Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

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Script

Episode 148

Hello and welcome to episode 148 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Over the last three or four years, I have introduced a number of concepts, models and systems and the question is, how do all these fit together to make a workable, effective productivity system? That’s a great question because there are a lot of different ways you can manage your work, but for me, ultimately it’s less about the actual system and more about the workflow that you use.

Ultimately, how you manage your work in the time you have available is the key. It does not matter how brilliantly you have all your stuff organised if you don’t know where to start, or even how or when to start, you will not have an effective system. You workflow—the way to start your day, how you manage your work throughout the day and how you end the day is where everything comes together. And the best workflows need little thought or decision making. It’s just what you do. So that’s what I will be explaining in this week’s episode.

Now, before we get to the question, don’t forget, for those of you already enrolled in the Your Digital Life 2.0 course, you now have a brand new update waiting for you. All you need do is go to your dashboard on my Learning Centre and you will find everything there.

This year, you get the Time Sector System, and almost all the classes have been updated with better content and better explanations.

PLUS… You also get my Email productivity and goal planning courses absolutely free!

Now would be a great time re-take the course so you can refocus your system and workflows and go into the final quarter of 2020 refreshed and working at your most productive.

And, of course, if you have not joined the Your Digital Life programme, you can do so. For just $74.99, you get a complete course that will give you everything you need to become better organised and more productive. You learn how to build your own digital system as well as how to manage your email and goals and bring everything together in a fantastic workflow. Full details of the course are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Angela. Angela asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following your on YouTube for quite some time now, and I have seen you talk about COD, PACT, the Golden 10 and now the TIme Sector System. Is this just an evolution of your system or do al these things play an important part in the way you do your work each day?

Hi Angela, thank you for your question.

To answer your question, I thought it would be a good idea to explain how everything works and how each part fits together.

So let’s start with COD. COD stands for “Collect, Organise and Do”, it’s the foundation of every great productivity system. You see, you need to collect everything that comes your way that you feel is important or something you need to do something about. You then need to organise all that stuff you collect and of course, you need to do your work.

So, whenever you start building a productivity system you need to start with COD. How are you going to collect your stuff? Will you use your phone, computer or a paper notebook? Or, will you use a combination of all of those?

The key is to develop a collection system that is quick and easy. Having a complex method to collect stuff might look cool, but if it’s complex you will resist. It needs to be fast and you need to think carefully about how you will do that.

I use an app called Drafts to collect around 95% of my stuff. Drafts is an app on my phone, Watch, iPad and computer and when I open it up, it starts off with a blank sheet and I can type or dictate whatever I want to collect. It’s incredibly fast.

Now once I have an item in Drafts, I can then choose where to send it. The two main areas are Todoist for a task I have to do or Evernote for an idea or a note.

I’ve been using Drafts for years now, and it’s just automatic for me to open it and add an item whenever the thought comes to me. There’s no thinking. It’s now intuitive and automatic.

Next comes the organising. Organising means where will you process what you collected? For this, you need a to-do list manager and a notes app. So, tasks go into the folders you have set up in your task manager. You can organise your folders in whatever way you want. The simplest would be a “home” folder and a “work” folder. So anything related to your work goes into your work folder and anything related to your personal life goes to your home folder.

Now, the reason you need folders is to prevent your task manager’s inbox from becoming overwhelming. You need somewhere to put your tasks.

Personally, I use the Time Sector System, this is where I organise my tasks by “when” I will do them. That could be this week, next week, this month, next month or long-term. But you may prefer to organise things differently. The key is to have a place where you can group similar tasks together.

If you are a Getting Things Done person, you will organise by context, that’s by people, place or thing. For example, you would have folders called Home, office, computer, phone, boss, spouse etc.

How you organise your tasks is up to you.

The key to the organising part of your system is you want to spend as little time as you can organising. You see, organising can become a productivity drain if your structure is too complex or you have too many apps. You will spend too much time adding folders, sub-folders, labels, tags and trying to decide where to put something.

The simpler you can make it, the less time you will spend organising and that is a good thing. I would say, that the goal is to spend around 5% of your time organising each day. That works out at around 20 minutes a day cleaning up your inboxes and managing your tasks and notes.

