Your Time, Your Way

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Script

Episode 171

Hello and welcome to episode 171 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.

You would think that the simple act of writing down everything you have to do onto a coherent list would be simple and easy to do. It makes sense, get everything out of your head and onto a piece of paper or into a digital task list so you don’t forget what needs doing.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that. Problems start because of the kind of things we put on our todo lists and the kind of things we omit from the list. We then end up focusing all our time and attention on the wrong things leaving the more important things left off and neglected.

This week, it’s all about making sure you have the right things on your list every day.

Don’t forget, if you do have a question you would like answering on this podcast, all you have to do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer the question for you.

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

This week’s question comes from Jen. Jen asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been making to-do lists for years but have never felt they help. When the list gets too long I just ignore it because it is so overwhelming, and when I do use the list all I end up doing is doing more work. It leaves me with no time to rest or relax or do anything else but work. Is there a correct way to write a to-do list that I am missing?

Hi Jen, thank you for your question.

You are right is asking this question Jen, because there is a misconception about to-do lists that many people have and that is if you write everything down that needs doing you are help-way to becoming organised. You are not.

You see, when we think of to-do lists, most people think they are the realm of your work only and any personal tasks are just an afterthought. So you will often find twenty or thirty tasks are all related to your work—write this report, prepare that presentation or call this client—and then two or three tasks related to your home life—do laundry, clean up the living room or take the trash out tonight.

Now it may well be true these tasks need doing, but they are superficial. None of these improve your life in anyway. They don’t improve you as a person, they don’t move your goals and aspirations forward and while you might get credit for doing a good presentation, that’s all you get—credit. You rarely learn anything that improves your life.

I’ve had an interest in reading and learning about successful people since I was around eleven years old. I’ve been fascinated by what makes one person massively successful and another a failure. I don’t mean that in a judgmental way, I mean that in the way a highly talented, initially successful person, loses it all and never comes back. I can spend hours reading articles and books and watching documentaries about people.

The thing about highly accomplished people is they don’t use to-do lists. Well, not in the way most people use them. And this is the same for seemingly very productive people too. They just don’t use a to-do list in the same way most people do.

So what is this secret?

Well it starts with knowing what is important to you. You see, if you want to become more accomplished in the things that you want to be more accomplished, then the majority of what goes on your to-do list must be the things that will move you forward on those things.

If these are not on your to-do list you will never accomplish them. Period. Sure, you will accomplish getting your laundry done and your living room cleaned up and if that is your life’s goal then well done, you’ve found the secret to creating a meaningful to-do list.

But let’s be honest here, I’m sure getting your laundry done and your living room cleaned is not your life’s mission.

So what is it you want to accomplish? That’s not an easy question to answer because there is so much choice in the world today.

If we go back two-hundred years when most of us lived an agrarian life, there was always a purpose. Prepare the land for the seed, sow the seed, tend to the crops during the summer and harvest in the autumn. The goal was to maximise the yield of our crops. If we didn’t there would not be enough food for our family to eat during the winter months. Our life’s purpose was to ensure there was enough food for our families.

We did not waste time repairing walls, painting our house or other cosmetic tasks in the spring, summer or autumn—if these things needed doing we did them in the winter months. During the growing and harvesting seasons, our focus was on making sure we maximised the yield of our crops. It was a life or death decision.

Today, when you look at most people’s to-do list, very few of those tasks involve maximising the yield of anything. Most tasks are cosmetic and move very little forward.

This problem is because with so much choice about what we can do, we end up dabbling at many things and mastering nothing, but if you want to be accomplished, if you want success at anything you have to stop dabbling and start focusing on mastering.

And what does that mean?

Well, you need to know exactly what it is you want to accomplish. If you don’t know what you want, how will you ever know you are on the right path towards achieving it.

How many of you are mothers and fathers? I am sure you want to be a great parent—being a parent is certainly not something you want to be dabbling at. But let me ask you this: how many of you have tasks related to being a great parent on your to-do list?

Surely, if being a great parent is important, you want to be spending time each day on nurturing that, not panicking about whether you completed last month’s sales figures for your boss. If you are panicking about these types of tasks, then your to-do list is not working for you. It’s working for your boss (or company)

So what can you do to make your to-do list more effective and more in tune with your needs and not the needs of others?

Well, start with that question: What do you want? Now there are eight basic areas in everyones’s life that needs attention. These are:

Family and relationships
Personal finances
Career and business
Health and fitness
Personal development
Life experiences and lifestyle
Spirituality
Life’s purpose

Almost everything you want out of life will come from these eight areas. We all want great relationships with our family and friends, we want a successful career or business. We want to be fit and healthy, have continuous personal development, a solid financial base, enjoy life and live in the moment and not the past.

When you have these in balance you will feel happier, more fulfilled and relaxed about your life.

If you put all your time and effort into your work, you will feel the imbalance and it will be like you are just a cog a the wheel. You won’t feel happy, fulfilled or even enjoy life.

And that is why most to-do lists do not work. They are too focused on your work and not on your life. You need to switch it round. Your to-do list needs to be focused on your life, not just your work.

How do you do that?

Let say you want to become an author. It’s been a dream of yours since you were in middle school but you have never done anything about it. Where do you start?

You start by writing a book. That’s the only way you will become an author. What do you need to do to write a book. You need to write. So, you need to make sure you have a task on your to-do list called “write book” or “continue writing book” and that task needs to come up on your to-do list three to four times a week. You also need to find time for writing on your calendar each week. Set aside a block of time however frequently you want it to be and make sure that is what you do at the appointed hour.

Or it could be you want a great family relationship, then you need to make sure you have tasks on your to-do list that support that endeavour. Tasks like “arrange date night with my partner”, “decide where to take the kids this weekend”. The tasks won’t happen by themselves. You need to initiate them and they need to be priorities.

The next thing you need to do is to understand the concept of “when at work do your work. When at play do your play and never mix the two”.

What this means is you have time each week for when you are at work. Traditionally this would be Monday to Friday 9 til’ 5. So between these hours, that is exactly what you do. You do your work. You don’t socialise, do online shopping or doom scroll through your news or social media feeds. You do your work.

Then you have ‘play time’ or time when you are not working. During these periods you work on your other tasks—developing your relationships, working on your health and fitness and hobbies. You work on the things that are important to you.

Now most modern digital to-do lists will allow you to tag or flag your tasks. So all you need do is flag or tag tasks related to your work and when at work those are the only tasks you see. You work on these. When you finish work, you close your work tasks and you pull up the list of non-work tasks and you work on those.

When you build this balance into your to-do list, you know you are working on your life and not just your work. Work is just one part of a life. It’s important, but it is not all important to the exclusion of living your life. You life needs to be nourished, developed and lived

Most people feel unfulfilled, stressed out and overwhelmed because their to-do list promotes this imbalance. It might help your work, but it destroys your life and no work is that important.

