Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 164

Hello and welcome to episode 164 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One area that often gets overlooked when we start to build a productivity and time management system is balance. After all, we cannot and should not spend all day and night working. It’s not healthy mentally or physically and can have a devastating effect on our family and social life.

Yet, sometimes we just need to do the work. If you are starting a business, preparing for exams or in the middle of a big project, all your time and attention should be and needs to be on that endeavour. What happens to balance in those situations? Well, that’s what I am answering this week.

Now before we go any further, I just want to give you a heads up this will be the final episode this year. We’ll be taking a little end of year break. Don’t worry, we’ll be back on the 4th January.

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I am really struggling to find time for my personal life. I have been working from home since March and I find all I am doing is working all day and night. I don’t have any time in the evenings because that’s the only time I have to reply to email and I feel I spend all day in meetings through Microsoft Teams. Are there ways to help balance out the day when you are stuck at home all day, every day?

Hi Kevin, thank you for your question.

I think the flexibility promise of working from home has thrown up some hard realities for a lot of people. At least when we had to go to an office to do our work there was a clear distinction between being at home and being at work. Now the two areas of our lives are being conducted from the same place and that removes a lot of barriers between our working lives and our personal lives.

The first thing I would always recommend is you build in some structure to your day. What I mean here is you set a start time and a finish time for your work. Simple? Yes. But there’s a reason for this.

You see, if we have a start and finish time to do our work each day, we now have a psychological deadline. Part of the problem with working from home is we have no structure—a structure that is built into a workplace. When we go to a workplace we have a start time—be there for 9:00 AM—and we have a finish time—leave at 6:00 PM. This means there is a fixed time each day in order to do our work. Whatever we want to accomplish that day, we much finish it by 6:00. It sets a sense of urgency. We must finish this by 6.

When working from home, we no longer need to commute, we tell ourselves we can do another 30 minutes. There’s no rush to finish so we can miss the worst of the traffic or avoid being late for dinner. Tacking on an extra thirty minutes to our day does not carry the same consequences.

The problem is it does carry consequences. Not the same consequences, but consequences all the same. You start to get complacent about your working time. Those extra thirty minutes one day soon become the ‘new normal’, and there will be days when you work an extra hour or two and soon your whole closing down work for the day becomes very blurred.

So, set a start time and finish time for the day and be strict about following it.

Another area that quickly disappears is the lunch break. How many of you working from home no longer take your full lunch break? I know this one is incredibly difficult as that was one of the first things I stopped doing when I started working from home a few years ago.

As there was no one to go and have lunch with, it was just much easier to make myself a sandwich and eat at my desk while processing my email.

Now depending on where you live in the world, your lunch break allows you time to get outside and get some exercise in. Go for a walk. A tip here is if you walk twenty minutes down the road, then turn round and walk back home you have just walked for forty minutes and that is around 5,000 steps. Do that twice a day and you hit the magical 10,000 steps a day.

My dog has benefitted a lot with me working from home. We go out walking every lunchtime and it’s a great way to get some air, refresh and reset ready for an afternoon session of work.

You also need to make sure you are in control of your calendar because it is so easy to allow people to schedule video calls at lunchtime. First up, you need to eat and second up, you need your break.

The number of people I speak to who have been stuck on Zoom meetings all day and realise they have not eaten or taken a break. No. You have to put a stop to this.

Just as if you were in your workplace you need to be unavailable at your designated lunch break. And if having a meeting at you usual lunchtime, then make sure immediately the meeting ends, you take your break then.

Okay, now for those of you who are saying to yourselves ‘I can’t do that, my boss expects me to be available’, then you have some questions to ask yourself. Are you really happy working for a boss from the 20th century who is clock-watching you? Are you happy working for a company that does not trust you? I know I wouldn’t be and I would be making it a goal for 2021 to find another company or another boss.

That takes care of the situation many people have found themselves in this year. However, there will be a day when we regain our freedom of movement and we can move around again. I’m not sure we will ever go back to the way things were before 2020, but a normal, of sorts, will inevitably come one day.

Now, as a person who is self-employed finding balance is difficult for me. However, one thing I have learned in ten years of being self-employed is there will be periods when I need to be focused. For example, if I am recording a course, everything stops for two days. My calendar is blocked out all day and night and for 48 hours I pretty much live in my studio. I don’t check email and only check messages periodically—usually when I am making a coffee or a cup of tea.

But, once the course is launched I take two or three days off. So, it’s a period of say four of five days of intense work, followed by two or three days of complete rest.

You don’t have to be completely structured every day. Balance does not necessarily mean the ‘perfect eight’—that’s 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours leisure. Balance means making time for the things you want to do with the people you like doing things with. And the keyword is making time for it.

It’s no good complaining about not having time. You do have time. You just have to make the decision to stop doing work and start doing the things you want to do.

Hopefully, you already know you cannot push yourself through ten to twelve hours of work every day. There’s a point where you will get diminishing returns. Even in an eight-hour workday, you will start to lose efficiency towards the end of the eight hours. Pushing on will not get more work done. Pushing on likely leads to mistakes that need rectifying later—which results in more work. You need to rest.

So, depending on the kind of work you do, the balance could be two or three days of intense work, followed by two or three days of relaxation.

I can give you another example—a seasonal one. I’m a content creator, my work involves creating content. I also want to have a week of complete rest over the Christmas holidays so, this week and next, I will be doing some intense content creation certainly not being very balanced with my time. However, this means during Christmas week I will have no content to create so I can put my feet up, eat warm mince pies with brandy cream and spend a lovely Christmas with my wife and little dog.

You may be seeing a pattern here, balance is all about getting in control of your calendar. That’s where you can see where you are spending your time. It can warn you about future over-commitment, it can also show you patterns from previous weeks. If you find yourself feeling a bit numb and out of sorts, just go back a couple of week in your calendar, you will likely see you have been pushing yourself too much and losing your balance. When that happens you can use your calendar to reset. Build-in some more relaxing days and take some time off doing what you want to do.

Ultimately, you are in control of your time. Nobody can force you to do things you do not want to do. If you have no time for your friends and family because your boss and clients are demanding so much of your time, then you need to question your choice of career. Despite what you may read in the news, you can always change your job, no seriously you can. The job market is always tough, but that should never be an excuse to trap yourself into thinking the job you have today is the only job you can do.

I changed careers completely in two of the last worst recessions. I quit being a lawyer in the middle of the dot com bust in 2002 and I quit my job as an employed English teacher to start my own teaching business in 2009. Was it hard? Yes, it was. Was it impossible? Of course not, It is always about knowing what you want, and then creating a plan to make it happen.

Ask yourself what’s important to you? Then open up your calendar and schedule time for it. It’s simple.

I hope that has helped you in some way, Kevin. Remember, you are in control of your time, so make it count. Take control of your calendar and make sure you structure your day. Have a start and stop time and build in time for yourself, your family and friends and don’t let anyone take it away from you.

Have a fantastic week, a wonderful holiday season and a joyous new year. We’ll be back in the new year.

Monday Dec 14, 2020

How To Process An Overwhelming Inbox And Get Organised

Monday Dec 14, 2020

Last week in my Todoist video, I showed how I process my inbox at the end of the day. This generated a lot of questions, so this week I am answering those questions.

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 163

Hello and welcome to episode 163 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.

There are three parts to any good productivity system. There is the collection of the inputs being thrown at you. There’s the organising of those inputs—what do they mean to you? What do you need to do? And When? And of course the most important part, the doing.

This week’s question is about the collecting part and how to get those collected inputs into your system.

Now, before we get to the question, hopefully, you will now be in the final stages of your 2021 planning. Yo really do not want to be doing your 2021 planning in the final week of 2020. That’s a time for reflection, resting and where possible spending time with your family.

So, if you would like help in formalising your ideas into achievable goals and to begin the year with a solid plan, then I have a personal one on one coaching programme. You can get yourself two fifty-minute calls with me, personally, to help you set up 2021 for just $149.00.

I know this might not be for everyone, but if you are serious about turning 2021 into a great year, then just head over to my coaching page on my website, complete the questionnaire and lets get you set up for an incredible year.

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

This week’s question comes from Zoe. Zoe asks, Hi Carl, I’ve taken your COD course and the one area I struggle with is deciding where I should put a task when I have put it into my inbox. Deciding what context to add and which folder to put it into can be so overwhelming, I usually just don’t bother. Are there any tips and tricks you could share that will make organising my tasks easier?

Hi Zoe, Thank you for your question.

I often see this problem when I am coaching. When you are not organising your inbox on a regularly basis the number of tasks builds up and one of two things will happen. Either you will stop adding new tasks because you stop trusting your system or you start to do your work directly from your inbox because the rest of your system has collapsed.

Neither of these situations is very good.