The rest of the time you want to be doing the work. That’s the “D” part of COD. Do. If your organisation structure is simple, then each day you will have a list of things you want or need to do and you just get on and do them.

And that’s where the Golden 10 comes in.

A few years ago, I decided to find out what the optimum number of tasks a person could reasonably expect to be able to complete each day. I discovered that number to be about ten.

When you take into consideration all the unknowns in a day, the unexpected urgencies and emergencies from customers, bosses and co-workers, then realistically you will only be able to complete around ten meaningful tasks a day.

I say meaningful because there are always little routines we have to do—take the dog for a walk, do the grocery shopping, clean the house etc. These just have to be done when they need doing. I don’t include these in the 10 meaningful tasks. These just have to be done when they need doing.

So, before you finish the day, you do your Golden 10. That means you look at your calendar and your task list and see what you have scheduled for tomorrow. You assign the ten most important tasks a flag or something that highlights them for you. This should take you no more than ten minutes.

Now the ten comes from the 2+8 Prioritisation method. This is where you choose two objective tasks—the two tasks you absolutely must do tomorrow whatever happens. No excuses. These could be something important for your work, or they could be goal-related. You get to choose. The eight other tasks are the eight tasks you would like to get done—the should dos if you like—but it would not be the end of the world if you did not manage to complete them.

Finally, where does PACT come into it? Well, PACT is; patience, action, consistency and time. To get good at anything you need to have patience, you need to take action consistently over a period of time.

This works for your goals and for developing your own productivity system. If you want to build a functional, productivity system then you will need to be patient. It does not come together overnight and it takes time to get used to managing your tasks, processing and organising things. But you do need to take action and you do need to consistently do it.

I’ve found if you consistently do your Golden ten at the end of the day, you are 95% of the way there. You see the Golden Ten gives you an opportunity each day to step back and look at what you have on your plate. It allows you a little time each day to prioritise what you need to get done and focuses you on the 20% of tasks that will give you 80% of your results.

When you do not do any planning, you find you pick the low hanging fruit—the 80% that only gives you 20% of your results. When you do that, you will feel busy all the time, but also feel you are making little to no progress on the things you have identified as being important.

So that in a nutshell, is how everything comes together. Start with COD. Look at how you are collecting your stuff. Is it easy, fast and not feel like a burden or too much effort? Make sure you organise everything you collected consistently. I generally do that every 24 to 48 hours and spend at least 90% of your time each day doing the work.

At the end of the day, spend ten minutes planning tomorrow. Decide what your ten most important tasks for the day will be. And don’t worry if you don’t have ten. The less you have to do the better. I often start days with only six or seven tasks for the day.

And most important of all, if you are serious about becoming better organised and more productive, be PACT. Be patient, take action consistently over time and soon you will find you intuitively follow a workflow that grows with you and removes a lot of stress, keeps you focused on the work you have identified is important and you start to feel each day you have completed a lot of meaningful work.

Thank you, Angela, for your wonderful question and for all you for listening. I feel so honoured to be able to help you in whatever way I can each week.

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

Monday Aug 24, 2020

How To Use Your Task List With Your Calendar.

Monday Aug 24, 2020

This week’s question is all about managing your tasks and managing your events. Where does everything go? Your calendar or your task list?

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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Script

Episode 147

Hello and welcome to episode 147 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, I’ve had a few questions recently on how best to schedule your day and what should be on a task list and what should go on your calendar. It’s a good question and it goes to the heart of managing your time and your days and weeks.

Now, before we get to that, If you are sick and tired of endlessly rescheduling tasks and starting the day with a lot of overdue tasks, it may be time for you to consider the Time Sector System.

The Time Sector System shows you a different way to manage your tasks, a way of being more realistic about what you can get done each day and each week. It encourages you to become better at prioritising your time and the work you have to do and it makes your daily and weekly planning easier and faster and a lot less complex.

It’s a system designed in the 21st century for the 21 century and will help you eliminate all those overdue tasks and give you a simple time management system that you can build on and learn new habits that will ultimately put you back in charge of your time.

Full details of the course are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks: Hi Carl, I’ve seen a few of your videos recently on using your calendar but I’m a bit confused. Are you saying you should manage everything from your calendar or from both your calendar and your task list?

Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question and I’m sorry for any confusion. Hopefully, in this episode I can clear things up for you.

