Your Time, Your Way

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Script

Episode 158

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Steve, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the core work of a duty manager.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you also to you for listening.

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

Monday Nov 02, 2020

How To Stop Overthinking and Over Planning.

Monday Nov 02, 2020

Podcast 157

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

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Script

Episode 157

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

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

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

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

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

All the links and details are in the show notes.

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

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

Hi Maria, Thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

But how do you stop overthinking and over planning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Oct 26, 2020

How To Find Time To Create A Productivity System.

Monday Oct 26, 2020

Podcast 156

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

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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How To be More productive Blog Post

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Script

Episode 156

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Tina, thank you so much for your question.

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

But there is hope.

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

So, what do you do in this day off?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write it down. Get it into your inbox.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Oct 19, 2020

How To Be More productive.

Monday Oct 19, 2020

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

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Links:

How To be More productive Blog Post

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 155

Hello and welcome to episode 155 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Last week, I wrote about how to be more productive on my blog and it elicited a lot of questions related to that question: How can we become more productive.

The reality is, it’s not rocket science. More of than not what causes out difficulties with productivity are the tools we are using. For some it’s that they are not using any tools, for others it’s they are using the wrong tools altogether. This week, I will explain all so you too can begin down the road of improving your overall productivity.

Now before we get to the answer, as I mentioned last week, October is the best time to begin planning the coming year. And, well, 2020 has not turned out exactly as many of us planned.

In order to help as many people as I can to develop an achievable plan to really help you dive deep into your dreams and goals and bring them forward so you can begin making progress on them. I know it is difficult to maintain focus on these goals and dreams, but while it may be difficult it is not impossible, and I devised a course a few years ago that helps you to uncover those goals and dreams and to show you how to build them into your everyday life so you can start making progress on them.

Time And Life Mastery is my premium course and it is packed full of ideas, methods and strategies that will help you to turn dreams into actionable goals. So for the next few days, you can buy this course, which is normally $99.00 for just $74.99. That’s a 25% saving and it’s a course that will not only show you how to build a life you want, it will also inspire you to take action.

I do hope you will join me on the course. I put my heart and soul into this because I know it works. I know because I took delivery of my Range Rover Velar two weeks ago, and that is the start for my wife and me to begin building the lifestyle we want for our long-term future. (Those of you who have taken the course will understand that reference to the Range Rover)

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

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

This week’s question comes from Laura. Laura asks, Hi Carl, I’ve been trying to find ways of getting my work done. I’ve tried all the apps, and read blog posts, books and watched videos, yet I still find I cannot get all my work done. I always feel overwhelmed. Can you tell me how someone can become more productive and better with their time management? Is there some secret?

Hi Laura, thank you for your question and thank you to everyone else who wrote to me about this very topic.

Now, As I wrote in my blog post, to become more productive you need to become very aware of how you spend your time. Now when I. Say become aware of how you are spending your time, I mean from a bigger picture point of view.

Let me explain.

The bigger picture view is where you can see how much time you are spending on doing the work—work that matters, and how much time you spend not doing the work that matters.

Now, of course, this means identifying what “work that matters” means. Work that matters is work you have decided needs doing. It is the tasks and your task list and it is the meetings and obligations you have on your calendar.

You also need to be very aware of how much time you are spending inside your productivity apps. Now let’s get something straight here. While planning and knowing what you need to do is important, I do not deny that time spent planning, processing and reorganising your lists of work is not doing the work. In the COD system that is the “O” - organising. Organising is not doing. Doing is doing.

I remember when I was first introduced to Notion. I had seen the videos on YouTube, I had read their website and I was so excited. Finally, I thought, here was an app that would help my planning better than any app that had come before it.

I hurriedly installed it on my computer and began setting it up.

Six hours later, I was still not quite happy with my set up, so I skipped dinner and carried on. A further two hours later, I was tired. I stopped. I then opened up Todoist to see what work needed doing. I had begun the day with ten tasks. And there, in my today view, were still ten tasks. I had done none of my work. I had spent over eight hours trying to set up Notion how I wanted it and had done nothing important all afternoon.

What a complete waste of time. I gave up with Notion, deleted the app snd swore I would never again make that mistake.

What you need to realise is when an app developer creates an app, one of the metrics used to convince investors to invest in their startup is the amount of time a user spends using the app every day. So, it is in the best interests of the app developer to encourage you to spend time inside the app.

Now, I am not suggesting that is Notion’s intention, I do not know their intentions. But you look at almost any pitch an app startup gives and somewhere in their pitch will be that metric.

Now if your goal is to become more productive, spending more time inside a, so-called, “productivity” app is not being more productive. Being more productive is getting your work done to the highest possible standard in the least amount of time.

So how do you do that?

Well, firstly make sure you are spending enough time each day doing your work. Of course, that is much easier to say than do.

But once you become very aware of how you are spending your time it does become easier. For instance, I use my calendar app to block time out each day to work on my core work. The work that really matters. Blocking time on my calendar takes around thirty-seconds. I do it the night before and I only block time out for the next day. I look for the gaps and if I feel I need an hour or two to do some specific work, I will block that time out.

Let’s say, for example, I want to write a blog post. I know I need ninety minutes for that task. I look at my calendar and see that between 1:30 pm and 3:00 pm my calendar is clear of meetings. So I will block it.

At 1:15 pm the next day I get an alert on my computer to say “writing time in 15 minutes”. So, I will start to finish off whatever I was doing. Take a quick five or ten-minute break and then start writing. I did not need to go to my to-do list manager. I know already my plan was to write the blog post, so my calendar alerted me and I begin.

