Your Time, Your Way

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

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

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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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

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:

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:

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 185

Hello and welcome to episode 185 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.

Many of you listening to this podcast, I am sure, are on a journey to discover the best time management and productivity system. Well, the truth is it’s already been developed. It’s used by the most incredibly productive people every day and it is possibly the simplest system you will ever use.

You don’t need any special software or devices. You do not need a PhD and you could start using it today.

And that is what I am going to tell you about today. How you can create it, use it and become unbelievably more productive than you are today.

But first… Right now I have a special offer on my time management and productivity courses. You can buy The Time Sector course, Your Digital Life 3.0 AND Productivity Masterclass courses for just $175.00. If you buy this bundle of courses this week, you will also get the Time And Life Mastery course as a free gift. Once this week ends, you will no longer qualify for the free gift.

So, if you want what I consider to be, the Ultimate Productivity bundle of courses including the Time And Life Mastery course, then you need to act now. This offer will be ending at the end of this week (that’s 13 June)

I know you won’t be disappointed and I know these courses are all you need to develop your own system—a system that works for you.

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

This week’s question comes from Mike. Mike asks, Hi Carl, I know there are a lot of productivity and time management techniques and systems, but is there one that is better than all the others that most people don’t know about?

Hi Mike, thank you for your intriguing question.

You are right there are a lot of time management and productivity systems around. I’ve tried most of them as well over the years. I say your question is “intriguing” because this is something I’ve never really understood about people and that is why so many want the most complex systems. Systems that take forever to manage and update every day and apps that demand constant and never-ending upkeep.

You see the worst productivity systems are those that take you away from doing your work. I suppose if you think about it that’s logical. The more time you spend updating, organising and playing around with a system, the less time you have for work.

Now, when I was thinking about my answer to you, Mike, I considered naming the worst culprits for this but I decided that wouldn’t help and it would likely put a lot of people on the defensive. If I say something and you disagree with me, you will feel you must defend your choices and once you are defensive, I cannot help you.

So, before we go any further, I want to ask you to open your mind. You see, when I tell you what the best productivity system for all of us is, I want you to have an open mind. If you go all defensive, you will not learn anything. You will defend your choices and that misses the point. We all make bad choices and we all think we are different and we need a uniquely different system to everyone else. The thing is we are not all different—we all get twenty-four hours—and the only thing we can do is decide what we need to do in those twenty-four hours.

It’s those decisions where people go wrong. They choose the wrong activities. The most productive people you and I know make better decisions. That’s it.

So, what is the best productivity system?

It’s the Ivy Lee Method. Now, many of you may already have heard of the Ivy Lee method, but to give you a quick summary of how it was made famous. A gentleman in 1918, by the name of Ivy Lee, was asked by The Chairman of Bethlehem Steel, Charles Schwab, to come up with a method to increase the productivity performance of his executive team.

Ivy Lee came up with a six-step process. That process is:

Decide what you want. Your goals and life purpose.
At the end of each day, take ten minutes to write out the six most important tasks you must complete the next day.
Prioritise your six tasks by importance
When you start the next day, begin at the top of your list and work you way down. Don’t move on to the next task until you have completed the previous one.
If you do not manage to finish your six tasks, move any unfinished tasks to the next day.
Repeat the process.

Now, the part people familiar with this method miss is the first step. You see, you need to know what your goals and purpose are. Without that, your choice of six tasks each day will not necessarily move your goals and objectives forward and you will gravitate to doing work for other people and not necessarily for yourself.

Now, I don’t mean for you to be selfish here. What this means is answering the question: what is it that you want? Now it could be you want to be promoted to an executive position. You may want to start your own business or you may want to be financially independent by the time you reach fifty.

You need to be very clear about these goals.

Once you are clear on your goals, you can begin using this process.

Now, I’ve developed a number of resources to help you here. Probably the best one is my FREE Areas of Focus Workbook that takes you through the process of developing your very own areas of focus. These are the things that are important to you. Once you know these and have developed a goal around each one, you are then ready to begin using the Ivy Lee method.

So, why only six tasks?

One of our biggest problems is we are trying to do far too much each day. The reality is, you will always have far more to do than time available each day. That’s just a given. So, what you need to do is prioritise. That’s why the Ivy Lee Method is so effective. To use the method, you must relegate a lot of tasks that would normally be demanding your attention and you have to get ruthless about where you spend your limited time each day.