So what can you do?

Well, if your task manager’s inbox is overloaded with tasks that have been there for days or weeks you need to stop. What I mean by stop is you need to schedule an hour or so to process your inbox.

Unfortunately, when your inbox is overloaded, the chances are you will be telling yourself you are too busy to stop and process it. And of course, when you say that to yourself it becomes a vicious circle. Your inbox continues to grow (or not as the case, maybe) and you continue to feel overwhelmed and busy.

So, stop. Just stop. If you cannot do it during your office hours then do it between 9 and 10 pm. Or wake up an hour earlier than usual. You need this hour and you need to be offline and off the grid when you do it.

The first thing you have to do is process it.

Now there could be an underlying problem that you eluded to, Zoe. Your folder structure and contexts are too complicated.

Processing your inbox should be easy and fast. It should not need too much thought.

This is why the Time Sector System came about. I found myself processing my inbox and getting stuck where to put something. Was it a project (because I knew I was going to have to do two or more things to close it out) or a single action item? Or was it part of another project?

Then once I had decided where to put the task, I had to think about what context to add to it. Did I need a specific tool—my phone, computer? Or did I need to be at a particular place?

Agh! Way too many decisions and far too slow.

So how do you streamline this?

First up, you have to simplify your system. Do you really need contexts today? The old @office, @computer, @home, @hardware store etc.

Contexts worked twenty years ago when you needed a computer to reply to your email or write a report, but today you can do those things from your phone. In fact, the last statistic I read was around 70% of email is done on a smartphone today. And I often begin writing my blog posts using my phone.

You may find contexts work for you, but if you are not using those lists, then don’t use them. If you do use those lists, then there’s no reason to add a context.

Next your folder structure. As I am sure you already know, I no longer manage my tasks by project. I manage my projects from my notes app and that is my project support file. All my projects both active and inactive as well as completed projects are all contained in my Notes app. So I do not need to create a folder structure that duplicates my projects.

For one thing, I am not working on all my projects at the same time. Projects are usually worked on in the order of priority—usually deadline priority.

So my task manager is organised by when I will do a task. This means the only folder I need to look at on a weekly basis is my This Week folder. While I am doing my work, anything I want to or need to do next week is irrelevant. I’m doing that next week.

When I am doing project work, I am working from my project notes, not my task manager. If I have a meeting about a project, I can open the project file in my notes app and add comments, tasks and relevant information directly into the project notes, If I receive an email or a Twist message related to a project, I can, if I wish, copy and paste any relevant information into my project notes. It’s a central place for anything related to that project.

Now, when I do my weekly planning session, I can go to my projects and decide which projects I will be working on next week and add tasks to my task manager then.

So, when it comes to processing and organising my inbox tasks is simple. I have two questions to ask: What is it? And when will I do it?

It’s strange as I say that, it sounds complicated, but really it is quite simple. If you open your inbox now and try it, ask yourself what is it? What do I have to do? And then ask yourself “when can I do that?”

So for example, let’s say you have a task such as: “find a website designer to create a website for my new company” the first question is what is it? This is a research task, so when will you do it? You may decide you don’t need to do it this week, and you will do it next month, then just drop it into your next month folder. There’s nothing else to do with the task now. You’re not going to do it until next month so put it into next month’s folder and forget about it for now.

You could have a task that says “call Jenny about her resignation letter”, now this is something you likely have to do ASAP, so all you need do is decide when you will do it. Let’s say you decide to do that tomorrow, so add tomorrow’s date and drop it into This Week’s folder.

And that’s it. That’s all you need to do to process your inbox. Over time you will get faster at this. I can clear fifteen to twenty tasks in my inbox in less than five minutes. Knowing that means there’s no resistance to processing. It’s just something I do just before I finish my day.

Now a few words of caution here. The Time Sector System only works if you do a weekly planning session. If you are not bringing your next week tasks forward to this week and dating those tasks everything will fall apart.

If you are not going into your project list to see what needs doing and pulling tasks into your This Week folder then you will soon find yourself falling behind with your projects.

But, if you do the weekly planning session, you will be fine. The great thing about a weekly planning session is you are in a quiet place… hopefully, and you give yourself thirty minutes or so to get yourself set up for the week ahead. The feeling you have once you have done it is fantastic. You feel organised, on top of everything and ready for the week ahead.

When I did my planning last Saturday, I saw I would be away from my desk on Tuesday for most of the day so I was able to reschedule my Tuesday tasks to other days. I’m not worrying about anything being missed because I have gone through everything and made sure I am on top of it all.

So there you go, Zoe. Ask yourself do you really need those contexts? You probably do not. And do you really need all those folders in your task manager? Again, you might be happier managing your projects from your task manager. But if you do, you will need to review all those projects and make sure there are not errant tasks that crept into the wrong folder.

I hope that has helped. The best approach is if something isn’t working, then find another way. There will always be a way that works for you. Keep experimenting and you will soon find it. More often than not though, the simplest approach is the best approach.

If you would like to know more about the Time Sector System, I have a comprehensive blog post you can read about it, I also have a playlist on my YouTube channel and you can take the course. All the links are in the show notes.

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

Monday Dec 07, 2020

How To Plan 2021 To Achieve Your Goals

Monday Dec 07, 2020

Podcast 162

This week, it’s all about putting into place a plan for the new year.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 162

Hello and welcome to episode 162 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.

Back in October, I shared with you a simple template you could use to brainstorm ideas for what you want to accomplish in 2021. Now the idea behind that is you give yourself a few weeks to think about this and there are a few areas where you can give some thought. Your lifestyle, your career, your relationships as well as your bucket list and how you can challenge yourself.

So, this week’s question centres around what happens next with this list.

Before we get to this week’s question though, I would like to thank everyone who took part in my holiday sale this year. Without your support none of what I do to help people would be possible. So thank you so much.

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

This week’s question comes from Richard. Richard asks; Hi Carl, I downloaded your annual planning sheet and have filled it out. You mentioned that when we get to December we need to filter this list into a few actionable goals. Could you tell me how you would go about doing that?

Hi Richard, thank you for your question and thank you for downloading the planning template.

Now, before we start, if you would like a copy of this template, you can still get it from my download page on my website. What it is is a series of six questions about what you would like to change in the new year. These range from your personal life—your relationships, your health and fitness to your professional life—how you do your work, whether you would like to change your career etc.

The purpose of these questions is to provoke you into thinking about what you want from your life and once you have a set of ideas written down, you can move on to the next stage—which is where Richard is asking for some tips.

So, once you have your ideas written down, what do you do next?

Well, the first step is to go through your list of ideas. Many of the ideas you collected will likely be unrealistic at this stage. For instance, you may have written down on the list to sell your house and buy a yacht and live in the South of France. A wonderful idea, but perhaps realistically, this is not going to happen in 2021, but could be something for 2025. However, while you may not sell up and buy a yacht next year, you may find there are a few things you could do next year. You may decide you would like to visit a harbour in the South of France as part of your holiday next year and get some ideas on the types of Yachts available. You may want to do some research on how to buy a yacht, what second-hand ones cost etc.

Working on these areas keeps the idea alive and also builds excitement towards the ultimate goal.

You may have a few ideas on your list that you could work on next year. Health and fitness, of course, is a common one. With the restrictions on our movements this year, you may have accidentally gained a few pounds in weight and you want to get yourself back into shape. So, you can bring that forward to a goal or project to work on.

With something like that, all you need decide is when will you start and how will you do it. Let’s say you want to lose fifteen kilograms (around 30 pounds or 2 ½ stone). So by when would you like to lose that weight? For something like this, you would probably best do it over a six-month period. So, giving yourself six-months, how much weight do you need to lose per month? That would be 2.5 KGs - that’s a realistic—and more importantly healthy—figure to aim for.

Next up would be how? How will you do it? Will you diet only—a tough way to do it—or with you combine a little dieting with exercise? If so, what kind of exercise will you choose?

Let’s say you decide to do cycling, then perhaps you need to get your bike serviced, or even buy a new bike ready to get started.

So, from that one idea, you are likely to find you have a number of tasks to perform to put yourself in a position to be able to start from the 1st January.

Or you may have to change your career on your list. With something like this what skills will you need to be able to switch careers? Do you need to go back to school and get some formal qualifications? If so, there’s your starting point. Research possible universities that do courses that will give you your qualifications. Will you need to save money or could you get a grant? There’s a lot of research there. So, you may decide January will be your research month

Other items on your list could be to create a purpose-built home office so you can move towards working from home career. One thing this year has done is to accelerate the changes to the way we work. So what would a project like this involve? Would you turn your basement into a home office or your spare bedroom? What will you need to purchase?

So, as you can see, from the ideas you have collected over the last month or two, you will have quite a few ideas that you can now expand and turn into projects and goals for 2021.

