Your Time, Your Way

Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Script | 331

Hello, and welcome to episode 331 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.

How often do you begin the day with a to-do list that you know will be impossible to complete? What does that do to your motivation? If you are like most people, your motivation will sink, and the day becomes another stressful horror show.

Why is that? Why do we find ourselves with a to-do list longer than any reasonable person could complete in a single day? Is it because we are over-ambitious and over-optimistic about our abilities or because we have too much to do?

Well, this week, we will examine some of the causes of this problem and discuss potential solutions. While not necessarily easy to implement, these solutions will give you the necessary breathing room to create realistic, doable days and leave you with enough energy to enjoy your evenings doing what you want.

Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, may I ask a favour? If you have been kind enough to buy a copy of my book Your Time, Your Way, could you leave a review? Reviews help other people discover the book, learn better ways to manage their time and their lives and reduce stress, which will ultimately help all of us.

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

This week’s question comes from Heather. Heather asks, Hi Carl, I have tried for years to use a to-do list, yet after a few days, the list becomes enormous, and I stop looking at it (which makes the list even longer). I’ve tried all sorts of digital to-do lists and even pen and paper, but nothing works.

How does anyone keep their to-do list manageable so it doesn’t become useless?

Hi Heather, thank you for sending in your question.

To get to the bottom of this, we need to go back to some basics. That is to understand the relationship between time and activity.

To start, can we all agree that doing anything requires time? Whether taking your dog for a walk, cooking dinner, or meeting up with friends, all activities require some time.

Can we also agree that each day has twenty-four hours?

As long as we accept these two facts—that anything we do requires time and that there are twenty-four hours in a day—we have a solid anchor on which to build a reliable time management system.

When I accepted these two facts, everything changed for the better. It didn’t matter how much was on my to-do list if I didn’t have the time to complete the tasks.

I remember the days before I accepted this. I used to commute to the university I was teaching at—ninety minutes each way—and then teach for six hours. I had a to-do list with over thirty tasks on it, and I needed to stay two or three hours after my classes to talk with my students.

In effect, my day was doomed the moment I woke up. There was no way I could drive for three hours, teach for six, do two hours of tutorials, and complete thirty tasks. Yet that was what my day looked like each day.

That had nothing to do with time management or productivity. It had everything to do with me being unrealistic about what could be done in a single twenty-four-hour period.

And that is where most of our problems start—being unrealistic about what can be done in a single day.

If you are familiar with my Time Sector System—a way to manage your work and time more realistically—you will know about something I call your “core work”.

Your core work is the work you are employed to do. It does not include work you have “volunteered” to do—those little favours you do for a colleague or looking something up for your boss. It’s just the work you were employed to do.

As a university lecturer, I was employed to teach. My core work involved preparing for and delivering my lectures. There was some additional work, such as setting and grading exam papers, but for the most part, my core work was teaching my students.

Sending attendance records and dealing with class time conflicts for my students was not a part of my core work. I did do those tasks, but they were never at the expense of doing my core work.

Establishing what your core work is gives you some advantages. The first is you know what to prioritise each day. As your core work is what you are employed to do, it naturally follows that it will be your top priority for the day.

The second is you learn how long it takes to do your core work. This helps you see what is possible and not possible regarding the work you set for yourself each day.

Let me give you an example. Today, I run a coaching programme. After each coaching call with a client, I write feedback summarising what we discussed and include a little homework for them to do before our next call.

Writing one piece of feedback takes me, on average, twenty minutes. This means I can write around three pieces of feedback per hour. I didn’t know this when I first started writing feedback; I only learned this by repeating the same task over and over.

This is an average. Sometimes, it may take me thirty minutes to write one; other times, it may take ten minutes. I am human, and so are you—I hope—which means the time it takes you to do something will vary depending on how much sleep you’ve had, whether you are stressed or anxious about something. You could be distracted by a colleague, family member, or anything else from a long list of potential factors.

If you try to strictly limit yourself to a precise timeline, you will become stressed out. It’s not possible. With your activities, you can only work with averages. Time and the number of tasks you have may be fixed and easily identifiable; however, how long it takes you to do the tasks is not. There are too many variables involved to be able to do that.