So let’s start with the calendar. Your calendar is your most powerful productivity tool because it is the one tool you have that will never lie to you. It shows you the number of hours you have each day and it will not allow you to over-schedule yourself. Well, I suppose you could do that, but you would very quickly see the impossible situation you have created for yourself.

So, how do you use your calendar? First, you want to schedule your non-negotiable events. These could be meetings, family commitments, your exercise time and classes or other commitments you have that are important to you.

For me, each week, I have a number of classes that are at the same time each week. These are on my calendar as repeating events. They are non-negotiable for the most part—although from time to time I will cancel these if I need some time to record a course or if I need to take a few days break for thinking and planning.

I also schedule my exercise time on my calendar too. I do this at the beginning of the week because each week the type of exercise I do is likely to be different. To do some weights at home—because at the moment gyms are not the safest of places to be— takes around 45 minutes. And a quick shower afterwards means I need an hour. But there’s no travel time or cooling off time—which I usually need if I have been out for a run or to the gym.

If I go out for a run, I usually need ninety minutes. So I schedule my exercise when I do my weekly planning.

That takes care of my core commitments for the week.

And that’s what you should be doing when you plan the week. Start with your calendar. Make sure you non-negotiable commitments are on there first. After all, they are non-negotiable. They must happen at a specific time and on a specific day.

Once your non-negotiables are on your calendar, look for blocks of time you can block off for focused work. Now when I say “focused work” I mean projects or goals you know you need to commit a certain amount of time in order to get them done.

Here it will be up to you how and when you do this work. Because my week is largely fixed, I have recurring blocks of time for writing, recording and creating. For example, Monday morning I have an online class between 8 AM and 9 AM and once that is finished I have a block between 9:15 AM and 11 AM for writing my blog post for the week. It’s fixed and it’s recurring every week. I do the same on a Tuesday morning. Every Tuesday I have an outside class at 7:30AM and I get home around 9:30AM. So between 9:30 AM and 11:30 AM I have a recurring block of time for writing this podcast script.

These ‘events’ are fixed and recur every week. They are non-negotiable. If I did not block these times, my blog post and podcast script would not get done, or I would find it difficult to find the time to do them. I need that structure and I need that consistency to do it.

You could do the same. If you have a regular meeting that requires planning for, you can block time on your calendar to prepare for the meeting. Once it’s blocked and it recurs at the same time each week, you know you have the time available to prepare for your meeting. Of course, if you ignore the time block, then it won’t work and you would quickly find you run out of time because other, less important but louder things will inevitably crop up.

This is also how I have time each week to prepare and record my videos for YouTube and write the two newsletters I produce each week. Each piece of content has a block of time scheduled on my calendar that recurs. So, my newsletters are written on a Wednesday and Friday morning. My videos are recorded on a Thursday afternoon and a Friday morning and edited on a Friday afternoon. Producing and publishing content each week is important to me and the work I do. So, it is non-negotiable and is fixed on my calendar each week.

The way to look at it is if it is important and must get done, then schedule the time required to do it on your calendar when you do your weekly plan. If you are not scheduling the time to do the work that is a “must’ how will you find the time to do it when your week starts? There will always be ‘emergencies’, demands on your time and requests from bosses, colleagues and customers. These demands are often loud, but not really important—unless you think every request you get at work is important (seriously, that is not true at all)

So, what goes on your task list?

Your task list is for all the little things that need to be done on a daily or weekly basis. The things that come up and gets added to your inbox. Let me give you a few examples.

Yesterday, as I was feeding my dog, I used that last of his supplement tablets. That went into my inbox; “Buy Barney some more heart supplements”. Another one was from this morning, I said I would send my students a link to a video I was watching last night. So I added that to my inbox.

Now, let’s take those two examples. They are now in my task list inbox. Do I need to schedule a time to do them? No. They just need doing. My dog’s vet is a ten-minute walk from my house and I already know I will need to drop into the supermarket at some point in the day today anyway. So, when I go to the supermarket I will take a small detour and call into the vet to get the supplement.

Sending the video to my students will take less than two minutes, so I will do that this evening when I process my inbox. I do not need to schedule these on my calendar. I will do them when I get a break in my day.

