Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 144

Hello and welcome to episode 144 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, the question is all about building your own system, something I feel very passionate about because it’s only when you have a system that works for you that you can finally start to trust your system and when you trust your system you use properly that’s when you start to see huge increases in your productivity and your time management.

But first...

The early-bird discount for my latest Your Digital Life 3.0 course will be ending Tuesday 4 August at midnight PST (That’s LA time). Right now, if you have not enrolled in this amazing course, you can get it for $59.99–that’s a 20% discount on the normal price of $74.99.

Remember, with Your Digital Life you get a course that covers your whole digital life including your calendar, notes app, to-do list and cloud storage. PLUS... I also give you free access to my Complete Guide To Creating Your Goals and Email Productivity Mastery courses (which alone is worth $99.00)

So don’t miss out on this amazing offer. Remember this offer will be ending tomorrow at midnight LA time. So get yourself enrolled today. Full details of the course are in the show notes.

If you are already enrolled in the course, this is a free update and you do not need to do anything. The new, updated course is available for you in your dashboard on my learning centre right now.

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 Abdul. Abdul asks; Hi Carl, I’ve struggled for many years to find a productivity system that works. I’ve tried GTD and that is too complicated for me, I’ve tried a digital version of the Franklin Planner—which was okay, and I’ve tried so many other ‘systems’. Is there something wrong with me or do you know of any other systems that might work?

Hi Abdul, thank you for your question.

First up, I can promise you there is nothing wrong with you. So many people I’ve met feel exactly the same way you do. That’s partly because there’s so much advice out there, it’s hard to know what works and what doesn’t work. Plus, the technology available to us today is changing so fast it’s hard to find a settled set of apps and really learn those before a new app comes out promising to revolutionise how we manage our projects and tasks.

The reality is, no one system will work for everyone. We are all different and that is a good thing. Life would be very boring if we were all the same; liking the same things and doing things in the same way.

I think it’s also a good thing we have so many different apps to choose from. With all this choice there are so many different ways we can build a system that will meet our own individual needs.

Of course, with choice comes confusion. We find ourselves asking if the tools we are using today are the best tools and wondering if there are better tools we could be using that would make out systems better. That is a dangerous way to think. That can lead to app switching which never creates a trusted system. All app switching does is creates distrust and wastes a lot of time moving all your data from one app to a new app and then finding you have data, tasks and notes all over the place.

One of the best approaches is to do a little research on how successful people manage their time. Try to find what apps they are using. For example, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO uses Apple Notes for everything. It’s his to-do list manager, his journal and his notes app. Now the way my brain works that would not work for me, but I do admire the simplicity of creating lists in Apple Notes to manage the work I have to do each day.

And that is another consideration for you. What kind of work do you do? I would consider my work as creating content. It’s what I love doing and I am fortunate to be able to make a living from it. As I create content for different platforms each week, all I need to do is manage when I will write and record each week. I know at the beginning of the week I need to write a blog post, a podcast script, two newsletters, record this podcast and record two to three YouTube videos. Knowing that at the beginning of the week means I can schedule the time for that in my calendar and fix it each week.

But if you were an emergency room doctor you are unlikely to have a fixed schedule like that. Your work will be shift based and so no one week would be the same. Your calendar would be changing on a week to week basis and you are likely to be dealing with working some weeks during the day and some weeks at night. I find shift workers are better using their calendars as their primary time management tool.

If your work is largely project-based and your projects change frequently, then calendars will be useful for managing your meetings but not helpful managing all the different tasks you will have for the different projects you are working on. So a to-do list manager would likely be your primary tool for managing your time.

So, the starting point is to look at the work you do. If you are in sales, for example, often the driver of a sales process is the company’s CRM system. If you try to run a hybrid CRM system alongside your company’s CRM system you end up duplicating everything which is not the most efficient or effective way of managing your work. With that situation, it is far better to work with your company’s system, or at least give it a try before looking for alternatives.

Another consideration is to figure out how you yourself like to see things. Are you a visual thinker—preferring to see things visually? If so, then apps like Asana or Trello would work best for you. These apps use boards to show you where your tasks and projects are and you get to choose how many boards you have, what the columns are and all you do is move things around your columns.

Alternatively, if you are like me where I am a bit of a visual thinker and a linear thinker, you could use an app like Todoist or Microsoft To-Do to manage your tasks and Asana or Trello to visually represent your projects progress.

So there quite a few different ways to build a trusted system.

That said, if I were to start from scratch myself today, then I would begin with my calendar. Your calendar is your best friend because it will never lie to you. It shows you exactly how much time you have available each day and from there you can allocate the work you want to do on a daily and weekly basis.

I use my calendar to schedule out my work. I don’t go too deep with what I put on there but I use it to tell me if I am writing, doing exercise, teaching or recording. When I do my weekly planning session, I can schedule out the time I need to complete my content and do my exercise. I can get that fixed before the week starts and I know I have time then to complete all my content for the week.

The details of what I write about will be in my notes app and tasks that need doing—updating my website, scheduling my social media posts and errands will be in my to-do list. All I have on my calendar is an ‘event’ called “writing time” or “audio/visual time” once I see that I can refer to my notes and see what I have planning to create that week.

I’ve also a few clients who use a to-do list as a capture tool only—ie they collect tasks and then later in the day transfer those tasks directly to their calendar. This is a great way to make sure you are not over-scheduling yourself and it also helps with prioritising. With this system, you only need an inbox in a to-do list manager.

So, first, understand the kind of work you do and what you need to manage that work. Secondly, sort out your calendar. Make sure you are using it properly and you have your ‘must-do’ work scheduled on there at the beginning of the week.

Next up, as I eluded to above, make sure you have a good capturing system. This means you need to learn keyboard shortcuts, use widgets on your phone and set up Siri. You want collecting to be as easy and simple as you can possibly make it. You see, the thing with collecting is if you are not collecting everything then your whole system falls apart before you begin. If you know you don’t have everything collected, there’s no way you will trust your system. So, make sure you collect everything. Work on developing that habit right now.

Should you use labels or tags (contexts in the old GTD system) in your to-do list manager? That’s an interesting question. For the kind of work I do, I don’t need them. In the old days when if you were to do writing you needed a computer, then I did use them. But today, when I can write on my phone, reply to emails and listen to podcasts, I really do not need them. But...

If I were in sales or real estate, then I probably would. I would like to see all my calls and follow-ups, so a labelling or tagging system for calls and follow-ups would be good. But as a content creator, I really do not need them. This one really is up to you. But be careful. Don’t add labels and tags and not use them. I’ve seen a lot of people say they need them, but then never use them to filter down their lists. If you’re not using them, delete them. Just because your app has the ability to add tags or labels or contexts, does not mean you have to use them.

So as you can see, Abdul, with all the choices you have today, you want to be thinking about how you work, how you think and what you like.

One caveat, Whatever way you want to build your system, keep it simple and keep the apps you are using to a minimum. There are four core apps you really need: a calendar, a to-do list, a note app and a cloys storage system and you only need one of each. It’s when you start adding additional apps to manage your work that things get complex and you find your duplicating and losing a lot of tasks. Think “Project One” as I like to call it. One app for each part of my life. One writing app, Ulysses for me, one To-to list manager (Todoist) and one notes app (Evernote)

Hopefully, that has helped, Abdul. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.

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

Monday Jul 27, 2020

What's The Best Way To manage Your Projects and Goals?

Monday Jul 27, 2020

This week, How should you be managing your goals and projects?

Links:

Your Digital Life 3.0 Online

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 143

Hello and welcome to episode 142 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, it’s all about managing your projects and goals and how to make sure you are focused on the right things.

Now before we get to that, don’t forget if you are enrolled in my Your Digital Life 2.0 online course, head over to your dashboard, there’s a very nice surprise for you. Your course has just become Your Digital Life 3.0 and it’s a huge update. I’ve updated the time management part to include the Time Sector System and I have re-recorded almost all of the videos so they are better quality and more educational than ever before.

If you are not enrolled in the course, you can enrol this week in the course and save yourself 20%. It’s a fantastic course that shows you how to manage your digital life including your to-do list manager, your notes, your email. Your goals and your digital files. There’s so much content in there and for less than $60 it is also incredible value. So get yourself signed up today and start building a digital system that will finally get you better organised and more productive without al the stress and overwhelm most of us feel today.