But averages are fine. Over a week, those things do average out, and you will find that your critical core work is consistently getting done.

However, this goes a step further. Because I know I need one hour a day to write feedback, I can only allow up to three coaching calls a day. If I were to allow four or five calls a day, I would require more time to write the feedback.

Requiring more time to write my feedback would mean I would need to reduce something else. Perhaps I could stop writing my blog posts or newsletters or reduce the number of episodes of this podcast.

Remember, time is fixed—that part of the equation cannot be changed. The only thing that can be changed is the number of tasks you do—i.e. your activity.

Another factor here is that repeating the same task over and over leads to better efficiency, which reduces the time it takes to complete the tasks. If I were to take three of you listeners to a Formula 1 pit lane and we attempted to change the tires on an F1 car as they came in it would take us a long time.

While the tools would be given would be state of the art, and each tyre only has one bolt to undo, our unfamiliarity with the task would slow us down. The pit crews tasked with changing the tyres can do so in less than two seconds. That comes about because they practice. They’ve done it over a thousand times before.

What you can do is look at your core work and calculate how long it takes you to do that work each week. You may need to monitor this for a week or two, but the exercise will give you some valuable data. Data you can use to plan out your week.

For instance, I discovered that if I dedicated an hour a day to dealing with my actionable emails and messages, I would never have a situation where anyone was waiting longer than 24 hours for a response. There are some days where I cannot reply to all of them, but on the whole, I can stay on top of it all (and that’s based on 150 emails on average per day, although not all of them will be actionable).

Responding to my actionable email for an hour daily means I have developed the most efficient method possible. I group all my actionable emails in a single folder. When I process my inbox, I can quickly identify anything that needs action and move it to my actionable folder in seconds. I’ve been following this process for over ten years, and now I can clear around 350 emails from my inbox in less than thirty minutes.

Ten years ago, that would have taken me more than two hours. Repetition is not just the mother of mastery; it’s also the secret to getting faster at doing anything.

Last week, in one of my newsletters, I wrote that hope is a terrible time management strategy. Hoping you will find time to do your work is never going to work. The only thing that works is to get realistic about what you have to do and how much time you have available.

I’ve seen so many people tie themselves in knots, trying to perform impossible mental gymnastics to circumvent this fact.

It’s only when you stop trying to do the impossible and get real about what you can and cannot do in a day that you start to get control over your time.

So far, I’ve talked about the constants—your core work—which is known to you. But what about all the unknowns? The agitated client who needs your help urgently or your boss who forgot an important presentation she is due to deliver this afternoon and needs your help to prepare.

One thing you likely will have discovered is that these unknowns are going to happen. Perhaps not every day, but more often than you would like. How do you manage these?

This comes back to controlling your calendar. Filling your calendar with appointments and time to do your tasks leaves you vulnerable to all these inevitable unknowns. You will need to create space for these.

Again, this is about being realistic. How many meetings do you have scheduled today? When are they? How much time do you have between them?

Perhaps an additional question is: Do you really have to attend all these meetings? Are there some you could excuse yourself from? Maybe not, but it’s worth asking.

I love to ask people if they could guarantee two hours a day where they are undisturbed so they can get on and do their most important work for the day. Would they become more productive? Of course, the answer would be yes.

Why not try that? When you plan the week, find two hours a day for undisturbed, focused work. If you were to look at your calendar next month, could you pre-block those two hours out now? I suspect most of you listening to this could do that. Why not do it now? At least try and see what happens.

There will be days when you cannot do that, and that’s fine. If you could do three days out of five where you could, though, you’ll soon find yourself becoming more productive.

And that’s what it’s all about, Heather. Understanding your relationship with time. Time is fixed; you cannot change that. You only have control over what you say yes to and the number of tasks you complete each day. Focus your attention on that part of the equation. Learn what you can realistically complete each day and then get more efficient at doing that work.

I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Heather. Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.

Sunday Jul 14, 2024

Forget Discipline. Instead Focus On Your Standards.

Sunday Jul 14, 2024

This week, is it possible to stay disciplined, or is there a better way to ensure you are consistently doing the things you want to do?

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Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Script | 330

Hello, and welcome to episode 330 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.