Now, here’s the thing. It’s great to say “I have to do my work”, but how serious are you about your work if you allow distractions to get in your way? I’ve heard all the excuses. I have to be available for my customers, my boss, my colleagues and on and on that list goes.

Okay, that may be true. So, what’s more important? Doing your important work or being available 24/7 for your boss, customers, colleagues etc? You can’t really do both. You need to make a decision.

Here’s the thing though, you customers, boss and colleagues will never ever be upset or angry with you if you are not available for an hour or so because you are doing the work that matters. Seriously, if you want to become more productive you do need to make those decisions. Yes, they are difficult decisions, but again, what’s important here?

Now, what do you do about all those meeting invitations? There’s a lot of those and somehow you need to get control of them. If you find you are attending meetings five to six hours a day you are going to need to have a conversation with your boss. Let’s say three out of the five days you spend five hours in meetings. That leaves you will just three hours to get your work done.

If you struggle to finish your work because you are attending so many meetings, then you need to develop a different strategy. One way that can help is to make sure you plan out your week. Planning out your week is not something you can do in five or ten minutes. It takes a little longer than that. When you plan out the week what you are doing is deciding what needs to be done that week.

Now what I have found is when I have a set of outcomes for the week—work that I want to get completed by the end of the week—I can create a preliminary plan and if I cannot complete something one day, I can move it forward to another day that week. The goal is to achieve my outcomes by the end of the week not try and do everything in one day. This means if I am flooded with meetings, I can designate Thursday or Friday as a no meetings day and make my excuses or ask for the meeting to rearranged.

If you have some control over your schedule you could create a permanent day as a no-meetings day. I do this on Tuesdays. I don’t allow any meetings or calls to be scheduled on a Tuesday. This means I can use Tuesdays as a focus day to do those bigger tasks that require more than two or three hours to work on.

Ultimately, you need to set some boundaries. I know if you are low down in the command chain this can be difficult, but having that conversation with the powers that be can help here. What’s the worst that can happen?

The key really is having a plan and a set of outcomes for the week. If you have these written down and you remind yourself each day of your outcomes for the week, you will be surprised how much you actually get done each week. This is a far better strategy than having no plan and not knowing what you need to do each day. I can assure you if you don’t have a plan, you will end up working on someone else’s plan and that is never ever a good strategy for you. That way you end up helping other people to do their work and find yourself in meaningless meetings wasting your valuable time.

So, if you want to get serious about becoming more productive, then monitor how you currently spend your time. How much time are you doing work that matters? How much time are you planning and organising (or as we used to call it shuffling paper)? If you are spending more than 5% of your time planning and processing then your system is far too complex. Simplify it. Do you really need all those sub-projects and tasks? Do you need all those tags and labels? Maybe you do, but perhaps you do not. If you are not ever searching or using tags then don’t use them.

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

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

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

Monday Oct 12, 2020

How To Stay Focused On Your Plan For The Week

Monday Oct 12, 2020

In this week’s podcast, how do you stay focused on your plan for the week?

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 154

Hello and welcome to episode 154 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, if you are listening to this podcast you obviously have some interest in becoming better organised and more productive. And, I guess you have set up a system… Hopefully, that system is based around COD (Collecting, organising and doing).

Now if you are also doing your weekly planning, how many of you are able to stick with your weekly plan? In theory, if you sit down on the weekend and give yourself twenty to thirty minutes to plan out what you want to accomplish in the week, then you should be getting a lot of your important work done… In theory. In practice, that’s a lot harder to do, and it takes a lot of effort and focus to accomplish.

But it is possible and this week I will share with you some of the strategies I use to make sure I stay focused on my plan throughout the week.

Now, before we get to the question, If you haven’t already done so, you can download my annual planning sheet as well as my areas of focus worksheet (for free) so you can begin planning out next year. Yep, 2020 has not turned out how we expected, and I am sure many of you have had to make some pretty dramatic changes to your plans, but no matter how well or badly this year has gone for you, we all get another chance next year and taking the time over the next three months to plan out what you want to accomplish next year will reap some incredible rewards.

So, head over to my website, carlpullein.com and download these very helpful planning sheets and make sure you are setting yourself up for an incredible 2021.

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

This week’s question comes from Beth. Beth asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed David Allen’s Getting Things Done and recently your Time Sector System and the problem I have is no matter how well I plan out the week, I very rarely do what I plan to do. I am constantly interrupted by my colleagues and staff as well as my customers. Is this normal or is there anything I can do to help me stay focused on my plans?

Hi Beth, thank you for your question.

I think we all struggle here. It’s very easy to make a plan on a Sunday afternoon when we are away from our normal environment and then arrive at work on a Monday morning and thrown into the emergencies and crises of the day and our carefully crafted plan is thrown out of the window.

As Mike Tyson apparently famously said: “We all have a plan until we get punched in the face”.

So how can we stay focused on our plan for the week and still manage the emergencies and crises that will inevitably come up in the week?

The first thing to do is plan to do less.

It’s very easy to plan things out when our phones are not ringing and our colleagues and staff are not asking questions all day. This often leads us into a false sense that we can do a lot more than we really can. If I am being truthful to myself I know that I can realistically only focus on one or two projects each week.

Sure, I would love to be able to work on five or six projects, but realistically, with everything being thrown at me, as well as my core work, no matter how much I want to work on those five or six projects it just isn’t going to happen.

That said, in my team, there is only one person. Me. It might be different if you manage a team of people where you can delegate responsibility to your team members, but even then there is only a limited amount of work you can focus on each week.

It is far better to focus on one or two things each week and make sure they are done to the highest possible standard than to try and do everything and find your standards fall and you miss very important tasks.