Most people are not ruthless enough. Now, this is caused, in part, because we are natural people pleasers—we hate saying “no” to people and it’s in part because of FOMO—the Fear Of Missing Out—we worry that if we say “no” to something we are closing the door on an opportunity. The trouble is, we cannot and never will be able to take every opportunity that comes our way. If we are going to say yes to an opportunity, we will have to say “no” to a lot of other opportunities.

In many ways, you have to trust your instincts. In my experience, it’s your instincts that will tell you whether an opportunity is right for you or not.

I’ve studied people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates for years and I’ve also studied the working habits of historical figures such as Winston Churchill, Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford and all these people used the Ivy Lee method in some form or another.

They all know or knew where their priorities are or were and they did not allow themselves to be distracted by anything else. In a sense, they took this method to the extreme, but then, all these people got extreme results.

Now you could continue down the same road you’ve been following, but before you do, ask yourself if you are getting the results you want.

You see, you may indeed have the best-looking app, you may have well-organised notes or as is fashionably called today PKM system (that’s personal knowledge management system) but that does not mean you are getting the results you want.

The results you want link straight back to the first step in the Ivy Lee Method. What do you want? If what you want is a cool set of productivity apps that gives you hours of entertainment organising and playing with the settings, then fantastic! But I suspect that’s not really what you want—well, I hope not.

Most people want to get their projects completed on time without any fuss. They want to be on top of their work including their email and they want to enjoy a balanced personal and work life. This life is possible to achieve. But you will need to make the right kind of choices and those choices begin with…

What needs to be done today?

Now, for those of you who have followed me for a while now, you know I advocate the 2+8 Prioritisation System. It’s really what Ivy Lee set out with his method but with a slightly larger number of tasks.

With the 2+8 Method, you decide what two things must be done today and if you don’t do anything else all day, those two things will be done—even if you have to pull an all-nighter (although let’s hope that does not happen too often) The remaining eight tasks are the next most important tasks and you will do as many of those as you can. If you don’t complete them all, no problem, you just reschedule the remaining ones and repeat the process for the next day.

Ultimately, what both Ivy Lee’s method and the 2+8 Prioritisation is about is prioritising your work. Understanding the difference between tasks that do get things done and tasks that pretend to get things done but don’t do much more than shuffle digital paper, and focusing all your time and attention to bigger, important work.

That’s how all the super-successful people operate. They’ve been doing it for centuries. You can even trace this back to the thirteenth century and William of Ockham who popularised Ockham’s Razor—where the simple answer is usually always the best one.

Ivy Lee’s Method is simple, anyone can use it and you do not need elaborate organisational systems or apps to use it. A simple piece of paper left on your desk would suffice—that’s how Bethlehem Steel’s executives used it back in 1918.

Today, we have a lot of incredibly powerful applications that can do much of the hard work for us, but we need to be careful what we choose to use. We also must understand that no matter how much we would like to have a few extra hours each day you are never going to get them. Time is the part of this equation you are not going to change. Time is fixed. Time is also your most valuable asset and you cannot afford to be wasting it on low priority tasks that move you nowhere.

The only variable you do have is your activity and that’s the variable where your ability to choose how you spend your time needs clear intentions.

So, the answer to your question, Mike, is yes there is a best system. It beats all other systems and works 100% of the time. The only reason most people are not using it, is the same reason most people never learn about, or use, the Law of Attraction: It’s simple and we humans love complexity. We just cannot bring ourselves to accept that something so simple could have such a profound, positive effect on our lives.

So while 97% of the world’s population will continue to complain about how much work they have to do and that they never have time to finish all the things they want to do, the remaining 3% will continue to use Ivy Lee’s Method and achieve amazing things.

It’s your choice. Become ruthless about what you say yes to and have a clear set of goals and plans to achieve what you want out of life, or continue down the same path you are on right now with no clear plan or purpose and a personal productivity system that would challenge the abilities of even the smartest NASA scientists.