Now of course, there are other things in my task list. I have an amendment to do to a proposal I sent out for a workshop. It’s a small amendment and I was asked to do it last week. It was not urgent and I scheduled it in my task list to do this afternoon. It will take me around ten to fifteen minutes to do and it is non-urgent. So, it is on my list of tasks to do today and I will probably do it after I finish my exercise today. It is not on my calendar—it does not need to be. It will get done later today when I have some free time.

Now I have other recurring tasks on my task list. Things like do my admin, write my journal, clear my action today folder in my email etc. All these tasks do not need time scheduling on my calendar, they can be anytime throughout the day when I get a moment. And there will always be moments of time to do these things.

And that’s an important point. You should not be blocking out your whole calendar with work. You need space to do your regular tasks, deal with things that come up throughout the day and anything else that just needs doing.

For me, I generally use the morning to block time out for important work that needs an hour or two of focused time. I try to keep late afternoons free so I can deal with anything on my task list that needs doing.

You see, morning times for me is when Europe is asleep and the US is preparing to go to sleep, so very little comes in at that time. Late afternoons Europe is waking up, but as so many people check email in the morning I know I am unlikely to be disturbed by anything urgent, and the US is fast asleep.

And that’s a good point. If you are going to do this and block time out on your calendar for your important focused work, block times out when you are least likely to be disturbed. If you get the majority of your calls and emails in the morning, then do your focused work after lunch. Likewise, if you find late afternoons are your quietest times, when Slack, Twist and emails are quiet, then schedule your time blocks late afternoon. Find the right times for you.

This is why planning the week really helps. You should know what your important work is. Your core work. The work you are paid to do before you start the week. Make sure you have time scheduled each week to do that work. If you are not doing the rod you are paid to do consistently, you are not going to have a job for much longer. That work needs scheduling. Anything else does not need scheduling and can be kept in your task list to be done when you get a few moments in the day.

I hope that helps, Benjamin. I hope it has cleared up some of the confusion.

Thank you for the question and thank you to you for listening.

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

Monday Aug 17, 2020

Why I Don't Use A Task manager As A Project Manager

Monday Aug 17, 2020

What are the benefits of managing your projects in a notes app as apposed to a to-do list manager? That’s what I’ll be answering in this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast.

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Script

Hello and welcome to episode 146 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, I have a question about why I manage my projects in a notes app (and occasionally a spreadsheet—but you didn’t know that did you?) So, what I decided to do to answer this question is to take you through why I find to-do list managers are a terrible place to manage projects and to challenge some preconceived ideas about how best to use a to-do list manager and a notes app as well as other tools.

Now, before we get to the question and the answer, if you have missed it in the last couple of weeks, my Your Digital Life 2.0 course has become Your Digital Life 3.0 and it is practically re-recorded from the ground up. You now have the Time Sector System in there as well as how to manage your files, your email, your goals and your notes. It’s pack full of great tips and tricks.

So if you are looking at building new ways of working for the post-pandemic work life, then now would be a great time to get yourself enrolled. It’s a great course and will set you up wonderfully with a productivity system that works for you so you take full advantage of the digital tools we all carry around with us every day.

Okay onto this week’s question which means it time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:

This week’s question comes from Abigail. Abigail asks, Hi Carl, I have been watching some of your videos on YouTube and your approach to using a to-do list seems very different from other people I have watched. My question is why do you manage your projects in your notes app and not your to-do list? Isn’t that what a to-do list is for?

Hi Abigail, thank you for your question.

Now, I spend a lot of time each day reading productivity and time management forums, blog posts and books and the biggest mistake I see is people creating elaborate and complicated systems. Complexity is the number one productivity killer. No matter how busy you are—or think you are—building yourself an elaborate and complex system is just going to make you feel even busier. it does not solve your problem.

The only way to become more productive and bring some kind of balance into your life is by creating a system where you spend very little time inside your to-do list. Your to-do list only needs to tell you what you need to do today.

Now here’s the biggest mistake I see. people trying to manage projects inside their to-do list. Now I know where this came from. It came from a misinterpretation of GTD—that’s Getting Things Done, by David Allen.

Now GTD never said manage your projects inside your to-do list. GTD is all about creating folders based on your contexts. That’s people, place or thing. What that means is you create a list of folders based on a place, which could be your office or home, a person, your partner, your boss or colleagues or a thing, which could be a computer, your phone or iPad.