When I hear people discussing discipline, I am always interested in hearing about their struggles.

Life is always a struggle. We are often torn between what we want to do and what we must do. I would love to watch my rugby team play live, yet the kick-off time is usually around 2 AM in my time zone, and I know I must be asleep at that time.

I’ve discussed the importance of daily and weekly planning many times. If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably know how valuable a solid weekly planning session is to your overall productivity. The question is, how consistent are you?

It’s easy to skip the weekly planning because there’s no immediate penalty. You could go through the whole week without any plan and get stuff done. Unfortunately, this approach leads to doing the work of others and never being able to do what you should be doing.

Whether you do or you don’t do the right things will always come down to discipline. But is that true? Perhaps not. There is another way, and I will show you that by answering this week’s question.

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

This week’s question comes from Clyde. Clyde asks, hi Carl, I’ve loved following you and other people who teach time management and productivity skills. I know the concepts and what to do but never do it. I think I am too lazy or lack discipline. Do you have any strategies to help someone like me who lacks discipline?

Great question, Clyde.

Very few people are able to be determinedly disciplined every day. I can think of only one person—David Goggins—who has mastered this. Yet David Goggins was not always like that. If you know his story, it took him many years to develop the resolve and mental strength, and even after all those years, he admits that each day is a struggle.

This means that being consistently disciplined will be an uphill battle for us everyday folk—one we will likely lose.

So, what can we do instead?

I’ve found that we can develop a set of standards by which to live our lives. This can begin with simple things like going to bed and waking up at a consistent time.

You are likely already doing this; if you are, it will be much easier to set that standard.

The great thing about standards is your mindset changes. Instead of thinking, “I have to wake up at 7:30 every morning”, it becomes something you do. It goes from “I have to wake up at 7:30 to “I wake up at 7:30” because that is who you are.

It took me years to become consistent in writing my journal. During those years, I used to think, “I should write a journal.” The problem with that statement is the word “should.” That single word makes it optional. Remove that word, and now it becomes a standard.

I cannot imagine a day not spending ten minutes writing in my journal after making my coffee. I look forward to sitting down with my favourite pen and journal and writing my thoughts, ideas, and fears on a page. I am a journal writer. It’s part of my identity.

Yet I also remember the years of thinking, “I should write a journal”, and never writing one. I began to believe there was a problem with my discipline. The truth was it had nothing to do with my discipline. It was because writing a journal every morning was not a standard I followed.

When I was in my final year of high school, my first part-time job was working in a hotel. I was very fortunate because, in the late 1980s, hotels were still focused on quality and personalised service instead of the standardised, automated service most hotels offer today. This meant that everything had to be pristine and in perfect order from the moment a guest walked into reception.

I remember my induction training focused on little things like placing the pencils and notepads on the conference room tables in the exact same way and how the handles of the tea cups should always be placed, with the handle pointing to the right and the teaspoon placed on the left.

Even how the decoration of the plates must always be pointing in the same direction.

I learned those things thirty-five years ago and still follow the same standards today when laying the table for a family meal.

It doesn’t feel hard to do that. I have set these standards for myself, and I follow them daily without thought or difficulty. There certainly is no discipline involved.

You may have heard the phrase, “We are creatures of habits”. Well, that’s true. We are creatures of habit. If you are not doing a weekly plan, it is because it is your habit not to plan the week. If you are not exercising regularly, it’s because you are in the habit of not exercising. It has nothing to do with discipline. But it does have everything to do with the choices we make.

You can choose not to plan the week, or you can choose to plan the week. The question then is, what is your standard? Are you the kind of person who plans the week consistently or not?

Another way I have seen this manifest is through exercise. When I was a teenager, I was a competitive middle-distance runner. I was a sub-four minute 1,500-metre runner at the age of 16.

When I was training, doing a 10-mile run every Sunday was the standard. It didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, snowing, or a gale was howling. It was 10 am Sunday morning, and I’d put my running shoes on and head out the door to begin my ten miler.

I rarely enjoyed it, but it was just something I did. I did it because I saw the benefit every summer when racing on the track.