It also goes to heart of why your to-do lists don’t feel like they are working Jen, they don’t work because they are imbalanced and no motivating you.

The only way to change that is to understand that work is just one part of your life. You need to bring in all parts of your life and make sure you are working on these consistently.

Finally, back to something I eluded to earlier. Mastery. To become a master at anything means you work on developing your skills consistently. Let’s take the example of becoming an author. The only way you will master writing is to write. Make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and write some more. You need to be doing this consistently. I mentioned Ian Fleming before—Ian Fleming created James Bond and he had a process for writing his books.

Between March and December he would research and practice writing—he would collect product names, research them, write about them in a little notebook, experimenting with different prose styles and word combinations. Then between January and March each year he would go to his bungalow in Jamaica, and each morning write between 9 AM and 12.

This consistency produced a book a year for twelve years between 1952 and 1964, when he passed away. None of these books wrote themselves. Ian Fleming had to have the tasks—continue researching book and continue writing book on his task list.

What was the driving force behind this activity? Ian Fleming knew what he wanted. His goal was simply to write "the spy story to end all spy stories" and that is what he did every year for twelve years. He executed on his goal and the tasks related to that goal were on his task list.

There you go, Jen. Hopefully that has helped. Don’t use your to-do list for your work tasks exclusively. That will only create an imbalance in your life and leave you feeling stressed out and unhappy. Instead make sure the things you want do and accomplish are prioritised on your list every day.

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

Monday Feb 15, 2021

How To Achieve Your Goals (Every Time)

Monday Feb 15, 2021

This week, the question is all about how to achieve your goals when you have failed miserably before.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

The Ultimate Productivity Bundle (Lunar New Year Offer)

Todoist Office Hours Goal Planning and Tracking Episode

Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook

More about the Time Sector System

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 170

Hello and welcome to episode 170 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.

We have reached that time of year where over 80% of the goals set on January 1st have been dropped. Where resolutions, goals and new good habits are just a distant idea and where old habits and practices have returned.

That’s a terrible statistic—80% of all new year goals and resolutions fail by the first week of February. Yet it really does not have to be that way. Achieving a goal is possible for everyone if it is approached in the right way. And how to do that is what I will be answering this week.

Now before we get to the question and answer, I would just like to let you know that we have been celebrating the Lunar New Year here in Korea over the weekend and to celebrate the new year, I have put together a bundle of my finest courses to help you go from where you are today to where you want to be in the future.

This bundle includes the Time Sector System, my Productivity Masterclass AND Your Digital Life 3.0. With these three courses, you will have everything you need to create your own time management and productivity system, you will learn the skills to develop an organisation system that makes finding your files and notes quick and easy and you will learn a way of managing your email that takes the stress and overwhelm out of dealing with a massive amount of email.

Plus, as part of Your Digital Life 3.0, you also get free access to my Ultimate Goal Planning course—so a course relevant to today’s question.

Normally, if you buy all three of these courses it would cost you over $180, but for the Lunar New Year, you can pick up this bundle for just $99.00.

You will have to hurry, as this bundle will be ending on Wednesday 17th Feb. Full details on how to pick up this bundle can be found in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Ashley. Ashley asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you speak about goals and goals planning before and wondered if you have any tips for someone who fails every time they set a goal. I’ve failed so many times now I just laugh at myself every time I think about setting a goal. Is there anything I can do that would help me to set and achieve goals?

Hi Ashley, thank you for your question.

Now, this is a timely question because last week I did a talk for Todoist’s Office Hours series where we talked about goal setting and tracking using Todoist and as I was preparing for that talk, I went through the three main components and tried to think of better ways to explain why each part is important.

So, let’s start there.

There are three parts to achieving a goal: What, why and how.

This translates to what do you want, why do you want it and how will you do it.

Now you need to be very clear about what it is you want. It’s no good saying “I want to lose weight” or “I want to earn more money” while you might think these are clear they do not specify exactly what you want. How much weight do you want to lose and by when? How much more money do you want to earn and by when? Unless you know this, then if you skip dinner tonight and weigh yourself tomorrow you will likely to have achieved your goal. Or your boss could say, okay I’ll give you an extra $5.00 per month—probably not what you had in mind.

So get very specific about what it is you want:

I want to lose ten pounds by the end of March. I want to earn an extra $1,000 per month by July.

What do you want and by when do you want to have achieved it?

That’s fairly straight forward.

Now the mistake most people make is they decide what they want then move straight to how they are going to do it.

Now, let’s look at why this is a problem. Everyone knows how to lose weight. It’s a very simple formula: eat less, move more. Now we could argue about the semantics and talk about the types of foods you should be eating, but even if you are eating the healthiest foods, if the calories going in are higher than the calories coming out, you will still gain weight.

No matter what goal you want to achieve, all you need do is spend a little time on Google and you will find all you need to know about how to achieve it. If you want to become an astronaut and spend some time on the International Space Station and do a spacewalk, Google it and you will find a road map explaining everything you need to know and do to become an astronaut.

The difficulty in achieving your goals is never about the how. How to do it will be well documented. How to save money, how to earn more money, how to get your dream job, how to become a doctor. Whatever your goal is the how to do it, will never be a problem.

So, if you know what you want and you know—or can at least find out—how to do it, then why do so many people fail at achieving their goals?

It’s because their reasons for achieving those goals are not powerful enough.

The key part to achieving your goals, Ashley, is in your reasons for wanting to achieve your goals.

How to lose weight is easy. If you eat less and move more you will lose weight. However, there is one factor that will always get in the way. Hunger. When you reduce your calories sufficiently to lose weight your body will tell you it does not like eating less food and so will produce a chemical response in your brain to tell you you are hungry and you must eat something right now.

However, it is unlikely you will feel hungry first thing in the morning when your willpower it at it’s highest, you are more likely to feel hungry later in the day when your willpower is at it’s lowest.

This means your reasons for wanting to lose weight need to be stronger than your body’s reason for not wanting to feel hungry.

So, if you have decided you want to lose weight, then why? Why do you want to lose weight? It is for cosmetic reasons—you want to look good? Is it for health reasons—you don’t want to develop diabetes? Why do you want to lose weight?

Likewise with earning more money, or complete a masters’ degree or getting a promotion at work. Why do you want to do these things?

When your reasons for wanting something are strong enough, your motivation for sticking to your plan—the how—will be stronger than the forces pulling on you to stop making these changes.

You see our minds and bodies do not like change. We love habits. We love routines. It’s why we feel tired around the same time each day and why, if you allowed it, we would wake up quite naturally without an alarm clock. It’s why, weirdly, the amount of money we earn is usually roughly the same as the amount of money our friends earn. We love stasis. We hate change.

But, if you really want to achieve your goals you will have to change. You will have to go through a period of discomfort where your mind and body is fighting you to get back to it’s comfort zone.

