use Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail, this course is a must for you. This course will take the stress out of managing your mail and bring calm and focus to an area of work and life we cannot ignore.

Links to the course are in the show notes.

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 Anna. Anna asks: Hi Carl, I took your Time Sector course and really enjoyed it. I have set everything up but now I find I have so many tasks in my today view I just don’t want to go and look at it. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?

Hi Anna, thank you for your question.

Now there are a couple of reasons why your daily list is looking overwhelming and fortunately, there are ways you can manage that.

However, the first thing we do need to look at is how you are writing your tasks. There are two schools of thought here. One says you should break down your tasks into small bite-sized chunks and the other says to do the opposite. Personally, I like a hybrid of the two.

Let me give you an example. Imagine you have had a headache for a few days and you feel it’s time to see a doctor. With the first school of thought, you would write the following tasks:

Get telephone number of doctor

Call doctor and make appointment

In the second school of thought, you would just create a single task called make appointment to see the doctor.

Now, I know this is a very simple example, but it shows you what can quickly happen if you break down your tasks into smaller tasks. You end up with double the number of tasks.

Personally, I don’t think there is a right or wrong way. The best way is the way that works for you.,

But, if you want a list each day that is less overwhelming I would suggest you ere on the side of writing macro-tasks rather than micro-tasks.

For me, I prefer writing macro-tasks. My task list contains tasks such as write blog post, do expenses, clean the office, plan YouTube videos. I could break these down into write the first draft of blog post, clean the carpets in the office or prepare YouTube video plan, but I don’t need such detail. I see the task: write this weeks blog post and I know exactly what needs to happen next. When I go into the office, I can see immediately what needs cleaning, I don’t need to break it down into the different parts.

Now the other reason you may have an overwhelming daily to-do list is that you are just trying to squeeze in more than you can do. This is very common. It’s a human condition to believe we are capable of doing far more than we really are. It’s the same as our inability to estimate how long it will take to do something. We think responding to an email will take around two minutes but often it takes five or ten minutes. We are terrible at estimating how long things will take.

This is one of the reasons I developed the 2+8 Prioritisation method. This is where you select ten important tasks for the day and make these the tasks you will focus on for the day. Two of these tasks are your must-do objectives and the remaining eight are your should do tasks. By limiting yourself to ten meaningful tasks per day, you force yourself to be realistic about what you can do each day.

Now, these ten tasks do not include your daily routine tasks—these just need doing anyway, but those are not all that important and so if you were unable to do a few of them one day it would not be problem. You can always catch up with them the next day. This is why in the Time Sector system I recommend you set up your routines to recur when they need to recur. You can always reschedule these if you find yourself running out of time.

The other benefit of using the 2+8 Prioritisation Method is it forces you to prioritise your tasks. You can’t do everything all at once, so you need to make decisions about when you will do them based on their deadlines, importance and your schedule.

In today’s world with so many tantalising distractions, we need a mechanism that restricts the flow of things we want to do. Like most people, I want to do a lot each day, but I have to be realistic about what I am capable of doing. I want to spend some time with my family, I want time to exercise, read, relax and get enough sleep. If I filled my to-do list with all the things I would like to do, I would not have any time for those important personal things I want to do and would quickly find I have no time to sleep or eat. That’s why I use the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. It acts as a way to restrict the amount of things I do each day leaving me feeling refreshed and safe in the knowledge that I have completed the most important things each day.

Now there is one more area that needs attention if you want a more manageable and less overwhelming to-do list and that is make sure you are doing the daily and weekly planning sessions. Time and time again, when people reach out to me for help, the problems they are facing are caused simply because they are not doing any kind of planning.

You see if you are not planning the week, your daily planning is going to take a lot longer. If you plan the week, your daily planning will only take around ten to fifteen minutes a day and we can all find ten to fifteen minutes a day. If not you have much bigger problems in your life than simply time management.

The weekly planning session is all about scheduling your most important tasks throughout the week and finding a balance to each day. If you see you have back to back Zoom meetings on Wednesday, you can avoid scheduling bigger tasks on that day and spread your tasks out on other days. You might see you have a meeting-free day on Thursday, so you schedule more of your important tasks for Thursday. This way not only do you find balance in your week, but you also prepare yourself mentally for the day.