So if you had a task that required you to use a computer, you would put that task inside your “Computer” folder. If you had a task that required you to do it at home, then you would put the task inside your “home” folder etc.

Now, you can create an additional list for your projects, but it is only a list of projects, not a list of tasks associated with those projects and this list is only used for review purposes.

All your project support materials, your plans, mind maps and documents related to your projects go into your project folders which are kept nearby.

Now GTD was written in the pre-digital age—or pre-smartphone age--and things have changed a lot since then.

What has happened now is people are trying to manage everything from their to-do list and all that does is create every increasing list of tasks that only the loudest and most urgent get done. Everything else often gets lost somewhere inside a folder and only be discovered once a task bankruptcy is declared—which when you try to manage everything from inside a to-do list will inevitably happen.

In talking with some very productive people I discovered this approach to task management is not a very efficient or effective way to manage your work.

Let’s look at a better way.

The first step I would advise anyone is to look at where you do most of your work. For me, I work out of my little studio in my home. So for the most part of the day, I am working at my desk with my laptop. I write there, plan there and do all my admin. So, my primary work tool is my laptop. If I go out for a class or a meeting I take my iPad with me so I have my teaching materials with me and I can write any meeting notes (and, of course, I always have my phone with me.)

Now, once you know where you do most of your work and you know what devices you have, the next thing to look at is software.

This is where things can get complicated very quickly. The best thing here is to use the tools built into your computer. So if you are a Windows user, use Microsoft’s tools. That would be Outlook for your email and calendar. OneNote for your notes and project support materials, To-Do for your task list and OneDrive for your documents.

Now, if you don’t like Microsoft’s software, and I know a few people don’t, then you always have the option of using Google’s suite of apps. Gmail, of course, and Google Keep and Tasks—although Google tasks is very very basic and may not meet your needs over time.

If you are an Apple user, you have some excellent apps in Apple Notes, Reminders and iCloud.

So there’s quite a lot of choice. If you are starting out on building your own productivity system, stick with the built-in apps first. As you develop your system, you can look for third-party alternatives, but I would not recommend you do that initially. You want to be focused on creating a system first and looking for the best third party alternatives will only distract you from that endeavour and likely force you into arranging things in a way that may not meet your needs.

Now how do you build a system that works for you?

Well, this depends on the type of work you do. For example, I have quite a lot of coaching clients that I need to manage. For that, I use a simple spreadsheet. I maintain all admin details related to those clients in a spreadsheet that contains their email address, how they prefer to communicate, when they started their coaching programme and when the programme is due to finish. I also can add a few notes there too just in case I need to be reminded of something later. It’s a kind of customised CRM system

For the actual notes from my calls with my clients, I keep all that in my notes app in a folder called “coaching”. That means when I have a call with the client, I can quickly find the note and have that ready on my screen so I can add notes during the call. It also means I can do a review of our previous call and remind myself of their deliverables.

Ideas for this podcast and my YouTube videos are all kept in my notes app as well as the content schedule for this week.

Each client also has a folder in my cloud storage drive too. Inside there are any documents related to that client as well as the feedback I send them after each call.

One thing I don’t do is have a project folder for each client in my to-do list as well. That would just create a huge list of unnecessary folders. Instead, if I have to do something for a client all I need do is add a task such as “send Mike Smith a copy of my email workflow” - that would go to my inbox and later when I do my planning for tomorrow, I will process that by deciding when I need to do it. For something like sending a copy of my email workflow, I would probably do it directly from my inbox as it would only take a few seconds to do.

So what you are trying to do really is build a workflow with clean, clear boundaries. Your calendar will tell you where you need to be and with who and at what time. Your to-do list will tell you what tasks you need to perform today and your notes will give you the details of those tasks and any supporting information you may need in order to do the task.

So, for example, I may have a task today to clean up my website. Now that could be a very big task with a lot of different parts to it. I may want to change some images, I may wish to rewrite some text and I may wish to change the fonts or colour scheme. Having all that in my to-do list would just be crazy. I can’t put sample images in my to-do list, I can’t have all the text changes I want to make in my to-do list because to-do lists were never designed to hold that kind of information.