So, where do you plan all these out?

For me, I take the projects and goals I have decided to work on and create individual notebooks or folders for them in my notes app. I have a master note for each project or goal where I can transfer the original idea and I will then brainstorm the next steps to making this happen.

Let’s take the Yacht example, I may decide this is not going to happen until 2025, but next year I need to investigate the costs involved. How much would a boat cost to buy? Can I get a finance package? How much will harbour fees cost? What are the maintenance costs etc? While I may not actually buy the yacht in 2021, there could still be a lot of preparation work I could do.

You can then keep your collected information in your created notebook. Things like quotations, website links and meeting notes.

For your fitness goals, you can collect inspiring pictures and articles and keep them in your project notebook. You can also create a training log in there to track your progress.

The way I see it is, October and November are my idea generation months and December is where I plan out the projects and goals I want to accomplish next year.

Now, a few tips here.

Remember you are limited by time. You only have twelve months and so try not to do too much. The idea with the annual planning sheet is you keep it in your notes app so you can refer back to it next October when you restart the process. You don’t have to do everything next year.

I break things down into quarters. So, one of the ideas on my list is to write a book next year. I love writing books but find I am limited by time. But, next year, I have planned out to write the first draft of the book in the first quarter. I want to find an hour a day to write the book. That’s not too difficult as I already know I spend an hour a day on various social media channels and YouTube. So I can cut that time down and write my book instead.

Another project I have is to re-record all my courses that are not in HD. That’s five online courses. So, I will do one course every two months. The content is already there, so I do not need to plan out the courses again—I still have the outline. All I need do is review the outline, update where necessary and then set aside two or three days for recording. So it is a realistic project for next year.

I am using Todoist’s new boards feature to plan out when I will do these projects and that means I can see what I have planned for each quarter and make sure I am not overloading myself.

Overall, you will find this process exciting. It also acts as a real motivator as well because it gives you a goal for the year and these goals and projects are goals and projects that will improve your life and push you forward towards a life you love living.

You can also add in places you want to visit for when the world opens up again—don’t worry it will. We humans are natural adventurers—so I am planning a trip to the UK and Ireland in the second quarter next year. Really excited about that.

But remember, you don’t have to do everything you wrote down next year. You can hold some back for 2022. I do. One the beauties of this is you start to see a trend. If you keep writing down something like move to the countryside—something that has been on my list fir the last four years—that could be an indicator that there’s something deep inside that you really want to change about your lifestyle.

You may not be in a position to move next year, or even in 2022, but it might be a realistic plan for 2025. With things like this, you can ask yourself what can I do next year that will make that move closer?

So there you go, Richard. There’s quite a lot you can do in December to really start to make some of these goals and projects a reality. Enjoy this planning time. It’s a lot of fun, it’s inspiring and motivating and it leaves you very excited about the start of 2021.

Good luck and thank you for your question.

Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, then all you need do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.

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

Monday Nov 30, 2020

How To Manage A Never Ending Todo List

Monday Nov 30, 2020

This week, how to manage a seemingly never-ending to-do list

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Script

Episode 161

Hello and welcome to episode 161 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week’s question is all about managing time. Now I know some people will claim you cannot manage time, and if we are talking about the amount of time we have each day that is true. But we can manage how we use that time and that is where many people struggle yet when you understand what you have and you know your limitations then it can be very easy to manage.

Now, before we get to this week’s question I just want to give you a heads up on my 2020 Thanksgiving holiday sale. This year I have kept things as simple as I can. All my courses and bundles of courses are currently available with a 30% discount. And for my coaching programmes, you can get yourself a 20% discount.

I’ve had to limit my coaching programme offer to the first twenty people as I do all the calls personally and I want to do the best job I can in helping people.

So if you are interested in joining my coaching programme please act soon as the available places are going fast.

Okay, on with this week’s question and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Juan. Juan asks, hi Carl, I started to use your Time Sector System earlier this year and it has really helped me to simplify my workload. The problem I have though is I rarely complete my tasks for the day. I feel I have too many tasks and I don’t know how I can stay on top of all my work. How do you manage your tasks? Is there a way to always finish your work each day?

Hi Juan, thank you for your question.

Let’s look at this as an equation. There is two sides to this equation. The first side is time available. That’s fixed at 24 hours each daily cycle. You cannot change that. It’s the same for all of us. The second side is the work required to be done. That’s variable.

So, when you base your thinking on the fact that of the two sides to the time management equation only one is variable we can focus our attention on managing that side.

But first, on the work to be done side of the equation we have to factor in some fixed pieces. The first is sleep. We have to sleep. Now depending on your own personal sleep requirements that could be anything between six and nine hours per day. We also need to eat and that likely will take up a further ninety minutes.

So, of those twenty-four hours, we are already down to say fourteen hours per day (taking an average of ten hours for sleeping, eating and taking care of personal hygiene)

Now, having taken out time for the essentials—sleeping and eating etc—individually we may have other important tasks to take care of. For example, I schedule exercise time every day. I cannot function properly without exercise so I have an hour a day set aside for exercise.

You may have a young family and they will require time attention each day and that could be two to three hours.

Then we have our regular routines, household chores, paying bills, taking the garbage out and walking the dog. All these can quickly add up to an hour each day.

So, when you take into account your fixed time requirements, you are likely to have no more than eight to ten hours left to do all your other work.

But, it does not really end there. Another factor in this equation is your energy levels. We often assume we will have bundles of energy every day, but you know this is rarely the case. You may have not slept well the night before, you may be feeling a little sick or have a headache. All of these can have a debilitating effect on your energy levels which will affect the amount of work you can comfortably do each day.

The reason I explained that is most people’s expectations of what they can do each day is unrealistic. They bite off more than they can chew—as my mother used to say.

You need to get realistic on this side of the equation. It’s the only part of the equation you can manage.

If you use the Time Sector System, the key folder you are focused on each week is your This Week folder and you quickly learn how many tasks you can realistically accomplish each week because at the end of the week if you have any remaining tasks it will be an indicator of one of two things. Either you were being overoptimistic when you did your weekly planning or an emergency arose that took up a lot of time.

The longer you operate the Time Sector System you learn what your realistic task number is. For me, I have 17 recurring areas of focus each week. These are my most important, must-do tasks each week. They relate to my most important work such as preparing and recording this podcast, writing my blog post and recording my YouTube videos. They also include the tasks I need to complete in order to achieve my goals.

That leaves me with around twelve other tasks I can complete without putting myself under strain.

You might think twelve tasks in one week is not many, but when I talk about a task it could be planning an update to a course which will require around three to four hours, or preparing a workshop for a client company. These are not tasks like replying to an email. Email replies are part of my daily routines.

As long as I am doing my area of focus tasks and routines I am taking care of my most essential work each day. My major work. The work that will give me 80% of my results.

So knowing I have room for twelve additional tasks, when I do my weekly planning I can decide what needs to be done the following week.

Now, life is not that simple, of course. Through the day emergencies and urgencies will happen. They always do and you cannot plan for those. You just have to deal with them as they come up. You just have to have the flexibility to deal with those.

Now the beauty of the Time Sector System is you stop thinking in terms of what you get done each day, you start thinking in terms of what you get accomplished each week. So, if an emergency occurs and you get none of your planned tasks done one day, you can do a daily planning session and reschedule those tasks for other days in the week.

This week, for example, I could not prepare this podcast script on Tuesday because of a family trip. I saw that on Monday evening when I did my daily planning and rescheduled the podcast script to Thursday morning. It meant Thursday was busier than usual, but I was able to find the additional ninety minutes by waking up a little earlier than usual.

Having the freedom to shuffle tasks around on a daily basis allows me to be more flexible about when I do my tasks. Obviously, if a task needs to be done by Tuesday morning it needs to be done on Monday, but not all your Monday tasks will have the same tight deadline. Some may be just moving a project forward task and could be done later in the week if you don’t have enough time to complete it on the day you’d like to do it.

But the key to all this is learning to prioritise. You cannot do everything and you will always have more tasks on your to-do list than you could complete in a day or week and those tasks will keep coming. It’s like email. You can get yourself to inbox zero and within twenty minutes you’ve got a full inbox again.

So the real decision you have to make is which of all these tasks are you going to do. You cannot change the amount of time you have and so, you have to decide what tasks you will do and which ones you will not.

Of course, you could change that third variable—your energy levels, but quite often that involves time. You need to get plenty of sleep and you need to be exercising to increase your energy levels, so you still need to find a balance.

One pointless complaint is to complain about a lack of time. You don’t have a lack of time. You have the same amount of time as everyone else. Complaining about time is looking at things the wrong way round. You have too many tasks and you can always reduce that number by saying “no” to new inputs.

