Showing you ways to get control of your time through tested techniques that will give you more time to do the things you want to do.
Episodes
Monday Jun 22, 2020
Monday Jun 22, 2020
This week, how do you build structure into your day so you stay focused on what is important?
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
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Building a 21st Century Time Management System
Script
Episode 138
Hello and welcome to episode 138 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, you have yourself organised. Your to-do list is set up, your projects are being managed from your notes app and your calendar is serving you (rather than the other way round) but you are still struggling to get your most important work done each day. Why is it going wrong?
Well, that depends and that’s what I’m going to answer this week.
Now before get started, have you joined the time management revolution yet? Are you using the Time Sector System? If not, there a couple of ways you can join. The first, of course, is take the course. For just $49.99 you can learn everything you need to get started with this fantastic system.
If you're not ready to take a course, then don't worry, I have a comprehensive blog post detailing the outline as well as plenty of set up videos on my YouTube channel.
All the details are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sarah. Sarah asks: Hi Carl, one of the things I’ve always struggled with is getting my planning done each day. When I do plan (which, to be honest, is not often) I end up not following my plan and not getting my work done. Are there any tricks that you use that help you stay focused on your work?
Hi Sarah, thank you for your question.
I find this is a common issue for many people when they decide they want to get themselves better organised and become more productive. Setting things up is generally quite easy. The motivation is high and you set aside time to do it. The issues arise once you begin implementing the process.
The problem here is that the process can be boring. And the habits haven't formed yet. So if you have not embedded the habit of planning the day the day before and setting up some structure into your day, your old habits will do their very best to prevent you from following your plan.
So step back for a moment and ask what one new habit would have the biggest impact on your time management?
This could be taking ten minutes at the end of the day and creating a plan of action in your calendar for the next day. Or it could be to focus your attention on collecting items into your to-do list manager—an important first habit to develop.
It’s really about establishing which 20% of your efforts will give you 80% of the results you desire.
If you try to change everything at once, all you need is one slip up and you feel everything has failed. And more importantly, trying to change everything all at once is hard. I would say it’s almost impossible because you are going to be constantly pulled back to your previous habits. Our brains hate change.
Change takes a lot of energy and we will resist it. You have to be determined to change and you have to focus on making that change. So make it easier for yourself and focus on one thing at a time.
So if you have never spent any time planning a day, it is something you are not used to doing, so at the end of a day, you’re tired and just want to crash out in your favourite armchair, you are not going to sit down with your laptop and spend ten minutes planning tomorrow.
That said, one simple way to start is to do two things. The first is to make sure you develop the habit of collecting everything. It does not matter if you think something is silly, just collect it. You can delete it later. And don’t worry about how much you collect. If you are using the Time Sector System it won’t take long to process what you collected.
The second part is to dedicate ten minutes at the end of the day to look at your calendar for the next day and decide what you will get done.
That’s it. Collect and plan.
Now, this is not the complete picture, but developing these two habits first will set you up for success later.
You see, if you are not in the habit of collecting everything that comes your way, you will forget something. And if you are not planning your day, all your old, unproductive habits will stay around. The goal in the initial stages is to change those habits. To build a little structure into your day.
So, the building of your daily structure involves two steps:
The first, before you begin the day, while you are drinking your morning coffee, open up your calendar and look to see what your day looks like. Then review your to-do list for the day. In total, that should only take 5 minutes. You do not need to do anything else. Just look to see what you have planned for the day.
The second is doing the same thing again in the evening. Give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to review your day’s tasks. Look at what you didn’t do, reschedule those for another day, look at your calendar for tomorrow and decide what needs doing. Then stop.
Now, here’s the essential part. Commit to doing that every day for a week.
In total, you are committing yourself to twenty to thirty minutes every day for seven days.
If you really want a way of motivating yourself, then draw out a sheet of paper with seven boxes on it and every day you do it put a cross in it. You are looking to create an uninterrupted chain of seven crosses to indicate you completed these two processes for seven days.
Now, after a week, and with seven crosses, create another seven boxes and do the same the following week.
As the ‘chain’ grows you are going to find it increasingly difficult to skip a day. The rule is, if you skip one day, you must start a new piece of paper and draw out seven boxes and begin again.
What you are doing is using Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain’ methodology to keep you focused on what you are trying to do.
What I’ve found with many of my coaching clients is as they focus on the morning review and the evening planning sessions, they make tiny adjustments to their set up. As they do this they begin to feel they are making progress—which they are doing—and at the same time, they are beginning to embed new habits. And habits are so much easier to manage than trying to restart things every week.
The next thing is self-discipline. Now here I notice a frequent problem. I’ve come across a lot of people who have developed a false belief over the years believing they are just not the disciplined type. This is complete rubbish! It’s just an excuse to avoid doing something that is quite hard to do.
We all have bundles of self-discipline. It is not that you are not the self-disciplined ‘type’, it’s that you are human. And humans are naturally lazy. So, really not following through on your commitment is just laziness. Apologies for being so brutally honest.
This is why you need to start small. Self-discipline is just like a muscle and to grow your self-discipline you need to exercise it. Exercising self-discipline does begin with small things. For example, sitting down at the end of the day for ten minutes with your calendar and to-do list open and planning tomorrow, while quite a small task, if you do it every day and practice resisting the urges to skip it, you build your self-discipline. Every time you resist the temptation to skip it, your self-discipline becomes stronger. Every time you give in to the temptation, you weaken your self-discipline because there is no pain associated with giving in.
Instead, every time you skip a planning session you need to feel bad. Feel guilty. Be angry with yourself. You failed and you will need to restart your seven-day chain.
Once you have committed yourself to doing a daily planning session, when you give in and don’t do it, then you must associate that with failing. Tell yourself: you failed!
Our feelings about failure cause us pain. We hate to fail. Failing at something is one fear we all have. Failing at a presentation, failing to achieve something leaves us feeling bad. Use that bad feeling to motivate yourself to not fail. After all, we are only talking about ten minutes here.
You can help yourself by doing something pleasurable while you do your planning session. Get yourself a glass of wine or a beer. Treat yourself to a nice cup of relaxing tea. Whatever you enjoy, use that to motivate yourself to do your daily planning.
As with anything worthwhile, the key is your motivation. Why have you decided you want to get better organised and more productive? Is it because of the disappointment you feel when you let someone down and miss a deadline? Or is it because you want to have more time to do things you really want to do? Whatever your motivation for becoming better at managing your time, use that to motivate yourself.
Whenever you feel like not doing that planning session, remind yourself why you are doing it. Write down your reasons why and stick them somewhere in your work station so you can see it every time you sit down. Don’t lose sight of your why.
Once you have embedded your daily planning session, create s structure to your day. Use your calendar to block off time for your important work. You can use the same strategy with building this structure.
For example, if you decide you want to exercise four days a week, put your exercise days on your calendar. Let’s say you decide to exercise Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday every week, put that on your calendar. Fix it there are create recurring events. This way, you will gradually begin to see those days as your exercise days and you will just do your exercise without thinking too much about it.
And you can gradually build in more of the things you want to consistently do. As each week passes your self-discipline grows, your habits change for the better and after three of four months, you find your new habits are embedded.
Now, the reality is you will still have bad days and weeks. That’s natural. We all get thrown out of our routines. Going away on holiday, spending a week on a training session etc. All these throw us out of our routines. The trick is to recognise these changes and to refocus ourselves when we return to our normal daily lives.
A trick I learned a while ago is with morning routines. If you try and create morning routines around a particular time every day, your chances of success are limited. All it takes is a night out on the town and being late to bed, and you will wake up a little later, you will skip your morning routine.
If, however, you create your morning routines around a series of actions you take from the moment you wake up, it means that no matter what time you wake up, you will follow the same routine and that way you are much more likely to follow through with your plan.
So there you go, Sarah. I hope that helps and has given you something to think about. Start small. Build that chain and your self-discipline and remember, if you fall off the wagon, you can always get back on it again.
Becoming more intentional about how you spend your time is a journey. There will be hills and mountains to climb. You will fall done, trip up and have to restart. But it’s a journey. You find out a lot about yourself on this journey and if you stick with it, the results are profoundly fulfilling and often lead for more positive changes in our lives.
Thank you so much for your question and thank you to all of you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Monday Jun 15, 2020
Monday Jun 15, 2020
This week, how do you reset your time management system when things have gone wrong?
Links:
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
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How to Stay Productive When Everything Gets Thrown Out of Sync
Script
Episode 137
Hello and welcome to episode 137 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about getting back into your system when you have been thrown out of sync by external events or just because you have drifted off course. And that happens a lot more frequently than you might think.
Now I wrote about this a while ago and I have linked to that post in the show notes. For me, it generally happens after I have been travelling. Coming back to Asia after a trip to Europe throws me right out of sync and it can take me around ten days to get back on track.
That said when it does happen you there are a few strategies that can help guide you back on course.
So let me now hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, can you help me? I love the idea of being organised and having time to do my work, yet every time I do get organised a few days later I stop and everything just falls apart. Is this normal?
Hi Sam, yes it is perfectly normal. It happens to all of us from time to time. So you are certainly not alone. The question is how do you prevent it from happening?