Ok, 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 Brian. Brian asks: hi Carl, There’s a lot of advice out there about how to manage your projects and goals. Is there a right way to manage everything?

Hi, Brian thank you for your question. I know this can be a dilemma for a lot of people when they start out on the road to becoming better organised and more productive. There is a lot of conflicting advice out there.

The problem I find is we are dealing with people, and all people are different. That’s what makes the human race so fascinating. However, it does cause a few problems when people like me try to help other people. Because we are all different we all think differently and we all like to organise things differently.

If my wife is putting away clothes, she bundles socks very differently from the way I bundle socks. I like to fold them together in the Marie Kondo fashion. My wife prefers to bundle them up and fold them inside out… Really annoying hahaha

And that’s my point. I have a preferred way and my wife has a preferred way. We are all different.

So we have to know how we personally like to organise things. Are you a linear thinker or a visual thinker? Or are you, like me, a little bit of both?

You see if you are a linear thinker, then managing your projects and goals in an app like Asana or Trello is not going to be the most effective way for you. Likewise, if you are a visual thinker, apps like Todoist and Things 3 will not be the best way for you.

This is why following the latest trending productivity apps is never going to satisfy you. Each new app on the market will always be built on the developers own preferences and not yours. I know these developers do plenty of research asking where the ‘pain points’ in users’ current apps are, and we, as users, are very happy to tell them. But, these extra features are not going to improve your productivity—they don’t make your work any easier and they don’t help you to do more work in less time—often the reverse.

Let me give you an example of this. Snoozing emails. I know a lot of people who want this feature and use this feature, but let be perfectly honest here, it’s a useless feature. What does it do? It delays the inevitable. Someone has taken the time to write you an email and because you believe you are busy you hit the snooze feature and the email disappears. And then what? You now cannot deal with it if you get a few spare moments, and you know it is coming back. It’s just lazy. Instead, a more effective way of managing email is to just make the decision “what is it?’ And “what do I need to do with it?” Then just move it to the appropriate folder. Simple really.

Okay, so once you know what kind of thinker you are when it comes to managing projects your need to know your outcome. What exactly is it you want to accomplish?

Now with respect to goals and projects, you should adopt the same approach. That is to have absolute clarity on what you want to achieve.

Ask the question: what’s my outcome here?

Without absolute clarity on what it is you want to accomplish you will find yourself running around in circles and not really knowing when or if you have completed your project.

When that happens you won't want to review the project and when you do review it you won't really know what needs to happen next which creates a vicious circle of not knowing what to do next and not wanting to review the project because of that.

This is why if you ever learn about leadership, one of the most important skills in leadership is to be able to communicate, with absolute clarity, what you want your team to do. All great leaders know how to communicate their outcomes with absolute clarity.

So, step one whenever you begin a project or goal get really clear on what your outcome is.

Now, what do I mean about clarity? Well, let’s take losing weight. If you just say to yourself “I want to lose weight”, well that might appear clear, but how much weight do you want to lose? You see it’s very easy to lose weight. Weigh yourself just after you have eaten dinner, go out for a thirty-minute walk, go to bed and weight yourself again in the morning after you have been to the bathroom and before you eat or drink anything. I can guarantee you will have lost weight.

But I am sure that is not really what you meant when you said you wanted to lose weight. So be very clear. How much weight do you want to lose and by when?

The same principle applies to projects. I have an online workshop to do later this week. The topic of the workshop is how to manage and complete projects and goals. So what’s my outcome here? The outcome is to deliver an online workshop to around 100 people that is entertaining, educational and inspiring so the participants take what I teach them and do something with it to improve their project and goal management.

That description is at the top of the note I created when I began planning the project. Because I have that written down at the top of the note, I see it every time I work on the project. I never lose sight of my outcome.

As I develop the workshop, I keep referring to my outcome. I am asking myself does this meet my project’s outcome? I often break things down to a slide level too. Does this slide meet the project’s outcome? Could I make it clearer? Does this section inspire and educate? Will my message motivate the participants to take immediate action?

By having that clarity, working on the project is much easier. Certainly a lot easier than having a vague idea of what the workshop will be about.

So, before you start any project or goal, make sure you have absolute clarity on what your outcome is.

Once you know what your outcome is, the next step is to list out everything you need to do to achieve that outcome. Now at this stage, you want to be writing out everything and anything. This is, in a sense, a brainstorming session. What do you have to do to go from where you are today to where you want to be when the project or goal is complete? Where’s the gap and how do you close the gap?

Now, for me, this is where a lot of people go wrong. What most people do is they just transfer all those tasks to their to-do list manager. Now the problem with this approach is you end up with a lot of tasks that really don’t need doing and you end up with a long list of important and not so important tasks. It’s not a very effective way to do it.

A better way is to go through your list and decide which of all the steps you have written down in your brainstorming session would give you the biggest impact. Which of those tasks would drive the project forward?

For the workshop, that is developing the slide deck and the workbook. This means any time I spend developing my slide deck and the workbook is quality time. Time spent deciding on the slide deck theme—the colours, fonts and background—is not a priority. That’s the icing on the cake, so to speak, and can be done once the important content has been created.

The same with losing weight. What are the tasks that will move that goal towards completion fastest? “Eat less move more”. Trying to decide what exercise to do, what gym to join, what clothes to buy and how frequently to exercise will not move the goal forward. You want to lose weight? Eat less, move more. So anything that involves movement and eating less is where I would put all my effort and attention. I can always research gyms, decide on clothing and other stuff later—I could even think about it as I am going for a walk around the block. The only way to achieve my weight goal is to eat less and move more.

So, once I have decided which tasks will move the project or goal forward, only then will I add these to my to-do list manager. I don’t want the little, less impactful tasks in my to-do list because they will only distract me and often give me a false sense of progress. The little, less impactful tasks will get done as and when they need doing, but I do not want them distracting me. If they need doing fine, do them, but I only worry about then if not doing them prevents me from moving the project forward.

Now, I understand it can be difficult to decide which are the high impact tasks, but the extra effort is worth it because it is these tasks that move things forward faster and once you create momentum, projects and goals have a habit of getting accomplished without too much effort.

A final thought to add here is to stop over complicating and overthinking things. One way to prevent this is again absolutely clear what it is you want to accomplish. Let’s say you want to produce a newsletter for your organisation. Great! Where do you start? Often people start with trying to find the best newsletter platform. Why? You see when you start a newsletter you are not going to have very many subscribers at first so the platform does not matter. What matters is content. What are you going to put in the newsletter?

Once you know what you are going to put in it, start creating the content. What platform you use can come later. A quick Google search will give you the top ten newsletter platforms and when you have content you are going to make a decision much quicker. If you have no content, you will use deciding what platform to host your newsletter on as an excuse not to create content and I’ve seen so many people spend months talking about which platform and when (or if ) they finally decide another six months have passed. In six months you could have built up 500 or a 1,000 subscribers, instead, you wasted six months on a minor part and have less than ten people who once said they would be interested in your newsletter.

Another area of over-complicating things is dividing a project up into sub-projects and sub-tasks, Why? Why do you need all that complexity? For a project or goal to complete you just need to do the work. So all you need is to see what needs doing next. Most projects and goals will not get done in one day, so what do you need to do today to move it forward? Do that.

When you try to get clever and create sub-projects and sub-tasks you spend far too much time managing and organising the tasks and not enough time doing the tasks. Shuffling around your tasks does not complete projects and goals. You only complete these by doing the tasks. So do the tasks. Be clear each day what needs to happen and do it. That’s how projects and goals get accomplished.

I hope that has helped, Brian. Thank you so much for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering you can email at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.

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

Monday Jul 20, 2020

How To Prioritise Your Most Important Work.

Monday Jul 20, 2020

This week, how to prioritise and more importantly how to decide what is a priority and what is not.

Links:

Your Digital Life 3.0 Course Page

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 142

This week I have a question I suspect was sparked by last week’s podcast on what super-productive people have in common. This week, the question is about how to prioritise your tasks and how to decide what a priority is.

Now, before we begin, for those of you who are in my Your Digital Life online course, if you head over to your course dashboard, you will find this year’s long-awaited update. And it is a very big update! Almost all of the course has been re-recorded and updated. I have retained to the core essence of the course—how to manage your digital life—but I have updated the task management side of the course with the Time Sector System as well as going into a lot more detail on managing your notes, goals and projects.