So, when you are doing your weekly plan, choose the projects that are the most important or urgent and prioritise those for the week.

If you have a lot of projects falling due around the same time, you may need to renegotiate the deadlines. Never be afraid of doing this. This is not a reflection on your abilities to do your work. This is you demonstrating you are in control of your time and if you renegotiate a deadline giving your customer or boss enough notice you are unlikely to be refused.

Problems occur when you call your customer or your boss the day before the deadline and inform them you are not going to make the deadline. Then you are asking for trouble and you are going upset your customer and your boss.

So when doing your weekly plan make sure you review your project deadlines and take care not to have too many deadlines at the same time.

Next up, is to put some structure into your day. Now by this, I mean set aside two or three hours each day for focused work. This is usually best done first thing in the morning. If you start work at 8:30 AM, then set aside 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM for your focused work.

By “focused work” I mean you turn off notifications and email and just focus on the work you have planned to do for the day. If you can get yourself those two to three hours each day, you are going to get a lot done. Problems happen when we allow ourselves to be interrupted by every notification we receive—it’s just not conducive to getting important work.

I know we think we have to be available 24/7, but that is just not true, no matter who you are.

When it comes to email the way I see it is, if my house was on fire, my neighbour is never going to email me to tell me. They are either going to call me or bang on my door. Real emergencies are never communicated to via email so stop thinking email (or Slack or MS Teams etc) are emergency channels. They are not. Real emergencies are delivered either in person or via your phone.

If you do lead a team, explain the communication channels to your team. Make sure they understand that between certain times of the day you should not be interrupted unless it is a real emergency and make sure you explain what a ‘real emergency’ is.

Another tip I would give you is to set aside some time towards the end of the day for communications. I find if I dedicate an hour or so towards the end of the day to deal with my communications I can stay on top of all my email and messages without much effort. You will find trying to stay on top of all your communications sporadically throughout the day tiresome and things will inevitably slip through the net.

There’s no problem doing two or three processing sessions through the day, I generally process first thing in the morning, just after lunch and before I start my evening coaching calls. Here to emphasis is on processing, not doing.

What I mean is I go through my inbox and move any actionable emails to my Action This Day folder. Then, when I finish my coaching calls for the day, I sit down for an hour and do my communications. I respond to my actionable emails and messages in one go.

One of the advantages of this method is you do not get caught up in email ping pong. You are only sending one reply to an individual per day. And remember, if something is urgent, then don’t use email as the main method of communication. Jump on a call, explain what needs to be done and if necessary follow up the action steps by email. But don’t rely on email as the main source of communication.

Another area that helps to keep you focused on your plan for the week is to do a daily mini-review. Now the keyword here is “mini”. It should not take you more than ten to fifteen minutes to review what you have done for the day, making sure you are moving forward on your plan for the week and make any adjustments required in order to put you back on or keep you on track for the week.

You see, no matter how well we plan our week, as I mentioned at the beginning, your plan is going to change once it hits the emergencies and urgencies of the week and sometimes you are going to have to drop everything to deal with those emergency. By having a few minutes at the end of the day to reassess and adjust the plan, you are going to find you get a lot more done than if you just give up the plan and allow the week’s events to drag you each day.

So, when planning the week, make sure you plan less than you think you can do. If you do have an incredible week, you can always add more work later.

Have a structure to your week. Give yourself two to three hours each day for focused work and some time towards the end of the day for dealing with your communications. In between those times, keep things as flexible as you can soy do have time each day to deal with the unknowns.

Make sure you are clear about how to communicate with you. Keep only a few channels open—you do not have to be available on all channels. Make sure the key people you work with understand exactly how to communicate with you in an emergency.

And finally, set aside ten to fifteen minutes each day to review progress against your plan so you can make any necessary adjustments.

It’s not difficult, but you do need to commit to maintaining a structure and to resist the temptation to let everything fall down once the inevitable crises of the week begin.

Thank you, Beth, for sending in your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you would like answering all you need do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.

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

Monday Oct 05, 2020

Here's My Weekly Workflow and The Tools I Use.

Monday Oct 05, 2020

So, you have all your tools—great notes apps, great writing apps and a fantastic system set up but how do all these tools come together and work for you rather than the other way round? That’s the question I am answering this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 153

Hello and welcome to episode 153 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.

Well, 2020 is into its final leg now. The final quarter has begun and it is this time of year that I love. Not only because we get to see amazing autumnal colours here in Korea, but I also start my planning for the next year. And while 2020 has not worked out exactly how I expected—I think we have all found that—it does mean things can get better and we will one day be able to start travelling and seeing this amazing world.

What I mean by beginning my planning season is I use a templated note I keep in Evernote that covers different areas of my life and encourages me to think about ways I can improve those areas. Areas such as my business, my family life, my health and fitness and my goals. It’s a review of where I am and where I want to be and I seek ways to bridge the gap.

The next two months is where I brainstorm ideas and in December I start to make decisions about which of those areas I will focus on and how I will achieve the outcomes I want. Because I give myself plenty of time to plan things out, it means I am not scrambling at the end of December to put together a list of New Year's resolutions, instead, I have a carefully curated list of real areas I want to improve and grow.

I have put a link in the show notes to my downloads page where you can get yourself a copy of this planning sheet and you too can start the process of making those improvements to your life that you feel need improving.

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

This week’s question comes from Gustav. Gustav asks: Hi Carl, I am a great fan of your COD system and in terms of collecting and organising things, my system fits like a glove. But when it comes to the “Do“part where I produce articles, conference papers, blog posts etc. I still encounter difficulties.

Would you mind giving some insights of your content production flow and handover between your tools as this where I find the biggest difficulties?