The daily planning session is essentially a check to make sure your plan is holding up. You will find important tasks have been collected during the week and you need to find time to add those to your list and so things may need to be moved around. That’s life. You will never be able to create a perfect plan, but having a plan does give you the peace of mind knowing that you have time to get all your important tasks done for the week. Sure, you may have to renegotiate some of these, but that’s fine. It means you are engaged with your world and moving with the flow of the week.

One final area you may want to consider is how you are using tags, labels or contexts in your task manager. If you use a task manager such as Todoist, you can add labels to your tasks. This means you can filter out tasks. So, for example, if you have a label called “communications” you can add that label to any task that requires you to communicate—email, phone call or Slack messages. Then, when you decide it’s time to deal with your Communcations for the day, you just bring up that label for the day and all you see are tasks related to communicating. Really the only tasks you need to see at that moment.

That is a leaf directly out of the Getting Things Done book, and if you are a GTDer, then that is a modern take on using contexts. We’ve come a long way since 2001 when GTD was written. We don’t have to be in the office sat in front of our work computer to reply to email today, we can reply to email anywhere from our phones. But if you want to reduce the lists you are looking at you can create contexts based on the type of work you are doing.

So there you go, Anna. Thank you for your wonderful question. I hope that has helped and will give you a few ways you can reduce your daily list to a more manageable number.

Thank you to you too for listening. Next week, this podcast will be taking a little break, but I will be back with another episode answering your questions. So, if you do have a question you feel I can answer, then you can email me; carl@carlpullein.com and I will be very happy to answer your question.

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

Monday Mar 22, 2021

How To Work With A Security Conscious Company

Monday Mar 22, 2021

How do you manage a situation where your company uses a particular set of tools that cannot be accessed outside of the office? That’s the question I am answering this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 175

Hello and welcome to episode 175 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 common question I am asked is how to manage a situation where the tools you prefer using are different from the tools your company uses. Another variation on this is where your company does not allow you to access the company tools outside of your company or your company’s devices. It’s a dilemma I know many face.

So, that is what I will be answering today.

Now before we get to that question, I want to give you a heads up that my Email Mastery programme has just been updated and is now available.

This course will teach you the concept of Inbox Zero 2.0 and is designed to help you to get your email under control so you are not being constantly distracted by it and any actionable email is dealt with quickly and effectively.

The methods and workflows taught in this course will change your whole relationship with email. It will remove the overwhelm, the thousands of emails sitting in your inbox and will give you a system that requires little effort to maintain.

This system works. It has helped thousands of people get back in control of their mail and given them time back to work on more important things.

And if you join the course this week, you will be able to buy it for just $39.99 as part of the early bird discount.

Full details of the course are in the show notes. If you want to take the stress and strain of managing hundreds of emails every day, this course is for you.

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 Stian and Steve. The question is: Do you have any tips and tricks for managing tasks and calendars when you have to use the software your company tells you to use and that cannot be used on personal devices. This makes managing to-dos and calendars very difficult as there are at least two of each.

Thank you, Stian and Steven for your questions. Hopefully, we’ve summarised your questions accurately.

This question is about being in a situation where your company has very high standards of security on company materials, software and devices, and this is understandable given news like the recent hack on Microsoft Exchange servers.

Now before we start, the first thing I would not advise is to fight the system. The tools and devices a company uses are chosen for a specific reason. A lot of research has generally gone into this by IT departments and while there often is some bias towards the IT department’s favoured operating systems, on the whole, they get it right.

If your company uses Microsoft’s suite of tools, then those are the tools you will need to use. Sure, that can be frustrating if you prefer third-party tools, but that is the way things are and unless you can demonstrate to your IT department that your solution is better than the existing arrangement, you are going to be fighting a losing battle.

So, instead of fighting the system, take a step back and look at what tools you are permitted to use.

Think of it like the scene in the film Apollo 13 where the engineers have to build a CO2 filter using only the materials on board the Lunar Module. Essentially fitting a square peg into a round hole.