You know the most dangerous place anyone can be is when they are earning enough money to feel comfortable. To be able to drive a reasonably nice car, to live in a nice house in a nice neighbourhood. To have a comfortable job with a stable company. That is a very dangerous place to be because the fear of losing any of that will always be stronger than the desire to improve and change. So changing anything will scare you. The problem is change is inevitable.

There will come a time when your company wants to make changes, you may perhaps reach an age where you will not be able to progress further in your company and younger colleagues begin to pass you on the promotion chain and your worst fears will become a reality and begin to live a life of fear, dread and anxiety.

So, for you to begin achieving your goals you need to reset your comfort zone. You need to become uncomfortable being where you are today. You need to be uncomfortable weighing what you weight today. You need to be uncomfortable earning what you are earning today and you need to be uncomfortable not knowing what you need to know to perform at your best.

So how do you find strong reasons for wanting a goal?

Well, in my experience, the stronger the emotional attachment to your reason the more likely you will succeed. I’m reminded of the story of a successful businessman who had everything he wanted. A great job, a wonderful family, a nice car and house etc.

He was also a very heavy smoker. Smoking was his pleasure. He would sit down in his favourite armchair and smoke every evening. His doctor, his wife and friends all urged him to stop smoking but he refused, telling them smoking was his one pleasure in life.

Then one day his five-year-old daughter came into his room crying. She was saying “Daddy, I don’t want you to die” He calmly said, “I’m not going to die honey”.

“No Daddy, you are going to die” she replied pointing to his cigarette.

At that moment, he stopped. He realised he wanted to be there to walk his daughter down the aisle on her wedding day and to play with his future grandchildren. At that moment, he got a very powerful reason for quitting smoking. From the very next day, this guy never smoked a cigarette again. And, yes he did walk his daughter down the aisle and got to play with his grandchildren.

You see, when you make you reasons for wanting to achieve your goal incredibly powerful by making them emotional, you will succeed no matter how hard it is because you will have a reservoir of motivation for those days when things are very tough.

So, make what you want clear. Be very specific about what it is you want. Make your why a powerful, emotional reason for wanting to achieve this goal and change your habits and behaviours so they fall in line with your desired outcome.

However, there is another level to consistently achieving your goals. That level is who do you want to become? How do you want to live your life? What do you want to be doing in ten or twenty years time? What kind of lifestyle do you want to live? What do you want for your family and friends?

This is what I call your North Star. Your North Star is your journey. It takes you in the direction you want to live your life. If you have a, as Tony Robbins calls it: “A compelling vision of how you want to live your life” then your goals, your habits and your daily activities will follow suit.

When your goals align with your long-term vision of the life you want to lead, you will find achieving your goals becomes easy because as you journey towards building the life you want, all you will be doing is making tiny adjustments to the way you live your life today. It’s why you will often hear: “most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade”

When you are working towards a longer-term vision the changes you need to make are much more manageable.

I’m sure many of you have heard of the book called “The Secret”. The book’s premise is that if you want it, if you desire it and if you can imagine having it, then you can have it. It’s as the Bible says “ask and you will receive”. Well, it turns out there is some truth to this.

If we ask questions like “why can’t I lose weight?” Your brain will answer that question. It will give you all the reasons why you cannot lose weight. Same for “why do I never get promoted?” And “Why can’t I find the love of my life?” That’s exactly what you will get—reasons why you cannot do something.

Change the question and you will get different answers. Instead of asking why you cannot lose weight, ask “what do I have to do to lose ten pounds?” “What skills do I need to learn to get promoted?” “Who do I need to talk to to find the love of my life?”

These questions will give you a list of all the things you can do to achieve your desired outcome.

So there you go, Ashley. It’s not that you cannot achieve your goals, you can achieve your goals, but you need to begin focusing on your why. Why do you want to achieve these goals? How will being successful with your goals align with your future vision? Get this part of the equation right and you will no longer have any difficulties achieving your goals.

Thank you for your question, Ashley, and thank you to you for listening. Don’t forget to check out my Lunar New Year bundle. There is something in there for everyone.

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

Monday Feb 08, 2021

3 Simple Ways To Stay On Top Of Your Work

Monday Feb 08, 2021

This week, in a slight change from the usual format, I’m going to give you my top three tips for becoming better organised and more productivity in your everyday life.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook

More about the Time Sector System

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 169

Hello and welcome to episode 169 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

For those of you who don’t know, I help people develop strategies to overcome tremendously overwhelming workloads, whether that is email, client requests, project support and a workplace that does not support a productive environment and we work on strategies to develop personal goals and the more important areas of focus such as your health and wellbeing, your relationships—particularly your family relationships and your financial future.

One of the benefits of working with so many people in this way is I get to see where most people struggle with their productivity, time management and the overall balance in life.

It’s hard. The world we live in today expects us to know everything that is going on around us, to form an opinion about those events and to choose sides. We also have increasingly heavy workloads that the technology available to us today is not helping. Instead, it is creating more and more work.

Three years ago, the main form of business communication was email and the telephone. Today, it’s email, telephone AND Slack. What's App, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Instead of having one or two channels of communication to monitor each day, we now have multiple channels to stay on top of.

Is it any wonder we feel overwhelmed and stressed out?

So, in this week’s episode, I want to share with you a number of tips and strategies that have worked for me and many of my coaching clients—strategies that have helped to bring calm and control to our lives while the world around us becomes noisier and busier as each day passes.

First up

Email. Now, when we are dealing with email there are two parts to the process. Processing and responding. You want to be very clear about the differences between these two parts.

Processing is about making a decision about what an email is and what you need to do about it and there are only four things you can do with an email. Reply, forward, archive or delete. That’s it. There are no grey areas here. An email requires one of these four things.

Responding is just one action—you reply to the email.

Trouble starts when you try and do both at the same time. For instance, when you open up your inbox and you see thirty emails in there if you start at the top and try and reply to those emails that require a reply, forward emails that need forwarding (with a cover note explaining why you forwarded the email) and delete and archive the rest, even with the best will in the world you are likely to only manage to clear ten to fifteen emails from your inbox in thirty minutes. You then have to stop and go to a meeting.

When you return from the meeting you now have another thirty emails in your inbox. So that’s now forty-five unprocessed emails to deal with. This number will keep creeping up until eventually you give up and start to cherry-pick your email looking for urgent and emails from important people such as your boss or clients. And after a few weeks you end up with thousands of unprocessed emails in your inbox and now you have no idea whether anything in there is important or not.

Instead, you must separate processing from doing. Processing only requires you to make a decision about what something is. So you go through your inbox and you clear your email. Emails that require action from you goes into an Action folder. I recommend you name this folder “Action This Day” because it serves as a reminder to you to deal with it today. Emails you want to keep for future reference gets archived (you don’t need complex folder structures today because all popular email clients have fantastic search) and any emails you don’t need gets deleted.

In tests with myself and many of my clients, processing in this way can clear an inbox of 75 emails in around 15 minutes.

That now leaves you with fifteen minutes to start working on your Action This Day folder.