If you have not signed up for the course yet, you can do so AND if you do so now you will be able to sign up with an early-bird discount of 20%. That a huge saving on the best productivity course around. And remember, with Your Digital Life, once you are in the course you will receive free updates every year. PLUS you get FREE access to my Complete Guide to Creating Your Own Goals and Email Productivity Mastery courses as well as a FREE copy of Your Digital Life 2.0 The Book AND a completely re-written workbook for 2020.

Your Digital Life is incredible value at less than $70. (Or less than $60 right now) So get yourself signed up right now and start building a complete digital productivity and organisation system that will make living in the digital world seamless and worry-free.

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 Tony. Tony asks: Hi Carl, I recently heard you talk about your “core” work and why you should prioritise these tasks. I understand that, but how do you decide what is important on a day to day basis?

Thank you, Tony, for your wonderful question.

This is a hard question to answer as it will be different for everyone listening. What my “core” tasks are will be very different from a person who manages a team of people all reporting to her. However, although all our “core” tasks will be different, the process of deciding what those tasks are is the same for everyone.

Firstly, to avoid any confusion your core tasks are your high-value tasks. The tasks that earn you your income. If you did not do these tasks consistently, you would lose your job or at the very least you would damage your career or if you are self-employed you would seriously damage your business.

So, examples would be if you are in sales, being in front of your customers or clients is your core—your high-value tasks. So anything you do that puts you in front of your customers is high value and a priority. That could be calling or visiting your customers. It could be prospecting for new customers or asking for referrals.

The low-value tasks in sales are completing your reports. I’ve worked with a lot of companies that insist their sales teams complete elaborate sales reporting forms every day. The only people these forms benefit are office-bound sales managers who are more concerned about keeping their sales documents up to date and who have lost sight of the important part of their team’s work—sales.

If you are in the medical field as a healthcare professional your core work is being in front of your patients. Treating them and making sure they are receiving the best care you can give them which may mean spending time each week learning about the latest medical procedures and drug breakthroughs so you can pass on these benefits to your patients.

If you struggle to see where your core work is, the clue is usually in your title. Salesperson? Your core work is sales. Healthcare professional? Your core work is taking care of the health of your patients.

Spending hours in diversity classes or IT training is not a core part of your work. Those classes may be important for the organisation—after all a diverse, culturally sensitive workplace is important as well as knowing how to operate your company’s IT platforms—but to sacrifice time for these when there are customers waiting or patients to be seen means you have your priorities the wrong way round.

So the first step is to make a list of the task you consider to be important to the work that you do. The vital, high-value tasks that complete the purpose of your work.

Now, one part of this that I feel is very important is to do the same with your long and short term goals. While it is important to make sure you have your core work prioritised, it is also important to make sure your goals are also feeding into your day. I know how easy it is to fill your day with work tasks that benefit your employer—I spent fifteen years doing that—when you do that, you neglect what is important to you and that can have devastating effects on your overall wellbeing and motivation.

This why a crucial part of learning how to prioritise is to consistently do a weekly planning session at the end of the week.

Now a quick point on where and when to do your weekly planning session. Don’t do it at work and don’t do it on a Monday morning. The best place and time to do a weekly planning session is on a weekend away from your place of work. Why? Because removing yourself from the hustle and bustle of your workplace allows you to see the bigger picture of your life as a whole instead of just seeing your work life. Your life is not just made up of your work. There are your family and friends. Your goals, your hobbies and your health and wellbeing. If you are not taking care of these areas of your life you will feel out of control and have that sense you are making no progress on the important things in your life. In effect, you feel like you are always putting out fires not doing anything to build the life you desire. So, do your weekly planning session on a weekend wither at home or in a local cafe away from your usual working environment.

Okay, so once you have established what you high value, core tasks are, take a look at your calendar for next week. How many of those tasks have you allocated time for? I ask that because if these are genuinely your high-value core tasks you must make sure each week you have time carved out to make sure they happen.

You see, if you are not blocking time each day and each week to work on these high-value tasks, other, less important—but often louder—tasks will take over your day. Low-value tasks have a loud voice—they don’t want you to think about their low value so they often come bundled up in layers of urgency. You boss emails you and asks a question that if your boss spent five minutes in your company’s system could get the answer themselves, or a client calls you to say their shipment has not arrived—when the delivery company has already emailed them with the tracking number and given an estimated delivery day.

These tasks, when they pop up, appear urgent and cause us to think they are now a priority, yet, if you stop for thirty seconds you would realise they are not priorities and can be dealt with diplomatically and quickly—“sorry boss I’m in a meeting” or “have you received a confirmation email from the delivery company yet?”

These types of tasks do not need you to drop everything to rush around and spend an hour panicking. Stop, think, evaluate and make a decision. What’s more important? Only you can answer that.

The final part of this is to use the 2+8 Prioritisation method. This is where you take ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day and process your to-do list’s inbox and look at what you have on your list of tasks for tomorrow. Pick two tasks and make these your objectives—The two tasks you must complete no matter what else happens. And select up to eight other tasks, that while you will do everything you can to complete them, it would not be the end of the world if you were unable to do so.

These are your priorities for tomorrow. It does not mean you ignore everything else you need to do, but these ten tasks are your priorities. Make sure these get done first. If, and only if, you have time at the end of the day will you begin work on the other low-value tasks.

When I began the day today, I had eight of these tasks on my priorities list. Two priorities—prepare this script and write my blog post. I have identified content creation as one of my core, high-value tasks so the content gets done first. When I look at the list now, of the six remaining tasks for today, four of them relate to content, one relates to my health and fitness—exercise and one relates to a client matter. As long as I complete these eight tasks today, I know I have moved the important things forward. I have taken care of all the high-value tasks I needed to take care of today and if I don’t do anything else today, I can be happy knowing the right things were done.

That is why the 2+8 Prioritisation Method works. It keeps you focused on the work you have identified as being important. If you are not completing these tasks on a daily basis, then you are allowing the less important, low value—but noisy—tasks take control of your day and you need to stop and evaluate why that is happening.

You could be saying “yes” too easily. If so learn how to say “no”. It’s a skill, but a skill worth learning nonetheless. It could be you have made the wrong decisions, look at your decision-making process and see how and where you can improve.

Adopt the CANI approach—the Constant And Never-ending Improvement approach. How can I improve my decision-making process? How can I make sure I stay focused on my priorities every day? All of these questions help you to stay focused on your core, high-value tasks.

I am not pretending this is easy. It is not. The truth is it is a constant battle because as humans we are programmed to take the easy path. But, when you make the decision to no longer accept the easy way and instead do it the right way, then you will start to see huge improvements in your productivity, your time management, your career and your overall sense of happiness and well-being.

Good luck, Tony and thank you try much for your question. Thank you also to all of you for listening.

Don’t forget to take the new Your Digital Life 3.0 course—if you are already signed up for the Your Digital Life programme. If not, you can still get yourself in and right now save yourself 20% with the early-bird discount.

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

Monday Jul 13, 2020

What Makes Highly-Productive People So Successful?

Monday Jul 13, 2020

This week, What makes a super-productive person? What do the most productive people do that other people do not do? That’s the question I am tackling this week.

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 141

Hello and welcome to episode 141 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, I have a fascinating and challenging question to answer. What habits and actions do the most productive people use to male them so productive. It’s a question that has interested me for years and I have quite a long list of ideas I have collected over the years that this week I will share with you.

But first… If you are struggling to make a time management system work for you, or you feel your personal time management is terrible, then I may have a solution for you. Earlier this year I developed a new way of managing your workload called the Time Sector System. It’s a system designed for the twenty-first century and shows you that the only thing you can control is when you will do something.

It does not matter what it is you need to do, in what order or how many tasks you have to complete within a project. The only thing that matters is when are you going to do it. After all, no matter how urgent, pressing or important a task is, if you do not have time to do it, it will not get done.

So, if you want to learn a system that shows you how to manage your time properly, take a look at the Time Sector System. Full details of which are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Helena. Helena asks: HI Carl. As someone who has been interested in productivity and time management for a long time, what do you know about how really successful people manage their time and get the important things done?

Hi Helena. Thank you for your excellent question.