Hi Gustav. Thank you for your question.

I thought the best way to answer your question would be to go through how I develop different types of content starting with my regular content such as this podcast, my blog and YouTube videos and then onto bigger content such as an online course.

So, let’s start with my blog as I think this is the easiest one.

I write a blog post every week, and so I need a consistent stream of topics and for that, I have a simple note in Evernote where I keep all topics. Now, the problem I encountered when I began writing regularly was getting my topic ideas into the note in Evernote. That problem was solved by the brilliant app, Drafts. Drafts is a simple, yet very powerful notes app. Now, it’s not really your traditional notes app in that while you can keep your notes in Drafts, Drafts is at it’s best when you use it as a launcher for your other apps.

Drafts makes it incredibly easy to grab an idea into your iPhone or iPad (or desktop) and then send it to a predetermined note in Evernote. So let’s say as I am driving, I get an idea for a blog post. All I need do is tap the bottom left of my Apple Watch and that will start the dictation feature of the Drafts app on my watch and I can dictate the idea straight into Drafts. Later, I can then pull up the actions sheet in Drafts and append that idea to a note in Evernote. I never need to open Evernote.

This saves so much time and reduces the resistance. When you have thousands of notes in Evernote it can be difficult to find the note you want to add an idea to. With Drafts, you don’t need to find the note as it does it all for you.

This means on a Sunday night before I go to bed, I look at my blog post ideas list in Evernote and choose the topic I want to write about tomorrow.

And that nicely brings me on to the writing process. I write my blog posts every Monday morning. Once my morning calls are complete, I open up my writing App, Ulysses and I begin writing. As I have already chosen the topic I will write about, I don’t need to go looking for a topic. I just begin writing and for the next ninety minutes, that’s what I do.

As I am writing, if I find a statement or example requires a link, I will look for a suitable link as I am writing or as I am editing the article.

Editing is done the next day. I like to leave the first draft for 24 hours to settle. I also find when I come back to an article the next day I see more mistakes than I would if I tried editing the article immediately after writing it.

Once edited, I will select the image using Unsplash.com or Pexels, create a duotone image from the file and then schedule the article to be published at 10 AM on a Wednesday (that’s Korean time) and it’s done.

That really is pretty much the process I follow for all my content. This podcast script is written on a Tuesday morning and edited on a Wednesday or Thursday. The script is written again in Ulysses and the questions I get from you wonderful listeners are kept in a note in… You guessed it, Evernote.

Now, for my YouTube videos, the process is slightly different. I have a note in Evernote that has space for three videos. I write out the topic for each video into a table in the note and then add notes and ideas for the video.

The capturing process is the same as everything else. Ideas begin in Drafts then get moved to Evernote and then that Evernote note is my reference material for when I am preparing the content. If I find any links, images, videos or anything else I want to include in any of this content, it is added to the note.

Why I do things this way is because I have everything I need to write the article or record the video in one place instead of having everything all over the place. It reduces the chance I will be side-tracked by a distraction and allows me to just get started and create.

For the bigger projects such as writing a book, again, all my research materials are in Evernote. Now for a project like writing a book, I would create a notebook for the project. That way I can clip webpages, create project timelines and a separate note for chapter ideas.

Now, for online courses, I use Apple’s Numbers spreadsheets. That’s because each lesson in the course requires a lot of notes and learning points and I want to be able to add additional information such as whether something would be a talking head lesson, a presentation slide or a demonstration. An online course takes a lot of work to make sure it fits logically together and having an outline in Numbers helps me to see the bigger picture plus I can drill down into details when I am developing the course.

However, again, the outcome for the course will be contained in a note in Evernote as well as anything else that may be relevant to creating the course.

The way I see things is Evernote is my project support app. I can keep all relevant reference materials, links, screenshots and anything else I may want to develop the content I am creating.

For written work, I use Ulysses where I have a drafts folder for all the content I am working in developing and once it has been completed I move the article to an archive folder. My goal is to keep things as simple as I possibly can with as few steps as I can make it. So, having two apps—Drafts for collecting materials on the fly, Evernote for storing all that material and Ulysses for writing the actual content does that for me.

So where does Todoist come into this? Todoist is my to-do list, so all Todoist is doing is telling me what to work on. So, on a Monday morning, I have a recurring task called “write blog post” which is linked to my blog post ideas Evernote note. My calendar has a block between 9:00 AM and 10:30 AM called “Writing time” and Ulysses is where I write.

I find structuring my days and weeks in this way ensures all the content I want to create each week is done. I keep Thursdays and Fridays as free as I can for content creation such as videos recording and editing and Wednesdays are for online course development. But everything starts and ends using these apps: Drafts, Evernote and Ulysses for writing.

Now, I use Ulysses because it’s a simple writing app with a lot of power. It also syncs seamlessly between my devices. I often begin writing my podcast script while on a bus or train and as Ulysses on my iPhone is fantastic I often find I have written over a thousand words before I get home and I can finish it off on my computer. Trying to write in Microsoft Word on a phone is not the easiest task.

Hopefully, that has given you some food for thought, Gustav. The key is to try and keep things as simple as you possibly can and use tools that work for you. Trying to use a lot of different tools because they promise to do one thing well, might not always be the best solution. Evernote can do many things, in fact, I could use it for writing my blog posts, but getting content out of Evernote is it’s Achilles heel. Ulysses has some incredibly powerful export features which makes it so much better for writing.

Thank you, Gustav, 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 Sep 28, 2020

How To Manage Your Files And Notes

Monday Sep 28, 2020

This week’s question is about once you have collected your ideas, tasks and commitments how do you know where to put those collected items?