Today, I am no longer a competitive runner, yet I still do my longer runs on a Sunday. Doing them on any other day seems weird. It breaks my standard.

So, Clyde, it has nothing to do with being lazy. We are all lazy. We inherited that from our ancestors when food was scarce in the winter months, and we needed to conserve energy to survive. The least active people survived the winters. All animals are designed to be lazy.

Yet, because we are naturally lazy, our brains will fight us when we try to change something about the way we live our lives. Change requires a lot of energy and focus; our brain’s natural instinct is to stop us from doing that. Routines and habits are safe, and so if you are not currently planning your week or blocking time out for doing your important work, your brain will fight you. And it will continue to fight you until your new habits are embedded.

This is why you will fail if you try and change too much at once. That involves far too much mental energy to remember your new standards. Instead, you pick one thing at a time.

I find changing one thing each quarter works best. This gives you three months to focus your efforts on one thing. That allows you enough time to adjust to your new habit or routine.

At the start of this year, I began a challenge to do at least ten daily push-ups. I knew ten would be easy to do when I was squeezed for time or travelling. I have tracked the number of push-ups I have been doing and noticed that the first week was a struggle. I was doing the minimum.

By the second week, I was doing between twelve and fifteen daily. Six months later, I am consistently doing between fifty and sixty a day, and it doesn’t feel any more difficult than when I was doing ten in early January.

Today, doing push-ups before I take my evening shower is something I just do. I don’t think about it. I get down on the floor and do them.

So, where would you begin if everything is not working? I suggest weekly planning. It’s giving yourself a plan for the week that lays the groundwork for better time management and productivity.

Planning the week gives you time each week to step back and examine your life as a whole, refocusing you on what is important to you.

Weekly planning highlights things you may be missing. For instance, you may realise you have not spoken with your brother or sister for a few weeks or have not thought about what you will do for the holidays later in the year.

And it also allows you to look ahead and make sure nothing significant has been missed and, more importantly, to plan out your week so it is balanced between your work and personal lives.

You will find that dedicating the same time each week to your weekly planning helps you become consistent. I’ve found Saturday mornings are usually the best time to do it. The week is still fresh in your mind, and once done, you can enjoy the weekend without worrying about the week ahead.

It’s much harder to be consistent and set a standard if you try to do the weekly planning at different times each week. You set the standard that you sit down and plan the week ahead at 8:00 a.m. every Saturday morning. That’s your standard.

This helps your family, too, because they know you do your weekly plan each Saturday morning. They will leave you alone and let you get on with it. (Hopefully)

This goes with anything you want to be more consistent with. Learning new things, for example, can be done in the evenings before bed. That hour before I go to bed has become one of my favourite times of the day. I get to sit down with my commonplace book and learn something new. Last week, I learned how to make the “perfect” cup of coffee and how to do a proper double-edged safety razor wet shave.

Learning something new each day has become a standard for me. Going to bed now without learning something feels strange. It doesn’t have to be something deep. It can be anything you might be interested in at that moment. The standard you set is about learning something new, not learning something specific.

So there you go, Clyde. Stop trying to be disciplined. That is very hard to do. Instead, set yourself standards. These are things that you just do because that is the person you are. You are the kind of person who clears their actionable email each day. The kind who plans their week and allocates one or two hours a day for doing the important things.

Thank you for your question, Clyde.

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

Monday Jul 08, 2024

Chronic Illnesses And Productivity

Monday Jul 08, 2024

What can you do to be productive when you have a chronic illness or a very unpredictable schedule? That’s what we’re looking at today.

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Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Script | 329

Hello, and welcome to episode 329 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.

It’s a daily challenge to protect our time and stay focused enough to get our work done. It becomes even harder when we don’t get enough sleep or are worried about something in our personal life.

Yet, if you are suffering from a chronic illness or recovering from one, this challenge becomes exponentially more difficult. Not only are you trying to get work done, but you will also face unpredictable tiredness, low energy, difficulty consistently doing your work, or even knowing if you can do any work today.

This means planning the week is almost impossible, and you’ll find yourself frequently changing events and meetings on your calendar.

The good news is there are things you can do that don’t make you even more tired.