I have always said the tools you use to work your system are less important than the system itself. A great system should work with a pen and notebook. If the system you are using to manage your work cannot work with pen and paper, then your system is too complex and the problem is there, not with your tools.

All you really need is a place to collect your inputs—your tasks, project notes and other important information. A way to organise those inputs so that what needs doing comes up when you need to see it and you need to be getting on with your work.

For collecting, organising and doing you do not need anything elaborate.

Now, if your company insists you use their Microsoft suite of tools you have an amazing set of tools that are getting better and better. It might be nice to be able to choose a task manager such as Todoist, Things 3 or OmniFocus, but those options are not on the table here. The only option you have is Microsoft ToDo or Planner.

Now, I am old enough to remember a time when to read and respond to my company’s email I had to be in the office at my work station. I could not access my company’s calendar or email system outside of office hours and that was fantastic! It gave me a natural barrier between work time and personal time.

Today, most people no longer have that luxury now they have access to their email and calendars 24/7 and that means work emails arriving at 11 pm on a Saturday night—because there’s always someone who thinks sending emails at 11 pm on a Saturday night is a good idea.

If you have read the original Getting Things Done book, published in 2001, that was written at a time when most people had to be in their office to be able to see what their projects were and the tasks they had to do. You could not do that from home on a Sunday evening. To do a weekly review, the book advised you to do it on a Friday afternoon before going home. That made sense. All your work-related projects and tasks were there. It was also a nice way to finish the week.

So, if you do have to use your company’s software, take a step back and review what tools you have. Apply the Apollo 13 mindset. For most people that would be a Microsoft Outlook account that gives you email and a calendar. You will also likely have access to OneNote for note-taking—which is one of the best note-taking apps out there today anyway, and Outlook Mail is excellent—even on a Mac now.

Think about it. Many salespeople are given a company car that enables them to visit clients and prospective clients. Most company car drivers do not have much choice about which car they can have. It’s usually a medium-range Ford, Hyundai or Toyota. I’m pretty sure if we could choose any company car we’d all be choosing Porsches, Range Rovers or Bentleys. That’s not the way the world works… Sadly.

The same goes for the tools our companies use. IT would be a nightmare for companies if every employee used different tools to get their work done. We saw this being played out a year ago when there were concerns about the security of Zoom. In the end, IT departments standardised which video conferencing tools employees were allowed to use. Some went with Zoom after they beefed up their security. Others went with Microsoft Teams.

So, if we can’t change the tools we have to use at work, what can we do to mitigate this? The first thing I would do is to find out all the various inboxes I have where work is coming in. There will be your email inbox, possibly your Slack or Microsoft Teams inbox, plus maybe a SaleForce inbox. Knowing where your work is coming from is the number one priority.

Next, create a start of day checklist that includes checking all these inboxes and task lists for new work coming in. Then copy and paste your tasks for the day into one list. Now that might be a third party task manager if you are allowed to do that, or just a simple list in your company approved notes app. This list will form part of your daily task list. All you need is a simple list of tasks you need to complete that day.

Another thing worth investigating is whether you can subscribe to your work calendar. I don’t usually advise people to put their personal events on their work calendar—who knows who has access to that. But you may find it is possible to subscribe to your work calendar and have that coming into your preferred calendar of choice be that a Google or Apple calendar.

In my experience, having two different calendar apps causes conflicts with your time. You will likely double book yourself one day. If you can’t subscribe to your work calendar, then try it the other way round and subscribe to your personal calendar—just make sure nobody else can see it.

The reality is there are no magic bullets that will miraculously allow your work and personal systems to converge. When you find yourself in a situation where your company essentially locks down their information, the only way you will find a solution is within your work permitted tools.

Should you run two systems? Well, it’s not impossible but it’s not ideal either. But maybe that is the only solution you have.

However, no matter how security sensitive your company is, they are not going to stop you from writing down things like “call Charles Grey about the proposal” or “work on Project X presentation” into a third party application. No nefarious corporate spy is likely to figure out what those simple tasks mean. You can use your phone to collect these tasks into your preferred app.