Instead, all that information is contained inside my notes app (or a document in my writing app)

This means I see on my to-do list a task that says “clean up my website” and I will have linked the note related to that directly to the task—all I have to do is click on the task and I will be taken straight to the note. From there I am ready to begin work.

And yes, quite often there is a master task list in my notes app. Why? because when I check off a task in my notes app, the task stays there and is crossed out. It doesn’t disappear as it would do in a task manager. This means when I want to review progress on the project, I can quickly see what has been done, what still needs doing and any communications I have had with partners or clients about deadlines and milestones.

Everything is in one place which makes deciding what needs doing next simple.

So for me, a to-do list is exactly that. It’s a to-do list, not a project management tool. For me, there’s too much going on inside a project to effectively manage it from a to-do list. There’s too much information for one, and it is very hard to see what has been done. All a to-do list will tell you is what needs to happen next and that can be very misleading as each task is treated equally inside a task manager. There’s no indication of how long a task will take unless you start adding labels with time estimates, which starts you down the road of complexity creep.

Inside my notes app, I can create a timeline for when the different parts of a project need to be completed by. This great when I do my weekly planning because I can instantly see which projects I need to push forward next week and I can then add tasks to my to-do list based on that knowledge. For example: “work on Time and Life Mastery update” and link that task to my note related to that project. All I have to do is check my calendar to see which days I have time to it, and then add the date to my task.

The glue that brings all this together is my master projects list. This again is inside my notes app and every Sunday, when I do my weekly planning session, I check this list and review deadline dates. All this is in a single note with a table that lists all my active projects, with their deadline dates, where they currently are and what still needs to happen to complete the project. It’s simple, very quick to read, as my projects are organised by deadline date, and I find making decisions about what I need to work on next week is quick.

As I use Evernote as my projects notes app, I also link my master projects list to the individual project’s note so I all I need do is click on the note link and be instantly in the project’s note.

So, the reason I do not use my to-do list to manage projects is first, to-do lists are not project management tools. They are just task managers. There’s just far too much information required to maintain projects effectively for a to-do list. I’ve found—through a lot of trial and error—that the best place to manage projects is in a notes app, which is a modern-day equivalent to the GTD project support folders.

It also means I have instant access to what has happened on a project and what still needs to be done and a timeline that tells me how much more time I need, or if I need to extend a deadline and if I am on target to complete the project on time. A to-do list is never going to give you that kind of instant information or feedback. All it will ever do is give you a list of tasks with varying degrees of difficulty and not tell you what you have already done (unless you go hunting for your completed tasks which is an incredible waste of time)

Now I know it is hard to let go of old habits. There is a perverse comfort seeing a long list of tasks to do because it makes us feel busy. But I for one do not want to feel busy. I want to feel in control and know that what I am working on right now is exactly what I need to be working on right now and not have to worry about other things that may have got lost inside a task list manager that is full of tasks and I don’t know where they all are.

So there you go. Abigail. I hope that has explained how and why I do not use a task list manager to manage my projects. I just found it never worked well with the more longer projects I have to do. Managing a simple home improvement project could be done quite easily inside a to-do list, but the type of projects I and most people are working on, there is just far too much additional information coming in to be able to effectively manage all that from a to-do list manager. They were not built for that level of information.

I do get a lot of questions about this system—a system I call the Time Sector System—where your to-do list manager is organised by time sectors. If you want to learn more about this, then I wrote a Blog post about the basics of the system which I have linked to in the show notes and if you want to build a similar system for yourself I do have the Time Sector Course—again the link to this is in the show notes.

Thank you for your question, Abigail 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 Aug 10, 2020

How To Prioritise Your Work

Monday Aug 10, 2020

Podcast 145

This week, I am answering a question on priorities and more specifically, how to prioritise your days and your weeks in an increasingly distracting world.

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Script

Episode 145

Hello and welcome to episode 145 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.

are you struggling to stay focused on your priorities? Do you even have the time to decide what your priorities are? I come across this a lot where when so much is being thrown at us by our bosses, colleagues and customers, it feels impossible to decide what our priorities are and even if we know what our priorities are, it feels like the world is conspiring against us to actually get them done.

Well, fear not. in this episode, I will give you everything I’ve learned and practice that keeps me pretty much focused on the things I have decided are my priorities for the day and the week.