So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Mia. Mia asks, do you have any productivity tips or advice for those with chronic illness? Or just those who have incredibly unpredictable schedules? I'd love to find a way to be more productive that doesn't feel stressful, but obviously, time management is difficult for me.

Hi Mia, thank you for your question.

With illness, the priority is always to avoid making things worse. This means prioritising rest above everything else. Naturally, this can be difficult as an employee because of your company’s demands. Hopefully, you have an understanding boss.

It’s also tricky if you are self-employed, as your work may be your only source of income.

So, given that you must prioritise rest and recovery, the place to start is with your calendar. Don’t start with your task manager—that will never help you. All that will do is remind you that you have a lot of things to do. It will never tell you if you have the time to do it. Only your calendar can do that.

Before opening your calendar, though, ask yourself when you will most likely be focused and have some energy. That could be in the morning if you are a morning person or perhaps in the evening if you are a night owl. It’s this time you want to be protecting.

However, there’s an important factor to consider. According to recent research, and as Andrew Huberman points out, we focus in ninety-minute cycles.

In other words, we can focus for about ninety minutes before needing a rest. However, that time will reduce if you are ill or recovering from an illness. Depending on the severity of your illness, the amount of time you can focus on before needing a rest could be very short.

A couple of years ago, I worked with a client who was suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and her focus time was around twenty minutes before requiring a four-hour rest. Fortunately, she was on long-term sick leave, but being an ambitious person, she wanted to readjust her lifestyle so she could better cope when her condition improved.

When you know your focus time ability, you can better plan a schedule that allows you to get at least some things done.

For instance, if you know you focus better early in the morning, plan your focus block of time then. You want to work with your natural rhythms rather than fighting against them. It’s tough when you’re not sick to fight your natural rhythms; when you are sick or recovering from an illness, it will work against you and leave you more tired.

When planning the week, try to book meetings and appointments when you are not at your most focused. There’s something about human interaction that produces its own natural energy.

This means that if you are a morning person, you would schedule a block of time in the morning for doing your most important work for the day, then give yourself a sufficient break before allowing one or two meetings in the afternoon.

The good thing about this approach is if you feel strong and can go a little longer with your focus time, you have the flexibility to do so. Although, be careful here.

I usually need to wake up early Monday and Tuesday morning for calls. I only get three or four hours of sleep on Sunday and Monday nights. I find that on Tuesday afternoons and evenings, I am exhausted. Knowing this, I don’t schedule much work but keep things as free as possible, so I am not trying to push myself too hard.

If I push through on a Tuesday, I am also tired on Wednesday. If I back off a little on a Tuesday afternoon, it will give me time to recover, and I can be back on point on Wednesday.

If you schedule this during a weekly planning session, you can protect time for focused work before anyone tries to schedule more meetings with you.

Okay, so that’s the weekly planning taken care of. Now, how do you deal with the unpredictability of suffering from a chronic illness?

This is where having a weekly objective comes in.

Whether you are suffering from a chronic illness or not, one thing you will likely have discovered is that, being human, your energy and motivation ebbs and flows. Some days, you’re on fire and in the zone; others, everything is a struggle. The trouble is, it’s impossible to predict when this will happen.

The mistake we all make is thinking tomorrow will be the same as today or better, yet that’s not guaranteed. When you set objectives for the week rather than the day, if you do have a bad day or two, you can still recover and get what needs to be done, done.

Another thing to work on is establishing your daily non-negotiables. In my case, they are walking Louis, my little Yorkshire Terrier, getting a minimum of twenty minutes of exercise and spending at least thirty minutes responding to my actionable emails and other messages.

What are your daily non-negotiables beyond getting enough sleep and the right nutrition?

Whatever they are, they need scheduling, so you protect time for them.

I would also recommend scheduling your rest times too. Rest and recovery are a big part of your rehabilitation when you are ill. This becomes a hard must-do each day—whether you want to or not. Not getting sufficient rest will delay your recovery, which is never good.

Scheduling your rest time also brings some predictability to your days and week. If you know you will rest between 10:30 am and 2:30 pm, you can better schedule your tasks and appointments in the day. You have a hard block for four hours in the middle of your day, and whether you need the rest or not, at least you know you have it in reserve.