But that said, the simplest way to manage this is to just use the company-approved apps. You may not likely them, but if they show you a list of tasks you need to complete each day and you have a notes app where you can keep your notes and project support materials for your projects then you have a system. Maybe a system not using your preferred tools, but at least you have a system.

SO, the best advice I can give you if you are in a situation where your company is running multiple tools is to not fight your IT department. By all means, reach out to them to see if you can use your own apps, but you get a firm no, then look at what is available and set up your system within those tools.

Make it a routine start of day task to collect all your work tasks from the various inputs your company has into one consolidated list and work from that list each day.

One final tip I may suggest that has worked for some people in the past is to use a task manager that will email you a list of your tasks each morning. Todoist does this, for example, and you can set it so it emails you at 5 am in the morning. Then when you get to work, all you need do is print off that list, and use it as not only your task list for the day but also as a collection system. You can write down new tasks onto that paper and when you get home at the end of the enter the new tasks and check off the tasks you did. You can do that as part of your daily planning session.

I hope that has answered your question, Stian and Steve, Thank you for the question.

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

Monday Mar 15, 2021

Managing Life With Type 2 Diabetes

Monday Mar 15, 2021

This week on the Working With Podcast I am delighted to have Davis Knight of DIABETICSavvy talking about how a Type 2 Diabetes diagnosis in 2018 changed his life and helped him to become better organised and more productive.

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Monday Mar 08, 2021

How To Manage An Overwhelming List of Tasks

Monday Mar 08, 2021

This week, how do you turn a list of over 200 tasks into a manageable list of daily actionable tasks.

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Script

Episode 173

Hello and welcome to episode 173 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.

For those of you familiar with Getting Things Done, you will have come across the term “mind sweep”. A mind sweep is where you sit down with an empty piece of paper or blank screen and just empty your head of everything that’s on your mind. These could be things you need to do, ideas or pretty much anything on your mind. You get everything out of your head and into an external source.

Once you have done that you then go through your list and decide what the ‘next action’ for each item is

Done correctly, this list could soon build up in one very large list with hundreds of tasks and ideas on it. The great thing about a mind sweep is when finished you feel a huge sense of mental relief. Your brain is no longer trying to hold on to things and you realise that many of the things you were afraid of are not really that difficult to resolve.

However, one problem many people find is once you have this long list, how do you turn them into actionable tasks that you can complete and that’s what I will be looking into this week.

Now, before we get to the question, for those of you interested in my online courses, I have recently updated my Productivity Bundle. This bundle now includes Your Digital Life 3.0, The Time Sector System and Productivity Mastermind courses. This bundle gives you access to five courses because Your Digital Life includes my Email Mastery and Ultimate Goal Planning courses for free.

The bundle is priced at $175.00 which saves you over $100 if you were to buy all five courses separately.

So if you are ready to get yourself organised, build a system that works for you so you can live a more balanced life without having to worry about work and anything else you may be missing, then this bundle of courses will set you on your way.

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 Bret. Bret asks: Hi Carl, I have a long list of tasks from various mind-sweeps that I am having difficulty managing. How best can I structure this list so that (a) I don't miss scheduling anything important for the next 1-5 days and (b) I don't have to look through a list of 300 plus items every couple of days when making my most important tasks list?

Hi Bret, thank you for your question.

Firstly, it’s great that you have done a mind sweep, these are great ways to get everything on your mind off your mind. Doing a mind sweep does help to free up some cognitive space so you can relax and be more creative.

That said, mind sweeps can also create their own problems. Done correctly, a mind sweep will produce a lot of tasks and you need somewhere to put these tasks. Most people tend to put these into their task manager’s inbox and then process them through their various projects or time sectors. The problem here is that this over inflates your task manager developing overwhelm and a lot of redundant tasks that very quickly disappear into your system never to be seen again or pop up again six months later and you cannot remember why you ever put them into your system in the first place.

The first thing we need to recognise is we cannot do everything all at once. There’s a limited number of hours we have each day and each week. Whatever we put on our master task list needs time allocating to it. You will also find that mind sweeps produce a lot of ‘would like to do one-day’ tasks that really should not be in your task manager.