One more tip here, reverse the order you have in your Action This Day folder so that the oldest email is at the top. This way you don’t have to go looking through your folder, you just start at the top and respond to as many as you can before you need to attend you next meeting or whatever else you need to do.

Next tip is to schedule communication time each day. Because we now have multiple sources of communication from emails, Slack or Twist, Teams and messaging services, most of us need time each day to respond to those messages.

Now time does not miraculously appear. You need to create it. Given that we all get the same amount of time each day—24 hours—and we don’t want to be spending all 24 hours doing our work, we need to schedule time for dealing with our communications.

So, choose a time in the day—usually sometime in the afternoon is best—and dedicate it to responding to your messages and emails.

I, for example, spend about an hour each day on my communications between 4pm and 5pm. This hour is blocked on my calendar each day and so I know when it gets to 4pm I stop what I am doing and go through my Action This Day folder and clear as many messages as I can. I use Twist rather than Slack and Twist emails me when I have a message so I know whether I need to go and respond or not. Likewise, I get a lot of comments on my YouTube videos and again, notification of these comments come into my email so I know if anything needs replying to.

I try where possible to get all these messages into my email so I have a single place from which to launch my replies.

Just spending one hour a day on my communications keeps me on top of everything. I might not be able to get to clear my Action folder each day, but as I start with the oldest first, I know nothing is getting delayed.

Now to your tasks for the day.

An important thing to remember is your task list is always going to be behind. What I mean here is anything on your task list will be something you have decided needs doing, but has not been done yet. And if you decided you were going to do everything that needed doing you would never clear it because new inputs are coming in all the time. You will never clear your task list.

So, knowing that to clear your task list is impossible, your only real decision is when are you going to do the tasks. And that means you need to decide what is important and what is not.

Too often we put trivial tasks on there that probably don’t need doing or are so obvious you are unlikely to forget them anyway. For example, putting fuel in your car. You know when your car needs refuelling because your car is going to warn you. If you ignore the warning, then you will run out of fuel and that’s the best trigger I know.

Your task list is better used as a reminder of things you have identified as being important. If you have a presentation to do on Friday, then you only need your task list to remind you that you need to work on your presentation. So the task would be: “Work on Friday’s presentation”.

Now, I know some people recommend you break down the task into smaller components, but the trouble I see with this is you start to micromanage your tasks and that just generates a huge list of tasks that becomes overwhelming so you stop looking at your task list—or worse, continuously rearrange and organise your lists in the vain hope they will miraculously complete themselves. That’s just a form of procrastination that makes us feel better but does nothing to get our work done.

It’s far better to manage the details in a notes app like Evernote or OneNote. Here you can add your ideas, screenshots, meeting notes and anything else relevant to the task or project you are working on.

Let you task list inform you what needs doing and what your priorities are for the day or week.

This way you do not need complex folder structures. All you need is a way to organise your tasks. This could be by the individual project, by contexts—The Getting Things Done way—where your tasks are organised by the place you need to be, the tool you need or the person or team you need to be with in order to complete the task or by time, ie when you are going to do the task as in the Time Sector System.

Organising your tasks this way means there is little organising you need to do. All you need do is decide what needs doing today—what are your priorities? Make sure these tasks are dated and do a little review before you finish the day to assign your priorities for tomorrow.

This is not astrophysics level of complexity. It’s very simple. What needs to be done tomorrow to make sure your work is moving forward and the important things are getting done? It takes no more than ten minutes to look at your lists and make that decision.

Not doing this means you waste so much valuable time each day just looking at your lists and trying to decide what needs doing. And while you are doing that, more messages are coming in, more tasks are being thrown at you and it just becomes an endless circle of panic and reactivity.

By keeping your task lists simple and spending a few minutes before you finish the day deciding what you must do tomorrow to keep your important work moving forward, you will remain focused on your priorities and the important work gets done with little stress or overwhelm.

Complex hierarchical folder structures will always destroy your productivity.

My final tip this week is to clearly identify what is important to you. Not just in terms of your work but also in your personal life. If you are not taking care of your health and wellbeing, you will not have the energy to perform at your best. If you are not taking care of your close personal relationships, you know a decaying dying relationship is going to cause you so much pain and heartbreak that your whole life will suffer and if you are not taking care of your finances, money troubles will force you to make short term decisions that will hurt your future financial stability.

I have identified eight core areas you need to be taking care of. These are:

Your relationships
Your health
Your career/business
Your Finances
Your self-development
Your spirituality and mental health
Your life experiences
And your overall purpose in life—ie what do you want out of life?

Each of these is important but their priority in your life will change. When you are in your twenties your career and relationships may be your top priorities. In your thirties, your career, life experiences and self-development could be your priorities. Later in life, you will find your finances, life experiences, health and purpose in life will become more important.

However, it is important to know what each of these means to you, how important each one is in terms of where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow and to have clearly identified tasks or actions you can do each day or week or month that will keep you on top of these areas.

A simple example is making sure you have a date night with your partner each week. Spending some time with your children every day and showing interest in their lives. Or It means making sure you are eating right and getting enough physical exercise in and it means spending some time alone with your own thoughts and making plans for your future life.

As I said, none of this is difficult and most of this is obvious. The only thing you need to do is decide what you will do today and make sure you do it.

If you want to learn more about developing your areas of focus, I have a free workbook on my website you can download that will guide you through developing these eight areas. I will put a link in the show notes for you.

And of course, if you feel I can personally help you with any of these areas whether it is time management, productivity, getting control of your areas of focus or developing strategies to achieve your goals you can join my coaching programme. I know I can help you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve by working with you to develop simple strategies that work for you.

I hope these three tips help you. Try not to over-complicate things. Keep it simple. Decide what needs doing today and make sure you do it and never let your email and other forms of communication overwhelm you.

Thank you for listening and don’t forget to download my FREE areas of focus workbook. There are no catches. I won’t be asking you for an email address just click and download. I just want to help you build a life of fulfilment, joy and accomplishment, that’s all.

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

Monday Feb 01, 2021

What To Do When You Customers and Boss Don't Allow You Time To Do Your Work.

Monday Feb 01, 2021

A common question this podcast receives is about how to manage the different types of work that come at you every day. So. That’s what we’re going to address today.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 168

Hello and welcome to episode 168 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.

We all have different tasks, events and ideas coming at us every day and they come from many different places. They come from our customers and clients and because of the way we are conditioned to communicate with our customers and clients, we drop everything the moment an email comes in from them. You might have an over-enthusiastic boss who likes to micro-manage you and never leaves you alone to get on with your work and of course you might work on projects with overwhelming numbers of tasks.

Whatever kind of work you do, there is always a way to manage the workload and to still have a private life where you can indulge in your favourite pastimes.

Now, before we get to the question, if you are struggling to pull together a way of managing your time and feel you have tried everything, then I can help you. I have a coaching programme where we work together to create a consistent way of managing your time so you have time to do your work—whatever work that is—and leave yourself time for the things you love doing.