Before we get started, I need to address the elephant in the room. Whenever I talk about what I have learned from super-productive people I have met and read about, cynics will always point out that these people have an army of personal assistants doing a lot of their work for them.

And while this is true to a point. It is far too defeatist and simplistic. You see, super-productive and successful people were not always super productive and successful. What helped them to become the way they are is not an army of assistants, but a clear sense of what is important and what is not.

What these people know, and many others have not figured out yet, is that your work is divided up between high-value tasks and low-value tasks.

The high-value tasks take your goals and projects forward faster and more effectively than the low-value tasks. Low-value tasks need doing, but the super-productive among us demote their value on their to-do lists and where possible delegate those tasks to other people.

Let me give you a simple example. Imagine you are paid $30.00 per hour when you are working and you have six shirts to iron for next week. Now I know from personal experience to iron six shirts would take around an hour to do—well it would for me. If you spend one hour doing your ironing, you have lost $30. Alternatively, if you took those same six shirts to a cleaners around the corner it would cost you $10.00.

So, which is the better use of your time? Doing work that will pay you $30.00 or ironing the shirts that will pay you nothing?

If you take the shirts to the cleaners the net gain to you financially is $20.00.

That’s how the super-success manage their time. They understand the cost/benefit of the work they do. It’s how they think and that way of thinking is very different from the way most people think.

So while you may not have your own personal assistant, it does not mean that you have to do everything yourself. There are ways you can delegate your work. All you need do is get a little creative and know the value of your time.

For those of you starting our with your own business, maybe you could look into hiring a virtual assistant to do some of your admin tasks. You do not need to pay a virtual assistant for a forty-hour week, you only pay them for the time it takes to do the tasks you want them to do.

All you need do is work out how much it would cost you to delegate the task against the time you save and the amount you would make by better leveraging your time.

What it comes down to is knowing which tasks are important and which are not. I know that sounds simple and obvious, but it is surprising how many people do not do it. Most people treat every task as equally important and this is why most are stressed out, overwhelmed and feel they are making no progress at all on their goals or their projects. Not all tasks are equal. Most of them are not at all important.

Another way of working this out is to think in terms of the 80:20 principle. 80% of your results will come from 20% of the tasks you perform. So what you need to decide is what those 20% tasks—the ones that will give you the 80% return. Once you have established that, you can then try and delegate the 80% that do not do very much.

Another area where I see highly productive people excel is in how they manage their calendars. Your calendar is sacred territory and you should never ever allow anyone else to have control of it.

Now if you work in an organisation where your boss or anyone else can arrange meetings on your calendar you need to find ways to prevent that from happening. One way, for example, is to block time out on your calendar so you are shown as not being available. You can create ‘fictional’ meetings with yourself to do focused work so your calendar shows you are busy at certain times of the day.

Another trick you can use is to plan sessions of work a month or two in advance. If you know you have a project at the end of August, for example, you could block two days off around the 20th August. When you do this two things will happen. Firstly, your sub-conscious mind prepares you for it and secondly, if you tell people in advance—like a few weeks in advance—they are less likely to be upset or concerned about it. I learn that trick from one of the most productive people I have ever met. It works brilliantly.

The final thing super-successful and productive people do is they say no a lot more than they say yes. You see what these people understand is that if they spend more of their time each day on the high-value tasks, they will become more successful. If they spread their attention and say yes more often, they end up spending far more time on low-value tasks and they know when that happens their income and productivity suffer.

There’s a wonderful story about Steve Jobs where if you asked him for his time and it judged what you were asking him to do was low value, he would just ignore your request. He would give you a blank stare—if you asked him in person—or would ignore your email/text message. Now that’s going beyond saying no. That’s saying nothing. People soon got the message.

So, Helena, if you want to become a super-productive person and enjoy the benefits that come with that, you are going to have to make some uncomfortable decisions. For most people making these changes requires them to come outside their comfort zone and ask some very difficult questions. It’s easy to delegate blame to your company, your boss or your clients. When you do that, you are taking the easy road and it will banish you to a life of regret. And I do mean that. When you look back on your life in ten or twenty years time you will regret being so available to other people. You will regret not accomplishing the things you always wanted to accomplish and that is not a nice place to be.

So if you are ready to start the journey, the first thing you can do is establish what your high value and low-value tasks are—this is why a “do not do” list can often be useful. It shows you what are low value and what you should delegate or just find a better and faster way of doing them.

I hope this has been useful to you all. You do have the power to become highly productive, you just need to decide how much you are willing to sacrifice.

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

Monday Jul 06, 2020

Should You Switch To The Latest Apps?

Monday Jul 06, 2020

This week, should you switch to the latest app? Well, it depends and that’s the question I am answering this week.

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 140

Hello and welcome to episode 140 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 months, we’ve seen the launch of the noting taking app Roam Research and the email app HEY! Both of these apps have received quite a lot of publicity. The question is should you switch to any of these new apps? Well, it does depend on a number of things and that is what I shall talk about in this weeks episode.

Now, before we get to that, I just want to give you a heads up that the 2020 Your Digital Life course will be launching very soon. It’s a little late this year because I’ve completely re-recorded it and updated it with the Time Sector System.

Although this version is now the 3.0 version, anyone already enrolled in the Your Digital Life 2.0 course will, of course, get this huge update completely free. I know, I’m mad! But for me, it’s always about helping you to become better organised and more productive. So, keep an eye out for the launch. It’s coming very very soon.

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 Jez. Jez asks; hi Carl, what do you think of the new notes app Roam Research and Notion? These new players look like they are taking over from Evernote.

Hi Jez, thank you for your question.

Every few months I get a lot of questions like this on Twitter and my inbox is inundated with app developers asking me to promote their latest offerings and I think it is fantastic that these amazing people are working hard to make our lives easier.

That said, though, App stores can be very dangerous places. You see one of the biggest issues is people app switching every few months because the latest and newest shiny object in the App Store is offering to solve all your productivity problems.

Let's get one thing straight first. No app whether it’s new or old, will solve your productivity problems. Ever. Full stop.

You see if you have productivity issues it is not the app that is the problem. I mean, let's be honest here, as a species we survived pretty well with paper-based desk diaries and legal note pads for to-do lists. The issues many faces today, are the exact same issues knowledge workers have faced for decades. It’s not the apps. It’s the system you use, or not use.

So, there are two parts to this.

If you enjoy trying new apps and your productivity and time management systems keep you on top of your work, then that’s great. Go ahead, play, research and learn. It can be fun trying out new apps and seeing what they can do. I do that myself. Last week I played around with HEY! The new email app. And for those you interested, it’s not for me. I cannot send emails from my business email address only my HEY! Address. So it’s a non-starter. I also do not like being forced to manage my emails in the way the app developer wants me to manage my emails.

There are also some marketing issues here too. Picking a fight with Apple may seem a noble cause, but to me, it smacks of a publicity stunt to get attention. And forcing people to only use their HEY! Email address seems to be exactly the same way Hotmail developed a following in the 1990s. It all feels very fake to me. But that’s just my opinion.

Then there’s the other side to this. If you believe that if only you have the right set of apps your productivity issues will somehow miraculously be solved, then you are deluding yourself. They won't.

In fact, if you are constantly switching apps, you are compounding your problems because you never give any app a chance to become a part of who you are. You will be constantly playing with feature sets, trying to figure out how to do something and importing your notes, tasks or events into another new app. All of which takes you away from actually doing the work.

The truth is no app with be a perfect fit. You will have to compromise. When I moved to Todoist five or six years ago, I did so coming from an OmniFocus background. I was used to start and due dates. With Todoist you don’t get start dates. But the reasons for my move was much bigger than having start and due dates. It was because I was spending too much time in OmniFocus playing with perspectives and was not spending enough time doing the work. Todoist offered me a much simpler way of managing my tasks and it was the right move for me. It solved an issue of productivity for me. I quickly learned I did not need start dates anyway and I was only using them because they were a feature of OmniFocus.

And that is the point. If switching to a new app improves your workflow and overall productivity, then your switch was the right thing to do. If, however, it solves nothing and you find yourself back with the same issues you had before, then you’ve just wasted a lot of precious time. Time you will never get back.

Now with a notes app, this is an interesting place for me. You see, the right notes app for you depends on the way your mind works. I have clients who are incredibly creative and love to doodle in meetings. They love the feel of pen on paper, They think better in images and drawings and charts. For these people, a notes app that allows you to drop images, scans of written notes and use an Apple Pencil or stylus would work fantastically for them.