Would like to do one day tasks should go into your notes app on a note called “would like to do one day” or if you are following GTD, a “someday / maybe” list. You really do not want these low priority tasks on your task manager.

One of the ways to keep a task manager relevant and effective is to keep it clean and tight. By that I mean you only have clearly defined tasks in there that you know must be done at some point. You do not want your ‘would like to do if the circumstances are right’ tasks in there because these are not clearly defined. “Would like to do someday” is not a clear definition. I would like to see the films North by North West and Goldfinger in a cinema on a big screen one day, but how and when I have no idea so these are not clearly defined. Instead, they would be better put on a bucket or wish list.

Another type of task you want to be careful of is the “clean out the garage” type task. This type of task is deceptive because on the surface “clean out the garage” sounds defined. You have a garage, there’s a lot of stuff in there that needs cleaning up or throwing out and you want to do it.

The trouble with this type of task is not the what, but the when and how. If your garage needs cleaning out it likely means you have a lot of stuff that a few garbage sacks will not do. You probably need to hire a skip or truck to take what you throw away to the tip. It’s also unlikely to be a task that will take you a few hours. You likely have to dedicate a few days to do it and when that happens there are always other tasks that will become more ‘urgent’ on the day you decide to start doing it.

With this type of task, unless you are ready to set a date for doing it, you are best keeping it well away from your task manager until you are ready to make that decision.

How many times I’ve seen “clean out the garage” on someone’s list and discover that task has been on a list for over a year is incredible. Seriously, keep it off your task list until you are willing to block out two to three days on your calendar for completing this task.

So how do you make sure those important tasks get on to your task list?

This is why doing a weekly planning session is crucial if you want to be on top of your life. The weekly planning session is about making a decision about what is important enough to get onto your list of tasks for the week. And I really do mean that. The question to ask is: What is important enough to get onto my list for the week?

Your time is valuable—very valuable and you want to be selective about what gets on your task list. Throwing random unimportant tasks onto your task list for the week is not a good strategy. You start with your most important tasks for the week. These are the foundation for your week. I like to call these my objectives for the week. Once these are on if I feel there is space for some less important tasks I will put the next level tasks on my list.

By their very nature, less important tasks are not urgent, they are those nice to be able to do tasks, so it’s not the end of the world if you cannot get to them.

Once you have your objectives on your list for the week, you no longer need to be going back to a huge list of tasks. You’ve already made the decision on what is important this week and that’s where you need to be focused.

You see the problem you will have if you keep going back into a master task list every few days is you will lose focus on what’s important that week. That list will become a distraction and you will be tempted to keep adding to your tasks for the week. Remember, if you have done a weekly planning session you have already decided what’s important for the week. You don’t want to be allowing yourself to be distracted by more tasks. You can review your master list in your next weekly planning session and decide then what you want to work on next.

Remember, no week will be static. Once the week gets underway you will be collecting more tasks some of which will be urgent and need attention now. So while you may feel there is room for more tasks, the reality is there won’t be. The less is more principle applies when you do your weekly planning session. The less you put on your task list for the week the more you will get out of the week. You will be more focused on what you have decided to do for the week and you will have the time to do your tasks to the best of your abilities.

It also means you will be less stressed and overwhelmed because you will know that what you have on your list is important, and doable. And that makes your list more meaningful and inspiring.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to be doing a weekly planning session every week. It’s very hard to predict what you will be doing much further out than a week. Meetings you will have in ten days time are likely not have been scheduled yet. You could get a mind-numbing toothache and need to visit the dentist, or a project on track today could turn south in six days time.

Your weekly planning session is where you can review your mind sweep list select important tasks to add to your task list for the week and then only focus on those tasks over the next seven days. You will get a lot more done that way and you will stay much more focused.

I hope that has helped, Bret. Thank you for your question.

And thank you to you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you want answering, all you need do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer your question.

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

Monday Mar 01, 2021

How To Bring Balance Into Your Life

Monday Mar 01, 2021

Podcast 172

This week, I have a question about creating balance in your life, something I have been writing quite a lot about this week.

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Links:

The 2021 Task Management & Time blocking Summit

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