I’ve worked with lawyers, doctors, executives, real estate agents and salespeople to bring calm and focus to their lives and I can do the same for you.

No matter what you do and what you want time for, I can help you. All you need do is visit my coaching programme page, complete the questionnaire, choose your programme, schedule your call and you’re in.

Places are limited—I only have so many hours in the day, like you, but there are a few places left. If you want in, make sure you schedule your call very soon.

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

This week’s question comes from Mohammad. Mohammad asks: Hi Carl, I’m struggling to get all my work done. My boss is always calling me asking me what I am doing and my customers use email for everything and expect me to reply immediately. It just leaves me so exhausted. I’ve tried everything but nothing works. What would you advise anyone who just has no time at all to do their work?

Hi Mohammad, thank you for your question.

Firstly, don’t worry, you are not alone, there are many people around the world who share your frustration and there are a few things you can do that will bring some calm to your hectic days.

First up you are going to have to manage expectations. Most of the problems you are experiencing with your customers are down to their expectations of you and possibly the company you work for.

This usually manifests itself when we are in the initial sales process. In our urgency to get the sale we make promises we will find difficult to keep later. One of the most common ones is to tell a customer that you will always be on hand to answer their questions. And once those promises have left your lips, you’ve just set yourself up for a torrid time.

Now you may not be part of the sales process, but your initial contact with the customer is your only real chance to undo the danger. This is your chance to set out your contact policy. I know that sounds formal, but really that’s what it is. You need to establish a policy for how and when you will be available.

Let me give you a few examples of what you could say.

First up, Tell your customers the best time to contact you. For example, you could say, “it might difficult to contact me between 9 and 11 in the morning as I usually have meetings at that time, but if you leave a message or email me I will get back to you”

Now, don’t say when you will get back to them, doing so only sets you up again for a difficult time.

Now when you tell your customers this upfront, they are not going to argue with you, they will accept it. Your problems will start if you answer emails and messages the moment they come in.

What customers want is consistency, not necessarily speed. So you are only asking for trouble if you reply within minutes one day and don’t get back to them for two days on another. And let’s be honest here, nobody expects replies to emails within minutes unless you always reply within minutes. You need to manage your email response times.

You can apply the same rules to phone calls, but obviously, with phone calls, you need to be faster. However, you do still have a little room for manoeuvre. Generally speaking, a phone call should be responded to within an hour or two. Once again, though, be careful here. If you do miss a call because you are talking to another customer or are in a meeting, the best strategy is to call back as soon as you can.

Now you need to treat calls a little differently. Let’s imagine you have been in a meeting and when the meeting finishes you have five missed calls. Start with the oldest one first, and once the call is over before you make the next call, put any action steps you promised into your task manager or a piece of paper. This only takes around thirty seconds, don’t make the mistake of panicking and replying to all your calls without taking a minute or two between calls to get down your commitments.

No matter how crazy things get you do need to be following COD (Collect, Organise and Do). When you find yourself in a busy situation you still need to be collecting your tasks, commitments and appointments into your system.

A lot of managing your work is about following a process and having a few rules of engagement.

I remember when I was a competitive middle-distance runner. My favourite distance was 1,500 metres. Now with this distance, you need to be strategic. You will never win the race if you charge off a full speed from the gun. You’ll soon tire out and the other runners will pass you. Likewise, if you are not particularly fast at the end of the race, you would be unwise to risk a sprint finish with the other runners.

To be a good middle-distance runner you always trained and raced to your strengths. There were the basics—speed endurance—which you practised for in the early spring, there were overall endurance and strength which you practised and developed in the winter and in the summer months, when you raced, you focused on your speed.

In races, you always had a strategy based on your strengths. If you pushed yourself too fast too soon you would lose your rhythm and would be passed. No matter how tempting it was to go flat out, you waited and waited until it was the right time—for me, it was around the 300 metres to go mark—and then you focused on your sprint. Keeping your head and shoulders relaxed and use your arms for speed and never pushing so hard because that would tighten up your shoulders and you would slow down. It was all about staying relaxed in the shoulders and head. We trained for hours for that so it was automatic in the race. Whatever the pressure, you had practised your ending so many times you knew when going and you knew what to focus on.

You need to apply the same strategy to your work. The moment you panic and start rushing into your calls and replies to emails you will tighten up and you will slow down. Focus on your rhythm. Do one thing, do it well and then move on to the next thing. That way you shift the emphasis from the speed of reply to quality of your response.

What you need is time in the day to do your work. This is where you need to block time out. Of course, this depends on your role. If you are customer-service, then your job is to answer calls and reply to emails. But, you do need to act on what you promised the customer. So, how much time do you need to do that comfortably each day? Once you know that, you can find time on your calendar to block time out to do the work and make sure you communicate to your customers you will not always be available at that time.

Now how do you deal with your overenthusiastic boss? The first question I would be asking here is does my boss do this to everyone? The reason for this could be that if your boss does not and only does it to you, then there is an underlying problem you need to address. Why does your boss not trust you? What have you done to cause your boss to feel they must always be checking up on you?

For that, you will have to have an uncomfortable conversation with your boss. Find out why they don’t trust you and resolve the issue. You do not need that attention and you need to sort that out.

Explain to your boss your difficulties with managing your work and that their incessant interruptions do not help. Ask them what you have to do to build that trust? Their answer may not be pleasant, but it needs resolving or you will not get them off your back. Set some ‘rules’ where either you report your progress each day or you arrange one call a day where you discuss everything they want to know.

Finally, how do you deal with a lot of emails each day? First up, set up a folder and call it “Action This Day”—a term I stole from Winston Churchill. Now, as you process your inbox, there are only four things you can do with an email. Reply, delete, forward to someone else or archive it if you might need it for reference later.

The key with email is to understand the difference between processing and doing. Processing is deciding what to do with an email—reply, delete, forward or archive—and doing is replying to the email. If you try and do both at the same time managing email becomes a long drawn out chore. And let’s be honest, with the pressures on us today, you just don’t have time for this.

So, either you process or you do. How does this work in practice?

Open up your inbox and go through your email deciding whether something should be replied to, deleted, archived or forwarded. As a benchmark, most people can process 70 to 80 emails in around fifteen minutes. It does take a little practice to get that fast, but if you practice you will soon get fast at this.

Once you’ve processed your inbox, open up your action this day folder and start at the top and do your replies. A key part of this is reversing the order of this folder so the oldest email is at the top and the newest is at the bottom. That way when you open the folder, you don’t go looking for the oldest, it’s right there at the top.

With this system, you do not need to be forwarding emails to your task manager, you only need one task in your task manager reminding you to clear your action this day folder.

So there you go, Mohammad, there’s quite a lot there, but really it boils down to managing expectations, being consistent and if necessary having a difficult conversation with your boss.

There is enough time each day to get your work done and to have time for yourself at the end of the day but you do need to be strategic, focus on the process and never panicking. Do one thing at a time, do it well and move on to the next task.