Now before we get to the question, I’d like to thank all of you who enrolled in Your Digital Life 3.0. Without your support, I would not be able to do what I do and help so many people. So thank you. I am so grateful to you all.

And don’t forget if you are already enrolled in Your Digital Life, the new version is now in your dashboard on my learning centre, and if you haven’t enrolled, and would like to get yourself enrolled in this amazing course—a course designed to help you build a complete digital productivity and time management system, then you can do so right now. All the details are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Kurt. Kurt asks, Hi Carl, I’ve started using Todoist recently and I have copied your Time Sector method for managing my tasks. I like the simplicity. The problem I have is by Tuesday all my plans for the week seems to have been destroyed by all the demands from my boss and my customers. Is there anything you would advise to help stay on my plan?

Hi Kurt, thanks for the question. I know this is an issue for so many people. It comes up in my coaching calls a lot and I receive a lot of emails about it.

How to stay focused on what you have prioritised for the week?

Well, the good thing, Kurt, is you have a plan. That’s a great start. Most people do not have a plan and allow the week and their environment to control what happens to them. That’s never a recipe for success at anything. If you want to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow you need a plan and you need to follow that plan.

That’s the simple answer. But of course, as with most things in life, things are never that simple and distractions, demands and interruptions have a bad habit of getting in the way. So how do you deal with those?

First up, let’s take a step back. Most prioritising problems come about because we are trying to achieve too much at one time. As I am sure you have heard before, life is not a sprint. It’s a marathon and if you start a marathon with your sprint finish you are not going to do very well. You need to pace yourself.

Part of doing that is finding the right balance between the work you want to focus on and the unknown work that will inevitably come in as the week starts. None of us lives in a sealed-off bubble, we are all interacting in some way or another every day and with those interactions will come additional commitments and tasks. So before we even start planning the week, we need to accept those inevitabilities.

That said, knowing that you will get additional work on top of what you planned for means that you are forced to build flexibility into your calendar, and when you allow extra time in your week for the unknowns and they don’t happen (rare, I know) you get a lot of free time. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I take full advantage of that extra time to do whatever I want to do at that moment in time.

So, let’s look at how to stay on the plan in the week.

First up, what is your core work each day and each week? We all have core work. Work you just have to do. If you are in sales that could be meeting your customers, following up prospects and making appointments to see both existing and potential customers. Or if you were a website designer, creating websites would be your core work. The reality is, if you are not doing your core work each day, you would not have a job or a business for very long. So, you need to establish what your core work is and then make sure you are allocating enough time each day to do that work. That is your priority. Your core work. It’s where your income comes from and it’s where your value as an employee or a business owner comes from.

For me, I create content every day. That could be writing a blog post, creating the script for this podcast, recording a YouTube video or an online course. If I allowed other people’s priorities and demands get in the way of creating that content, it would not be long before I would not have a business and therefore a way to help people become better organised and more productive.

So, it is crucial I get my content done first. And that for me is key. As I prepare this script it is 5:30 AM. Not my usual hour of work, but I have a busy day ahead of teaching and I could not see any other time to prepare this script today. My priority for the day is to get this script written. So, when I planned the day last night, I realised I would have wake up early and get it written.

Now, the thing is, I do not normally have to get up so early. But I knew if I left it until the end of the day I would find an excuse not to do it—I would say to myself I could do it Thursday instead of Tuesday, and sure, on Tuesday morning Thursday might look like a quiet day. But there are no guarantees that it would stay that way.

I’ve been down that road before—pushing off work until later in the week only to find I end up with more work to do than I have week left.

So one day of getting up a bit earlier to get the most important task done is a very small sacrifice to make in order to get my priorities done.

So step one is to know what your priority is for the day.

And I use the singular for a reason. As I mentioned above, often the problem is we have far too many priorities. Now, this comes about because you are treating everything as a priority and the reality is not everything is a priority.

I am reminded of a quote by Patrick Lencioni who said:

“If everything is important then nothing is important”

You have to make the decision about what is important and what is not important and I know that can be hard. Often the least important task is the loudest and we are lulled into doing that instead of the quieter, more important task. Knowing what your core work is, understanding what tasks bring you the greatest gain, whether that is financial, professional or personal. These are the things you need to know before you begin planning out your week and your day.