One way to help you is to monitor how you are using your time each day:

How much time do you spend ‘chatting’ with your friends through chat apps?
How much time do you spend on social media during the day?
How much time do you spend chatting with your co-workers?
How much time do you spend going through message threads in Microsoft Teams, Slack or Twist?
How often do you “check” email and not do anything with it?
How much time do you spend searching the internet for things to buy?
How much time do you spend looking through your to-do list looking for something easy to do?

All these are huge time sucks and can take up a disproportionate amount of time each day. It’s surprising how many minutes can be lost getting sucked into a message thread and how much of a time waste it can be when the message thread does not concern you.

There are enough videos, articles and books on say no to new inputs, tasks and projects. Of course, you can always ignore that advice and carry on doing what you are already doing. You can keep trying new apps, rearranging your Notion pages and watching more videos on productivity in the hope that you will find a way to miraculously do your work without changing anything. Or you can change right now and work on the only thing you can work on. Prioritising.

So, how do you prioritise?

Again, know your limitations. How much can you comfortably do each day? You cannot do everything in one day, so you need to choose what you do. This is where the 2+8 Prioritisation method can help. That gets you to choose your two objectives for the day—the two absolutely must-do tasks and eight other focus tasks, or “should do” tasks that you will do everything you can to complete.

In my research, the optimum number of meaningful tasks anyone can complete in a day is ten. By meaningful I mean tasks that move projects and issues forward and take more than twenty minutes to do.

Focusing on getting ten meaningful tasks done each day does two things. The first is it focuses you on your MITs—your most important tasks and secondly it forces you to be realistic. When you know you are only allowed to schedule a maximum of ten tasks each day, you have no choice but to prioritise and say no.

These ten tasks do not include your routines, those just have to be done and routine tasks can be done anytime. Cleaning your house, washing the car and taking the dog for a walk can be done anytime.

I take my dog out for two walks a day. So, I do a session of focused work for a couple of hours in the morning and then take the little one out for his morning walk as a break for me and a walk for him. That way, I am completing my routine tasks in between my 2+8 tasks.

You can tell me you cannot say “no” to your boss or your clients and that may very well be true. But if the amount of work you have said “yes” to is greater than the time you have available what can you do? You cannot do anything about the time available—that’s fixed. The only variable is the amount of work you have said “yes” to. That’s the only part of the equation you can change.

So if you really want to consistently complete your assigned tasks for the day, get real about the number of tasks you are trying to complete each day. Time available is non-negotiable for all of us, the number of tasks we perform each day is negotiable so focus on that side of the equation. Reduce your commitments, say “no” to new inputs wherever you can, avoid time sucks like chat threads, social media and reorganising your lists.

Focus on your ten meaningful tasks per day. Get them done as soon as you can so you have the time to deal with the emergencies and unplanned events that will crop up each day.

And remember, if you have planned your week, not completing everything you planned to do one day, can always be moved off to another day that week.

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

Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast all you need to do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.

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

Monday Nov 23, 2020

My 2021 Challenge For You

Monday Nov 23, 2020

This week, in a rather special episode I am going to set you a challenge that if you accept, will guarantee to transform your life in terms of your health, your fitness and your mental and physical toughness.

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 160

Hello and welcome to episode 160 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 am I talking about? I want to challenge you to commit to running and completing a full marathon in 2021.

Why?

As I will explain in a moment, marathon running teaches you life lessons that will benefit you in so many different ways. From improving your health, managing your weight to showing you that you are capable of doing something you previously thought was impossible or that you didn’t have enough time to do.

I’ve heard all the excuses, and so I want to show you in this episode that no matter where you are fitness-wise, you can take this challenge and completely change your lifestyle.

Now before I explain this to you, I just want to give you a heads up that my Create Your Own Apple productivity course has been updated and is available on my Learning Centre.

While this year has not seen many functional changes to the apps you use, there has been a few changes to the way iCloud Drive works and I have also included how to set up the Time Sector System using only Apple’s productivity apps.

So, if you only want to use the built-in apps that Apple provide for free and want the peace of mind using built-in apps bring you, then this is a course for you.

Now, if you are already enrolled in the course, this is a free update for you, and if you are new to the Apple ecosystem and want to create a simple to use intuitive productivity system, then this course is for you.

Full details of the course are in the show notes.

Okay, no mystery podcast voice this week just me explaining why you should get yourself involved in the challenge.

So, how does running a marathon transform your life?

Well. Firstly, no matter what fitness level you have right now, to run 26 miles or 42 kilometres requires practice, or as we call it training. You are not going to be able to decide to run a marathon today and go out on Sunday and run 26 miles. Marathon running does not work like that.

To complete a marathon requires a period of about six to ten months of consistent training. You have to go out and run five to six times per week, every week for six to ten months. There is no getting around that and you cannot take any short cuts.

Because you are committing to training that many times per week you have to plan your training. If you have a busy week, where are you going to fit in your training runs? When you go on holiday, how will you continue your training?

What will you do when the inevitable injuries happen—and they will—how will you maintain your fitness?

All of these factors need careful consideration.

Plus, if you are over the age of 35 and have not exercised for a number of years, you will need to visit your doctor for a medical check-up. Marathon running puts a huge strain on your physical body and you need to make sure your heart and lungs are capable of going through the effort you will have to put yourself through.

Okay, so there are the challenges before you start. How does running a marathon help your productivity and your self-development?

The first, and in my opinion the most important, is it develops your self-discipline. Life is too easy for most of us today. We live in an incredibly convenient world. You’re sat down on the sofa binge-watching The Crown on Netflix and you feel hungry, all you need do is open your phone go to your local pizza takeaway app and order your favourite pizza and within 30 minutes you have a hot steaming plate of delicious pizza in your lap. With the exception of answering the door, you hardly needed to move. Total calories expended—about 40. Your pizza will contain at least 1,200 calories and watching TV will amount to less than 100 calories.

But, when you know you need to get in your daily run, you have to pull yourself up, get off that sofa and go out and run. No excuses. To do that requires a huge amount of self-discipline and effort.

When it’s pouring down with rain, the temperature has plummeted into the minuses (less than 30 degrees Fahrenheit) and the wind is blowing a gale, the determination and self-discipline required to put on your running shoes and go outside is massive.

That kind of mental training prepares you to achieve anything. It teaches you to push through no matter how hard—or boring— something is. And you learn that to achieve anything takes consistent effort over a period of time.

Secondly, marathon running moves you away from the pernicious instant gratification trap many of us have fallen in to. The last twenty years or so has been fantastic. Technology has transformed almost everything we do. Sadly, the drawback to this is we expect everything to come to us at the push of a button.

I remember when you ordered something by mail order, at the bottom of every order was the notice “please allow 28 days for delivery” and we were absolutely fine with that. Today, if you live in the right area, you can order something online at 8 PM and it will be sat outside your door when you wake up the following morning. Nobody is prepared to wait 28 days for their delivery today.

I can order a box of food from the UK using the fantastic site, The British Corner Shop, and that box will be delivered half-way around the world here in Korea within three to four days. Something that was impossible just fifteen years ago.

But with that instant service has come an expectation of instant gratification, yet great things take time to develop. Completing a marathon might not change the world, but it will change your world. The time and effort you put into preparing shows you that by taking consistent steps five to six times per week you move yourself bit by bit to a successful outcome.

And that is how great businesses are built. It’s how amazing careers are developed and it’s how you build a successful life. None of these can be achieved at the push of a button. To achieve any kind of success takes time, effort and consistency. You have to push through the difficulties, you have to learn how to deal with adversity and you have to learn to stay focused on the outcome.

Marathon running does that. To finish your marathon, you need time, you need consistency and you need to put in the effort.

Another lesson marathon running teaches you is that Google, Facebook and books can only take you so far. You will never complete a marathon by just planning and researching, At some point, you have to get outside and run. You can plan and research as much as you like, but that will never prepare you for a marathon. The only way you can prepare for a marathon is to get outside and run.

Too often I come across people who tell me they want to start a blog or begin a podcast but first they must… You fill in the blank. There’s always more research to do, there’s always something else they must do before they start their blog or podcast. No! Research and thinking will never create a blog or podcast. Only by recording or writing content will you create a blog or podcast. Doing. Doing the hard work of sitting down in front of a screen and writing or recording. That’s how you create a blog or podcast.

Research has its place. When you embark on training for a marathon you will need to read about training programmes, the best running shoes etc. But at some point, that research has to stop and you have to take those first steps. You may have to start by jogging 100 metres and then walking 200 metres, those first steps can be painfully slow. But as you do it, you gradually find that those 100-metre jogs turn into 200 metres and then 300 metres and before long you are jogging 800 metres (almost ½ a mile) and that in turn becomes 1.600 metres or almost a mile. It’s a slow process, but consistently going out for your daily run moves you closer and closer towards your target.