Then I have clients who think more linearly and prefer written outlining with links to connected ideas and notes. For these people, something like Roam Research or even Workflowy, OmniOutliner or Google Docs works best.

The right notes app for you depends on the way you think.

The same actually goes for your to-do list. If you are a visual person, Trello or Asana are likely to be the best for you. If you are more of a linear thinker, then Todoist, Microsoft ToDo or Apple Reminders would work better.

So, when it comes to choosing the right apps for you, you need to consider the way you think and work.

The problem with constant switching is you never learn how to use your app properly or build the all-important trust. If you do not trust your apps, you are less likely to use them properly.

The key to having a great set of apps is you instinctively collect everything into the app without thinking. I’ve used Todoist and Evernote for so long now, I don’t need to think of the steps to get something into my system. It just happens. I have an idea, I pick up my phone or activate the keyboard shortcut on my computer and collect the idea or task. It’s an automatic reflex. This is great because I stay focused on what I want to collect, instead of having to take my mind off that and try to remember how to save an idea.

And then we get to processing or organising what you collected. If you are constantly changing your apps you never really learn how to process quickly and efficiently. And with apps like Notion where there are so many customisable elements, the temptation to be constantly fiddling with your set up, the background colours or image means you spend a disproportionate amount of time playing and not enough time getting on with the work that matters.

What it all boils down to is what is it you want to achieve? Do you want to get better organised and become more productive, or do you want distractions and toys?

I agree it is important to keep up with the latest technology, but that should not be at the expense of your efficiency. I know plenty of productive people who still use a Franklin Planner. They routinely do their daily planning, they sharpen the saw and their planners are a gold mine of plans, appointments and tasks. They stick with it because it works and it is a system they trust.

It’s your system that really determines whether you are productive or not. Developing your system, and making it work for you is what will improve your time management. The app you use really doesn’t matter.

I think about the years I have been using Evernote and the incredible depository of notes, ideas and reference materials I have collected over the ten years of using Evernote is wonderful. Comparing Evernote to it’s newer rivals makes Evernote look and feel old fashioned, but it works, it’s never let me down (except on iOS which seems to have been fixed now) and I know how to find my notes in seconds. There’s no temptation to customise it—you can’t anyway— and because it has a fixed structure, I instinctively know how I want to organise my notes.

If I consider the time it would take for me to transfer all my notes from Evernote to something like Notion, it would just be a complete waste of time. I’m sure Notion in many ways looks and feels better than Evernote, but the real question is would it make me more effective? The answer to that is a resounding no. So, while I did try Notion a while ago, I quickly realised it was not going to make my system better or make me more efficient so the time cost involved in switching would not be worth it.

So, fix your system first. Make sure that works and that you use it automatically. Then find apps that work for the way you think, not because they look pretty or are the latest thing reviewers are talking about. All those reviewers will move on to the next things in a few weeks anyway. You will never be able to keep up with them and if you try your productivity will suffer. Just don’t do that.

Hopefully, that helps, Jez. Thank you for your question and once again, thank you to you for listening.

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

Monday Jun 29, 2020

How To Create Your Own Podcast (or YouTube Channel)

Monday Jun 29, 2020

This week, a slightly different episode. I’m answering a question about how to start a podcast, a blog or a YouTube channel.

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 139

Hello and welcome to episode 139 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

A question I am asked more and more these days is how do you start a blog, podcast, YouTube channel or even a newsletter, so I thought okay, I will answer that question this week because it is linked to productivity and being better with your time management.

Now, before we get to the question, if you are ready to take your time management and productivity to the next level and build a system fit for the twenty-first century and be ready for when we return to a semblance of normalcy, then now is a great time to get yourself enrolled in the course.

And if you are not yet ready to buy the course, I do have a number of resources that will give you an overview of the fundamentals of building the system. All the links are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Jim. Jim asks: Hi Carl, how do you start and run an effective YouTube channel (or podcast or blog)? I think this is a valuable question for people, like me, who would like to start a podcast or YouTube channel in their specific area of expertise.

Hi Jim, thank you very much for your question.

Now, before you get started with something like this you do need to understand the time sacrifice you are going to have to make each week or each month. It’s great that you have the idea of wanting to start a podcast, YouTube channel or blog, but the consideration I see a lot of people missing is just how much time it takes to create something like this every week. So let me tell you how much time I need to commit each week to produce the content I produce each week.

First my blog. To write a 1,000-word blog, edit and publish it takes me three hours. I allocate ninety minutes for writing the draft. Then I have a further hour of editing and finally thirty minutes to post the blog post and create the blog’s image.

My YouTube videos take around four to five hours each week. It depends on how many videos I produce. If I am publishing two videos in a given week, I need around three to four hours and three videos would need the full five hours to record, edit and publish with subtitles.

This podcast takes around two hours each week. There’s the script to write and the recording, editing and posting.

I also write two newsletters each week. Each one of those takes around two hours to produce and publish.

In total, I spend around fourteen hours each week producing my content.

Now, of course, you probably won’t be producing six to seven pieces of content each week, but those time estimates should give a rough figure to base your estimates on.

So, if you already feel overwhelmed by the amount of work you have each week, will you be able to commit to a further three hours of work?

And that brings me conveniently to my next tip. You have to commit to this every week (or month) for the next four to five years.

Creating a blog, podcast or YouTube channel is not a one-off event. It is a long-term commitment. This is not just about writing one post and thinking you have done it. It’s about writing or recording multiple posts.

Over the last four years, I have written nearly 300 blog posts, produced 138 podcasts and over 700 YouTube videos. It’s a big commitment.

So the first question you will have to ask yourself is; are you willing to commit to that time? Is so, then let’s move on to the next tip.

Now, you may have read all sorts of advice on starting something like this. And there will inevitably be a list of questions about who your target audience is, what your branding should be and how will you host it.

In my experience, that’s all complete rubbish and it invites you to spend far too much time procrastinating. I’ve known so many people that after three or four years are still trying to figure out who their target audience will be, what branding they should use and where to host their podcast.

None of this matters in the beginning. While you are figuring all that out. You have nothing. All you have is an idea. It would be far better to take your idea and start writing. Start publishing blogs, podcasts or whatever on the cheapest—preferably free—platform. You will never really know who your audience is until you get something out there. Then you will find out.

Once you have an audience, it is very easy to move your blog or podcast to your own website where you can maintain and curate your own content.

Trust me on this one. I made those mistakes in the beginning. I spent far too long thinking about who my target audience should be, and once I began publishing, I soon discovered I was completely wrong.

So, just get something out there. Once you have content out, you will start to get some analytics and that will tell you the truth far faster than if you try and guess.

As you produce more content, you will also develop your branding. Take my blog, for example, my first year or two of writing I just added a random picture I found on Pexels.com. After a year or so, I decided to use duotone images with a subtitle in the picture. That was how I developed my blog’s brand. It evolved over time. I did not, indeed, could not have created that right from the start. It took time.

The same went for my YouTube channel. If you look at my first few videos and compare them to how I do my videos today, you will see it has been an evolution. The more I learned about my audience the better I was able to ‘brand’ my channels and deliver content that people were asking for. In the early days, the only way I could develop a content list was to think of content that I would find interesting and make that.

And speaking of content or topics: How do you come up with ideas week after week? That’s a good question. The only way that has worked for me is to create a content list in my notes app and add topics as and when I thought of them.

Now, here I would advise that before you begin creating your content you draw up a list of at least twenty topics. The goal in these early days is to get twenty pieces of content out. As you write or record you will get more ideas. I find as I read articles, watch other YouTube videos or listen to podcasts I get ideas I think would be helpful and interesting. I then add these to my topic’s list. So you do not need to worry about coming up with ideas. Once you get started, you develop a keen sense of what will be interesting to your audience.

Now a couple of other points I feel you do need to understand. First is don’t go for perfection. You will not be perfect in your early days. You will get it wrong sometimes. You will make great content and not so great content. That’s fine and that’s perfectly normal. What is more important is that you ’ship’. Whatever your publishing schedule is, stick to it.