A lot of this comes down to our habits and our routines. In particular the habit of processing what you collected at the end of the day (or at least every 48 hours or so) Not clearing your inboxes frequently creates a lot of overwhelm and when that happens we resist and usually give up.
Now, this is one of those areas I found interesting many years ago. When I was in sales we were permitted to claim our expenses. The salesperson who trained me out in the field did her expenses the day before the deadline for submitting expenses. She would go into the glove box of her car and pull out all the receipts for fuel, lunches and other expenses, and then write them all out onto the expenses sheet. It took her around three to four hours to do it all.
My sales manager was a little better, he would begin doing his expenses a couple of days before. It was easier for him as he was based mainly in the office and he kept all his receipts in the top drawer of his desk.
Naturally, as I was a young twenty-something, I looked up to these experts and so followed their example. Soon I began to see this as a very inefficient way of managing expenses. Spending four or five hours painstakingly writing out the receipts onto a sheet once a month just seemed a bad way of doing it. I decided I would do my expenses every day instead. For me, this meant all I had to do was spend five or ten minutes at the end of the day and write my day’s expenses onto the expenses sheet.
One of the additional benefits of this practice was I did not lose any of my receipts. On the day the expenses were due, all I had to was calculate the total, add that to the sheet and hand it in—five minutes at the most.
This practice of having a closing down routine every day has stuck with me ever since. When I used a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, I practised the same philosophy. At the end of the day, I would spend ten to fifteen minutes collecting all my notes, adding the relevant bits to my projects section at the back of the planner and planning out the next day with my diary and to-do list. New to-dos were put where they needed to be and any admin sheets required for my work were updated and filed.
It was a small daily sacrifice that meant I was never in a position where I had to stop every I was doing just to get everything up to date.
My advice to you all is to develop a closing down routine that you follow every day. It does not have to be long. Ten minutes is fine. In this closing down routine, clear your to-do list inbox—decide when you are going to do the tasks, check your calendar for tomorrow, and clean up anything else that needs clearing up.
Clearing inboxes is how we get back on track. Clearing our inboxes—whether that is email or to-do list—the act of cleaning it up is enough to make us feel better and organised. It’s when we allow this area to slip when things go wrong.
Set aside some time each day for processing, Sam. It’s the first place to start. The purpose here is to avoid the build-up of overwhelm. That’s what often causes us to throw in the towel.
Developing the right habits can be very hard though, particularly if you try and do too much at once. And with a closing down routine, there is going to be a lot of trial and error. What you are looking for is efficiency and consistency. Spend a week or two testing out different ways of doing it. Decide what you want to clear at the end of each day and create a checklist.
Once you are happy with your checklist, set yourself a thirty-day challenge. For the next thirty days follow your closing down routine each day. Make sure you do as per your checklist.
Of course, if you feel you need to refine your list, by all means, refine it. After all, it is your list. The key is to commit to doing it every day for thirty days without missing a single day. That will begin the habit embedding process.
I find, having a set time each day to do the closing down routine is the best way. I often advise my coaching clients to set an alarm or a reminder on their phone or computer to come up fifteen minutes before they finish the day to remind them to do the losing down.
So for example, if you finish work at 6:00 pm set a reminder to come up at 5:45 pm and begin the closing down session. Stop whatever you are doing at 5:45, do the closing down and if needs be, finish what you were doing once you have closed down the day.
There are a lot of benefits in doing things this way. First of all, you give yourself time to process your inbox and review your calendar. It also gives you time to see what you need to do tomorrow and plan your objectives and tasks for tomorrow.
Back in the day when I worked in an office, there were many days when I left work, and because I had not looked at my calendar or cleared out my inbox, I had this nagging feeling I had missed something important. It was not the best way to spend the evening, worrying about what I had forgotten. Now When I worked in an office, we did not have smartphones and computers and iPads connected to our work life. Our work-life stayed in the office—a very nice state of affairs. So once I left the office I had no way of knowing what was missing until I arrived back at the office the next day.
Closing down the day, cleaning your inbox and knowing what’s on your calendar for tomorrow leaves you feeling relaxed and stress-free and that always leaves you free to actually enjoy the evening doing what you enjoy doing.
And while you may think having to find more time each day to plan and prepare is going to be hard, this is where you will have to make a decision. You see, if you are not prepared to do the backend work—processing your inboxes, keeping on top of your email and planning the next day—then where does that leave you?
Without the backend work, you will have overflowing inboxes, un-replied to emails and a lot of stress. Not exactly the position you want to be in. Quite the reverse, I’m sure.
The next part of the conundrum, Sam, is to have a system in place. And there are a lot of systems to choose from. There’s my Time Sector System, where you manage your work by when you need to do it. There’s the traditional GTD method (Getting Things Done) where you manage your work by context (people, place and things) and the Kanban method where your work is managed by what stage it is at.
Without a system, you will be flying by the seat of your pants. You will be in a reactive rather than a proactive state for most of the day. Being reactive means you are reacting to the loudest and latest rather than anticipating the pressures on your time and taking action to mitigate it before it happens.
Using those ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to clean up and process puts you into a proactive state because it’s like stepping back and looking at what you have to do and making decisions about when you are going to do it or would like to do it.
It’s when you have that level of organisation that you gain the clarity to plan better and faster and because you have turned it into a habit—helped by doing a thirty-day challenge—you are much less likely to fall off the proverbial productivity wagon.
The final part is the make sure you do a weekly planning session. Like the daily planning session, this does not need to be long. But it will take you around twenty to thirty minutes each week. Here all you need do is review the tasks you want to do next week and compare those against your calendar of events to make sure that what you plan to do is realistic when place alongside your daily commitments.
It’s no good scheduling fifteen tasks for Wednesday when you are going to be on a training course all day. You are not going to get your tasks done.
If you are using the Time Sector System, all you need do is move your tasks from your next week’s sector to this week, date your tasks, based on what you days look like for next week, and do a quick review of your project notes in your chosen notes app to make sure your projects are moving forward as you expect them to do so.
The weekly planning session is also a good time to catch up with anything that needs cleaning up. I usually process my Evernote inbox during this session because the notes I collect in Evernote during the week are not too many and can easily be filed once my weekly planning session is complete. It just feels like a natural step, to plan the week then clean up the previous week and make sure everything is reset for the following week.
It’s a great feeling knowing that everything is done, all your tasks and emails are clear and up to date and you are ready to begin the new week with a clear mind.
I hope these tips have helped, Sam. Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. If you are interested in learning more about the Time Sector System, then I have put a link in the show note to my blog post where I explained how it works and what you need to create the system. It’s simple, easy to develop and will do a lot for your time management and productivity.
It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
Monday Jun 08, 2020
Monday Jun 08, 2020
Podcast 136
This week, it’s all about using daily routines to build a structure to your day so you remain focused on what is important and keep the momentum going with your goals
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 136
Hello and welcome to episode 136 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So how do you make progress on your projects and goals consistently? It’s a question I get asked frequently and it is one of the secrets of the super successful.
Now the truth is there is no real secret to this, all you need do is look at the way people like Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Warren Buffett and Charles Darwin (yes the Origin of Species author) managed their time and you will see a pattern because really it is a pattern.
Oh, before we start, don't forget, if you have found that managing your tasks by project creates overwhelm and a lot of tasks slip through the cracks—never to be seen again—then it just might be time for you to try the Time Sector System.
The Time Sector System is a time management system designed in the twenty-first century, for the way we work today. It takes the overwhelm out of your work and helps to get you realistic about what you can achieve each day.
If you have tried other systems and not found anything to work, then take a look at the Time Sector System. This might just be the way for you to manage your work and your goals.
Full details of the Time Sector System are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Terri. Terri asks: hi Carl. I wonder if you have any tips on getting my projects finished. I seem to be very good at starting projects, but after a few weeks, I lose interest and then forget about them.
Hi Terri, thank you for your question.
This is something I used to really struggle with myself. I’ve always been very good at coming up with ideas and starting them—whether they are goals or projects— but terrible at finishing. I either got bored or just lost interest in doing them because something else, and seemingly more exciting came up. I felt I was an expert at accumulating projects and goals but terrible at following through.
In the end, I realised every achievement, every success I had ever had was built on one simple factor. Consistency.
You see things only move forward when you take action. But for you to get to the end of anything, whether that is a project or a goal you need to take that action consistently. There is no escaping that. There simply is no other way around it and there are no shortcuts.
This is how Dwayne Johnson built his successful acting career. He knows his success is built on three things. His personality, charisma and his physique. He’s not a classically trained actor, but he has natural charm and charisma, and that comes through, but to maintain his physique he has to work out every day and maintain a strict diet.
Every day, Dwayne Johnson will wake up four hours before he is due on set. That means if he is due on set at 7:30 am, he will wake up at 3:30 am and begin his exercise with forty-five minutes to one hour of cardio. He then has breakfast (eggs and steak yummy!) and does an hour and fifteen-minute weights session. He repeats that six days a week, taking one rest day on a Saturday.
Question: Would you be willing to do that every day for the rest of your life?
If you want to be a successful action star, that is the kind of consistent commitment you are going to have to make.
Now for you to build the momentum you first need to establish what are the tasks and activities you need to complete every day or week in order for you to move things forward? Without really understanding that you are just not going to make any progress.