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

Monday May 31, 2021

What You Need To Do To Make Your Productivity System Stick

Monday May 31, 2021

27 May 2021 | Podcast 184

This week, I’m answering a question about how to get started with and, more importantly, maintain a productivity system.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 184

Hello and welcome to episode 184 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 type of question I get asked is one around building and maintaining a productivity and time management system. It’s not so much about how to do it—after all, there are thousands of books and videos on this subject—it’s more about taking what you have learned by reading those books and watching those videos and turning that knowledge into a functioning system that works for you.

Now, before we get to the question, I would like to point out that June—which starts tomorrow (or Tuesday depending on when you listening to this podcast) is a 30-day month. Another golden opportunity for you to establish a habit. So, I thought I would suggest something.

In the book, Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill tells us to take an idea (or a goal) that we want to accomplish, and begin and end every day imagining you have completed it successfully for thirty days.

Now the trick to doing this is to write down your idea or goal onto a piece of paper, or in your digital notes app, and read it out loud at the start and end of your day. As you read out your goal, imagine you have successfully accomplished it and really feel the emotions you experience by completing it.

The purpose of doing this is to engage your subconscious mind. That is the part of your mind that uses your knowledge and experience to come up with solutions to problems and gives you steps to take to accomplish goals and solve problems.

Remove all negative thoughts, only focus on the positives—the feelings you have when you accomplish your goal or successfully develop your idea. If a negative thought comes up, such as; I can’t do that, or that’s impossible, remove it. Replace it with a positive thought.

At the end of June, you will have programmed your brain to seek ways of making whatever your dream, goal or idea happen. Try it. What have you to lose?

Now, back to 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 Alan. Alan asks: Hi Carl, for years I have been reading books and articles about productivity and how to become better at managing my time. I’ve taken your courses, and I’ve even been on a Getting Things Done Fundamentals course. Yet, despite all these courses, books and articles, I just cannot make a system work for me. I can do it for a few weeks, but I soon find myself falling back on bad habits. Do you know how to make one of these systems stick?

Hi Alan. Thank you for the question.

Firstly, I should tell you that you are not alone with this problem. I come across this a lot in my coaching programme and I get many comments on my YouTube videos about it.

With anything like creating and using a system, you need to start small. Radically changing the way you do something will inevitably result in falling back into old ways. It’s just the way the human mind works. We love routine and we evolved habit building to help us achieve that.

You see, there are so many distractions going on in our world—they’ve always been there. It started out on the savannah thousands of years ago when we needed to stay alert to the dangers that were all around us. If we did not have a way of automatically putting one foot in front of another or breathing in and out without thinking, for instance, our brain would soon be overloaded with stuff. That’s why we developed habits.

Habits are formed in our subconscious mind and that’s the part of the mind that does not know the difference between doing something that is good for us and doing something bad. It’s amoral and completely objective. What you feed it will be taken in and returned to you in whatever form it is acquired. That could be a habit or it could be, as I mentioned a few moments ago, a solution to a problem you are experiencing.

Understanding this helps us to take steps to develop the right habits and strategies, but it also means we have to do things in small steps and allow enough time for them to grow.

So, becoming more productive, and as a consequence better at managing our activities in the time we have each day, means we need to build the right habits in the right sequence.

So, first up, build a morning routine. Now, this does not have to be elaborate or take too long. If you give yourself anywhere between twenty and thirty minutes to start with, for a series of positive, high impact activities that you consistently begin your day with you will be on the right track.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you always begin your day by visiting the bathroom and then making a cup of coffee, those are the first activities to add to your morning routine. Start with something you already automatically do.

Now, the next steps need to be something new. For instance, you could spend two to three minutes doing some stretches. Begin with your neck, then shoulders, and move on down your body. Slowly stretch out your limbs one by one.

Once you have done your stretches, take your coffee to a quiet table, preferably near a window, and spend ten minutes writing in a journal. Your journal could be digital or paper, it doesn’t matter, just write out your plan for the day and a few thoughts you may have in your mind in that moment. Be strict about the time. Only do this for ten minutes.

Finish with looking at your tasks and your appointments for the day and then start your day.

In total, that routine should not take you longer than twenty minutes.

Now, the key to making this work is you commit to doing that for twenty minutes every morning for at least 30 days. Do not add anything nor take anything away. Just start your mornings every day like this for thirty days.