For your audience what’s worse than the occasional uninteresting post, is inconsistent posts. I subscribe to James Clear’s 3,2,1 weekly newsletter. (For those of you who don’t know, James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits). Every Thursday evening that newsletter arrives. Tony Robbins is another newsletter that is consistent every week. Every Sunday evening, I get Tony’s newsletter.

Then there are other newsletters I subscribe to that are woefully inconsistent. They start off with a bang, and then slowly disappear.

And the worst kind of content are those that come out in a flurry of emails, podcasts and blog posts when they are trying to sell you something and once the sales are over, these newsletters disappear. That just leaves a very bad taste and is guaranteed to lose you your audience.

The most effective way I have found for ensuring I maintain consistency is to set aside a fixed time each week to create my content. As I prepare this script, it is Tuesday morning. I always prepare the podcast script on a Tuesday morning. I have the same fixed time for my blog posts. Monday morning is when I write my blog post and Friday afternoons is my audio/visual day where I record my YouTube videos.

The only way I can build in the consistency needed to create my content is to fix the time in my calendar. For me, what goes on my calendar gets done. So, if it’s on my calendar it will get done.

The reality is if you want to create a blog, podcast or YouTube channel you need to be serious. You need to be in it for the long-term and that means a minimum of four to six years.

One final point. Don’t go looking at your numbers in the first six to twelve months. If you are writing or recording to build an audience you are never going to build a large audience in the first year or so. If you start obsessing about how many people are following you or how many subscribers you have you will be very very disappointed. It is a slow process. The only way you build an audience is through consistently putting out content week after week. There are no short cuts.

Create content because you want to help people. You want to teach people something, educate them on a topic close to your heart or because you want to enjoy the journey of building something from scratch. Never do it to become an ‘influencer’.

If the only reason you want to create a YouTube channel or an Instagram page is to become an influencer, you will fail today. There are far too many people doing that, and the vast majority of those people fail. Give people something of value and you will succeed.

All you need is PACT. Patience, Action, Consistency and Time. With those four elements, you will build something you can be very proud of.

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

Monday Jun 22, 2020

The Key To Building Structure Into Your Day

Monday Jun 22, 2020

This week, how do you build structure into your day so you stay focused on what is important?

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow

Building a 21st Century Time Management System

Script

Episode 138

Hello and welcome to episode 138 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

So, you have yourself organised. Your to-do list is set up, your projects are being managed from your notes app and your calendar is serving you (rather than the other way round) but you are still struggling to get your most important work done each day. Why is it going wrong?

Well, that depends and that’s what I’m going to answer this week.

Now before get started, have you joined the time management revolution yet? Are you using the Time Sector System? If not, there a couple of ways you can join. The first, of course, is take the course. For just $49.99 you can learn everything you need to get started with this fantastic system.

If you're not ready to take a course, then don't worry, I have a comprehensive blog post detailing the outline as well as plenty of set up videos on my YouTube channel.

All the details 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 Sarah. Sarah asks: Hi Carl, one of the things I’ve always struggled with is getting my planning done each day. When I do plan (which, to be honest, is not often) I end up not following my plan and not getting my work done. Are there any tricks that you use that help you stay focused on your work?

Hi Sarah, thank you for your question.

I find this is a common issue for many people when they decide they want to get themselves better organised and become more productive. Setting things up is generally quite easy. The motivation is high and you set aside time to do it. The issues arise once you begin implementing the process.

The problem here is that the process can be boring. And the habits haven't formed yet. So if you have not embedded the habit of planning the day the day before and setting up some structure into your day, your old habits will do their very best to prevent you from following your plan.

So step back for a moment and ask what one new habit would have the biggest impact on your time management?

This could be taking ten minutes at the end of the day and creating a plan of action in your calendar for the next day. Or it could be to focus your attention on collecting items into your to-do list manager—an important first habit to develop.

It’s really about establishing which 20% of your efforts will give you 80% of the results you desire.

If you try to change everything at once, all you need is one slip up and you feel everything has failed. And more importantly, trying to change everything all at once is hard. I would say it’s almost impossible because you are going to be constantly pulled back to your previous habits. Our brains hate change.

Change takes a lot of energy and we will resist it. You have to be determined to change and you have to focus on making that change. So make it easier for yourself and focus on one thing at a time.

So if you have never spent any time planning a day, it is something you are not used to doing, so at the end of a day, you’re tired and just want to crash out in your favourite armchair, you are not going to sit down with your laptop and spend ten minutes planning tomorrow.

That said, one simple way to start is to do two things. The first is to make sure you develop the habit of collecting everything. It does not matter if you think something is silly, just collect it. You can delete it later. And don’t worry about how much you collect. If you are using the Time Sector System it won’t take long to process what you collected.

The second part is to dedicate ten minutes at the end of the day to look at your calendar for the next day and decide what you will get done.

That’s it. Collect and plan.

Now, this is not the complete picture, but developing these two habits first will set you up for success later.

You see, if you are not in the habit of collecting everything that comes your way, you will forget something. And if you are not planning your day, all your old, unproductive habits will stay around. The goal in the initial stages is to change those habits. To build a little structure into your day.

So, the building of your daily structure involves two steps:

The first, before you begin the day, while you are drinking your morning coffee, open up your calendar and look to see what your day looks like. Then review your to-do list for the day. In total, that should only take 5 minutes. You do not need to do anything else. Just look to see what you have planned for the day.

The second is doing the same thing again in the evening. Give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to review your day’s tasks. Look at what you didn’t do, reschedule those for another day, look at your calendar for tomorrow and decide what needs doing. Then stop.

Now, here’s the essential part. Commit to doing that every day for a week.

In total, you are committing yourself to twenty to thirty minutes every day for seven days.

If you really want a way of motivating yourself, then draw out a sheet of paper with seven boxes on it and every day you do it put a cross in it. You are looking to create an uninterrupted chain of seven crosses to indicate you completed these two processes for seven days.

Now, after a week, and with seven crosses, create another seven boxes and do the same the following week.

As the ‘chain’ grows you are going to find it increasingly difficult to skip a day. The rule is, if you skip one day, you must start a new piece of paper and draw out seven boxes and begin again.

What you are doing is using Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain’ methodology to keep you focused on what you are trying to do.

What I’ve found with many of my coaching clients is as they focus on the morning review and the evening planning sessions, they make tiny adjustments to their set up. As they do this they begin to feel they are making progress—which they are doing—and at the same time, they are beginning to embed new habits. And habits are so much easier to manage than trying to restart things every week.

The next thing is self-discipline. Now here I notice a frequent problem. I’ve come across a lot of people who have developed a false belief over the years believing they are just not the disciplined type. This is complete rubbish! It’s just an excuse to avoid doing something that is quite hard to do.

We all have bundles of self-discipline. It is not that you are not the self-disciplined ‘type’, it’s that you are human. And humans are naturally lazy. So, really not following through on your commitment is just laziness. Apologies for being so brutally honest.

This is why you need to start small. Self-discipline is just like a muscle and to grow your self-discipline you need to exercise it. Exercising self-discipline does begin with small things. For example, sitting down at the end of the day for ten minutes with your calendar and to-do list open and planning tomorrow, while quite a small task, if you do it every day and practice resisting the urges to skip it, you build your self-discipline. Every time you resist the temptation to skip it, your self-discipline becomes stronger. Every time you give in to the temptation, you weaken your self-discipline because there is no pain associated with giving in.

Instead, every time you skip a planning session you need to feel bad. Feel guilty. Be angry with yourself. You failed and you will need to restart your seven-day chain.

Once you have committed yourself to doing a daily planning session, when you give in and don’t do it, then you must associate that with failing. Tell yourself: you failed!

Our feelings about failure cause us pain. We hate to fail. Failing at something is one fear we all have. Failing at a presentation, failing to achieve something leaves us feeling bad. Use that bad feeling to motivate yourself to not fail. After all, we are only talking about ten minutes here.

You can help yourself by doing something pleasurable while you do your planning session. Get yourself a glass of wine or a beer. Treat yourself to a nice cup of relaxing tea. Whatever you enjoy, use that to motivate yourself to do your daily planning.

As with anything worthwhile, the key is your motivation. Why have you decided you want to get better organised and more productive? Is it because of the disappointment you feel when you let someone down and miss a deadline? Or is it because you want to have more time to do things you really want to do? Whatever your motivation for becoming better at managing your time, use that to motivate yourself.