Let’s say you want to create a number of income streams in preparation for your retirement. The first step is to identify what needs to be done to do that. What kind of income streams are you considering? Which ones are viable? Which ones are not? And what steps can you take each day that will develop and build those income streams?
You see if you don’t make those decisions and establish what needs to be done every day or week, you will never begin taking action. This project will become a dormant project. It will be in your project list making you feel comfortable because seeing it there makes you feel something is happening but the reality is you are doing nothing to move it forward so it does not move forward. It is stuck, dead, dormant and until you start doing something, anything, it will remain dead.
That reminds me of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch there.
Imagine you want to start a podcast. You have the equipment—a laptop, a microphone and some audio editing software. Great. You have the equipment. So what next? How can you build your podcast? You need to begin recording your podcast. Now recording just one is not going to create a successful podcast, you need to be recording one every week.
So, what do you have to do each week to be able to record a podcast every week? Write a script, record it, edit it and then publish. So, each week you need to set aside time for writing the script, editing and recording.
I know how long it takes me to do this podcast every week, and that means I need to find around three hours each week. Two hours to prepare the script, thirty minutes to record it and thirty minutes for editing. So, on my calendar I prepare the script on a Tuesday morning, I record it Sunday morning and edit it Sunday afternoon and publish on a Monday morning.
These tasks are part of my recurring areas of focus and get done consistently every week. If I don’t do all these tasks every week, no podcast will be published. Period.
I’ve frequently spoken about Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, on this podcast and how he wrote a book every year. The routine was simple. Begin writing at 9:00 am and continue until 12 pm. Then return and do the editing of that day’s writing between 4 pm and 6 pm every day. After six weeks, a book was written.
And that is the secret. Consistency and routines. Turn the action steps that will take you towards completion into your routines and do them consistently until your project is finished or your goal is accomplished.
As Robin Sharma says: “all great things are difficult at the beginning, messy in the middle and beautiful at the end.”
Getting started is hard, keeping going when you doubt yourself is very messy, but by making sure you do whatever needs doing consistently over a period of time you will eventually have a completed project.
So how do you keep yourself motivated to keep going when things are hard. I remember when I began my YouTube channel, my videos were getting a few views, and I was picking up a few subscribers here and there. It was slow, it was hard and it was very difficult sometimes to give up five or six hours each week to make the videos.
But I knew the only way to grow and develop the channel was to keep going no matter how hard it sometimes seemed. I can promise you is was very hard to start. It was incredibly messy in the middle because a lot of time I had no idea what I was doing. But with each video, I made I was learning. I was getting better and my confidence was growing.
Today I have almost 50,000 subscribers—nowhere near the number the really successful YouTubers have, but to me, that is not important. For me, it’s about learning and helping. Each video I make I learn. And each video, I hope, helps at least a few people learn something that will help them to reduce their stress and become more productive. I am achieving my goal.
So, you need to develop the routines and build the structures into your days and weeks that will sustain your momentum. That is the only way you will build anything.
So once you have established the action steps you need to take consistently, get those action steps set up as recurring action steps in your to-do list manager or your calendar. Make them non-negotiable. Be determined to make them happen every day or week and understand that unless you are prepared to do that you will fail.
Another important factor here is to not confuse thinking and planning with taking action. Of course, you do need to do some thinking and you will need to do some planning, but all your thinking and planning is not moving anything forward. The only way to start moving things forward is to actually start taking real action.
Write that script, record that first episode and publish it. You will learn far more from doing that than you ever will researching and talking about it.
I often read articles that tell you to develop your branding, to establish who your audience is and to research your area. All that is complete rubbish. You will never know who your real audience is until you begin publishing. You could spend weeks developing a brand image only to discover that the people attracted to your message are not the people you thought would be attracted to it and you then have to waste a lot of time re-branding and rethinking your strategy. Publishing and getting whatever you want to do out there will teach you far more and a lot faster than ‘strategising’.
As Nike says: Just do it!
So Terri, make a decision about what needs to happen consistently. Make sure you plan when you will do those action steps every week and get started. The sooner you start the sooner you will get the kind of feedback you need to adjust and improve and the sooner you will get to the end of the project or achieve your goal. It’s all about turning action steps into routines and habits and making sure those steps happen every week.
I hope that helps. And thank you so much for your question.
Thank you also to all of you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Monday Jun 01, 2020
Monday Jun 01, 2020
This week, I answer a question about work/life balance and how to bring balance into your life when you feel you have too much work to do every day.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 135
Hello and welcome to episode 135 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.
Do you ever feel you have far too much work to do and that you spend all your waking moments doing or thinking about your work? You are not alone. Many many people feel the same way, yet no matter what industry you work in and no matter how busy you feel you are, it is possible to bring a little balance into your life and have a better perspective on your work and your life.
So let’s get straight into the question this week and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Daniel. Daniel asks: Hi Carl, do you have any advice on achieving a good work/life balance. This is something I am really struggling with.
Hi Daniel, thank you for your question.
Firstly, I do need to be honest with you here. I don’t believe in attaining a work/life balance. To me, this is a misnomer that can cause a lot of unnecessary stress.
You see when we become focused on achieving a work/life balance it puts a demand on us to stop doing something at a certain time because if we don’t we won’t have balance. So, for example, if I am working on developing a slide deck and I am ‘in the zone’, and I look up and see that it is 5:50 pm, now I feel pressured to stop working on the slide deck at 6 pm because if I don’t I won’t have any balance.
But what if you are enjoying being in the zone? I know I often am when I am working on a slide deck. I love that creative process and building ways to explain a point. For me, and many other people I have worked with, having a time pressure such as stopping work at a fixed time each day is not only impractical, it just adds additional stress you do not need.
Then there are cases where you have a deadline coming up and whatever it is you need to finish you cannot miss that deadline. In these situations, the added pressure of making sure you finish working at fixed times do not help your flow or your ability to finish your work on time.
Part of this problem is when we think of creating a work/life balance, we think in definitive times. For example, we think of a work-life balance of 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours play. Yet, life is not like that. It never has been. Sure, it would be nice to be able to consistently get eight hours sleep every night, to get all our work done in eight hours each day and to have eight hours to spend with our friends and family, but life is not like that at all.
We don’t always get those eight hours of sleep. We can easily allow ourselves to spend just a little too much time watching YouTube videos at night. Sometimes, the work we do needs a little extra time in the day—we may have got a few more emails than usual to reply to or a piece of work we are working on needs an extra hour or so to finish. That’s more like the reality we live in.
Now, there are jobs that help to make working fixed hours each day easier. In factories where we work on an assembly line in shifts. We begin our shift at 7 AM and finish when our colleague comes on shift at 3 PM. Or if you are a firefighter, nurse or call centre worker. These jobs generally have fixed hours. Yet, even with these jobs, particularly in the healthcare profession, once your shift is over, you often have training to attend and self-study to do.
So we do have to be careful about what we wish for. Trying to build a consistent work/life balance often leads to additional stress you do not need.
Instead, I find building your work/life on a weekly basis works far better and reduces a lot of the pressure we add by trying to stick to a daily work/life balance.
What I mean by building a weekly work/life balance is you first decide what is important to you. For example, if spending two or three hours every evening playing with you kids in something you feel is important to you, then you can schedule that time each day in your calendar. I know, for example, that despite Gary Vaynerchuk’s work ethic, which is impressive, he makes sure that whenever he is home in New York, he is home each evening and has dinner with his family. We don’t see that in his videos, but each evening he will go home and have dinner with his family. Once his kids are in bed, he may have a meeting or two late on, but he still makes sure the time he spends with his family is fixed.
Likewise, for me exercise is important and I make sure that at 2 PM, I stop whatever I am doing and spend an hour exercising. I might go out for a run, got to the gym or do some home exercises. That time is fixed in my calendar every day. For me, exercising at 2 PM gives me a nice break in the day and gives me a mental boost to be able to do a strong session of work in the evening.
Establishing what is important to you and what you want to do each day is a crucial first step to building a week of balance in your life.
To do that, either use pen and paper or your notes app and write out what you would like to be able to do every week. How much time do you want to spend with your friends and family? How much time do you want to spend on recreation? Etc. Write whatever you want to do each week down.
Then, open up your calendar and block time out each week to do these activities.
When I lived in the UK, in the summer, every Friday night was blocked out for going to watch the Leeds Rhinos play. If they were not playing at home and their game was not featured on TV, I had a free evening.
Saturday nights were Top Banana night at the Town and Country night club where my friends and I would start at the local pub, the Fox and Hounds, and once we were all gathered we would head out to the city centre and dance the night away. We would finish the evening with a curry at the Rajput in Headingley.
Those we great times and I have a lot of fond memories of those days. These were fixed events. I knew where I was going and what I was doing and it made my life so much simpler.
Now, what happens if you have an important project to finish? If you have been realistic about how you spend your time each day, there should not be any difficulty in finding the time to finish the project.
Imagine if you decided to redecorate your living room one weekend. You would block the weekend out your calendar and focus solely on completing that project. If you planned ahead and scheduled the redecorating, then when that weekend arrived everyone in your circle would know what you planned to do and so you would not be inundated with requests for your time. The trick is the make sure all the relevant people know what you wanted to do that weekend.