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 152

Hello and welcome to episode 152 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One of the fundamental parts of the whole COD system (that’s Collect, Organise and Do) is the collection part. After all, if you are not collecting the stuff that gets thrown at you each day, you get nothing into your system and you will continue to rely on your brain to remember things and we all know—well, I hope you do—that your brain is a terrible place to try and remember everything.

But, if you are throwing everything into your inboxes, how do you manage those inputs and decide where everything goes? That’s the question I am answering this week.

Now before we get to the question and answer, I just want to let you know that I have added the areas of focus sample and workbook to the Time Sector course now. So, you have a new video lesson explaining why your areas of focus are important, and you also have a downloadable workbook to help you set these up in your notes app.

If you are already enrolled in the course, you can find these new resources in the final section of the course, and if you have not enrolled in the TIme Sector Course… Err why not? (Hahaha)—seriously, if you want a simple, easy to maintain time management system that is built for the way we work today, then the Time Sector System is for you. And at only $49.99, it’s incredible value for something that will change your life and put you back in control of your time. You can get yourself enrolled by clicking on the links in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Jörg. Jörg asks: Hi Carl, two cornerstones of your productivity system are a note app and cloud storage. When using Evernote as a notes app, how do you distinguish which material goes in which channel and where to place your created files?

Hi Jörg, thank you for your question.

I think the best way to start with this is to run through where things should go in general.

Events, appointments and anything where you need to be and with someone at a specific time and a specific place should go on your calendar. So these are your meetings, appointments and time blocks for you to do some focused work—appointments with yourself so you are not disturbed.

Tasks—that’s things you need to do should go into your task manager. These could be your routines like take the garbage out, do your expenses etc. Or project tasks such as work on a presentation or call Phil about the soundtrack to a new marketing campaign.

Then we have your notes app and here is where you keep your project notes, ideas, links to reference materials and anything that you need to quickly access in order to do your work.

Finally, we have your cloud storage. This is where you put your files such as PowerPoint or Keynote presentations or Word documents, Photoshop and Illustrator files etc.

Now the great thing about using cloud storage is you can generate links directly to the files you need which can be put in your project notes so you can access the right files when you need them.

Why is this important?

What we are trying to avoid is having project files all over the place. What we want is one file that is accessible with just one click whether we are in our project note or to-do list.

Now, most cloud storage such as iCloud and Dropbox have something called version history which means that if you want to go back to a previous version of your document, you can using the history feature. I think Microsoft OneDrive has this feature too, but I am not sure about Google Drive. So, you do not have to keep multiple iterations of the same file, you can always go back if you need to.

So, how this all comes together is your task manager, tells you on a day to day basis what work you should or need to do. Ideally, you want to start each day with a prioritised list of your tasks for the day. To achieve this, you do your daily planning and use the 2+8 Prioritisation method to prioritise your two objectives for the day—the two tasks that you will complete no matter what, and eight other should do tasks—tasks that you will do your best to do, but it would not be the end of the world if you cannot complete them all.

Your calendar is telling you where you need to be and with who and at what time and it tells you how much time you have available to do your project and task work. Your calendar is also where you can block time off for uninterrupted focus work should you need it.

For me, I block 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM for my focus work each morning. I avoid scheduling meetings and appointments at that time… if I can—of course, that is not always possible, but by having that goal—to keep those two hours free each day for focused work, I achieve it more often than not.

So, what happens, is I start my project work for the day from my task manager. That task is a clickable link that takes me directly to my project note in my notes app. That gives me all the relevant information related to that project. The note has links to the file or files I am working on, any important information that I may have added from my own ideas or an email or Twist message I have received. I also have my project timeline in there so I can see where I am, where I need to be and be reminded of the project deadline.

It all works seamlessly together.

So, in the example above, I do my daily planning the evening before. I review the tasks I need to complete, clear my inbox and prioritise my tasks for the next day based on what appointments I have in my calendar—if I have a busy day of back to back meetings and classes, I will reduce the number of tasks I have for the day. Because I am planning the week ahead, I can reschedule any tasks that are not urgent and make sure the work I have assigned myself for the day is manageable.

When I start the day, I already know what I am going to focus on and so I can just get started. No procrastination, no time wasted planning the day—it’s already done. This means by the time I need to look at my task manager for the first time, it’s usually after 11 AM.

By having a link directly to my project note, I avoid the risk of going down a rabbit hole looking for work. It’s all directly linked together and all I need do is click and start. Simple.

Now, what goes in Evernote and what goes in my cloud storage is quite straight forward. Files, PDFs and documents go into my cloud storage in the correct project folder. Notes, copy and pasted email references and links to files go into Evernote. And I am very strict with this.

Now, what do I do with documents that I need to annotate? Usually, these will be PDFs (or images) and for that, I use an app called GoodNotes. GoodNotes is brilliant on the iPad with Apple Pencil and so I can bring a document into GoodNotes, annotate it and once finished I can save a copy of the annotation file to my cloud storage.

I would like to be able to do this in Evernote, but Evernote’s annotation features are terrible and it would mean I would have multiple copies of the same file. The very thing I am trying to avoid. So, I don’t mind bringing the document out of my usual system to annotate it with a great annotation tool and then send it back. It only takes a few seconds to save the file to my cloud folder so it’s not much of an inconvenience.

Because of that, I am currently testing out OneNote as a possible replacement to Evernote in the future, but for now, I am sticking with Evernote. We’ll see what happens with my test in the future.

The key to making this work is to have strict boundaries for where things go. You want to be able to access your work files from wherever you are so having these in a dedicated current projects folder in your cloud storage ticks that box. I don’t separate my work and personal projects because to me a project is a project it doesn’t matter whether it is personal. I want to have a folder that. I can access quickly that has all my current projects in one place.