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

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

Monday Jan 25, 2021

How Workflows Improve Your Productivity and Time Management.

Monday Jan 25, 2021

This week, I take you through the importance of developing your own workflows and explain why these are crucial to staying focused on what’s important to you.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Productivity Masterclass | Create your own custom daily workflow Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 167

Hello and welcome to episode 167 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Over the last few weeks, I have been writing and recording videos on the importance of creating your own workflows. This was something I was working on during my end of year break and this week, I am answering a question on how to develop your own workflows using whatever tools you are using to help you with your work and manage your time.

Now before we get to the question and answer, I would like to encourage you to take my FREE C.O.D productivity course. Now, for those of you who don’t know, COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and it is the foundation of any good productivity system.

You see, you need to be collecting every commitment, task and event somewhere you trust you will either act on it or remember it. You also need some time each day to organise all those inputs and to make sure they are relevant and decide what needs to happen next and when. And finally, you need to maximise the time you spend doing the work each day.

This course is my foundational course and is completely free. If you have already taken it, I would recommend, as we are at the start of the year, you retake the course as a refresher, and if you have not taken the course, then please do. It will help you to understand the basics and ensure that whatever system you do decide to use personally, you have a solid foundation.

Full details, as usual, are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Joseph. Joseph asks, Hi Carl, I read your essay on workflows in last week’s Learning Note and wondered if you could explain a bit more about how to set this up and more importantly what to do when you have a boss and clients who are contacting you every minute of the day.

Hi Joseph. Thank you for your question.

Let’s start with the philosophical thinking behind the concept of workflows. To become good at anything you need two things: consistency and discipline. There are other factors such as developing skills and deliberate practice and we do that when we perform our work. But the essentials here are consistency—doing the same thing over and over again—and we need the discipline to make sure we perform those actions whether we are in the mood to do it or not.

This is one reason why morning routines when performed everyday work. They allow you to develop the right habits, give you time each day to yourself and brings a little calm in what otherwise can be crazy noisy lives.

So, what does creating your own workflows mean?

In their basic form having a workflow for your day gives you a structure to your day. Most of our productivity problems do not come from the volume of work we have to complete. Our productivity problems develop because we are not allocating sufficient time to the important things and that often means we are not taking any time to establish what our core work really is. When you do not know what your core work is—the work that you are actually paid to do—then you will find you are dragged off doing nonessential work that does little to move any of your essential, important work forward.

So, before you go any further, ask yourself: ‘what are you paid to do?’ You are not paid to respond to email, yet how much time do you spend in your email app each day? Now it could be you are paid to take care of your clients who generally communicate with you via email, but that still does not equal you are paid to check and respond to your email all day.

If you are set in front of your inbox for large parts of the day, what that means is you are working reactively and not proactively. You would be better off investing some time anticipating your client’s needs and addressing those needs before they even cross your client’s mind.

I remember back in the day when I was working with clients I noticed my clients often picked up the phone or emailed on Friday afternoons and Monday mornings and the questions were always the same: ‘what’s happening with my case?’

At the time I was working with four or five corporate clients and so I produced a simple spreadsheet for each client with a list of all their cases and kept that sheet updated throughout the week. Then immediately after lunch on a Friday, I emailed my clients the updated list detailing where all their cases were and when they were anticipated to complete as well what information we were waiting for. This had the effect of reducing the number of calls I received on a Friday afternoon and Monday morning by over 80%!

That’s how you work proactively. Anticipate your customer and client needs and address them before they address you about them.

Other things you can do is prepare a standard email your email to all your new customers and clients outlining your procedures and timelines. This very often deals with most of the questions you will be getting. This works whether you are working in clinical trials, real estate, law or sales.

Once you know what your core work is and where you need to be spending most of your working time each day you can then develop a workflow that you follow each day.

Now, my workflow has gone through a few iterations over the years—usually the name I give each part—but the basics have remained the same for a very long time.

I have a start to the day list which includes my morning routines and a quick review of my most important tasks and calendar events for the day. Once those tasks are completed, I move to my Focus for the day list. This is the list of tasks I have decided need to be completed today. There will never be more than ten items on this list and they are all important.

Why no more than ten I hear you ask? Well, that’s because realistically I know I will not be able to do more than ten important tasks per day.

These tasks do not include non-essential tasks, would like to do tasks or any new tasks that come in through the day. These are simply the most important tasks for that day.

It can be very tempting to fill this list up by telling yourself that everything is important. It’s not. There is your core work—remember, the work you are actually paid to do—your project work that if not done will result in delayed projects and any work that has become urgent.

By restricting yourself to allowing no more than ten items in this list you give yourself a chance to actually complete it consistently. If you are not completing this list consistently each day, then either you are trying to do too much each day or you are adding too many nonessential tasks in there and you need to go back and look at how you are prioritising your days.

The final list is your closing down list. This list is for the nonessential tasks and work or the non-urgent stuff that needs doing some time but has no deadline. It’s also where you have most of your daily routines—the routines that just need doing but do not improve your life or move you closer towards your goals.

And also in this list are you closing down procedures. This is where you make sure you have replied to your actionable email, planned the next day and processed your inbox.

Once all of these lists are cleared. Close down your computer and go do something for yourself. Spend time with your family, exercise or just take a walk in nature. If you make sure these lists are functional, kept up to date and done, you will find you have a lot more time for yourself and others and your life will feel so much more in balance. It will not all be work, work, work.

You will find you worry less about what you have to do, what has not been done and whether you have time to prepare yourself for that presentation later in the week.

Because you have blocks of time on your calendar to do focused work, you have time each day to manage your communications and your are working proactively—also known as smart working—then your productivity increases and your stress levels decrease. It’s a win-win for everyone and all it takes is consistency and a little discipline.

To make this happen, use filters, tags to create three simple lists for the day. The first is your opening list. This is for your morning routines and time for yourself. My list includes: make coffee, drink lemon water, do stretches, ten minutes of journaling and process email.

Your second list is for your focused work for the day and this list cannot contain any more than ten tasks. This is where you will find your most importune work for the day.

And finally, you closing down list for all your little routine tasks for the day and for planning tomorrow.

One thing I would add. If you do find you have to deal with a lot of email, messages and phone calls each day, then set aside an hour or so each day for communications. This communication time is for replying to your emails and messages as well as any phone calls you need make. A good time for this is late on in the afternoon. If you reply to email early in the day you are only going to double up the number of emails you will probably need to reply to each day. You get caught up in email ping pong. If you reply later in the day you slow down the pace and the person you are in an email exchange with is forced to work on your speed and not you on theirs.

And there you go, Joseph. That’s how you develop workflows to make your day run smoother and to make sure you are working on the important things and not being caught up in other people’s dramas and nonessential work.

I hope that has helped and thank you for your question. Thank you to you too for listening and please get in touch if you have a question you would like answering. All you need do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com

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

Monday Jan 18, 2021

Should You Automate Your Time Management and Productivity?