The same applies to your work projects. Often as we approach the deadline we realise we are going to need more time to finish the project. In these situations, if you have flexibility built-in, spending a couple of extra hours each day to complete the project would not be an issue. You would still have time to do the things you want to do but may have to reduce the time you spent doing those activities in order to free up a little extra time to complete the project. Instead of spending an hour in the gym, you reduce it to thirty minutes for a week.
In these situations, your body would probably thank you for giving it a little extra rest time, but you still get your exercise in and you get to complete your project.
When you plan your week ahead, you get to see what needs your attention, you can build in the extra time needed to complete those activities while at the same time you are aware of your obligations to your friends and family. No week need be the same, you can build in the flexibility to get your work done and spend time on your leisure activities.
What I have found is not planning the week ahead, often leaves us at the mercy of events. Now while I accept there will always be unplanned for emergencies and obligations, if we plan the week ahead we make better decisions about where to spend our time and although it is unlikely your plan for the week will not have to change throughout the week—that’s where the daily planning session comes in—on the whole, the work you planned to do will get done.
This is why in the Time Sector System, once you have established what your recurring areas of focus are—the things you identify are important to you—you can build a week that allows you to fit your work around those things that you want to do and enjoy doing.
We all have a bad habit of overestimating what we can do in a day and underestimating what we can do in a week. If you write 500 words of an important report every day for five days, you have a 2,500-word report at the end of the week. Thirty minutes every day instead of two and a half hours on Friday afternoon when you are tired out and are just looking forward to the weekend. Which is better?
By planning the week, you can better distribute your workload and give yourself a better balance to your day and your week.
Another advantage of planning your week is you will find you reduce the sense of urgency that causes a lot of our stress. Knowing you have time in the week to finish your projects and obligations will give you a sense of calm and you will be able to manage the unknowns that will inevitably crop up through the week.
So, Daniel, if you establish some routines where you spend time doing the things you want to do, plan out your week so you get better at managing your time and not try and balance your days but instead balance your week, you will have a greater sense of calm, get a lot of work done and feel much more accomplished at the end of the week.
Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast, you can email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the details are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Monday May 25, 2020
Monday May 25, 2020
This week, what is the difference between an area of focus and a routine? It’s a question I am frequently asked, so this week I’m answering that one.
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Script
Episode 134
Hello and welcome to episode 134 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 am answering a frequently asked question about areas of focus and routines. What are the differences? It’s a question I am often asked and it is a difficult question to answer because we will all have different priorities and different things that are important to us. If you are just starting out building a new business your areas of focus will be very different from a student managing their PhD thesis or a person just starting out on their career in architecture.
That said, understanding which tasks need to be performed frequently and consistently in order for a goal or project to be successfully completed, that is relatively easy. It’s a skill well worth developing as it will help you to focus on what’s important.
Now, before we get to the question, if you have joined the Time Sector Course, check out the additional lessons I have added. I have added a lesson on managing your actionable email and developing a project in Microsoft OneNote. OneNote is a great app to develop your projects as you have a lot of features that can help. I will add an Evernote one once the promised Evernote update is released and in the coming weeks, I will be adding a Google setup for those of you who have asked for it.
Also, a Time Sector System for teams course is in development that can be rolled out within a company. I’m excited about that as I believe this system in a team will simplify the way projects and work are managed within a team.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Carlo. Carlo asks: Hi Carl, thank you for your excellent Time Sector Course. it has changed the way I manage my tasks in such a positive way. Yesterday, my weekly review only took 25 minutes—it used to take me nearly an hour every week. My question is: you talk about “recurring areas of focus” and “routines”. I don’t completely understand the difference between the two. Could you explain a bit more?
Thank you, Carlo, for this question. I am regularly asked it and I know it can be a difficult one because there is a grey area between the two.
The simple answer is routines do not improve your life or take your projects and goals forward. They are just things you have to do. Take the garbage out, wash the car, dog, cat etc. Do your expenses, check your bank accounts or update your time card. It would not be the end of the world if you missed doing a routine for a few days. They are just life’s less important necessities that we all have to do.
Areas of focus are the opposite of routines. Areas of focus do contribute to your goals and projects and do help to improve your life.
Doing your exercise, writing your journal, spending time talking with your partner, your kids and your friends. All these could be part of your areas of focus. Any activity you do that moves a project or goal forward would be classed as an area of focus.
Anything that is important to you and your wellbeing can be classed as an area of focus. This is why it is hard for me to give a precise definition. We all have different goals. Interests and priorities. Only you can decide what these are, nobody else can. I am afraid if I give a list of what can be classed as an area of focus people will copy it and think only things on that list can be an area of focus.
That is not the case. Areas of focus are deeply personal. They are whatever you decide is important, not me.
In a way you can think of an area of focus as any task you want to focus on that enhances your life or moves a goal or project forward.
So why separate them? Well,
One of the difficulties many of us have is we confuse activity with progress. We do a lot of tasks and feel like we have been busy but if we stop and analyse what we have done we have not moved any project or goal forward. We have been like the proverbial hamster running around on a hamster wheel. We are moving, but we are going nowhere.
This was a problem I identified in myself a long time ago. I felt busy all the time, I was doing a lot of stuff, running around and feeling stressed but my projects and goals were hardly moving anywhere. It was only when I stopped and analysed what I was doing each day did I discover that 80% of what I was doing was not important. It would not have been a big issue had I not done those tasks. It certainly would have made no difference whether a project completed on time or not. Yet, I felt these tasks had to be done.
This was something I learned from Tony Robbins’ Time of Your Life course, we micromanage tasks too much. We break things down too small.
There’s a false belief that if you break down tasks to a ‘more manageable’ level it will make the project easier or make it easier to start the project and stop you from procrastinating. It’s complete rubbish of course. If you are going to procrastinate you are going to procrastinate.
Just because you have a task that says “open up PowerPoint” instead of “work on presentation” it’s going to make it easier is rubbish. Being explicit and clear about what you need to do - ‘work on your presentation’ - is still going to get done.
However, one thing is important, you do need to identify the difference between the tasks that are going to give you the biggest return and the ones that give you a false sense of making progress.
This is why being very clear about the tasks that will move you towards your goals and the tasks that won’t move the needle very much is important and why I recommend you make a distinction between tasks that drive goals and projects forward and tasks that won't.
Why recurring areas of focus?
If you want to complete a project or achieve a goal you are going to have to take action consistently over a period of time. You won’t learn Spanish if all you do is study for an hour once a month. If you want to learn Spanish or any other foreign language you will have study the language almost every day consistently.
Learning a foreign language is not hard in terms of the process. The process is very easy. The difficulty is maintaining the consistency. That’s why so many people fail at achieving their goals and why projects are delayed. It’s a lack of consistency. Doing the work, day after day.
Establishing what tasks you need to do frequently and consistently that drive you forward is essential. Not knowing which tasks give you 80% of your results and which ones do not is going to lead you down roads that either take you nowhere or take you on a detour away from the objective.
Once you have established what these tasks are, you can then set them up to recur when you need them to recur. For me, exercise and fitness is an important part of my life. Maintaining my weight at 80 kgs is a part of that. So, I have a recurring area of focus that tells me to schedule my exercise on my calendar every Sunday.
However, taking my weight every Friday is actually set up as a routine. If I skip taking my weight reading once or twice it will not have any serious impact on my overall goal. Doing my exercise does have an impact. For me, if I am not exercising, I gain weight. If I exercise my weight remains reasonably consistent. Not exercising also impacts my energy levels too. So, an 80% impact task is doing exercise. Knowing my current wright is a 20% impact task.
Likewise, with my content. I produce seven pieces of content each week. One blog post, one podcast episode, three YouTube videos and two newsletters. Each one of those requires planning and writing or recording. These are important areas of focus for me and they have to be done every week. They are therefore contained in my recurring areas of focus.
Updating my content scheduler—I use Asana to manage my content—is not essential to the production of my content. It is important, but not essential. So, updating my Asana boards is a routine. I have it come up on a daily basis as part of my daily routines, but it would not have an effect on my content production if I skipped a day or two.
The important work is content creation. Managing the content schedule is not going to help with creating the content.
So there you go, Carlo, hopefully, that has given a clearer picture of the difference between a routine and an area of focus.
The whole point in separating these is so you can differentiate between the tasks that will drive your projects and goals forward and the tasks that do not really contribute towards that goal. Routines can be important but remember they do not make a big impact.
Over time you will get better at this and will instinctively know what tasks need to be performed regularly that will lead to your project or goal’s success and the less important tasks that, while perhaps being important, are not going to move things forward very much.
Thank you for your question and thank you to everyone who has joined the Time Sector Course. The feedback has been tremendous and I am so grateful to have been able to help so many people.
Thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Monday May 18, 2020
Monday May 18, 2020
Podcast 132
This week, how do you find time each day to work on your goals?
Links:
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
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Script
Episode 133
Hello and welcome to episode 133 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 fitting in your goals and the things you really want to do when you already have a full schedule.
Now, before we get to the answer, if you have been considering joining the Time Sector Course, now is the right time to do so. The early-bird discount will be ending in the next twenty-four hours. You have until midnight, Tuesday 19th to get yourself into the course at the special introductory offer.
This is a revolutionary new way of managing your tasks and your work. It gives you back your time, by focusing more on doing the work and less on the processing and organising. It’s simple, easily maintained and will give you so much time back.
Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks: Hi Carl, I want to begin an MBA but I am too afraid to commit totally to it. It’s expensive and I will have to save money to do it, but I am worried if I do save the money and register for the degree I will not do the classes and fail. It will be a waste of money. Are there any tips that might help?
That’s a great question, Stephen! Thank you.
Now I know it’s easy for people like me to tell you to sit down with a pen and piece of paper and write out your goals. But that is the first step. If you do not have your goals written down they are only wishes, and wishes are not strong enough to motivate you to get up and take the steps you need to take. So whatever you may think of the advice about sitting down and writing out your goals, start there. You do need that list.
Next up, how you structure your goal is important. It needs to be clear and it needs to be measurable. Just saying “I want to study for my MBA” is not good enough. You need to be much more specific than that. The goal needs to be written out as “to register for an MBA programme and to complete it by July 2023”
In that example, there are two parts. The first is to enrol in the programme. Now, I know MBA programmes are expensive so your first objective might be to save up enough money so you can enrol. The second goal will be to do the studying required for you to successfully complete the programme.
In this instance, take step one first. Save the money. While you are doing that you can do any research needed to find the right course for you. The good thing about having to save money first is it will test your resolve. If your “why” is not strong enough you will not progress must further than this initial step.
And that brings me to your “Why”.
Here’s the thing about your “why”. It has to be YOUR way. You have to want to do whatever it is you want to do for you. Not for your parents, your spouse or to impress people. When you do that, the “why” is someone else’s why and that will not sustain you. Your reason for doing something must come from within you.
Losing weight and building muscle so you can impress people at the beach will be short-lived. Losing weight and building muscle so you can live a long, healthy active life will be self-sustaining.
The same applies to studying for your MBA. If your real “why” is to impress people by having “MBA” after your name, your “why” will be weak. When you plan to spend a weekend studying and your friends suggest you go out for a few beers on a Friday night, you’re going to go for the beers (because you can tell everyone how hard you are going to study over the weekend) The problem will be when you wake up Saturday morning and you feel hungover and tired. The quality of your studies will be diminished.
So, if you are really serious about this goal, you are going to hand over your hard-earned cash. When you do that you are not going to want to waste your money so you are much more likely to carry through with your goal. Handing over money, or anything else of value to you, is going to give you a real incentive to put in the effort to study.
Okay, so you are enrolled, how do you make sure you consistently do your studies? Use your calendar.
This is where you are going to have to be completely honest with yourself. It’s easy to add events to a calendar and because it’s easy it’s also easy to ignore what's on your calendar. Never ignore your calendar.
Ignore your to-do list but never ignore your calendar. If you start ignoring what’s on your calendar your whole structure is going to break down. You need something on which to build your discipline. Treat your calendar as sacred territory. You know the saying - “if it’s on your calendar it gets done”
What this means to me is, if I am not sure I am going to be able to do something it does not go on my calendar. It goes on my to-do list. My to-do list is negotiable. My calendar is not.
You see you need something that you hold sacred when it comes to your time and your calendar is the best tool you have for that.
You do not have to micro-manage every minute of the day—you do need the flexibility to manage the unknowns that will inevitably come up in your day—and you need the mindset of what goes on your calendar gets done and only in exceptional situations would you ever consider not doing something on your calendar.
You can do a simple test here. Add a recurring event to your calendar to go for a 40-minute walk every evening for 30 days. Track it in a habit tracker or on a paper calendar (you can create one using Apple’s Numbers or an Excel sheet) and cross off the days. See if you can commit to 40 minutes every evening to walking. If you can do it, you will improve your self-discipline and the way you treat your calendar will improve.
So, decide how much time you want to dedicate to your studies each week. What you are looking for is a baseline… A minimum amount of time you will spend studying each week. Your lectures will be fixed. They go in your calendar first. Then you add the study time. Perhaps you decide you will dedicate two sessions of ninety minutes each week as a minimum. Fix those sessions as repeating events in your calendar each week. They are now non-negotiable. You will do whatever it takes to do those study sessions.
The key is to schedule the same time each week. Let’s say Monday evening between 8 pm and 9:30 pm and Saturday mornings between 10 am and 11:30 am. These are your fixed, non-negotiable core study times. Once you have established them, you tell everyone these times are non-negotiable.
At first, your friends and family will try and persuade you to make exceptions. Never make exceptions. Once people realise you are serious about this, they will stop trying to persuade you to do something else.
Of course, you are likely to increase these sessions once exams and written papers come due. But you still need a minimum requirement each week.
The next part of your planning is to identify the core tasks that will drive you forward with your goal. There is always something. If you listened to last week’s episode where I explained the difference between a core task and an area of focus, you will understand the importance of your core tasks.
Your core tasks are the tasks that move the goal or project forward. It's the time you spend in the gym, it’s the time you spend writing the blog posts or the book, it’s time you spend reviewing your course notes and studying. Your core, critical tasks are the tasks that get the work done.
Okay, so you know what your core tasks are, these need to go on your calendar. If you are using your calendar correctly, then your commitments will already be on your calendar. So what you are looking for are the gaps. If there are no gaps, you're overcommitted. You will need to review your commitments and reassess your priorities.
That can be very hard. Let’s say you always meet up with your friends for a Saturday morning brunch and it’s something you really look forward to. But what happens if Saturday morning is also the best time for you to do some solid studying?
Now you have the classic choice between something you love doing and doing something you know you should do for your future. This is where your “why” for doing something comes in. If you why for doing something is strong enough you will make that sacrifice. If it is not, you will not be prepared to make the sacrifice.
As I have said many times before, “if it’s important enough you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse” and nothing illustrates this more than when you have a conflict between something you enjoy doing and something you know you should do. This is where the strength of your why will come in.
If your why is strong enough you will instinctively know that the right thing to do is to spend one or two hours on a Saturday morning studying. It could mean you wake up one or two hours earlier on a Saturday, get your studying in and then reward yourself by having brunch with your friends. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
The important thing is that you get your scheduled study time in. That is your primary objective. Once that’s done you are free to do whatever else you want to do.
The difficulty with managing your time is the responsibility is on you. Nobody else. You cannot delegate the management of what you do with your time to someone else and then complain you don’t have enough time. This is your time. You need to protect it.
It fascinates me when people tell me they cannot manage their time because their boss is always giving them more work to do. Sure, that’s what bosses are supposed to do. But zoom out a little here. When you signed your employment contract you decided to give X amount of time five days a week to a company and in return, they agreed to pay you a certain amount of money. It’s a win for you and it’s a win for your company.
Within those hours each day, you give to your employer you need to manage the work that comes in. You can learn to become more efficient with the way you do your work, you could ask your boss to reduce your workload. There is a multitude of things you could do. Complaining is not an effective way to manage time. Accepting the problem, reviewing your options and then making a decision to do something positive about it is how you become better at your work and better at managing what you do with the time you are given each day.
I hope that has helped, Stephen. Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Monday May 11, 2020
Monday May 11, 2020
Do you find distinguishing between the important and the trivial difficult? Well, this week, that’s the question I’m answering this week.
Links:
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 132
Hello and welcome to episode 132 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
There’s a huge difference between trivial and critical tasks and I am pretty sure most of you listening know that. But, while we may think we understand this difference, how many of us actually know the difference between the two? Well. I shall be answering that question this week.
Now, before we get to the question and answer. For those of you who have already joined my Time Sector course, I just want to let you know that I have added two classes based on some of the questions that were asked. The first is how to manage actionable email and the second how to create a master projects list. So, if you have taken the course and have not seen those additional classes, they are there in the course now.
And if you have not joined yet, you can still get the course for $39.99 for a couple more days. The early bird special offer will be ending very soon, so please don’t miss out. This course is revolutionary and will change the way you manage your work and your tasks for the better. Gone will be the overwhelm of an unwieldy projects list, tasks will no longer disappear and die in a bottomless pit of tasks hidden inside old, out of date projects and instead, you will have a very active list of tasks that require a lot less time to manage.
Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sonia. Sonia asks: Thank you, Carl, for the great Time Sector course. It has really simplified the way I manage my work. I have a question about what you describe as “core tasks” could you explain a bit more what you mean by these and how they are different from areas of focus?
Thank you, Sonia, for your question.
I felt adding a section about “core tasks” was important because I have noticed a lot of people get caught up in trivialities, falsely believing these trivialities are important to the success of a goal or a project. They are not and often they cause distraction from the main objective and contribute to the project’s or goal’s failure
Now, to define a “core task” you should ask yourself: what are the tasks I do that directly contributes to my income, career and life success?
Now, this may not be as easy as it first appears. Often the work that directly contributes to your income, career and life success is not obvious. To give you a simple example:
Let’s imagine you want to become a champion body-builder. What would be the “core tasks” that will help you to reach the goal of becoming a champion bodybuilder?
The two core tasks would be lifting weights and diet.
This means that as long as you make sure you do your workouts every day and you eat the right foods, you will have contributed 80% of the work you need to achieve your goal.
However, if you were just starting out with this goal you would also need to find the right gym, get the right personal trainer (at least to start with), the right workout clothes, the right supplements and the right training programmes.
There’s actually quite a lot that needs to be done in order to get close to achieving the goal of becoming a champion body-builder.