To ensure this happens, do it on weekends as well as weekdays and you must make sure you have time for it every morning. So this means if you have to wake up early for a Zoom call, you wake up with sufficient time so you can do your twenty minutes before the call.

Now, if you fail, and skip a morning, you must go back and start again. You want to string together a minimum of thirty days doing the same thing every day. You cannot modify it or change it in any way. After thirty days, you can change it slightly, but this first step must be consistent.

Now, moving to your productivity system and embedding this. If you have taken the COD course, you will know the three basic components of all great productivity systems. Collect everything, spend a little time organising what you collected and dedicate the largest part of your day doing the work you set yourself.

The key habit you need to develop is collecting. If you are not collecting everything meaningful that comes your way, it won’t matter how elaborate or sophisticated the rest of your system is, you won’t trust it so you won’t use it. Develop the habit of collecting first.

To do that, take a look at how you collect your tasks right now. Do you do it consistently? If not, why not? You need that answer because you will need to change the way you collect so you are consistent.

This often means you need to review how you collect on your phone. This is the one tool you are likely to have with you everywhere you go so this will be your primary collection tool. Make sure that you have whatever task manager you use set up in such a way that collecting something is quick and easy and there are no barriers.

Since a lot of us are now working from home, you may find you need to do this with your computer too. I noticed over the last year or so, my primary collection tool has become my computer so I have a keyboard shortcut set up to add tasks quickly from my computer.

Again, give yourself thirty days to embed this habit. If you feel uncomfortable pulling your phone out when you are with people to add a task, get over that discomfort. Practice until it becomes automatic.

Now for the end of the day. This is another part to turn into a habit and I have discovered is also the most difficult to build. We are usually tired at the end of the day and when we are tired, we are less mindful about what we are doing and more prone to distractions. Again, developing a habit will help you. Just like brushing your teeth and washing your face before getting into bed, which you habitually do, you want to be spending around ten minutes reviewing your task list and calendar for tomorrow. Ideally, you will flag your most important tasks for the day while you do this.

Now, as you brush your teeth and wash your face, you can connect your ten minutes reviewing your task list and calendar to these activities to create a “habit stack” as James Clear would call it.

And as with your morning routines, do this every day for at least thirty days without ‘breaking the chain’. It is possible to develop this habit at the same time as you develop your morning routine, but if you find you struggle, then just focus on getting your start of the day right first.

For the rest of your work, you must avoid over-complicating things. Complexity is the death knell of any productivity system. It might look cool and pleasing to see a load of beautifully organised project folders with sub-folders breaking down each step of the project. But these kinds of structures are a nightmare to maintain, take far too long to organise and become holes where tasks go to die never to see the light of day again.

The reality is you only need to know what you must do today. You do not need to know anything else. Tomorrow is not here yet, and next week is too far away and there’s so much that will change that if you are trying to plan out beyond a week, you’ll be wasting your time because everything will change before you get to next week.

Here are a few observations that will help to simplify your system:

Stop sending emails to your task manager. Doing that creates duplication. People like Earl Nightingale (if you’ve never heard of him look him up), Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein, never added “reply to X’s letter” into a task list. They allocated time each day to reply to their mail. Learn from these incredibly productive people.

Know what your “must-dos” are each day and spend the majority of your time focused on completing those. Relegate your “should dos” and “would like to dos” to the end of the day. Most of these you will find sort themselves out anyway.

Be clear about what it is you want to accomplish each day. If you are not starting the day with a clear plan you will fail to get anything meaningful done.

Keep your task manager as clean and tight as possible. Be very strict about what goes on there. When you fill your task manager with trivial things, it soon becomes bloated and makes doing your planning sessions a lot longer than it needs to be.

What you want to be thinking is in terms of sessions of work. This is where you have time for doing your errands, chores, communications and project work. You may need to keep this flexible, and that’s okay—all you do is schedule this time when you do your daily planning session.

Look, massively successful people from the likes of JD Rockefeller and Henry Ford right up to Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson, focus their attention on the important things and never allow themselves to get lost in reorganising their lists or wasting time searching for the best productivity systems. We know what the best productivity system is. Ivy Lee demonstrated this to Charles Schwab over a hundred years ago.

Select your six most important tasks for the day, the day before and when you start your day, begin from the top and focus all your attention on completing the first task. When you complete it, move on to the next one and so on. This system still works today and it allows sufficient flexibility to deal with emergencies and client requests promptly and effectively so you can quickly get back to completing your list.