And marathon running teaches you about setbacks and how to handle them. Part of preparing for a marathon means you will pick up a few running injuries. You will get calf strains, hamstring pulls and blisters. When you take the first few steps, you will wake up the next morning and your legs will feel as stiff as boards. You will suffer soreness like you’ve never felt before and if you are training through the winter the chances are you will sprain your ankles at some point too.

That’s all part of the process. You will learn about RICE—the acronym for Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation—you will have a freezer full of frozen peas. Not to eat, but to put on your knees, ankles and calves when you pick up those running injuries.

But these setbacks only make you mentally stronger. You learn the importance of taking a rest day. You learn that setbacks are part of the process and that the way through them is to be patient, follow the process—RICE—and within a few days or a couple of weeks, you will be back to your best and raring to go again.

Because our convenient world has taught us we can have almost anything at a push of a button we have lost the art of persistence, determination and hard work to achieve the things we want in life. Yet, the realities are that instant gratification is short-lived. It does not make us happy in the long-term, it leaves us craving for more and a feeling unfulfilled.

By taking up this marathon challenge, you will learn so much about yourself. You will reset your approach to life by knowing that the best things in life take effort, hard work and patience. And more importantly, when you cross the finish line, exhausted, you will experience an exhilaration you have not felt for years because you have achieved something that just a few months before you thought was impossible and you have done something only a tiny percentage of people in the world have achieved.

And remember, marathon running is not a race. It’s an achievement and everyone who crosses the finish line after running 26.2 miles is a winner.

So I challenge you to become a winner in 2021. Put the awful 2020 behind you and focus on achieving this one thing in 2021. Not only will you accomplish something incredible, but but you will also teach yourself that nothing is impossible given a little patience, a lot of action taken constantly over a period of time.

Good luck and thank you so much for listening to this podcast.

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

Monday Nov 16, 2020

Why, and How, You Should Be Doing A Weekly Planning Session

Monday Nov 16, 2020

This week it’s all about why, and how, you need to be ding a weekly planning session.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 159

Hello and welcome to episode 159 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, do you do a weekly planning session every week? If not, have you asked yourself why? I ask that question because as I review the questions I get through my YouTube channel, my online courses and some of the issues I see in my coaching clients, most of these are related to the weekly planning session. You see, if you are not consistently doing a planning session each week, you are leaving yourself at the mercy of the events around you.

This week’s question goes to the heart of that problem and so hopefully you will learn why these sessions are important and what you need to look at so you create a plan for the week that is manageable, motivating and more importantly doable.

Ooh, before we start, I am being asked about this years Create Your Own Apple productivity course update. Yes, it’s coming. I am almost finished with the update and all being well it will be available from next weekend.

So, if you are already enrolled in the course, go to your learning centre dashboard next weekend and it should be there for you. And don’t worry, as always this will be a free update for any already enrolled in the course.

And, of course, if you are not enrolled and want to create your own productivity system using only Apple’s fantastic productivity apps, then you can enrol at any time and will receive updates every year.

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

This week’s question comes from Jack. Jack asks, Hi Carl, I hear you talk about the importance of the weekly and daily review. I’ve never been able to find time to do these and was wondering if they really are all that important. Could you explain why you think they are necessary?

Hi Jack, thanks for this question

It is true, I have spoken a lot about the importance of the daily and weekly planning sessions. You see the reality is if you don’t have a plan for the week, then you will end up working on someone else’s plan and that is not likely to be a great plan for you.

But aside from that, one of the reasons we feel stressed out and overwhelmed is because our brains are not really our best friends when it comes to the things we have to do. If you do not have any idea where all your projects are, then your brain will take over and start telling you are behind, tasks are overdue and all sorts of horrors are just waiting for you around the corner.

Spending a few minutes going through your project notes gives you a reassurance you are on top of things and you will clearly see what needs to happen next. Once you know that, the only decision you need make is when you will do whatever it is you need to do next. And that does not take a lot of time.

These days, I do my weekly planning on a Saturday afternoon. That process of going through my project notes allows me time to decide which projects I will work on next week.

At any one time I have around ten to twelve active projects, but I cannot work on them all in one week. So, I need to decide which ones I will work on next week. Sometimes that decision is easy because the deadline for a particular project is approaching. Other times it can be more difficult.

Generally, I only work on two to three projects each week. Most of the time, one of those projects will be in the planning stage so most of the work will be reading, meetings and thinking. Other times, the next steps to completing the project are clear and all I need decide is which tasks I will do next week and even then these are mostly obvious.

Just knowing all my active projects are moving forward is enough to settle my anxious brain. And that, for me, is one of the most important reasons for doing a weekly planning session.

Another reason for the weekly planning session is it gives you time away from the daily hustle and bustle to get your inboxes clear. Now, for the most part, I will clear my inbox every 24 to 48 hours, but I can get a little lazy on a Thursday and Friday and leave the processing until Saturday. I love processing these on a weekend because there are fewer demands coming from clients and colleagues. I have time to think about what something is, whether it is connected to an active project or whether I really want to do the task. Once I know I want to do something with it, all I need to decide is when I will do it. Will I do it next week and if so, when? When will I do the task?

And for that, I will have my calendar open so I can see what my week looks like. Where my meetings and calls are and if I have any prearranged work blocks.

For instance, this week, I will be putting the finishing touches to my Apple Productivity Course. I have blocked Tuesday and Wednesday for doing that, which means I need to get all my writing and any other work done on Monday. Essentially, I will be losing two normal working days to project-specific work.

Now, doing the weekly planning session means I see that and can reduce the tasks I plan to complete next week.

You may have added a training workshop to your calendar three months ago and if you are not doing a planning session you could easily have forgotten about that. Suddenly on Monday you see the workshop and realise you have lost two full working days. That is the worst time to be reminded you will be away from work for two days.

Now, if you are using the Time Sector System, once you have looked at the list of your active projects, all you need do next is move the tasks you have in your next week folder to your this week folder and do a quick check of your This month folder to see if you can bring any of those tasks forward.

For me, I check the tasks in my next week folder before moving them forward just to see if they are still relevant. Often I have a task in there that either I have completed already, or I decide does not need doing next week. The less I have in my this week folder the better as far as I’m concerned.

You see the thing about doing a weekly planning session is it sets you up for the week ahead and it makes the daily planning so much easier.

All you are doing with the daily planning session is checking to see if things are still relevant and adding anything new you may have collected through the day. It gives you time to process your inboxes and check you are on plan to complete your objectives for the week.

So what do I mean about your objectives for the week?

One of the best ways to make each week count is to set yourself a number of objectives. Now, these do not need to be work-related, they can be personal goals. In my case, I am currently doing a 60-day exercise and steps challenge. My objective is to exercise every day and hit a 10,000 steps goal each day for 60-days. So, I need to make sure each day I am doing my exercise and hitting the steps goal. Likewise, this week it’s all about getting my Apple Productivity course updated and published. Those are my objectives for the week.

Having these objectives means I stay focused on what is important.

Just a quick tip on setting objectives. Don’t set too many. The more you set the more diluted they become. The sweet spot for me is two and at a push three. So this week it’s hitting my exercise objective and finishing the Apple Productivity course. Just having two means I wake up knowing exactly what I need to do and I do not need to be constantly checking my to-do list looking for something to do. I am very clear.

Now, these objectives could be things like sort out a problem customer and turn them into your biggest fan. It could be to get a project you have been procrastinating on started or it could be to make a decision on a new job. You choose. These do not have to be big objectives. The only thing is you will do whatever it takes to get them accomplished that week.

Last week, one of my objectives was to keep Friday night clear so I could have a Sean Connery night. I accomplished that and it was wonderful! What a fantastic actor Sean Connery was.

So how long does all this take?

Well, the weekly planning session takes around thirty minutes. It does depend on how many items you have in your inbox and how fast you are at making decisions. The thing is, the more you do this the faster you become at making decisions. I can plan out the whole week in thirty minutes, often less.

The daily planning session takes around ten to fifteen minutes. Although I have to be honest here, it does depend on how tired I am. The only thing you need to do in the daily planning session is to review your calendar for tomorrow to see what’s coming up and your task manager to make sure you have a realistic number of tasks. If you do the 2+8 Prioritisation method, this is where you do that. Decide what your two must-do tasks are and what your eight should-do tasks are.

For most people, the hardest session is doing the daily planning session. My advice is to set a time each day when you will do this. Remember, it is only ten to fifteen minutes so if your regular work time finishes at 6 PM, then set an alarm for 5:40pm to remind you to begin your daily planning session. Even if you have work to finish, just stop doing what you are doing and do the planning session. You can always go back to whatever you were doing before you stopped.