Now, in this example, if you are not focused on your core tasks—the weight lifting and diet, it does not matter how many personal trainers you interview, what the gym looks like or the training programme is, you are never going to achieve your goal. Yet, often, people focus on these trivialities and they never move their goal forward.
The same problems occur with weight loss and other lifestyle changes you may want to make. If you have not identified the core tasks that will directly contribute to your goal’s success, then you will be running round in circles making very little progress.
Take for example something that happened last week. A student in my Time Sector course wrote to tell me the editing was off in some of the classes in the course. I went through every video and checking them and discovered that one video should have been trimmed .227 of a second sooner. A cut that 99% of people would not have noticed.
Now, in this situation, the writer was correct, the edit was off. But only .227 of a second off and only in one video. The question I had to ask myself was is this relevant? Does having ‘perfectly’ edited videos contribute to the course’s overall objective? The answer is no. Not at all.
The overall objective of the course is to educate. Now, the videos do contribute to that, but they do not need to have to the second perfect edits to achieve that goal. This means editing is not a core task in this project. Editing is an ‘important’ part, but it is not a critical part of the course’s development and overall success.
My core tasks are to educate people on the subject of time management, productivity and goal planning. That to me is why I am here. I love helping people and I love being in the education field. That is my core and anything that allows me to help people and educate, those will be my core tasks.
Knowing your core tasks also helps you identify the critical tasks inside a project. For example, are a number of people I follow on YouTube. Some of them create fantastically produced videos. Thomas Frank and Matt D’Avella, for example. They tell their story in cinematic glory and have millions of people following them. Now for them, their goal is clearly to produce near-perfect videos. It is something they have identified as being important. I admire them for the work they put into their videos.
For me, my goal is to educate. That is my critical, overall objective. My videos do not come close to the quality of the videos Matt and Thomas produce. I put out three videos per week. Matt and Thomas put out one video every seven to ten days.
The number of videos you put out each week is not important, but it does go towards demonstrating where your objectives are. Matt and Thomas’s goal is to produce beautifully created videos that both entertain and educate. And they achieve that with tremendous success—just look at their subscriber count. My goal is to educate as many people as I can in using Todoist, Evernote, Apple’s productivity apps and time management in general. Doing that with beautifully crafted films is not a priority for me.
So establishing what the core tasks that will drive you towards achieving the goal of your project or goal is an important first step. Without knowing what the core tasks are that will drive you towards achieving completion of a project or the achievement of a goal you will end up making little to no progress.
So how do core tasks differ from areas of focus?
Areas of focus are tasks that support your core tasks. To demonstrate this, let’s go back to the body-building example. The core tasks are lifting weights and eating the right food. To support that you still need a training programme. You still need to list out the foods you will buy from the supermarket and you will still need to schedule your gym time. Al these are areas of focus. On their own, they will not help you achieve your goal of being a champion bodybuilder, yet they are still important because without them it will be difficult to do the right weight training and eat the right food.
Developing a course. While the overall core tasks are related to the educational content, supporting that content is the video editing. If the editing was not done, then the content would be disjointed and distracting from the educational content. So, to create an online course, the core work is developing the slides to explain the points, recording the videos and uploading them to my learning centre. The areas of focus are editing the videos and marketing the course.
To give you a business use case image you have been asked to do a presentation in ten days time. To create a presentation you need a number of tasks. Things like creating the slides, get the information, decide on the theme, decide how you will develop your story, what clothes you will wear etc.
Many of those tasks are not important. The theme, the typeface you will use etc while having an impact if you have no content to put in your slides it does not matter how beautiful the colour scheme is. The core task is to create the slide deck. Without that everything else is irrelevant. Once you have your slide deck with the information you want to share with the audience, then you can focus on the design, the typeface, the colour scheme and the clothes you will wear.
Another area I find people getting lost in trivialities is when developing a business idea, or starting a YouTube channel or writing a book.
In these cases, once you have an idea, you need to begin developing it. So the core tasks would be to sit down and begin writing the book. To record your first video, write the first blog post or create your first product. Without any of those things, you will only ever have an idea.
Yet, I see so many people with these amazing ideas getting caught up with their branding, website design, blog hosting and video recording equipment. None of these is important at all. The problem is while you are researching and deciding on brand image, messaging and website design, none of the core work is getting done. No product is being built, no blog posts are being written and no videos are being produced. Those are your core tasks. Those tasks need to be your priority.
At some point in the future branding and messaging will become important, but not until you have some content or at the very least a prototype of your product. Then these areas may come important but are very unlikely to ever become a core task. The core task will always be your content.
Hopefully, this answer will go some way to explaining the difference between areas of focus and your core tasks. Core tasks are critical must-do tasks that produce your work. Keep you in employment and drives everything forward. Areas of focus are the surrounding tasks that, while important, do not necessarily produce the work that ultimately pays your bills and puts food on your table.
I hope this explainer answers your question, Sonya. Thank you for sending it in and thank you for allowing me to use it in this podcast.
Thank you also to you for listening. I really appreciate your support and I hope I am helping you to become better organised and more productive.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
Monday May 04, 2020
Monday May 04, 2020
This week, I have a fascinating question about the choices we have in life and what to do if you feel you made a poor decision and now what to reverse that decision.
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Script
Episode 131
Hello and welcome to episode 131 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.
Have you ever felt a decision you made about your career or life many years ago is the cause of your stress and unhappiness today and you feel trapped? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s question. What to do if you feel you are travelling down the wrong path.
Now, before we get to the answer, last week, I launched a brand new course called The Time Sector course. This course is designed for the twenty-first century. Created to help you manage all the inputs that come your way every day and allow you to focus on when you will do the task.
Many people have discovered that managing and organising your tasks by project does not work for them. In today’s world, with all the inputs coming your way and the many things you have are multi-step tasks, you end up with hundreds of projects to manage that leaves you spending a disproportionate amount of time just trying to stay on top of everything.
And many of the tasks you collect get processed into one of those hundreds of projects only to die a slow death never to see the light of day again. A really bad way to manage your work.
The Time Sector System eliminates projects from your to-do list altogether and instead organises your work by when you need or want to do it. A much more logical way to manage your tasks.
If you think about it, the only thing that matters is when you will do a task. The only factor that will tell you whether you can do a task or not is available time. It does not matter how much intention, motivation or inspiration you have to complete a task if you don’t have the time to complete it you will not complete it.
The Time Sector System gives you a much simpler way to manage your tasks. It puts the planning and managing of projects where it belongs—in your notes app—and helps you to manage your available time more effectively.
A link to more details about the Time Sector System is in the show notes. I hope you take some time to have a look as this system could be the difference between continuing to struggle to manage your tasks and your time and finding an effective way to balance your work and the things you love doing.
Okay, on with the show, so that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Bill. Bill asks: Hi Carl, several years ago I decided I wanted to work in sales, but over the last year I have felt increasingly unhappy with that decision. I took your Time and Life Mastery course and I realised my long-term vision is not what I am doing today.
I want to change my career and my direction, but I have a family and a mortgage and I just don’t feel I have a choice. Do you have any recommendations that might help?
Thank you, Bill, for the question. Now, let me start by talking about one of my favourite actors: Jason Statham. Like most action-adventure actors these days, Jason Statham plays pretty much the same character in all his movies: a tough, non-compromising, generally good guy.
But if you watch a little closer you will notice his characters also all appear to live the same simple life. If you have seen his Mechanic movies, for example, you’ll notice his home, while luxurious, appears to have very few things his character cares about. His record collection and his watch seem to be it.
Even in real life, Jason Statham lives a simple life—well simple by Hollywood standards. He follows a simple diet and a consistent exercise routine. You will also probably notice he does very few interviews or promotions outside of his movies.
If you look at the lives of the most successful people, the people who maintain their success over a long period of time, they all appear to have something in common. No matter how successful they become, they generally stick to the same routines and habits that enabled them to be successful every day. There's no compromise. Most of the people who achieve immense success and then disappear without a trace, also follow a similar pattern. They stop doing what made them successful in the first place.
Every day, when you wake up you get to choose whether to stay in bed or go and do some exercise. Nobody’s telling you to do anything. You are no longer a child. You get to choose. It’s the same with your diet. You get to choose whether to eat that cake or not. Nobody’s forcing you to eat it.
When you accept you have a lot more control over your life than you think it can be incredibly liberating.
Many years ago, after studying and training to be a lawyer, I discovered I hated working in an office. Prior to working in an office, I had worked in hotel management, car sales and other non-office based jobs. I thought working in an office would be fantastic. I was wrong. It felt I was a day release prisoner but in reverse. I had to be in a fixed location Monday to Friday, five days a week and was allowed home in the evenings. It was a horrible experience for me.
The problem was I felt I had no choice. After studying and training for six years I believed had to live with my choices. Then one weekend I sat down to think about where my future life was going and it did not look good. I was heading towards a career in an industry that did not inspire me, it was only a matter of time before I settled down got married, got a mortgage and had kids. And once that happened I knew it would be incredibly difficult to give up my legal career.
It was a weekend in November 2001, that I decided I did not have to do any of those things if I chose not to. I always had a choice about what I did each day and I also had a choice about what I wanted to do with my career.
All I had to do was exercise that choice and I could do that at any time.