Monday Jan 18, 2021

This week, I am answering a question about automating your productivity and time management.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Productivity Masterclass | Create your own custom daily workflow Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 166

Hello and welcome to episode 166 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

These days we hear a lot about automation, AI and machine learning, but what does all this mean for our personal productivity and time management? And can the current state of automation work for us by helping us to improve our productivity and time management? That’s the question I am answering this week.

Now, before we get to the question, I just wanted to give you a heads up about a special offer I am running at the moment.

During my end of year break, I came to realise that the key to seamlessly being able to get your work done is a combination of good habits and workflows—or routines. I know this can sound a little boring—doing the same thing day after day—but it isn’t really about doing the same thing day after day. The tasks and projects you work on every day will be different, but what does make a significant difference to your ability to get your important work done is to develop a workflow that you habitually follow every day.

And that is what my Productivity Masterclass course is all about. It teaches you how to build you very own workflows so you have a structure designed to keep you focused on what’s important that you eventually unconsciously follow every day.

It is the key to building amazing productivity habits and goes a long way to putting you back in control of your time,

So for the next few days, I am offering 20% off my Productivity Masterclass: Building Your Very Own Workflows. It’s an amazing course and one I am sure you will get so much value from.

Full details of this course are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Ruth. Ruth asks: Hi Carl, I read a lot about automation, AI and machine learning and it seems everyone is using it. But I don’t really know what it means or how to set it up and use it. Do you have any tips on getting the most out of this technology?

Hi Ruth. Thank you for your question.

Now the first thing we need to establish is that AI is a long way from being what a lot of people understand by the term “artificial intelligence”. It is not ‘real’ AI yet. All supposedly AI apps and tools are still based on basic algorithms and binary code. We are still a long way from achieving true artificial intelligence.

Machine learning is different to AI in that your device is watching what you regularly do and uses that information to present the best options for you. Machine learning is heavily used in your mobile devices these days and can be very useful.

However, the real problem with the current iteration of AI and machine learning is they will never know how you are feeling, what your current mood is, whether you had a fight with a coworker or how much sleep you got last night. Humans are not machines, we are emotional beings with varying levels of energy based on our sleep, mental wellbeing and the food we have eaten.

So what can you do to automate your work that does understand your current energy levels, mood and wellbeing? Well, that comes down to you and the workflows you set up.

One of the things I realised last year is when you develop your own workflows and use the technology we have today to do the organising for you, you develop systems that work for you and because you retain complete control over what is shown to you, you can take in account how you are feeling on any given day.

Let me give you an example. Many people have a morning routine. Now, morning routines are a great way to start the day with consistency and to build a great structure for your day. For some people, a morning routine may include exercise, for others, it might simply be a healthy breakfast and ten minutes of meditation. The beauty of starting building a workflow with a morning routine is that you can experiment a little with this.

If you are using a task manager, such as Apple’s Reminders, Microsoft’s ToDo or Todoist you can create a recurring set of tasks that pop up in your today view every day. What you want to be doing is making sure they pop up at the top of your list every day. To do that, all you need do is add a time to the task. Tasks with times will generally be at the top of your list.

If you are a Todoist user, I would recommend you use labels to denote your morning routines. You can then create a filter from that label to show you only the routines that are due today.

Now the goal here is not to rely on your task manager to remind you every day what you want to be doing for your morning routine. Hopefully, after a few weeks, you will automatically wake and begin your morning routine.

When I developed my morning routine, I had each part of the routine in Todoist, but as the weeks went by I soon no longer needed Todoist to remind me and I removed the tasks from Todoist. I now habitually start my morning routine the moment I get out of bed.

I have taken this automated workflow further now. I use my task manager to build a daily workflow that starts with my morning review—that’s a two-minute review of my tasks and appointments for the day and then I move into my important work for the day list and that is where I stay until the end of the day when I go through my closing down list that reminds me what tasks I should do to close down the day and prepare for tomorrow.

What you will find is that there are some things you need to do every day, others perhaps three times a week and some just once. So adding the appropriate dates to these and setting them to recurring when they need doing allows you to create your own automation.

Task managers are designed to show you what you need to see when you decide you need to see them. To do that you add dates and where necessary times and you can set these to recur.

Another way to create automation is in your calendar. Again, you set them up and make them recurring.

For example, you may decide you want to exercise four times per week. So you set a recurring event in your calendar to exercise. That could be Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Just put them in your calendar at the appropriate time and set them to recur.

The same can be for studying or taking a course. Decide when you want to do your study and put it in your calendar and set it to recur.

Doing things this way means you can easily change things around if you are not feeling too good, or for some reason or other things change and you are unable to follow your workflow.

I’ve found the best automations are the ones you set up for yourself. Doing it yourself allows you to mentally prepare for the task or event and as long as you have some self-discipline you will start to do it.

I’ve had a lot of problems with automation services such as IFTTT or Zapiers. These services can be used to join different apps together. For example, if you star an email in Gmail, it will be added to your task managers’ inbox. Or if you add a task with a date and time to your task manager it will be added to your calendar.

There’s a lot of little automations like this and in theory, they are great…when they work. Unfortunately, in my personal experience they don’t always work and if you start to trust these services and suddenly they stop working your whole system falls apart and you waste time trying to figure out where the problem is.

The other issue here is complexity. Adding all these services adds complexity to your system and complexity is what will eventually lead your whole system breaking down.

There are just some things you do not want to trust to third parties. Things like where things go on your calendar, and how your tasks are organised. Your hands-on approach here is important. It means you are using your productivity tools intentionally and proactively keeping you aware of what’s going on at all times.

I find that’s one of the unintended consequences of using automated third-party extensions. You get surprises and wonder where something came from and then you waste time trying to figure out what it is and rearranging stuff.

Ideally, you want to be adding tasks and events yourself. Now, there are some services that we all use. Shared calendars where your colleagues and family members can add appointments, but in those cases, you have agreed to share a calendar and in most cases, you get the option to accept or decline. And of course, you have project and task managers where the project leader can assign tasks to you. However, in those situations, you know who is sending you the event or task and it’s likely to be part of your normal working routine.

Now I am not saying you should avoid all these automations. There are some I would recommend using such as automated backups. I have an external hard drive attached to my computer that every 12 hours does a backup of what’s on my computer. It’s there and it works in the background. But this kind of automation is not critical to my daily work. I am not relying on it to tell me what work to do. If it stops working or my hard drive fills up, I will get a notification and I can fix it.

So my advice is to be very careful about implementing all these automations. When they work they can be great, but there is a high degree of backend complexity involved here and where complexity exists things will go wrong.

It is far better for you to stay in complete control of your work and when you do your work. Those decisions really need to come from you, not some algorithm that has no idea of your current mood, or energy level. It might seem like you are doing extra work, but that’s what you need if you are going to stay hands-on and connected to what’s going on in your life. It also means you stay in control of what you are doing each day.