If you don’t manage to clear your list, roll over the tasks you did not complete to your list of six the next day.

This is essentially what the Time Sector System is built on. Focusing your attention on the most important tasks for the day and if you cannot complete them, roll them forward to another day in the week. All that really matters is your most important work for the day and making sure you do that.

Every successful person you meet will use a form of this system today. Tony Robbins and Sir Richard Branson use it, as did Jim Rohn, Earl Nightingale and Andrew Carnegie in their day. If it’s good enough for these people, then it’s good enough for you.

Hopefully, that helps, Alan. Thank you for your wonderful question. You probably can tell I’m quite passionate about this subject.

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

Monday May 24, 2021

What is Personal productivity All About?

Monday May 24, 2021

This week, We are looking at productivity and time management and how you can improve both areas.

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Episode 183

Hello and welcome to episode 183 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 talk a lot about productivity and time management on this podcast and yet I don’t think I have ever answered a question about the actual mechanics of improving both. So this week, that’s what I am going to do.

Before we get into the question, I would like to draw your attention to my Ultimate productivity Bundle. I put this together because I have a lot of requests for discounts on multiple purchases. So, I have done just that.

You can now buy my three most popular courses: The Time Sector System course, Your Digital Life 3.0 and Productivity Masterclass PLUS get Time And Life Mastery thrown in for FREE. You save yourself over $100 and all it will cost you is $175.00.

This is the best value bundle I have put together and will change your whole approach to productivity and managing your workload.

Full details of the bundle 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 Shelly. Shelly asks, hi Carl. I hear a lot about how we should be improving our time management and productivity, but I don’t really understand what all this is about. To me, productivity is something you hear about in factories not in an office. Could you explain what the fundamentals of all this is about and, more importantly, why I should care?

Hi Shelly, Thank you for your question and don’t worry, I am sure a lot of people feel the same way you do.

Let’s start with the easy one. Time Management. The truth is you cannot manage time. Time is fixed. We all get the same amount of time each day and there is nothing we can do to change that. The only thing you can manage is what you do in the time you have.

However, that does give us something to work with. If we work eight hours a day and we have an amount of work to do all we need to do is start at the top and work our way down. I know this sounds incredibly simplistic, but it works.

Now, it was much easier to do this in our paper-based days. When we had letters instead of email and physical file folders instead of digital folders on a computer screen. In those dim distant days, we could see our work. Today, a lot of our work is not easily seen.

However, that does not mean we cannot manage it. Today, we need to make our work more overt. To do that all you need is set yourself up with a to-do list. This can be digital or paper-based. It does not really matter, but what does matter is you collect everything you have to do on to this to-do list.

Now, how do you make this work so you are better at managing your activities in the time given?

There are a few ways to do this and it really depends on the kind of work you do. However, the most important part of this is to schedule some time on your calendar for doing your work. This is the part most people miss.

I know a lot of people are great at collecting all their work into their to-do list but are terrible at making sure they have enough time to do the work.

Let me give you an example. Most people get a lot of emails and the emails that require replies can take up as much as two hours a day. If this happens to you, how do you expect to reply to your emails if you don’t have any time blocked on your calendar for doing it?

Time does not magically appear. You have to allocate time for these activities.

I need about an hour each day to reply to my emails, so I have a one hour time block each day for replying to my emails and any other messages. There’s no way I would be able to stay on top of my email if I didn’t have that time each day.

The next part to your question comes into play now, Shelly—productivity.

What is productivity, well first we need to change this a little and call it “personal productivity”. Personal productivity is completing meaningful project or goal work to the standard you expect and on time.

Now we do not want to be confusing personal productivity with busy work. Busy work is the meaningless work we do. Rearranging your to-do list because you are ignoring tasks and telling yourself if you could just see these tasks on a different list you would do them. No, you won’t. Stop fooling yourself.

Or meetings you attend that do nothing to improve your projects or move anything forward. Often these meetings are just meetings to exercise your managers’ egos. Stop attending these meetings. Find excuses and do something meaningful instead.

If you allocate time for doing your work, and you do it, you will find you get more work done and that means you become more productive.