And that is how I found myself in South Korea in June 2002. I exercised my choice and it was the best decision I have ever made.
For whatever reason, we often feel trapped by decisions we made earlier in life. The thing is you are rarely ever trapped. You always have options and you can always accept you made a poor choice and decide to try something new.
In many ways, the hardest battle we have is accepting we made a bad decision. But let’s get real here, nobody makes the right decisions every time. We all make poor decisions from time to time. Some of those decisions have small consequences, others have very big consequences, like marrying the wrong person or investing all our life savings into a sure thing that turned out not to be a sure thing.
But whether the consequences are big or small, we almost always have a choice about whether we continue down the same path or take an exit and begin something new.
So what do you do if you feel your current path will not take you towards your vision for the future?
Well, first research what will put you on the right path towards achieving your vision for the future. This can take quite a bit of time as it depends on what your vision is. You may be lucky and already have a clear idea of what you want to be doing with your life. Other times it may take a few weeks or months to figure it out.
For example, you could be a manager in a company now but want to become a church minister and share your faith with other people. In this instance, you only need to become more involved in your church, volunteer to run bible study groups, talk to your church minister about what he or she would recommend you do to fulfil your desire to become a leader of a church. You could investigate taking a theology course, or if there are any seminaries that allow you to attend part-time. There’s a lot of things you can do before you need make any kind of decision.
The key is to understand you do not have to make any kind of decision right away. Often the process of investigating and researching will give you a lot of inspiration and that will create momentum to keep moving forward. Remember, "most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade."
The fact you make a decision to do something about what you really want to do will change the way you look at things. You will start to see opportunities open up and you can then choose to take those opportunities or not when the time comes.
I often have people take a piece of paper and write out what they envision they will be doing in ten years time if they carry on doing what they are doing today. Where will they be in ten years time if they don’t change anything about the way they live today?
What if you don’t change your current career path or lifestyle choices? What if you are in an uninspiring career, eat and drink too much and do no exercise? What physical and mental condition will you be in in ten years time? Will you be happy? Will you be healthy?
Once you have done that exercise, turn over the piece of paper and envision where you will be if you make some changes to your career path and lifestyle choices? Will you be in a better place?
Often when you realise that to get where you want to be in the condition you want to be in in ten years time will not take a lot of changes. It may involve enrolling in an online university course and making some minor changes to your diet. Nothing too dramatic.
After that exercise, all you need do is make a decision about when you will begin. And the best time to begin is now. As the old Chines proverb says: “the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now”.
The next piece of advice I would give is; do not overthink things. All plans change over time. I’ve seen far too many people decide they want to start their own business, for example, and they spend months—and sometimes years—thinking about their branding and target audience. The truth is the chances are you will not get your branding or target audience right the first time anyway—at least not until you start doing something that attracts an audience. Then you will see who your real audience is and be in a better position to create a brand that work for them (remember it is always about your audience it is never about you)
I had a vision and a plan when I began my YouTube channel four years ago that within three months had completely changed. I also had a branding message, that was turned upside down once I was able to see the analytics from the content I was producing. The people watching my videos and reading my blog posts were not the people I thought would be watching. From that data, I modified my message and branding to better suit the people who were engaging with my content.
If you do a Google search for Apple’s first logo, you will see the idea of a simple, minimalistic company was not what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak first envisioned. Apple’s branding and image and products evolved over time once the company saw how they could differentiate themselves based on who was buying their products.
So Bill, take a step back. Do some thinking and figure out how you will use the next ten years to put yourself on course for the career and lifestyle you want to achieve for yourself and your family. You do not have to do anything as dramatic as quitting your job right away. Often all you need is to retrain yourself, change a few habits and make choices about your future life.
I hope that has helped and thank you for your wonderful question, Bill.
Thank you also to all of you for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question then you can email me at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Monday Apr 27, 2020
Monday Apr 27, 2020
This week it’s all about your goals and staying focused so you actually get round to completing them
Links:
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
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Script
Episode 130
Hello and welcome to episode 130 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.
I hope you are faring well during these difficult and unprecedented times. Disruptions to our lives like this do not come around very often, fortunately, yet with anything bad, I always like to see the silver lining and in this instance the opportunity to step back a little, review what we want to accomplish and how we want to accomplish it is an opportunity not to be missing.
I’ve written and spoken in the past about the need to stress test any kind of system you build for yourself, and now is a great chance to test your system. How does it cope when you are thrown out of your normal, day to day routines? How does it manage when you are surrounded by interruptions and demands from family members? Does it still work?
These questions can really help you to find that balance and find the best way for your system to be set up.
Now this week, I have a goals related question. We haven’t answered one of these for a while. This week it’s about staying focused on a goal and how to avoid being distracted and or lose interest in it once you have started taking the necessary action to make it happen.
Now before that, I would like to remind you that if you have not done so already I have a FREE online course that will teach you the concepts of COD - That’s collect, Organise and Do.
Collecting your tasks, commitments, ideas and events into a place you trust, spending a little time each day organising what you collected and the rest of the time doing the work you have identified needs to be done. It’s simple, it’s powerful and it works.
Details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Toby. Toby asks: Hi Carl, I had a number of goals and projects that I was so excited to start this year and yet after a few weeks I lost interest and stopped working on them. I think I have a problem with motivation as this has always happened to me. Is there anything I can do to stay focused on them?
Hi Toby, thank you for your question and I can reassure you you are not alone. Struggling to stay focused on your goals and projects is hard. To achieve goals you are going to have to leave your comfort zone and that requires some big changes to your way of life.
Completing projects can also be hard if you don't have a boss or colleagues keeping you accountable. It’s much easier to slip back into our normal way of doing things and find excuses about why we cannot achieve a goal or complete a project when we do not have someone keeping us accountable.
And that’s something you need to be very alert to. The excuses your brain will come up with that prevents you from making the necessary changes you need to make to achieve your goal or complete a project.
And boy our brains are fantastic at coming up with excuses about why you are so different from everyone else. Why you cannot write a blog post, why you can’t apply for that promotion or why you cannot run a 10km road race.
What I’ve found is whenever a person says “I can’t” the vast majority of the time it’s got nothing to do with a lack of ability or qualifications or money. It’s got everything to do with a reluctance to make the necessary changes one needs to make to achieve that goal or to complete that project.
The “ah but they are different” excuse. The thing is we are all different. But that does not mean you cannot achieve your goals or complete your projects.
I recently heard a podcast talking about how Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson became the highest-paid Hollywood actor. It certainly wasn't luck. It’s because The Rock does the work nobody else is willing to do.
Despite all the success he has had in recent years, the amount of money he has earned, he still wakes up at 4 am and goes for a run or spends 45 minutes or so on the running machine. The Rock understands this. He knows the secret to his success is in the gym, not on the sofa or lying in bed. It must be so easy for him to sit back and say I’ve made it. I don’t have to go to the gym today” Yet he still goes. Why? Because he knows why he is successful. He knows what it takes to be successful and he’s made the decision to make those sacrifices.
You know, if you want to the physique of Dwayne Johnson you have to do the work Dwayne Johnson does.
And if you are not prepared to do that that’s okay. Accept that as your reason for not having the physique of Dwayne Johnson. But don't delude yourself by saying The Rock is a special case, or he was lucky. No, he wasn't. He puts the work in day after day after day. There’s nothing lucky about that.
That is commitment. Not luck.
And this is the same for your projects and goals. It takes commitment and consistency. I suppose a good question to ask before you decide to start any project or goal is:
What am I prepared to sacrifice in order to complete this?
That’s because to commit to completing a project or goal will require you to make time for doing it. That means you are going to have to sacrifice something. What will you sacrifice?
It could be you enjoy sitting down at the end of a long day to watch TV. Or you love going out for a few drinks with your friends on a weekend, or your favourite place is your nice warm bed.
If you really want to achieve your goal, complete your project what are you going to sacrifice?
You see, if you’re not prepared to sacrifice anything to achieve your goal or complete your project your motivation is not strong enough to carry you through.
A classic one is as the summer approaches many people feel the urge to lose some weight. So they embark on a crash diet. They go from eating three meals a day plus snacks to eating only one or two and no snacks. After a few hours on their new diet, they feel hungry. Then very hungry, then unbelievably hungry and after a few hours or a day or two they give up depending on the strength of their willpower.
The sacrifice—the discomfort of feeling hungry—is more powerful than the urge to look good on their summer holiday.
I often hear people talk of the desire to write a book or to start an online business as a side project. And these are great ways to develop skills and push your potential. Yet, once again there is a sacrifice to be made. There’s the risk of failure and the perceived embarrassment that will come from that—seriously if you fail that’s far better than never actually trying. There’s the time sacrifice—you are going to have to commit time to do these activities and that means you are going to have to stop doing something you already do.
All of these sacrifices will test your resolve and test your motivation.
So how do you develop motivation that is strong enough to overcome the discomfort of moving away from your comfort zone?
Now that’s a very difficult one to answer because it depends on where you are in life. By that I mean if you are in your early twenties, you feel you have plenty of time to write the book, start your own business or start an exercise programme.