Once a project is complete I put the cloud project folder into my completed projects folder, I put the project note into my notes’ archive notebook and that’s it. All done. All organised and I know exactly where everything is.

At the end of the year, I will move most of those completed projects on to an external hard drive for future reference although if I think I might need to reference an old project I will leave it in my cloud storage.

So there you go, Jörg. I hope that helps and gives you some ideas about how best to manage your work. Thank you for your question.

And thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer, all you need do is email me, carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.

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

Monday Sep 21, 2020

How To Manage 'Millions' of Projects

Monday Sep 21, 2020

This week’s question is all about managing multiple projects, a full calendar and incessant daily interruptions so that you stay on top of what’s important.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 151

Hello and welcome to episode 151 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.

Now, this week I have a fantastic question about how to manage essentially a ton of stuff being thrown at you every day as well as making sure multiple projects are moving forward.

Now before I get to the question, just a heads up for those of you who are enrolled in the Time Sector Course. Last week, I added a new lesson on bringing your areas of focus into the daily mix of tasks. In that lesson, I take you through how to create your areas of focus and how they need to be filtering into the Time Sector System.

Of course, if you are not enrolled in the course, then you can still do so. It’s an amazing course and will transform the way you manage your work by simplifying your structure and making sure that you are focused on what is important today, and not worrying about what’s coming up next week, later this month or next month. After all, what matters is the here and now. As long as you have done your weekly planning session, you should not be needing to worry about next week and beyond.

Anyway. I hope you do join in the course. Full 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 Heather. Heather asks: Hi Carl, I’ve watched your videos and agree that separating projects from to-dos would simplify my life significantly. However, as a school principal I have a million projects, some new and some repeating quarterly, and a full calendar. How do you advise using a notes app to help prioritise and see next actions that should go into your task manager?

Hi Heather, thank you for this question.

Let’s start at the foundations. There is only a certain amount of time each day for us to do our work. We are not able to work 24 hours a day seven days a week. Aside from the need to sleep and eat it is neither sustainable nor healthy. So, what we need to do is to build some structure into our day and really understand what our core work is.

You see, knowing what work only we can do and what work we can delegate to our team helps with prioritising. If there is some work only you can do, as a principle, then, of course, this is going to be your priority. Nobody else can do it, so if you do not do it, nobody else will.

This goes for any team leader or manager. If there is work your team can do, then you need to let go of that work and delegate it. This means, of course, you must trust your team. You must also ensure they are shown exactly what you want and that means you will need to allocate some time to train your team.

Now, I’ve come across a few people who say “yeah yeah I know that, but I just don’t have any time to train my staff”. Sure, it’s a dilemma, isn’t it? But, if you are unable to manage your workload now, what is going to happen in the long-term? Something important is going to get missed, or you’re just going to have a breakdown. Either option is not a good option.

In this case, what I would do, is schedule a day for training.

How do you do this? first, decide what work you can and will delegate, to whom and have a clear set of outcomes for that work.

Then set up a training day. For that, you schedule appointments with your team individually and allocate the work you have decided to delegate and make sure the people you are delegating the work to know exactly what you want—the outcomes—and when it is due each week or month etc.

Can you afford to spend a day training your team? How about asking a different question: can you continue doing your work with its current workload?

Okay, so how do you manage all this in a notes app.

Of course, this is going to depend on which notes app you use. The best ones are Microsoft OneNote, Evernote and Notion for this kind of thing.

So, the first thing you will need to do is create a notebook called “Current Projects”. Inside there you create a new note or section for the project you are working on.

Now, what you put inside that note or section depends on the type of project it is. For your delegated projects you can create a table to manage key information such as who you delegated the work to and when you expect the work to be done. You can also create tables to manage the outcomes and anything else you need that will be related to that project.

I have a pinned note that lists all my active projects and where they are at, as well as information such as what the expected outcome is and milestones and deadlines. This note is used for reviewing and planning.

With this note, I am very careful. Sure it would be very nice to be able to add all my projects and say they are all due this quarter, but the reality is you are unlikely to be able to complete all your projects in one quarter. So, I get realistic and spread these out so they are manageable and doable. And, yes, sometimes I do need to renegotiate deadlines. You need to get okay with that. Renegotiating a deadline can be done if you give the project owner enough time. Trying to renegotiate a project deadline one week before it is due is not going to help you.

Just having a master projects list (for that is what I call this note) gives me a big picture view of what is due and when and that highlights any projects that I feel are just not going to get done by the deadline. I can then negotiate a new deadline.

For example, I do a lot of online workshops and conferences. For these events, I deliver a lecture or presentation and I also give each participant a workbook. Now sometimes a conference organiser will ask me to provide the workbook materials a few weeks before the event. Sometimes that is no problem, but last month I had several of these workshops and getting the materials to the organisers by their deadline was going to be very difficult. So, I asked the organisers if I could provide the workbook a couple of weeks later.

How did I know this was going to be difficult? It was because every week when I do my weekly planning, I review this master project list. I know what my core work is—the work only I can do—and I have that already blocked off in my calendar. So when I look at my week, I can see very clearly how much time I have available to work on these projects. As soon as I saw that in one week I had to prepare four workbooks I knew that was not going happen—well not if I wanted to complete my core work, which is non-negotiable—so I contacted the organisers and negotiated a few extra days to get the materials to them. In all cases, they were happy to accommodate me and I got the workbooks to them within the new deadline.

This is one reason why your notes app helps. It gives you the big picture view that a task list manager cannot do.