Every successful person you know does this. From Isaac Newton, who incidentally wrote, Principia Mathematica while in lockdown during the plague in the 18th century, to Elon Musk today. They schedule a time to work on their meaningful projects.

There’s no secret here and there is nothing complicated about it. These people were and are ruthless with their time. They understand the value of each minute of the day and they will not allow anything or anyone to disturb them when they are working on their projects or goals.

Now, this does not mean you block out the whole day and ignore all demands on your time. That would be impossible. Most of you will have bosses, colleagues and clients. But it does mean you allocate two to three hours a day for doing your work undisturbed and if you try this, rather than trying to find excuses why you are so different to everyone else (you’re not) you will find it a lot easier than you think.

So if you really want to improve your overall productivity, you need to allocate time for the work you have to do. It’s no good “hoping” you will have time, hoping is not a sustainable strategy. Hoping you will have time is a one way street to burnout, stress and overwhelm.

So, what else can you do that will help you get more out of your time and be more productive.

Two areas most people ignore is sleep and health. If you are not getting enough sleep and you are not moving or doing any kind of exercise, you are not going to be very productive. You will feel lethargic, your mood will be all over the place and your energy levels will be at rock bottom. Not the best way to be if you want to improve your overall productivity.

Getting enough sleep and exercise requires time, and as with getting your work done, you need to make sure you have this scheduled. Now it might be asking too much to be scheduling your sleep, but you should have a sleep routine. It could be you go to bed at 11 PM and wake up at 6:30 AM. If that is what you decide, then you need to stick to that routine.

Likewise, for exercise, schedule it. If you don’t, you will run out of time and not do it.

Your sleep and health need to be a part of your life. It is just something you do. Reading about the routines of great people in history, you will discover that they fixed their routines for sleep and exercise. Charles Darwin, for instance, woke up at 8 AM every morning and went out for an hour’s walk before settling down to a period of focused work.

Even Winston Churchill, not known for his physical fitness, would do his work in the morning, have a long lunch but would then go outside and do something manual such as building a wall or some gardening and taking a ninety-minute nap before dinner.

The right amount of sleep and exercise has always been a fundamental part of what makes incredibly productive people productive.

It’s far too easy to forget about our personal lives, but your personal life is more important than your professional life.

I’ve known people dedicate twenty plus years to a single company. Then one day the company decides to restructure—or gets into financial difficulties and these people have gone. Some may get what we call a golden handshake, but any money you get as redundancy or compensation will not last long. No matter how loyal you are to your company, that loyalty will never be returned—not in today’s world.

Now, this is not the companies fault. It’s our fault. My parent's generation, on the whole, stayed with one company for all their working lives. In return, these companies guaranteed a job for life. Today, we—the employees—jump from one company to another seeking bigger salaries and more time off. So, of course, companies have changed. No longer do they expect an employee to stay with them for their whole working lives so they are less willing to invest in you.

So another part of your day needs to be spent on your own personal development. Here you work on your personal skills. So many people get left behind while the world moves on and this can be avoided if you just give yourself thirty minutes or so to develop your skills each day. That could be reading, taking an online course or even watching a YouTube video.

Netflix or Facebook might be attractive, but neither of these will save your career or keep you fit and healthy. Time spent in front of the TV is time you are not working on yourself. Always remember that. Time is fixed, what you do with your time is your choice. Choose wisely.

So, if you want to improve your productivity and time management, become more strategic about how you use your time. Time is fixed. We cannot change that, but we can decide what we do with our allocated time each day. If you choose to use your time gossiping with your co-workers, that’s a choice you made. But you cannot then later complain how you don’t have time to do your work. You do have time. Do your work first, then if you have time left, by all means, gossip.

And don’t allow yourself to fall into the “hope to find time” trap. You will never find more time. It does not exist. If something needs doing allocate time for doing it. Whether that is dealing with your email and Slack messages, calling clients or reading important documents. If you must do it, then allocate time for it.

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

Monday May 17, 2021

How To Improve Your Team's Productivity

Monday May 17, 2021

10 May 2021 - Podcast 182

This week, how can you improve the productivity of your team or company? That’s the question I am answering this week.