Now, what about the people with unpredictable schedules? I was thinking about what types of work this would be and thought of firefighters and emergency room medical professionals. No day will be the same; some days could be very quiet, others extremely busy and stressful.

In these situations, you will find that this type of work involves shifts. You’re either on shift or not. When I was working in hotels, we worked shifts, and there was no way I could expect to do any focused work while I was on shift. It was impossible to predict when things would be chaotic or quiet.

To do focused work, you need protected time. If you are not confident you will get the peace and quiet needed, you will be on edge, waiting for the next interruption. This is not a great place to be mentally when trying to do your most important work.

The only real option is to structure your days so that when you are on shift, you allow yourself the freedom to do light, easy tasks such as admin and communications. These rarely need a lot of focus and can usually be done little by little.

You can save the tasks you need to concentrate on for an hour or two when you are not on shift. Once you structure your weeks in this way, if you are asked to produce a piece of work by a given date, you can check your calendar to ensure you have enough non-shift days to do the work you are asked to do.

It’s worth remembering that we are all limited by the hours we get each day. We can leverage this by hiring assistants and other people to do some of our work, but that option is not available for all of us. And you cannot delegate important things such as rest, family time, and working on your health to other people.

When you work shifts, much of the decision-making is taken away from you. You’re on shift, and your job is to help people. For those hours you are working your shift, that’s what you do. If there is downtime, take advantage by doing the little things that have a bad habit of accumulating, but never schedule something important when you are working. Leave those tasks for when you are off shift.

The key, Mia, is to get very strict with your calendar and trust that it will do its job for you. This does involve you not ignoring your calendar. You can reschedule or delete things but not ignore them. You need to trust something, and your calendar serves you. You can trust it.

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

Before I go, my book, Your Time Your Way, is now available in Kindle, soft back, and hardback versions. The links are in the description below.

Thank you for listening. It is now my turn to wish you all a very productive week.

Monday Jun 24, 2024

BACK TO BASICS | Time Management

Monday Jun 24, 2024

This week, what are the basics of time management?

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Get Your Time Your Way | Time Well Managed. Life Well Lived.

Script | 327

Hello, and welcome to episode 327 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 of this show.

A lot has been spoken and written about time management over the years. This has made the whole space of time management confusing when, in reality, time management is simple—or it should be.

Today’s question concerns all this and, more importantly, how to return to the basics of time management so you can regain control and not feel guilty about not doing things when more important things need doing.

Now, before we get to the question, just a quick reminder that Your Time, Your Way is now out in Kindle, Soft and hardback formats. You can get it right now and start building the foundations to live the life you want to live.

Your Time, Your Way is a book, yet to me, it’s much more than that. It’a also a manual to build a resilient time management system that will work in the background for you.

If you have already bought the book, thank you so much. Could you do me a little favour and leave a review? That really helps to get the book in more people’s hands, which can only benefit all of us. The more people who operate using these principles, the easier it will be to manage meetings and requests.

Anyway, back to this episode, 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 Robert. Robert asks, hi Carl, what do you suggest I do when, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot get control of my calendar? I try to block time out for my core work, but then I get so many meeting requests I have to either delete them or reschedule. It’s driving me crazy!

Thank you, Robert, for your question.

A good place to start is to look back at your calendar for the last two or three weeks and see where your time is going. How many internal meetings did you attend?

There’s a difference between internal and external meetings. Hopefully, your external meetings—with customers, for instance—are important. However, you should look more closely at your internal meetings. Were they valuable? Did you really need to attend them?

One important metric to consider is how many hours each week you spend in internal meetings.

Internal meetings are, by their very nature, places where you talk about the work. Work rarely gets done. The biggest waste of time for people is those team update meetings. These benefit no one and just drag people away from doing their work. A good manager sets up systems and processes so that their team maximise their work time and minimises their meeting time.

One thing you can do is set a limit on the number of hours you attend each week. For instance, you may choose to limit your internal meeting time to ten hours per week. Once that time is taken, you accept no more meeting requests that week.

This approach has two benefits. The first is you can confidently create time blocks for your core work around these ten hours. The second benefit is if anyone in authority challenges you about declined meetings, you have evidence to show you are being asked to attend too many meetings.