Another advantage of having this master projects list is you have a place where all the information you want to see, and in the way, you want to see it can be stored. A task list manager forces you to follow a template—which may not provide you with the information you want. Your notes app allows you to create the format you want. You have complete freedom.

So how, and when, do you move next actions over to your task manager?

For this, again I do it when I do my weekly planning session. But I also will add tasks when I am working on the project.

For example, imagine I am doing some work on a new online course. Now, a lot of the prep work for that involves a spreadsheet. This is my outline document and so a lot of information is added to that. As I am working on it, I may decide I need to research something. I will add that task to my task manager immediately. I will decide what needs researching and when I will do it. For something like this, I will add it to either my “this week” or “next week” folder in my task manager. The details of what needs researching will be added to the project note if necessary.

During my weekly planning session, I go through all my active projects. Inactive projects don’t need reviewing if they are not moving forward, but sometimes I do need to add a start date. That can be created as a task and added to one of my longer-term time sectors. For instance, I have a task in my task manager in my Next month folder that is dated that says “start work on Time And Life Mastery update” That task will come up on the day I have allocated and I can then decide if I want to, or need to, start right then. If not, I can re-date the task or I can start the project by moving the project note to my active projects list.

So for the most part, my task manager tells me what work I need to work on today. Today, I have a task that says “Write podcast script”. When I did my daily planning session last night, I saw that on my list and I flagged it as a morning task because morning is when I do my focused work.

Saturday mornings are when I work on my online courses. I have a recurring task in my task manager that tells me “work on online courses” and I have a direct link to the project note for the online course I am currently working on. So I see the task, click it and I am transported directly to the project note to start work on it.

The glue that brings everything together is the daily and weekly planning sessions. Seriously, if you are not doing those you will never feel you are on top of everything coming at you. These sessions do not need to be long. The daily one, once you have a settled routine should only take you around ten to fifteen minutes. And the weekly planning session normally takes around thirty minutes or so. It could be longer if you have a lot of active projects, but remember, you only have 168 hours each week, and not all of those will be spent working. On average you will be working between forty and fifty hours. So, for your weekly planning session, you are only able to allocate so much time for your projects.

That’s why your calendar is important too. If your calendar is already full, then there’s no hope. Sorry to be so blunt. But if you want to have time to work on your projects, you are not going to be able to change the laws of physics. Time just is. So, get control of your calendar. Do you really have to attend every meeting you are invited to? Would it not be possible to delegate some of those meetings to other people?

As a school principal, Heather, you should be able to block some time out for focused work sessions. Choose those times carefully. Often the best time for focused work is in the morning when you are at your freshest, but here we are all different. Find a time slot that you can block each day for your own focused work. Ideally, two hours each day where everyone who works with you knows you are not available.

Setting some boundaries is important. If you have no boundaries then other people will fill your time. In a typical working day, not being available for two hours is not a lot of time. But it is a lot of time to get focused work done.

I hope that has helped in some way, Heather. Good luck and thank you for your question.

Thank you to all of you for listening too. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Monday Sep 14, 2020

Why Everything Must Start From Your Areas of Focus.

Monday Sep 14, 2020

We’ve reached a rather special milestone this week. This is the 150th episode of the Working With… Podcast so I thought this week I would explain something important about how great productivity systems are built.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level

Steve Jobs’s Crazy Ones recording

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 150

Hello and welcome to episode 150 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, in a little change from the usual format, today I want to explain how to build your very own productivity system from the basic foundations.

As with all building, it starts with solid foundations and most people’s productivity systems fall apart not because of a lack of discipline but because the foundations on which the system is built are not strong.

There are three essential parts to any productivity system. There is the daily level—the tasks you complete. There is the project level, the group of connected tasks that when completed results is a finished project and then there is the areas of focus—the foundations of the system.

Now, It does not matter about the app you are using, it does not matter what industry you are working in. What matters are the foundations on which your whole system is built. I actually think this is a weakness in the Getting Things Done methodology. In the GTD book, there is a lot of stuff about collecting, managing your stuff and creating file folders for the different projects you create as a result of what you collected, but there is very little on why you are collecting that stuff. GTD focuses too much on the daily and project level and not enough on the foundational level.

You see, everything begins with your areas of focus or areas of responsibility. (There are many different ways of describing these). Essentially what this means are the very things you consider to be important in your life.

For most people, these will be things like:

Family and relationships
Your career
Your health
Your spirituality
Personal development
Life experiences — the places you want to visit, the things you want to experience.
Your finances
And your purpose in life.

There are more, but essentially most people would consider these areas of life as being important.

Now the funny thing is each of these areas will have a different level of importance depending on where you are in your life. If you are in your twenties, your relationships, career and life experiences are likely to be your top priorities. In your thirties, your family, life experiences and career. In your forties, it’s likely to be your personal development, finances and purpose in life. Fifties; finances will be near the top, your health and your family and so on. It changes with us and we are all different so the mix will be different for each of us.

But wherever you are in life, if you have not got these down, your system will be built on a foundation of sand. You will have no direction, no levels of importance that match where you are in life and so you will be operating from the level of your projects. Essentially your daily to-do list will be just that. A daily to-do list of tasks that are not connected in any way to what is really important to you.

And if you don’t know what your areas of focus are, where will your projects generally come from? Your work projects are likely to come from your company and boss. Your family projects will be a compromise with your partner. Only about a quarter of your projects will be self-generated, so you operate your daily life on other people’s agendas.

And if you are operating from the task level, then almost all your time is spent on small insignificant gains, fire fighting and other people’s requests. Rarely, if ever, do you do anything for your long-term self.