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Script

Episode 182

Hello and welcome to episode 182 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 podcast and many others tend to focus on the individual rather than the group and this is likely because changing an individual’s habits can be easier than trying to change a group’s habits. But that does not mean changing the way a group operates is impossible. With leadership and a commitment from the group as a whole, significant positive changes can be made and very quickly.

So that is what I shall be addressing this week.

Now, before we dive into the answer, I’d like to urge you to download a copy of my free Areas of Focus workbook. The cornerstone of all effective time management and productivity systems is knowing what is important to you. If you do not know what is important to you, you will soon find yourself serving the interests of other people and their interests are never going to be fulfilling to you.

Once you know what is important, you can then build these areas of your life into your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks ensuring that you are bringing balance into your life. Time spent on your relationships and family, your career, your health, wealth, experiences and overall purpose are a lot more important than most people realise. That balance gives you the sense of freedom and wellbeing that so many people lack in their lives today.

The download is free and I will not be asking you for your email address or any personal information. I just want you to discover what is important to you so you can build your life around what you want, and not what other people want.

So if you have not done so already, head over to my downloads page on my website—carlpullein.com and start working your way through it.

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 Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, I manage a team of sixteen people and we are all struggling to stay on top of the work handed down to us from head office. There’s a mixture of customer support, admin tasks and sales and it is just piling up and we don’t seem to be getting anywhere close to clearing our backlog. Do you have any productivity tips for teams that might help?

Hi Mark, thank you for your question and for reminding me that productivity is not only about the individual, but also about the team.

To answer your question directly, yes there are and there are quite a lot of them.

First up we need to deal with communication. How does your team communicate with each other? With the seismic changes in the way we work that has happened over the last year, one of the key areas that have a profound impact on a team’s productivity is in the way the team communicates.

One of the issues I’ve come across numerous times is the number of channels a team can communicate. There is the phone, email and instant messaging of course, but over the last twelve months, there have been additional channels added. Slack, Microsoft Teams and even messaging within project management software such as Salesforce and Trello.

That’s a lot of communication channels a team member needs to navigate and with so many channels to check there is going to be a time cost and a risk of something important being missed.

A leader of a team needs to designate one channel for team communication. Ideally, this channel should be a purpose-built channel. By that I mean, if you are using an app like Trello or Google Docs, while they do have a way to add comments and messages to documents or tasks, these tools were not designed to be a complete solution for communicating.

Instead, you would be better served if you designated one purpose-built communication tool for all your team’s communications. Apps like Microsoft Teams, Twist or Slack have been developed for teams to work together and they have the added benefit for team leaders to see what’s going on without the need to be constantly interrupting team members asking for updates.

Within these apps, you can create various channels, so in your case, Mark, you could have a separate channel for customer support, sales and admin as well as any other area your team is responsible for.

This way you and your team can quickly see what’s going on, ask questions and assign responsibility for the different tasks that can be involved.

With these apps, Teams, Twist and Slack, you can add on your favourite task manager as an extension. For instance, if you use Todoist, you can get the Todoist add on for Teams and Slack so any task that is assigned to you, you can quickly add it to your own to-do list. And as Twist is made by the people who develop Todoist, their integration is excellent.

Next up is ownership. One reason why so many tasks and issues within a team fall between the cracks—so to speak—is because no one has taken ownership of the problem.

While modern technology does help us to get more work done more effectively, it only works if the people using the technology take responsibility for what goes in it. So, if there is a customer with a problem, then someone in your team needs to take responsibility for that customer.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a customer support team that has no such responsibility, so each time I communicate with the team I get a different person who is using the same script as the one before. Now not only does support management by computer input damage the relationship with the customer (we are humans we like to work with other humans and not machines) it also leaves your customer support team feeling unfulfilled because they get no sense of accomplishment if all they are doing is picking up where someone else left off and then passing the problem on to the next person in the shift.

Give someone responsibility for each task—whether that is a customer support issue, a sales lead or some admin task that needs doing for head office. That way there is ownership and accountability and your team will be much better engaged in the process and their work.

Next up is meetings. Meetings are the antipathy of productivity because while you are holding a meeting nothing is getting done. Sure, decisions may be made, but more often than not, a team with good leadership will always have excellent decision-making processes anyway.

And while decisions are being made, you will often find no one is willing to take responsibility to see that the decision is carried through.