Likewise for the weekly planning session, having a set time each week helps you. My time is 12pm Saturday. I make a cup of tea, put on some music and start. If it helps you can create a checklist in your notes app to guide you, although once you become consistent at this you won’t need to checklist as everything will be automatic.

If you have never done a weekly planning session try it this week. Look at your active projects to see what needs to happen next and look at your calendar and see where your busiest days are and make sure you do not have too many tasks allocated for that day.

One final part of why you should be doing a weekly planning session is to make sure you are not over-committing yourself. No matter how much work you think you have—and that can be a lot—the two barriers you will always come up again are time and energy. Both of these are limited. Each day you only get 24 hours and depending on your physical and mental state, you only have a limited amount of energy.

Knowing this (and it doesn’t matter who you are, if you are human you are limited by these two factors) you need to limit the number of tasks you are trying to do each day. You are not going to be able to do everything no matter how urgent things are. You need to prioritise.

For me, I limit my weekly tasks to thirty and that includes my recurring areas of focus. That might not seem very much, but each day new inputs will come—trust me they do—and whenever I have allowed more than thirty tasks into my this week folder, at the end of the week, I have to reschedule a lot of tasks because I just did not have time to do them. Get serious about what you can and cannot accomplish each week and each day and stop trying to fool yourself. You cannot do everything so you need to pick what you can do and do that to the highest possible standard.

Find your limit and then use that as your guide to what you can accomplish in one week. All you need do is track how many tasks you are doing each day and each week—that is actually doing and completing—and then use that as your guide. It will take a little time to find your sweet-spot, but when you do, your weekly planning will take a much more meaningful roll in your productivity life.

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

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

Monday Nov 09, 2020

What is Your "Core Work"?

Monday Nov 09, 2020

This week, I have a question that comes from a concept I introduced in the Time Sector System course. That of identifying your “core work” and once you have identified the work you are paid to do how do you prioritise that? Find out more in this week’s podcast.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 158

Hello and welcome to episode 158 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Last week, I wrote about how I have been using the concept of prioritising my core work from when I began working in my early twenties. It just seemed a logical way to work. This is what I was employed to, so this is my priority.

Since then, I travelled through a few different industries and have come across a lot of evil little distractions that want me to focus on their unimportant crises. It happens to all of us. Those little temptations…go on just take a little look… Go on…what’s the worst thing that could happen?

As forms of communication get better and faster, these little temptresses and tempters become even more malicious and cunning and we can quickly find ourselves being dragged off—sometimes willingly—to places we really do not want to go.

So, this week, I want to share with you my strategies for staying focused on my core work and not allowing those malicious little temptations to side-track me on the unimportant.

Now before we get to that, I hope you are well into your planning for 2021 now. I know we live in very uncertain times. I for one was expecting to be booking my flights to Europe to visit my family for Christmas now, instead, I am having to plan a few days away in the Korean countryside will no chance of being able to leave the country over Christmas. Bit that does not mean I cannot plan 2021.

We might not know when we will regain our freedom of movement, but that does not necessarily mean we cannot improve our lot in life. Often adversity brings with it opportunity and we should not let those opportunities escape. We can take some time to look at them, decide if they are worth pursuing and build a plan to turn 2021 into, as David Guetta recently said, The biggest party year ever!

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

This week’s question comes from Steve. Steve asks: Hi Carl, I recently took your Time Sector Course and loved it! Thank you. I do have one question though. You talk about “Core Work” in the course, could you give me some examples of what “core work” looks like on a daily basis?

Hi Steve, thank you for your question.

Okay, so how do we define “core work”? Well, your core work is the work you are paid to do. The work you were employed to do.

In its basic form, if you are employed as a salesperson, your core work is making sales. If you are a doctor, your core work is treating patients and if you are a pilot, your core work is flying the plane.

Now, I know from my own experience in sales, just making sales all day is not exactly what I have to do. I also have to do my expenses, fill our activity reports and perhaps update a company’s CRM system. Those tasks are not your core work. Those tasks, while important to your admin team and perhaps your sales manager, do not necessarily help you make more sales.

So identifying the work that directly contributes to you making more sales is identifying your core work. The work that will directly contribute to your income.

Let me give you a few examples from my own working history.

I began my work life in hotels. I started out as bar staff, then moved into the restaurant as a waiter and eventually became a duty manager. It was a great life and no one day was the same. I loved the movement—you never stopped moving—I loved the people and I loved the variety of problems that were thrown at me every day.

Now when I started working as bar staff, I was employed to serve drinks, keep the bar clean and tidy and take and serve bar food orders. Behind the door of the staff entrance was a cleaning schedule. Each day, a different part of the bar was required to be cleaned. This could be the glass shelves behind the bar where we put the whiskeys, brandies and liquors or it could be the fridges where we kept the fruit juices, tonics and bottled beers.

Not long after beginning my work there, I learned that the 8:30 to 4:30 PM shift was the quietest. We did serve tea and coffee as well as sandwiches and other small snacks, during the day, but there were few customers early in the day. So, if I was doing the 8:30 AM shift, I would start my day by making sure the fridges and shelves were fulling stocked, and the cleaning for that day was done first.

I knew if I left it until after lunch, there would be a good chance I would not be able to do that day’s cleaning and I would end up having to work over to get it done. So, for me, priority number one was doing the cleaning and make sure the bar was fully stocked ready for the evening.

Once that work was done, it did not matter how busy lunchtime or the afternoon was. I was ready. I could focus on giving outstanding service to our customers. I was able to do my job well and I believe that is why I was given the chance to become a duty manager.

I applied the same rules when I became a duty manager, as soon as I arrived at work I would do a hand over with the previous shift’s manager. We would go through the events that had occurred in the earlier shift and once that meeting was over I would go into the duty manager’s office and review the bookings we had for the day.

Once that was done I would go round the various departments to make sure everything was okay and ready for the shift. I wanted to know of any potential problems early so I could make sure we had a plan in place in case the worst-case scenario happened. This was my planning and preparation time. It gave me the overview of what was happening.

Again, as a duty manager, my job was to make sure everything ran smoothly and any guest issues were dealt with quickly, effectively and to the highest possible standard. Knowing what was happening and where helped me to make sure I discharged that duty.

Once that was done—usually my first hour of the day—I was ready to do my work. Mostly that was helping out where there was pressure. Check-in time, for example, I would help out reception, dinner time I would help out the restaurant or the bar (or even the kitchen!)

That was the core work of a duty manager.

When I became a lawyer, I made sure when I began the day I started with the key cases for that day. I had already reviewed my case laid the previous evening—even back then I was doing a daily mini-review—I wanted to know what was coming up, what needed my attention and I wanted a plan for the day before I started the day.

As a lawyer, we were at the mercy of the phone. Our clients had our direct dial number—we would never give them our mobile phone numbers—and so I knew if I was to get my core work done, writing contracts, checking legal documents and preparing court filings I needed to get them done before the phone got hot and it got hot every day.

But by applying a little analysis, I soon discovered the busiest time for the phone was between 9:30 and 11:30 AM. So, as I began my work at 8:30 AM I knew I had an hour to get my biggest tasks done. So that is what I did. I did not check the mail or my email, that would have been a tremendous waste of a valuable hour. I needed to get that big work done. That is why having a plan for the day prepared before I began the day I was able to stay on top of my core work. The work I was paid to do.

My core work has changed over the years, now as a teacher and coach, now I need to prepare materials and content. That is my core work today. And although I am no longer at the mercy of a constantly ringing phone, I do still get those inevitable emergencies each day. But, my task manager allows me to collect the work as it comes in, my calendar allows me to block time out to create my teaching materials and the content I put out each week and as my calendar is king, I know that if I am supposed to be preparing this podcast, then I should not be checking my email or instant messages.

I need ninety minutes to prepare this script, so I block those 90 minutes. It’s part of my core work. Checking email is not. I know I will have time later in the day to deal with email. But I must get this script prepared. That is core. The same applies to writing my blog post, recording my YouTube videos. All these are part of my core work. It is how I help people and helping people is my purpose.

Your core work will be different, it is for everyone. But to work out what your core work is go back to your job description. What were you hired to do? If you are self-employed as I am, what work brings in your income? That’s where you start. You will find your core work there.

As Jim Rohn and Brian Tracy say, planning a sales call is not your major work. Being in front of the customer is your major work. Planning sales calls, updating the company’s CRM system and checking your email is minor work. And yes, some of that minor work is important, but it is not your core work. Always remember that. Core work gets the job done, minor work often distracts us and leaves us feeling overwhelmed and busy. When you focus on your core work, the work that matters, you never feel busy because you are always moving the ball forward.