Whenever you feel like not doing that planning session, remind yourself why you are doing it. Write down your reasons why and stick them somewhere in your work station so you can see it every time you sit down. Don’t lose sight of your why.

Once you have embedded your daily planning session, create s structure to your day. Use your calendar to block off time for your important work. You can use the same strategy with building this structure.

For example, if you decide you want to exercise four days a week, put your exercise days on your calendar. Let’s say you decide to exercise Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday every week, put that on your calendar. Fix it there are create recurring events. This way, you will gradually begin to see those days as your exercise days and you will just do your exercise without thinking too much about it.

And you can gradually build in more of the things you want to consistently do. As each week passes your self-discipline grows, your habits change for the better and after three of four months, you find your new habits are embedded.

Now, the reality is you will still have bad days and weeks. That’s natural. We all get thrown out of our routines. Going away on holiday, spending a week on a training session etc. All these throw us out of our routines. The trick is to recognise these changes and to refocus ourselves when we return to our normal daily lives.

A trick I learned a while ago is with morning routines. If you try and create morning routines around a particular time every day, your chances of success are limited. All it takes is a night out on the town and being late to bed, and you will wake up a little later, you will skip your morning routine.

If, however, you create your morning routines around a series of actions you take from the moment you wake up, it means that no matter what time you wake up, you will follow the same routine and that way you are much more likely to follow through with your plan.

So there you go, Sarah. I hope that helps and has given you something to think about. Start small. Build that chain and your self-discipline and remember, if you fall off the wagon, you can always get back on it again.

Becoming more intentional about how you spend your time is a journey. There will be hills and mountains to climb. You will fall done, trip up and have to restart. But it’s a journey. You find out a lot about yourself on this journey and if you stick with it, the results are profoundly fulfilling and often lead for more positive changes in our lives.

Thank you so much for your question and thank you to all of you for listening.

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

Monday Jun 15, 2020

What To Do When Everything Falls Apart

Monday Jun 15, 2020

This week, how do you reset your time management system when things have gone wrong?

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow

How to Stay Productive When Everything Gets Thrown Out of Sync

Script

Episode 137

Hello and welcome to episode 137 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week it’s all about getting back into your system when you have been thrown out of sync by external events or just because you have drifted off course. And that happens a lot more frequently than you might think.

Now I wrote about this a while ago and I have linked to that post in the show notes. For me, it generally happens after I have been travelling. Coming back to Asia after a trip to Europe throws me right out of sync and it can take me around ten days to get back on track.

That said when it does happen you there are a few strategies that can help guide you back on course.

So let me now hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:

This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, can you help me? I love the idea of being organised and having time to do my work, yet every time I do get organised a few days later I stop and everything just falls apart. Is this normal?

Hi Sam, yes it is perfectly normal. It happens to all of us from time to time. So you are certainly not alone. The question is how do you prevent it from happening?

A lot of this comes down to our habits and our routines. In particular the habit of processing what you collected at the end of the day (or at least every 48 hours or so) Not clearing your inboxes frequently creates a lot of overwhelm and when that happens we resist and usually give up.

Now, this is one of those areas I found interesting many years ago. When I was in sales we were permitted to claim our expenses. The salesperson who trained me out in the field did her expenses the day before the deadline for submitting expenses. She would go into the glove box of her car and pull out all the receipts for fuel, lunches and other expenses, and then write them all out onto the expenses sheet. It took her around three to four hours to do it all.

My sales manager was a little better, he would begin doing his expenses a couple of days before. It was easier for him as he was based mainly in the office and he kept all his receipts in the top drawer of his desk.

Naturally, as I was a young twenty-something, I looked up to these experts and so followed their example. Soon I began to see this as a very inefficient way of managing expenses. Spending four or five hours painstakingly writing out the receipts onto a sheet once a month just seemed a bad way of doing it. I decided I would do my expenses every day instead. For me, this meant all I had to do was spend five or ten minutes at the end of the day and write my day’s expenses onto the expenses sheet.

One of the additional benefits of this practice was I did not lose any of my receipts. On the day the expenses were due, all I had to was calculate the total, add that to the sheet and hand it in—five minutes at the most.

This practice of having a closing down routine every day has stuck with me ever since. When I used a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, I practised the same philosophy. At the end of the day, I would spend ten to fifteen minutes collecting all my notes, adding the relevant bits to my projects section at the back of the planner and planning out the next day with my diary and to-do list. New to-dos were put where they needed to be and any admin sheets required for my work were updated and filed.

It was a small daily sacrifice that meant I was never in a position where I had to stop every I was doing just to get everything up to date.

My advice to you all is to develop a closing down routine that you follow every day. It does not have to be long. Ten minutes is fine. In this closing down routine, clear your to-do list inbox—decide when you are going to do the tasks, check your calendar for tomorrow, and clean up anything else that needs clearing up.

Clearing inboxes is how we get back on track. Clearing our inboxes—whether that is email or to-do list—the act of cleaning it up is enough to make us feel better and organised. It’s when we allow this area to slip when things go wrong.

Set aside some time each day for processing, Sam. It’s the first place to start. The purpose here is to avoid the build-up of overwhelm. That’s what often causes us to throw in the towel.

Developing the right habits can be very hard though, particularly if you try and do too much at once. And with a closing down routine, there is going to be a lot of trial and error. What you are looking for is efficiency and consistency. Spend a week or two testing out different ways of doing it. Decide what you want to clear at the end of each day and create a checklist.

Once you are happy with your checklist, set yourself a thirty-day challenge. For the next thirty days follow your closing down routine each day. Make sure you do as per your checklist.

Of course, if you feel you need to refine your list, by all means, refine it. After all, it is your list. The key is to commit to doing it every day for thirty days without missing a single day. That will begin the habit embedding process.

I find, having a set time each day to do the closing down routine is the best way. I often advise my coaching clients to set an alarm or a reminder on their phone or computer to come up fifteen minutes before they finish the day to remind them to do the losing down.

So for example, if you finish work at 6:00 pm set a reminder to come up at 5:45 pm and begin the closing down session. Stop whatever you are doing at 5:45, do the closing down and if needs be, finish what you were doing once you have closed down the day.

There are a lot of benefits in doing things this way. First of all, you give yourself time to process your inbox and review your calendar. It also gives you time to see what you need to do tomorrow and plan your objectives and tasks for tomorrow.

Back in the day when I worked in an office, there were many days when I left work, and because I had not looked at my calendar or cleared out my inbox, I had this nagging feeling I had missed something important. It was not the best way to spend the evening, worrying about what I had forgotten. Now When I worked in an office, we did not have smartphones and computers and iPads connected to our work life. Our work-life stayed in the office—a very nice state of affairs. So once I left the office I had no way of knowing what was missing until I arrived back at the office the next day.

Closing down the day, cleaning your inbox and knowing what’s on your calendar for tomorrow leaves you feeling relaxed and stress-free and that always leaves you free to actually enjoy the evening doing what you enjoy doing.

And while you may think having to find more time each day to plan and prepare is going to be hard, this is where you will have to make a decision. You see, if you are not prepared to do the backend work—processing your inboxes, keeping on top of your email and planning the next day—then where does that leave you?

Without the backend work, you will have overflowing inboxes, un-replied to emails and a lot of stress. Not exactly the position you want to be in. Quite the reverse, I’m sure.

The next part of the conundrum, Sam, is to have a system in place. And there are a lot of systems to choose from. There’s my Time Sector System, where you manage your work by when you need to do it. There’s the traditional GTD method (Getting Things Done) where you manage your work by context (people, place and things) and the Kanban method where your work is managed by what stage it is at.

Without a system, you will be flying by the seat of your pants. You will be in a reactive rather than a proactive state for most of the day. Being reactive means you are reacting to the loudest and latest rather than anticipating the pressures on your time and taking action to mitigate it before it happens.

Using those ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to clean up and process puts you into a proactive state because it’s like stepping back and looking at what you have to do and making decisions about when you are going to do it or would like to do it.

It’s when you have that level of organisation that you gain the clarity to plan better and faster and because you have turned it into a habit—helped by doing a thirty-day challenge—you are much less likely to fall off the proverbial productivity wagon.

The final part is the make sure you do a weekly planning session. Like the daily planning session, this does not need to be long. But it will take you around twenty to thirty minutes each week. Here all you need do is review the tasks you want to do next week and compare those against your calendar of events to make sure that what you plan to do is realistic when place alongside your daily commitments.