I’ve noticed another problem with operating a system from a project or task level. You will never be satisfied with your apps either. You will be constantly changing them, playing around with dangerous apps like Notion where there are so many bells and whistles you are led to believe that if only you can find the right database, then everything will start to work for you. It won’t, of course, because the app is never a substitute for what is important to you.

What apps you use is not important. What really matters is you have a place where your areas of focus are written down and that can be anywhere. A notebook, a simple notes app, or Notion, Evernote, OneNote or Apple Notes. It really doesn’t matter where you write these down. All that matters is you have them written down. So apps like Notion can be great, but only if you use them so they serve you instead of the other way round.

And that means you start by clearly defining your areas of focus.

Start with the framework of:

Family and relationships
career
health
spirituality
Personal development
Life experiences
finances
And purpose in life.

Now, the reason you start here is that all your projects and goals need to start from here. What do I mean by that?

Well, any project given to you by your boss, will be related to your career area. If you do a great job in doing your part of the project, you will help advance your career.

If you decide you want to learn a new skill or a foreign language, these could be related to your personal development or your career or both. Saving money will be related to your finances, embarking on a regular fitness programme is related to your health and so on.

So building your system from the foundation of your areas of focus creates a solid foundation on which to build your goals and your projects.

So what do you put in your areas of focus? Well, here you want to be writing out a sentence or two on what is important to you. For example, your family and relationships could be something like:

“I provide a stable, caring and loving home for my family and I am always there for my friends and family when they need me.”

For your career, you can write out the kind of employee or employer you want to be. Perhaps write out where you want your career to go.

What you will notice is your areas of focus are like your big overreaching goals and values.

Looking back over my own productivity journey, the first book on productivity I read was a book by a gentleman called Hyrum Smith called 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management. It’s a great book and is still available today.

The book begins with getting you to identify your governing values. Before identifying your goals and then your tasks. (Sound familiar?)

I also studied Tony Robbins’ time management system which is explained in his course Time of Your Life. Again, where does it start? It starts with your areas of focus, your life’s purpose, goals and of course your values.

All great systems begin at your areas level because without knowing what your values, life goals and what is important to you is, you will always be operating at a superficial level. You will feel unfulfilled and your days will pass in a blur of “what the hell happened today?”

Now, I don’t know what system Elon Musk uses, but watch any interview with him and you can see he is operating from his values. In particular, he’s operating at his life purpose level. Everything he does is focused on achieving his life’s purpose. To colonise Mars. Space X will provide him with the means to get to Mars. The Boring Company will provide him with the tools to build a way to sustainably live on Mars, and Teslar will provide a way to transport people around Mars.

Steve Jobs was the same. He operated at his areas of focus level. To provide tools for creative people to change to world for the better. His values were clearly centred around simplicity, ease of use and beauty. The whole Think Different campaign was built around what Steve Jobs valued most.

“The people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”

If you’ve never seen the original ad that Apple recorded with Steve’s voice saying the above quote you should. You can hear the passion, the drive and purpose in his voice. I’ve put a link in the show notes for you… Well worth a minute of your time.

Now, if your projects and daily tasks are not being driven from your areas of focus you are not going to be motivated to do either a good job or complete them. It’s the same with your goals. If your goals are not built on your areas of focus you are just not going to motivated enough to keep going when things get boring, difficult and monotonous.

Let’s take an example.

If you have in your health area of focus a sentence that states:

“I take care of my health and maintain a high level of fitness so I can continue to enjoy playing with my kids and grandkids long into my life”

And one day, you notice your waistline has expanded a little and it feels like an effort to get up a flight of stairs. That should alert you to your area of focus on health.

Now you can create a goal that will reduce your weight down to a level you are happy with, change your lifestyle a little so you move more and find more time to exercise.

Because that goal is coming from an area of focus you have identified as being important to you, you are much more likely to stick with it.

However, let’s say you are happy with your weight, and fitness is not something you particularly enjoy, but your co-workers persuade you to join them in a fitness and weight loss drive.

When you are feeling hungry a week or two into the drive and it’s raining outside but you are supposed to go out for a thirty-minute walk, how likely are you going to stick with your plan? Not likely. You just won’t have the motivation because the goal is not coming from your areas of focus. (Unless one of your values is related to being the best at everything you do—that would give you the motivation to complete the goal)

This is one of the reasons I spent time in my Time Sector course getting you to write out your core work—the work that is important to you. It’s also why the Time Sector System has a unique, dedicated folder for ‘recurring areas of focus’. These are the tasks that if you do consistently every day, week or month you are maintaining the areas of your life you identified as being important to you. It is such an important part of building a solid, sustainable productivity system.

So I urge you to take a little time this week to really think about your areas of focus. Write them down in your notes app, journal or notebook. I’ve given you a list in this podcast of where you can start with your areas but feel free to add others. We are all different but we all have one thing in common, to live a life of fulfilment, joy and happiness you need to be spending more of your valuable time nurturing and growing at your areas of focus and values level, not the projects and daily task level.

If you have a strong set of motivating and—more importantly, true to you—areas of focus, then 90% of what you do each day will be fulfilling and you will not be ending your day asking “what the hell happened today?”

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you found it motivating enough for you to begin writing out your areas of focus. Last week, I wrote a blog post on this topic and again, I’ve linked that in the show notes. In that post, I shared a few diagrams that show you how a productivity system should be working. Take a look, it will help you with your areas of focus development.

Now go build that fulfilling life.

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

Monday Sep 07, 2020

How To Manage Change in a Fast Changing Environment.

Monday Sep 07, 2020

This week the question I am answering is all about managing change in a rapidly changing, and uncertain, world. Something most of us are experiencing right now.

Links:

The Super 10 PLUS Course Bundle

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System