This is why I advise you to do your daily planning the night before and not in the morning. Planning the night before removes you from the hustle and bustle, it allows you to step back and take a bigger picture view of what you have to do. It gives you greater clarity and you are free from the distractions that a workplace brings—even if that workplace right now is your home. It allows you to compare where you are, and where you hoped to be according to your plan. You can then make the necessary adjustments.

Again, when it comes to making adjustments you will need to look at what your priorities are. I’m no longer afraid of cancelling a few appointments or meetings if it means I get my core, prioritised work done.

Not that was not always the case. I used to prioritise meetings and appointments. But over time I discovered that a lot of my meetings and appointments were not achieving the desired results and certainly did not take my objectives forward as much as doing my core work. Once I discovered that it became much easier to make my excuses and not attend the meeting.

Once you have your plan for the day, start the day with your number one priority. Get it started, I may not finish this script by the time I need to prepare to leave, but if I get 75% of it done, then later in the day, knowing I only have 25% to do, I am much more likely to sit down for 30 minutes later in the day to get it finished.

Often the hardest part of any task is just getting started. So, knowing that, if you can just do something with your most important task for the day first thing, you start the momentum and that gives you a greater chance of getting it finished before the day ends.

The next thing I would advise is to make sure your priorities for the day are written down somewhere you will see them.

We know we are going to get distracted and interrupted. There’s nothing you can do about that, but once you have dealt with the interruption, you need a way to quickly get back on track. Having your priorities written down either on a piece of paper on your desk or in a To-do list manager you actually look at, will make it much easier for you to get back on track.

Now, when I say have a list of your priorities for the day written down, I do not mean have them listed in amongst all the low-priority tasks. I mean you have a single list with just your top one or two tasks for the day on. Nothing else. It’s this list that will keep you focused.

If you have them on a list with all your other tasks for the day, you are just going to start looking for the low hanging tasks—the easy ones—in the false belief that if you can just get you list down in number you will have had a productive day. Sure, you may have got a lot done, but you got a lot of low-value work done at the expense of the more important high-value work. Just do not do that.

If you are using a digital to-do list manager, like Todoist, you can use the flags to highlight your priority tasks and then use filters to hide away all your other tasks until you have completed those high-value ones.

Ultimately, it comes down to this, Kurt. Stop trying to do everything all at once. For one, you will never do it and secondly, you’ll either get so frustrated you will give up planning altogether or you will burn yourself out. Neither option seems very appealing.

Instead, decide what your core, high-value work is. Make that the foundation of your priorities every day and spread out the bigger tasks throughout the week, rather than trying to do them all in one day.

There’s a saying in British politics attributed to former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, that “a week is a long time in politics”. The truth is a week is a lot longer than you think and when you plan out the week, decide what your must do, high priority tasks are and keep them to a minimum, you will find you have plenty of time to get the sudden, unplanned for emergencies done as well as those high-value tasks you decided you were going to get done that week.

It takes time, it takes consistent practice, but as long as you persevere, adjust where necessary and stay focused on the task at hand, you will get there and making sure your priorities take priority every day will become second nature.

Good luck and thank you for the question.

Thank you also to you for listening and just a heads up, This podcast is now, finally, on Spotify. So if you are a Spotify user, you can now subscribe to this podcast right there.

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

Monday Aug 03, 2020

What You Need To Create Your Very Own Productivity System

Monday Aug 03, 2020

Podcast 144

In this week’s episode, I answer a question on developing a system that works for you.

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 144

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

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

But first...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Abdul, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Jul 27, 2020

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

Monday Jul 27, 2020

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

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 143

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask the question: what’s my outcome here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Jul 20, 2020

How To Prioritise Your Most Important Work.

Monday Jul 20, 2020

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

Links:

Your Digital Life 3.0 Course Page

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 142

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Tony, for your wonderful question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Jul 13, 2020

What Makes Highly-Productive People So Successful?

Monday Jul 13, 2020

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

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 141

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Helena. Thank you for your excellent question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Jul 06, 2020

Should You Switch To The Latest Apps?

Monday Jul 06, 2020

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

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script

Episode 140

Hello and welcome to episode 140 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Jez, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

So, there are two parts to this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Jun 29, 2020

How To Create Your Own Podcast (or YouTube Channel)

Monday Jun 29, 2020

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

Links:

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System