It’s no good scheduling fifteen tasks for Wednesday when you are going to be on a training course all day. You are not going to get your tasks done.

If you are using the Time Sector System, all you need do is move your tasks from your next week’s sector to this week, date your tasks, based on what you days look like for next week, and do a quick review of your project notes in your chosen notes app to make sure your projects are moving forward as you expect them to do so.

The weekly planning session is also a good time to catch up with anything that needs cleaning up. I usually process my Evernote inbox during this session because the notes I collect in Evernote during the week are not too many and can easily be filed once my weekly planning session is complete. It just feels like a natural step, to plan the week then clean up the previous week and make sure everything is reset for the following week.

It’s a great feeling knowing that everything is done, all your tasks and emails are clear and up to date and you are ready to begin the new week with a clear mind.

I hope these tips have helped, Sam. Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. If you are interested in learning more about the Time Sector System, then I have put a link in the show note to my blog post where I explained how it works and what you need to create the system. It’s simple, easy to develop and will do a lot for your time management and productivity.

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

Monday Jun 08, 2020

What It Take To Complete Your Projects and Accomplish Your Goals

Monday Jun 08, 2020

Podcast 136

This week, it’s all about using daily routines to build a structure to your day so you remain focused on what is important and keep the momentum going with your goals

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 136

Hello and welcome to episode 136 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

So how do you make progress on your projects and goals consistently? It’s a question I get asked frequently and it is one of the secrets of the super successful.

Now the truth is there is no real secret to this, all you need do is look at the way people like Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Warren Buffett and Charles Darwin (yes the Origin of Species author) managed their time and you will see a pattern because really it is a pattern.

Oh, before we start, don't forget, if you have found that managing your tasks by project creates overwhelm and a lot of tasks slip through the cracks—never to be seen again—then it just might be time for you to try the Time Sector System.

The Time Sector System is a time management system designed in the twenty-first century, for the way we work today. It takes the overwhelm out of your work and helps to get you realistic about what you can achieve each day.

If you have tried other systems and not found anything to work, then take a look at the Time Sector System. This might just be the way for you to manage your work and your goals.

Full details of the Time Sector System 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 Terri. Terri asks: hi Carl. I wonder if you have any tips on getting my projects finished. I seem to be very good at starting projects, but after a few weeks, I lose interest and then forget about them.

Hi Terri, thank you for your question.

This is something I used to really struggle with myself. I’ve always been very good at coming up with ideas and starting them—whether they are goals or projects— but terrible at finishing. I either got bored or just lost interest in doing them because something else, and seemingly more exciting came up. I felt I was an expert at accumulating projects and goals but terrible at following through.

In the end, I realised every achievement, every success I had ever had was built on one simple factor. Consistency.

You see things only move forward when you take action. But for you to get to the end of anything, whether that is a project or a goal you need to take that action consistently. There is no escaping that. There simply is no other way around it and there are no shortcuts.

This is how Dwayne Johnson built his successful acting career. He knows his success is built on three things. His personality, charisma and his physique. He’s not a classically trained actor, but he has natural charm and charisma, and that comes through, but to maintain his physique he has to work out every day and maintain a strict diet.

Every day, Dwayne Johnson will wake up four hours before he is due on set. That means if he is due on set at 7:30 am, he will wake up at 3:30 am and begin his exercise with forty-five minutes to one hour of cardio. He then has breakfast (eggs and steak yummy!) and does an hour and fifteen-minute weights session. He repeats that six days a week, taking one rest day on a Saturday.

Question: Would you be willing to do that every day for the rest of your life?

If you want to be a successful action star, that is the kind of consistent commitment you are going to have to make.

Now for you to build the momentum you first need to establish what are the tasks and activities you need to complete every day or week in order for you to move things forward? Without really understanding that you are just not going to make any progress.

Let’s say you want to create a number of income streams in preparation for your retirement. The first step is to identify what needs to be done to do that. What kind of income streams are you considering? Which ones are viable? Which ones are not? And what steps can you take each day that will develop and build those income streams?

You see if you don’t make those decisions and establish what needs to be done every day or week, you will never begin taking action. This project will become a dormant project. It will be in your project list making you feel comfortable because seeing it there makes you feel something is happening but the reality is you are doing nothing to move it forward so it does not move forward. It is stuck, dead, dormant and until you start doing something, anything, it will remain dead.

That reminds me of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch there.

Imagine you want to start a podcast. You have the equipment—a laptop, a microphone and some audio editing software. Great. You have the equipment. So what next? How can you build your podcast? You need to begin recording your podcast. Now recording just one is not going to create a successful podcast, you need to be recording one every week.

So, what do you have to do each week to be able to record a podcast every week? Write a script, record it, edit it and then publish. So, each week you need to set aside time for writing the script, editing and recording.

I know how long it takes me to do this podcast every week, and that means I need to find around three hours each week. Two hours to prepare the script, thirty minutes to record it and thirty minutes for editing. So, on my calendar I prepare the script on a Tuesday morning, I record it Sunday morning and edit it Sunday afternoon and publish on a Monday morning.

These tasks are part of my recurring areas of focus and get done consistently every week. If I don’t do all these tasks every week, no podcast will be published. Period.

I’ve frequently spoken about Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, on this podcast and how he wrote a book every year. The routine was simple. Begin writing at 9:00 am and continue until 12 pm. Then return and do the editing of that day’s writing between 4 pm and 6 pm every day. After six weeks, a book was written.

And that is the secret. Consistency and routines. Turn the action steps that will take you towards completion into your routines and do them consistently until your project is finished or your goal is accomplished.

As Robin Sharma says: “all great things are difficult at the beginning, messy in the middle and beautiful at the end.”

Getting started is hard, keeping going when you doubt yourself is very messy, but by making sure you do whatever needs doing consistently over a period of time you will eventually have a completed project.

So how do you keep yourself motivated to keep going when things are hard. I remember when I began my YouTube channel, my videos were getting a few views, and I was picking up a few subscribers here and there. It was slow, it was hard and it was very difficult sometimes to give up five or six hours each week to make the videos.

But I knew the only way to grow and develop the channel was to keep going no matter how hard it sometimes seemed. I can promise you is was very hard to start. It was incredibly messy in the middle because a lot of time I had no idea what I was doing. But with each video, I made I was learning. I was getting better and my confidence was growing.

Today I have almost 50,000 subscribers—nowhere near the number the really successful YouTubers have, but to me, that is not important. For me, it’s about learning and helping. Each video I make I learn. And each video, I hope, helps at least a few people learn something that will help them to reduce their stress and become more productive. I am achieving my goal.

So, you need to develop the routines and build the structures into your days and weeks that will sustain your momentum. That is the only way you will build anything.

So once you have established the action steps you need to take consistently, get those action steps set up as recurring action steps in your to-do list manager or your calendar. Make them non-negotiable. Be determined to make them happen every day or week and understand that unless you are prepared to do that you will fail.

Another important factor here is to not confuse thinking and planning with taking action. Of course, you do need to do some thinking and you will need to do some planning, but all your thinking and planning is not moving anything forward. The only way to start moving things forward is to actually start taking real action.

Write that script, record that first episode and publish it. You will learn far more from doing that than you ever will researching and talking about it.

I often read articles that tell you to develop your branding, to establish who your audience is and to research your area. All that is complete rubbish. You will never know who your real audience is until you begin publishing. You could spend weeks developing a brand image only to discover that the people attracted to your message are not the people you thought would be attracted to it and you then have to waste a lot of time re-branding and rethinking your strategy. Publishing and getting whatever you want to do out there will teach you far more and a lot faster than ‘strategising’.

As Nike says: Just do it!

So Terri, make a decision about what needs to happen consistently. Make sure you plan when you will do those action steps every week and get started. The sooner you start the sooner you will get the kind of feedback you need to adjust and improve and the sooner you will get to the end of the project or achieve your goal. It’s all about turning action steps into routines and habits and making sure those steps happen every week.

I hope that helps. And thank you so much for your question.

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

Monday Jun 01, 2020

How to Build a Positive Work/Life Balance

Monday Jun 01, 2020

This week, I answer a question about work/life balance and how to bring balance into your life when you feel you have too much work to do every day.

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System