If you want to learn more about the Time Sector Course and how to build in your core work I write a blog post a few months ago about it. The Time Sector house shows you how to build in your core work to your recurring areas of focus so you never have to worry about this on a daily basis because when the work needs doing it will come up on your daily list.

I hope you found this helpful, Steve. Thank you so much for your question.

Thank you also to you for listening.

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

Monday Nov 02, 2020

How To Stop Overthinking and Over Planning.

Monday Nov 02, 2020

Podcast 157

This week, what can you do to stop overthinking and over planning.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 157

Hello and welcome to episode 157 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One issue I find that causes the biggest problems is overthinking and over planning. Now I suspect there are many reasons for this, partly because of the many books and articles written about the benefits of planning—and there are a lot of benefits. But we should always remember that planning and thinking never get the job done.

So, this week, I will attempt to answer this excellent question.

Now, don’t forget we are in the middle of planning season—which seems a little ironic given this week’s question—and that means you should be thinking about what you want to accomplish next year.

To help you, over on my downloads page you can get my FREE annual planning sheet and if you are an Evernote user, I have a template you can get that will put the planning sheet into your Evernote.

All the links and details are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Maria. Maria asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the valuable content you produce. I want to ask about planning. I find myself spending so much time planning and organising each week I find I have no time to finish my work. Do you have any ideas about finding time to plan and do the work?

Hi Maria, Thank you for your question.

One of the reasons I came up with the COD system several years ago was because I too found myself spending too much time planning. When I sat back and thought about the process, I realised all I needed was a simple and quick way to collect new inputs into a trusted place. I needed some time each day to organise those collected inputs and the rest of the time I needed to be doing the work. And that, in essence, is what COD is. Collect, Organise and Do.

Now, breaking it down, Collecting is something you should be doing automatically. A new input comes your way, you collect it. Job done. Once it is collected it is in your system.

The area I found most difficult to sort out was the organising and doing. I realised I was spending far too much time organising each day. It was a joy to be reorganising my lists and changing typefaces and creating new perspectives and views. But all that organising and fine-tuning was not doing the work. That is why eventually I came up with the ratio of spending 90% of my time doing and 10% planning and organising. That meant in a typical eight hour day you spend forty minutes or so planning and organising. As time has gone by, I have made my own processing more efficient and now aim to spend 95% doing and only 5% planning and doing. That’s what eventually led to the development of the Time Sector System.

So, in any given day, if I spend more than thirty minutes planning and organising, I know I need to readjust.

But to get to that stage takes time and practice. It’s not something you can do overnight. You need to learn how to process inboxes quickly—without overthinking things. For instance, with the Time Sector System, the only decision you need make is “when am I going to do this task?” As there are no projects, labels, tags or contexts in the Time Sector System, you do not have to waste time trying to decide which project it goes to (or if it a project by itself) or whether you need a computer, phone or some other tool. It’s simple and it gets the job done.

But how do you stop overthinking and over planning?

The first thing is to be absolutely clear about what your outcome is. If your outcome is a bit fuzzy, you will be drawn into thinking too much about it. By that, I mean unclear outcomes leads to unclear action steps.

Now one of my favourite sports is the World Rally Championship. I’ve been following it since the days of Juha Kankunnen, Carlos Sainz and Colin McRae in the 1990s and the incredible Lancia, Toyota and Subaru teams of that era.

One thing that has always struck me about motorsport teams is they are completely focused on the outcomes. When a new season begins, the focus is on winning the championship for both the drivers and the manufacturer. These top manufacturers want to win and the whole team from the drivers to the mechanics and design engineers have that one goal in mind. The whole team, all departments, everybody start with a very clear outcome.

For each round of the championship. The goal is the same. You cannot win the championship in one single round, to win a championship you have to be at the top of the leaderboard by the end of the rally. It’s about winning consistently.

Monte Carlo is the first round every year, all teams go there to win the race. If they don’t they go back to their base, analyse why they did not win and make any adjustments that will put them into a stronger position next time.

When your whole team is focused on the same outcome, you never get bogged down in details. The question will always be: what do we have to do to win?

Let’s look at a simple example. If you decide to start a project to lose weight and get healthy, that may seem a great goal particularly if you state it as “I will lose weight and get healthy by the end of the year”.

On the surface that may seem a very clear goal. But, it is not. You see, there are too many unanswered questions. For example, how much weight do you want to lose and what does “get healthy’ mean?

What happens with an unclear outcome like this is you will spend far too much time researching. You give yourself an excuse not to start because there will always be something else to read or watch.

Instead, if you state the goal as “I will lose 20 pounds in weight and remove sugar and refined carbs from my diet by the end of the year”

Now, in this example, the second part is easy. You do not need to do too much research you just need to stop eating sugar and refined carbs. The first part, to lose 20 pounds may need a little research on the best and healthiest way to do it, but, your outcome is very clear and really to lose weight, it’s simply all about reducing your calorie intake.

Another way having clear outcomes works is once you know exactly what it is you want to accomplish, your brain will help you to achieve it. Tony Robbins has a great analogy for this. Having very specific and clear outcomes is like being a modern-day missile. Once the missile is locked onto its target it will overcome any obstacle to make sure it hits its target.

Now let’s look at a more every-day example. Imagine you work in sales and you want to increase your prospecting activities. You decide to do that, you need to make a number of phone calls each day. So, you create a list of names and numbers.

Now, here the problem is you could have a list of over 1,000 people to contact. If you say I will call these people every day until the list is done, you will procrastinate. On day one you will see a list of 1,000 plus people to call and you will try to find a way to break it down. You are not going to be able to call 1,000 people in one day, but your brain is trying to solve the problem and it thinks it must call those people ASAP.

Instead, if you go that one step further and take that list and say. “ I will call ten people from this list every day for 100 days” now you have a very clear outcome. You will not resist. All you have to do is call ten people today. That’s all you need to focus on.

It’s the same with writing a book. Preparing a report or presentation. Be very clear about what you want to accomplish and by when and your brain will help you. If not, your brain will hinder you. It will get in your way and give you plenty of excuses.

I see this a lot with people who want to start their own business consultancy. The key to starting a successful business consultancy is to build credibility in your chosen field. How do you build credibility? Well, unless you are lucky and already have a reputation in that field, you need to start writing blog posts, creating YouTube videos and or podcasts. You will never build a successful consultancy by leaving your current employment on a Friday and opening the doors to your consultancy on Monday expecting people to start calling you. It does not happen that way.

It takes years of putting out content to build credibility. So, start writing about your chosen subject. Start by setting a project to write one blog post and a podcast each week. That’s your project and your outcome. This will stop you from wasting time trying to decide which software you need to write the blog post with, where you will host your podcast and which day you will post. That is incidental stuff. It’s easy to find out where to post a blog post and host a podcast. The hard part is doing the writing and recording. And remember, without content, it does not matter how fantastic your software and hosting services are. No content, no blog or podcast.

Now how does this work for people who do not want to lose weight, get healthy and start their own business consultancy?

The same principles apply. Start the week with a plan and by that, I mean a set of outcomes you want to accomplish. That could be to finish a particular section of a project, it could be to resolve an outstanding issue with an unhappy client or to exercise six times that week.

If you have a set of realistic outcomes for the week, your brain will work with you. If you rely on a to-do list linked to hundreds of projects you’re not going to move very much forward. You have no clear outcomes. And I am sure you have already noticed, the incoming work never stops. It just keeps coming. And that just leaves you feeling overwhelmed and overworked.

When your to-do list is organised by projects, you will spend far too much time inside your projects list looking for work to do and more often than not you choose either the easiest to check off or end up working on tasks that are latest and loudest and find yourself never moving anything significant forward.

This is why I consistently stress the importance of the daily and weekly planning sessions. Spend around twenty to thirty minutes each week devising a set of outcomes you want to accomplish that week, and give yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to create a daily plan for the next day that will take you towards achieving your weekly outcomes.

This way, you will not need to waste time breaking down projects into tiny steps. If one of your outcomes for the week is to prepare and finish a great presentation for your next business meeting, the only task for that in your daily list would be a recurring task every day for that week that says “work on presentation for next week’s business meeting”. All your notes, resources and presentation file will be somewhere else—your notes app and file folders—and all you need do is open up your presentation file and notes related to that project and get working on the project.

Likewise, if you have an unhappy customer that you need to sort out, then really the only task in your task manager would be “sort out customer A’s problem” and either call the customer and find out what you need to do to make things right or call your colleagues you may have the answer. You do not need ten sub-task to sort that out. The outcome is clear—make customer A happy. Your brain will figure out what to do.

So there you go, Maria. I hope that helps you. Remember, focus on the outcomes, not the steps. Trust your brain. It’s been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years and based on your own life experiences it will find a way to achieve whatever your outcomes are.

Thank you for your question and thank you to you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering all you need do is email me your question at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the sow notes.