I was a smoker when I was in my twenties—I didn’t care about lung cancer or other smoking-related diseases—they didn’t happen to people in their twenties. But as I got older that little voice in my head was telling me to give up—my long-term health would suffer and I would die young. And sure enough, the point came where my motivation to stay alive and live a healthy long-life became stronger than the nicotine hit I got from a cigarette. I quit.
If you are in your early thirties you are thinking about settling down, developing your career and building a family life for yourself, By the time you get to your mid to late forties, you motivation to preserve your health will be becoming stronger.
So a lot of our motivation comes from where we are in life. If you’ve just experienced the birth of your first child, your motivation to protect and preserve the financial well-being of your new family will be incredibly motivating. (Probably less so once that child becomes an adolescent teenager) As you approach retirement your motivation to build a sustainable retirement fund for yourself will be strong.
So, if you are looking for motivation you need to be asking questions about why a goal or a project is important.
And the final step to all of this you need to figure out what you need to do consistently every day to make whatever it is you want to accomplish happen.
The truth is, motivation will not last. The discomfort of your sacrifice will always trump your motivation later in the day. What you need to be doing is developing habits and routines that take you towards completing your project or your goal.
Writing that book? Write something every day. Set a minimum target say 500 words per day. Want to lose weight? Change your eating habits. Find the foods that you currently eat that directly contribute to your weight gain and replace them with healthier alternatives. Want to get that promotion at work? Find out what you have to do in order to get it. What training courses can you take, what skills need developing and make doing the work a habit or a routine? Something you just do.
Look for the action steps that will directly result in you completing your project or achieving your goal.
The Rock wakes up at 4 am because to him going to the gym and working out directly contributes to his success. Warren Buffett reads for 5 hours a day because he knows that the knowledge he picks up reading those financial reports directly contribute to his bottom line.
What can you do that will directly contribute to you achieving success with your projects and goals?
There you go, Toby. I hope that has helped and given you some concrete steps you can take to achieve your projects and goals. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question, then you can email me—carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Monday Apr 20, 2020
Monday Apr 20, 2020
This week it’s all about calming down an out of control productivity system.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
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Script
Episode 129
Hello and welcome to episode 129 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.
I do hope you are all doing well and staying safe. It is in times of difficulty when the best of us comes out. Now is the time to stand up and be a leader and set an example for everyone around us.
Now this week, I’ve received a few emails and I’ve had a number of people ask this question on this subject—or a similar question— and that is one where the productivity system itself has become overwhelming and is now the problem and not the work being thrown at us.
Now, before I do go into this week’s question, I should point out that if you also find your productivity system has become bloated and overwhelming now would be a very good time to take or retake, my FREE COD productivity course. COD (Collect, Organise and Do) was created with simplicity at its heart. It was born out of my own experiences creating a monster of a productivity system that In itself became the problem that demanded more and more of my time every day.
The COD course will take you through the basic set up of a simple system, explain what you need (and by omission what you do not need) and show you, in outline, how to manage your work so you spend more time doing and less time organising and processing.
So if you haven’t done so already, get yourself signed up. It’s completely free and don’t worry, it is not a sales pitch designed to get you to sign up for ever more expensive courses. It is a course designed to help, not sell. And most important of all, it will show you the essential components of building a productivity system that works for you.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Helen, Helen asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following your work for some time and wonder if you can help sort out the mess I am in. I am using Evernote and Notion for my notes, I also have to use Microsoft OneNote for my work and I also use Todoist for my personal tasks and Microsoft’s new To-do for my work tasks. It all just feels so overwhelming. Is there anything I can do that will help me to feel more in control?
Firstly, thank you, Helen, for sending in this question.
Now, where do we start? The best place to start is recognising there is a problem and in this case Helen, you have done that. You have recognised you have a problem.
A good place to start is to calculate how much time you are spending organising and processing each day. Under normal circumstances, you really should only be spending twenty to thirty minutes, maximum, processing and organising your work. The rest of the time you should be doing the work.
A lot of overwhelm is self-inflicted. We spend more time adding than taking away. What we should be doing is looking at subtracting instead of adding.
Asking questions such as ‘do I really need this app?’ And ‘Is this adding to or reducing the amount of work I do each day?’ Are helpful in determining whether or not your system is the cause of the problem.
Also, look at the tasks themselves—do those tasks really need doing or can you combine them with other tasks—picking up your prescription at the same time as doing your weekly shopping. Replying to your actionable email while waiting to pick up your kids from school, for example.
Problems are also caused by us wanting to see a lot more than we need to see. And there is a difference between what we would like to see and what we need to see.
What you need to see is a simple list of tasks you have prioritised to do today. Nothing else. What we like to see often can be a list of tasks labeled to be done at the office and at the computer. What we have planned for the week, progress of a specific project and a whole bunch of other stuff. The problem there, of course, is seeing all that stuff doesn’t move anything forward and just causes anxiety, overwhelm, distraction and a feeling of being busy. Not exactly a good mental state to be in.
The time to be looking at future work is when you do your weekly planning session and to a less extent when you do your daily planning. 95% of the time on a day to day basis, you should only be seeing what you have prioritised to do today. That’s all that matters right now.
Tomorrow’s tasks are irrelevant at 9 am today. Tomorrow’s tasks only become relevant tomorrow. Stop looking. Focus on today’s tasks today and tomorrow’s tasks tomorrow.
You see, you are dressing up procrastination and calling it “planning”. Looking at next week’s tasks on a Tuesday afternoon when you still have Tuesday tasks to do is not planning. It’s procrastinating. There is a time for planning when a project or an idea needs developing and the associated tasks can be pulled out and put into your to-do list. But if you are constantly looking at what's coming up tomorrow, later in the week or next month and you still have tasks today’s tasks to do, you are procrastinating. Stop doing that. Do the tasks you have assigned yourself to do today and only go looking for more when you have completed those tasks.
Now many people have become so conditioned to checking and rechecking that there is a feeling of comfort in this action. A kind of delusion has set in—being convinced that all this checking and reviewing is somehow making them more productive. It’s not. You need to snap out of that thinking. Planning, reviewing and checking have their place, but that should never be at the expense of doing the work.
It’s similar to the same situation I find people who want to start a blog or YouTube channel. An awful lot of time is spent thinking, planning and thinking again and doing more research and more planning. You see all that planning, research and thinking is not doing. Nothing is being written or recorded. So nothing is happening.
Again, planning, researching, and thinking have their place and they are important. But none of that should ever get in the way of actually doing. For me, if I find myself planning and thinking beyond a few hours I see that as a trigger to analyse why I am not doing. I’ve learned from experience that having an idea, spending a little time thinking and planning it out and then doing it often leads to something special. My blog, this podcast and my YouTube channel all had a few hours of research and planning, but they only ever got off the ground and started when I sat down and started writing or recording. It was those first few attempts that gave me far more momentum and information than whatever I read, watched or planned.
So be very careful not to use ‘I just need to do a bit more research’ as an excuse not to start doing the work that matters. You’re going to learn a lot more from doing than you ever will from researching.
Now for the one that creeps upon us and we are not aware it is happening. Too many apps.
This one has become a much bigger problem for many people over the last two or three years because we are so lucky to be living in an age where I feel human ingenuity and creativity are at a peak.
There are so many amazing apps to choose from out there. From Notion to Bear Notes, from Things 3 to Microsoft’s ToDo. All of these apps have sprung up in the last two or three years and promise so much. It is so tempting to add one of these tools to our system.
And of course, we convince ourselves that we absolutely must have this new app because it is going to plug a gap we think we have in our system. Notion to me is the biggest culprit here because it promises to be all things to all people. It’s a task manager, a personal wiki, a note-taking app, a research tool and a place to play around with building creative lists.
The problem here is because Notion is all things it is not one thing. So we add it to our toolbox and do not eliminate any of our existing tools. So now, not only do you have a to-do list and a notes app to keep up with and maintain, you now have Notion to keep up with and maintain too. You’ve just added more processing and organising time and done nothing that optimises the time you spend doing.
When you have tools that duplicate each other you put a lot of drag on your overall system. When you collect something where does it go? Which to-do list? Which notes app? Which calendar app? That’s a lot of decisions to make. And if you are in a rush and you collect something, how do you remember where you collected it?
This is why I preach you need one to-do list, one notes app and one calendar app. You do not need multiple apps that do the same thing.
If your company requires you to use Outlook and Outlook calendar, then make Outlook calendar your calendar app. Likewise, if your company collaborates using OneNote, use OneNote as you notes app. Don’t use OneNote for Work and Evernote for personal. You are just overloading your cognitive load and you just do not need all that complexity.
If you are serious about becoming better organised and more productive, then drop your excess apps. Pick one. One to-do list, one notes app and one calendar app. That’s all you need. You may have a lot of work to do, but you are not a multinational conglomerate responsible for over 100,000 employees and millions of customers. You are an individual with a number of tasks to perform each day and a limited number of hours in which to do those tasks. You do not need all these distractions and complexity.
Focus on the work you have decided needs doing today, keep the apps you use to a minimum and reduce the amount of distractions and interruptions you get as best you can. Doing that will reduce your overwhelm and busy-ness and improve the quality of your work faster than another app will do. It leaves you feeling much more relaxed fulfilled and ultimately a lot happier.
I hope that has helped, Helen. Keep things simple and you will be fine.
Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget to have a look at my FREE COD course—details of which are in the show notes— and please stay safe. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.