I’m not so sure I would be comfortable with a machine telling me what to work on next. I would lose that connection to my work and my priorities and it would feel I am a slave to machines and automation.

That said, there are some things where automation does make sense. Automated backups, appointment scheduling services—where you set the parameters when people can book appointments with you and other non-critical tasks. But be careful.

I hope that has helped, Ruth and thank you for the question.

And thank you to you too for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering, all you need do is email me at carl@calpullein.com.

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

Monday Jan 11, 2021

What It Takes To Plan A Fantastic Year

Monday Jan 11, 2021

This week, I’m answering a question about how to build an achievable plan for the year.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

The Time Sector Course Page

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 165

Hello and welcome to episode 165 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.

It’s that time of year again when we turn our attention to what we would like to do and change. It’s also a time we feel excited and enthusiastic about the future and that can lead to us being a little over-enthusiastic about what we can realistically do and change in twelve months. To make any year a success, we need to temper our enthusiasm and build a plan that is realistic and achievable while still being challenging.

That’s what I will be explaining in this week’s episode.

Now before we do get to the question, the start of the year is a great time to finally get your daily tasks sorted out so you are spending less time managing your work and more time doing your work. That’s where the Time Sector Course will help you. The course is designed to simplify your life, to make collecting everything that comes your way easy and giving you a system that makes it simple and, more importantly, to quickly organise that stuff so you free up more time to do the work.

So, if you want to start the new year, and be ready for all the challenges the year will throw at you, get yourself signed up for the course today. This is one small investment you can make right now that will give you a lifetime of returns on your effectiveness, health and time management.

Full details on the course are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks, Hi Carl I always struggle to create goals and plans for the new year. I have a lot of ideas I want to do, but find I become overwhelmed with everything I want to do and just give up. Can you help me to make 2021 different from all the other years where I have failed?

Hi Janine, thank you for your question and happy New Year to you.

One thing we all need to remember is one year is really only a small part of our whole life, and we cannot achieve everything we want to achieve in one year. Instead I have found seeing a year as a stepping stone towards a greater purpose gives you better perspective on what to plan for in the year.

Let’s take a simple example. If you plan to have a very active retirement . A retirement where you get to travel to exotic places, climb mountains and maintain a small farm of crops and a few animals, you will need two things. You will need good health and fitness and a robust retirement fund.

Those two things—health and wealth—are not things you can achieve overnight. They take years of work. You need to exercise and eat healthily regularly and you will need to save money. It easy to lose your health by overeating and leading a sedentary lifestyle, and it’s practically impossible to build a sufficient retirement fund in five years. It takes years of consistent saving to build up a sufficiently robust retirement pot.

In this example, the question to ask is what can I do this year to move me closer to creating the retirement I want to myself?

Another example could be with your career. Imagine you career goal is to one day be the CEO of a large company. Now, if you are just starting out on your career you are likely to be a long way from achieving that goal today, but that does not mean you cannot set yourself a few goals for this year that will move you closer towards that target.

Ask yourself what skills are you missing? And which of those skills could you develop this year? Are there any courses you could take? You should also review your current work and see where you could improve and if there are any areas where you are particularly weak and could do with some mentoring. It’s amazing how many people in your organisation who would be more than happy to act as a mentor to you.

By thinking of a year as a stepping stone towards a bigger purpose you will feel a lot less pressured to have lofty and mighty goals and plans. This year is just a step towards a higher purpose or goal.

So what could you do this year that will take you a little closer towards you greater goals and plans?

The next step here is to create a board divided up into five columns. In the first column you put your objectives for the year. These could be a fitness or health objective, for example, to lose a certain amount of weight or to complete a full course marathon. Or they could be a career objective such as get a promotion to a particular position.

For me, I have a health and fitness objective and a couple of business objectives. The objective is clearly stated in a simple sentence.

In the following columns you make a column for each quarter of the year. So, in column two you put Q1, then Q2, Q3 and finally Q4. Here you can add the projects and major events you wish to or will do in the quarters.

I have my planned trips in these columns. For instance, all being well, I plan to travel to Ireland in April or May this year to visit my family. That trip is in my Q2 column. I also hope to go to Tony Robbins’ UPW event in Sydney in September or October this year so that’s in Q3. These trips may not happen, they depend on how the pandemic works out this year, but as of early January they are my plans for the year.

Now the reason I put them here is because the trip to Ireland will take up at least two weeks, and Tony Robbins’ event will be a week. I need to be away of my time commitments.

Now the beauty of doing things this way is you will see where you are overcommitting yourself. I know a typical project requires around six to eight weeks to complete. Given that each quarter has at the very most twelve weeks, that means realistically I can only complete two projects per quarter.

That does not sound very much, but that’s still eight meaningful projects for the year. Knowing my bigger purpose about what I want to achieve for my business and family that’s going to make a significant impact on my overall objectives.

Having this chart, or Kanban board, makes it very easy to see where you are over extending yourself. It’s very tempting to load up the first quarter because of our enthusiasm and excitement for the new year , but if you slow down and understand you have twelve months in order to move yourself forward with your life, your career and your self-development, you are much more likely to achieve the things you want to achieve.

Now, I know many of you will be thinking that your work does not operate like that and you have multiple projects every week. That’s true if you cling to the old idea that a project is anything that requires two or more steps. But visiting the doctor for your annual medical is not a project. Seriously. It’s just something you have to do every year and all it requires is you find the telephone number of your doctor and make an appointment. Likewise sorting out a difficult customer or client’s issue is never a project. It’s likely to be your job and you just need to make that call, send that email or talk with your colleague. It’s not a project. It’s a task

A project is something much more involved than a couple of steps that could be sorted out in a day or two. The time you waste planning out these in your task manager is not worth it. It would be much faster to just add a task—“sort out Mrs P’s issue” and do whatever it takes to sort that issue out.

Real projects are things that make significant impact on your person life—moving house, getting married, retiring or turning your life around. Or work projects that involve developing and launching new products, building a marketing campaign or hiring new staff. These are real projects that require time, multiple steps and some planning.

So, Janine, if you want this year to be different, think about what you would like to be doing in five or ten years time and ask what you could do this year that will take you a step closer towards achieving that. You don’t have to do everything this year. Just a few little things that will move you forward.

As Tony Robbins says: “most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.” Think about the next tens years, Janine, let that be the driver for what you want to accomplish this year.

When you look at a year as a stepping stone towards living a fulfilled life rather than an end in itself, you get to think about what you could do this year that will move you a step closer towards achieving the things you want to achieve.

I hope this has helped, Janine and thank you for so much for your question. Thank you to you too for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering, then just email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer your question.

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

Monday Dec 21, 2020

Finding Balance In A Busy Schedule

Monday Dec 21, 2020

Do you find it difficult to switch off at the end of a working day? You are not alone. This week, I tackle that difficult balance.

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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.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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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.

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Create Your Own Apple Productivity System

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System