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

Monday Oct 26, 2020

How To Find Time To Create A Productivity System.

Monday Oct 26, 2020

Podcast 156

This week, it’s all about how to find the time to set up a system when you are already stressed out and overwhelmed.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

How To be More productive Blog Post

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 156

Hello and welcome to episode 156 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One of the more common objections to taking the time to build a productivity system is a belief that a person is far too busy to get organised. It’s an objection that has always made me smile because I often ask why a person is so busy they don’t have time to organise their work in the first place? It’s because they don’t have any kind of system for managing all the inputs that are coming their way in the first place and leads to a build-up of backlog and trying to remember everything in their heads.

It’s a vicious circle. No system, more inputs, less time and an overwhelming feeling of things spiralling out of control. And that ultimately leads to very dark places such as ill-health caused by stress and depression.

So, how do you manage all these inputs and find the time to get control of all the work you must do? That’s what I am answering this week.

Now, before I do get to this week’s question, October is the best time to begin planning the coming year. And, well 2020 has not turned out exactly as many of us had hoped.

In order to help you develop an achievable plan and to help you dive deep into your dreams and goals and bring them forward so you can begin making progress on them, I have reduced the price of my Time And Life Mastery course.

I know it is difficult to maintain focus on our goals and dreams, but while it may be difficult it is not impossible, and I devised a course that helps you to uncover those goals and dreams and shows you how to build them into your everyday life so you can start making progress on them.

Time And Life Mastery is my premium course and it is packed full of ideas, methods and strategies that will help you turn dreams into actionable goals.

So for a short period of time, you can buy this course, which is normally $99.00, for just $74.99. That’s a 25% saving. It’s a course that will not only show you how to build a life you want, it will also inspire you to take action.

I do hope you will join me on the course. I put my heart and soul into this because I know it works. I have been using these principles myself over the last ten years and it has allowed me to start two companies, get my health in order and to leave the so-called rat race of working for a company and being told what to do by boss and build a life I am in control of and love living and that energises me every day.

I hope you will join me in this course and turn 2021 into the year you wanted for 2020.

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 Tina. Tina asks: Hi Carl, I’ve taken a few of your courses and love them. The problem I have is I just cannot get on top of my work. I have so much to do and feel there is so little time to do it. I end up having to catch up with my work in evenings and at weekends and I am sick and tired of this. I have no time to put into practice all the things I have learned. I get so many messages and emails from my customers, and my bosses don’t help. Is there anything I can do to just get a little control?

Hi Tina, thank you so much for your question.

I know this is common—you are certainly not alone. I’ve come across clients of mine that have thousands of tasks on a backlog list that go back more than 12 months. When you find yourself in this situation it can feel like you are drowning and the temptation to just give up can be strong.

But there is hope.

The first thing to do is just stop. Stop trying to catch up and take a day off. Okay, I know, you are thinking how can a day off solve this problem? Well, the thing to realise is continuing as you are is obviously not working. What will happen if you don’t stop and change the way you are working currently? Something is going to break. Either your health will or your career will. Neither of which are particularly good outcomes.

So, what do you do in this day off?

Well, the first thing to understand is by stopping you put a stop to all inputs for 24 hours. I know, your email inbox will continue to fill up and if you are using Slack, Microsoft Teams or Twist, I am sure those inboxes will continue to fill up too. Let them. You need to put a 24 hour stop in new inputs.

A good tip here is before you take that day off, tell everyone you are away and will not be checking messages and emails—you can set up an auto-reply for this.

Now the reason for taking a day off is to set up a basic system. You need to Implement COD. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and what that means is you need to set up a system to collect all these inputs quickly and efficiently, you then need to organise these inputs somewhere and you need to be spending enough time each day doing.

Now, I am not sure what tools you are using at the moment, but you do need a task manager, a calendar and a notes app. Set up your task manager so you can collect tasks both on your mobile phone and your computer as quickly as you can.

Now to get fast at collecting takes a little time and practice, but you must do this. With all the inputs coming at you, you need a simple list of everything coming in so you can stay focused on whatever work you are doing at the moment.

Collecting everything into one place—a place you need to trust—means you are by-passing your head. As David Allen points out, “your head is a terrible office”, it is not going to remember everything. Your brain is designed to solve problems and be alert to threats to your life. Calling back a customer may be important to your work, but your brain will never treat it as urgent. It’s not a threat to your life, so it drops very quickly to the bottom of your brain’s priorities. Never trust you will remember something later. You won’t, not if you begin to feel hungry—your brain will always prioritise that over remembering to reply to your boss’s email.

Write it down. Get it into your inbox.

Now, once you have a collection system set up, you need to have a system for organising your work. Now, here is where things get interesting. I could give you a long, detailed explanation of a system of managing your projects and files, but there is no guarantee it will work for you. The best organisation system is always going to be personal to you.

For example, I manage my tasks by when I will do them—the Time Sector System. My project files are managed in my cloud storage system and my project notes are managed in my notes app. That works for a lot of people, but not everyone. A lot of people prefer the old fashioned way of managing their tasks by projects and tags. If that works for you, that’s great. Find the best way to manage your tasks and projects that works for you.

But the basics still apply. You need a place to keep your project files—that could be your customer files instead of projects if you are in customer support. You need a way to organise your tasks. Not all tasks need doing today or even this week. I have around twenty tasks that can be done next month, so these are in my next month folder. I also have seven tasks in next week already and we are only on Tuesday.

Once you have that structure set up, you can process everything you have collected once or twice a day depending on how busy you are. I process my inbox at the end of the day, you may find you need to do it twice a day. In that case process your inbox just before you go to lunch—decide what needs to be done that afternoon and what can be put off until another day. Do the same before you close down the day.

Now the purpose here is to get you to start prioritising. The reality is we cannot do everything. No matter how much we want to do everything. Somethings are best done by other people or we just have to put our hands up and admit we do not have the time or skills to do whatever we are being asked to do.

I get a lot of students on my courses asking me to show them how to set up the Time Sector System in Things 3 or Notion. The reality is, I do not know enough about these apps and the time it would take for me to learn them and then put together a video would be too long. I just don’t have time for it and I have to politely decline. You have got to understand you cannot do everything and you have to learn how to say no.

Now, when you are processing at the end of the day, you will discover a lot of the things you collected earlier have either been done, resolved themselves or are no longer necessary. Delete these. Deleting tasks is not bad. It is one of the best things you can do.

Processing is simple. You start at the top of the list, decide what something is, whether you need to do anything about it and if so, when will you do it and where will you store it.?

You may have collected a task about a customer who needs to set up a meeting with one of your sales team. Is this something for you to do or should you send the request to your sales team? In most cases this is a sales team task, so send the customer details to your sales team. Now, do you want to follow up on this? Hopefully, you trust your sales team enough to know they will act on it, so you can now remove the task.

You may have a task where you need to send a file to one of your colleagues, if you have the file handy, then do it now. Just get it off your plate and move on to the next task.

Now, the trick is to process frequently so you get faster at it. It takes time to develop these skills. I can process twenty or so tasks in less than five minutes. But then I have been doing this for nearly twelve years, so it has become natural for me to go through an inbox and make decisions about what something is and what needs doing. I can go through 100 emails in less than 20 minutes.

Processing, organising and doing are two entirely different things. When I process my email inbox, for instance, I do not do email. I go through the list and decide what something is, do I have to do anything about it? And if not, is it important or can I delete it? I then put actionable email into a folder called “Action This Day” and give myself thirty or so minutes at the end of the day to clear that folder.

A quick tip here. If you reply to email too fast you end up in email ping pong. That just increases the number of emails you get each day. Instead, reply to email once a day. That way you control the speed and you stop people from using email as a way to contact you urgently. Once they learn you only reply to email once a day if something is urgent they will find a better way to communicate with you.

And here is another thing you need to be aware of. If you make yourself too available, you will always be overwhelmed. Make it difficult to contact or interrupt you. Even if you are low down in the command chain you can still do this by controlling when you reply. Reply instantly and people will soon expect that of you at all times. You need to manage expectations. Slow down your replies.

Taking this day off will do wonders for you, Tina. It will allow you to set up a system, put into place a way of managing your work and to get everything on your mind off it and into your system.

Once you have your system set up, you must commit to it. Always collect the inputs into your inbox. Always process your inbox at the end of the day and always have a plan for the day. I know, that sounds like a lot to do, but if you commit to it, stick with, it soon becomes a habit and then you will find all that stress, overwhelm and overwork starts to disappear. I know It is not easy, but what will the consequences be if you do not do it?

Thank you, Tina, for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.

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

Monday Oct 19, 2020

How To Be More productive.

Monday Oct 19, 2020

This week the question we all ask: How to be more productive

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

How To be More productive Blog Post

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System