Now, while I do accept a limited number of meetings are unavoidable, they should be kept to a minimum. Each decision made in a meeting must be given a DRI—a Designated Responsible Individual to see through the decision and make sure whatever needs to happen happens within the allotted time. That way you have accountability and your team are empowered to make sure the work gets done.

And while on the subject of meetings, meetings should be limited to thirty minutes. There are two very good reasons for this too.

If you hold thirty-minute meetings these things will happen immediately. First, people will always arrive on time. One of the reasons you get people joining meetings a few minutes late is because with a typical hour-long meeting there is an expectation of small talk at the beginning. So there’s less sense of importance for the first five or ten minutes.

In thirty minute meetings, people sense that the meeting will start on time and get straight to the point.

Secondly, because the time is limited, people get to the point much faster. There’s little digression, and things stay on point.

You should always have an agenda and make sure people get that agenda at least 24 hours before the meeting so they have time to prepare. And if, as the leader, you discover someone in your team did not prepare, call them out for their lack of preparation. You will only need to do this a few times before your team soon learn they must prepare.

Whenever I talk with individuals about their time management troubles, the most common reason for backlog and overwhelm is not the volume of work they have but the number of meetings they are expected to attend. So reducing the number of meetings you hold just makes sense from a productivity point of view

If you want to improve your team’s productivity make all meetings voluntary. When you do this two things will happen.

Firstly, you give greater flexibility to your team to make judgments on whether they can or should attend a meeting. Trust that your team know whether they could contribute something significant to the meeting or not. If they feel they cannot, then allow them the flexibility to decline the meeting invitation.

Secondly, and more importantly, you make the meeting organiser accountable for the content of the meeting. If a meeting organiser frequently runs disorganised and ineffective meetings, people will stop attending their meetings. This will put pressure on them to improve the way they hold their meetings or better yet, stop holding meetings.

This is similar to me writing a blog post on a specific topic and find I don’t get any readers. That tells me the topic has no interest and I need to change the topic or make the writing more compelling. I am forced to improve either way. The same happens once you make all meetings voluntary. The quality of your meetings will improve significantly.

Finally, implement the Time Sector System. While I create the Time Sector System for individuals, it works brilliantly for small teams. Our work and priorities are moving incredibly fast these days. What might be a priority today could easily become obsolescent next week. The idea behind the Time Sector System is you focus on the work that needs to be done this week.

Now what I am about to say will seem counter to what I said about meetings, but there are two meetings a leader should have each week. The first meeting is held on a Monday where the team decides what needs to be accomplished this week. When you get agreement on this by the team and everyone is clear about what must happen to accomplish those goals and what their tasks are that will help accomplish those goals your team will be hyper-focused on getting their important tasks completed.

The second meeting is held on a Friday, where your team report on their progress and discuss any issues or delays and what needs to be carried forward to the following week.

The purpose here is to be clear about the work that needs to be completed that week. New inputs can be discussed in either meeting and decisions made about when these tasks should be done—this week, next week, this month, next month or longer term.

Using this method, the team leader needs to have a place where the team’s overall objectives for the quarter and the year are and what needs to be done and when in order to achieve these. To ensure all team members know what the overall purpose and objectives are, a shared Kanban board can help. Applications such as Trello, Asana or Meistertask are all great tools that can do this job well and responsibility for each project can be assigned to team members.

Again, as with tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack or Twist, the team leader can see instantly where a project is and what still needs to be done so there is less following up, and a lot more doing going on.

So there you go, Mark, those are the ways a team can dramatically improve its overall productivity. It begins with accountability and ownership. If nobody owns the task and is not directly responsible for it, then backlogs will develop.

If communication channels are all over the place, things will inevitably get missed, so make sure you and your team agree on one single communication channel.

And restrict the number of meetings and trust that your team know what they are doing and leave them to get on with doing it. Work gets done when people have the time and space to do the work, not when they are in and out of meetings all day satisfying a manager’s need to micro-manage.

I hope that has helped, you Mark and thank you so much 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 May 10, 2021

How to Focus On What's Important And Eliminate What's Not

Monday May 10, 2021

Last week, I answered a question about how to raise your productivity level, and that sparked a lot of questions about how to reduce the number of tasks you have to do each day. So, this week, I will explain how to do just that.

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