If your manager objects to this limit, you can increase the limit, but you do so in a way that they are fully aware of the time involved and how that will reduce your available work time.

There is always a conflict within a corporation between the managers, whose job is to fill their calendars with meetings, training sessions, and one-on-ones, and the producers—the people who produce the work—whose goal is to minimise events on their calendars so they can get on and do their work.

However, some compromise is needed here. Managers can only do their jobs if they know what’s going on and can give guidance and instruction when necessary. To do that, they need meetings. Equally, producers need to communicate what is being done, where there may be areas of difficulty and to ensure what they are working on is the right work.

One thing that will always destroy any attempts to become better at managing time is to treat everything that comes your way as urgent. That’s never likely to be the case. Most things are not urgent and are tasks that are being passed off to buy the sender some time.

Here’s something you can try when you are asked to do something. Default to doing it next week. This means if you receive a message asking you to do something, you respond with a reply, saying you will do it and get it to them next week. Avoid giving a specific date. Just say I will get it to you next week.

This tests how urgent something really is. The worst that can happen is the receiver replies, telling you it is needed sooner than next week. Okay, now you know it is urgent.

I do this all the time, and I can say that 90% of the time, I get the response thanking me, and that will be fine. The remaining 10% or so usually reply with something along the lines of “Could you do it sooner?”—which still gives me a choice.

Of all the things in the productivity world, the only thing you have that is constant is time. You are not really managing time. Instead, you are managing your activities within that time. This is great because you have at least one constant and that means you can do something with it.

Sadly, the second part of this equation is never fixed and will never stop. That is stuff to do. There will always be something to do. The trouble is because time is fixed; you have to solve a puzzle each day. How to fit in the right pieces of activity into your limited time.

If you do not know what your areas of focus are—the things that are important to you as an individual—and your core work—the work that is important in your job, you never have a reference to decide what should go on your calendar each day. Your areas of focus and core work give you your priorities, which means you can better choose what needs to be done each day. Without knowing them, everything will be important and urgent; in other words, nothing is important and urgent.

This means it’s important to step back and think about what is important—a way to pre-decide what will get your attention and what will not. This avoids having to make too many decisions each day—something that will inevitably leave you feeling exhausted and worn out.

That’s one of the reasons why I stress the importance of establishing your areas of focus and core work. It might take you a few weeks or months even to work these out, but the time it will save you in the long term makes this essential.

If you really want to get control of your calendar, Robert, then begin with what you want time for and fix it in your calendar when you do your weekly planning. If you would like forty-five minutes a day for exercise, then get it on your calendar and treat it as a non-negotiable part of your day.

Taking Louis out for a walk each day is non-negotiable for me. Not only is it important for Louis to get outside, but it’s also important for me as it gets me away from a screen. It also means I am moving—something we humans are designed to do. It’s one hour out of 24. It’s not much to ask.

Also, be aware of how much time you are spending on the hidden task admin. That’s the emails, messages and additional check-ins required when you accept tasks from other people. It’s never as simple as preparing a presentation. There are likely to be additional time commitments such as more emails, requests to add things from other people and, of course, the inevitable meetings.

If you’ve ever been asked to join a committee, you will have discovered that the one or two hours a week you were promised is never one or two hours. You’ll be expected to read reports, agendas, and meeting minutes and submit ideas. Those one or two hours very quickly become six or eight hours a week.

A couple of years ago, I agreed to do a series of interviews for an organisation. I thought a one-hour interview every month would be easy. All I would need would be an hour of research and preparation for each interview and the interview itself—two hours a month at most.

Hahaha, that’s not what happened. The research often took three or four hours; then there was submitting the proposed questions to the organisation, the back-and-forth trying to set up the interview time, and the requests for changes in the questions I proposed. In total, I found that those expected two hours a month turned into ten hours.

This goes back to one of the most basic laws of time management. Things will always take longer to do than you initially anticipate.

If you really want to master your time, getting control of your calendar is the most important part. This means you have to be strict and ruthless. That said, what you will find if you do is people will start respecting your time much more. If you are tow available, you lose that respect. It’ll always be, “Oh, ask Robert; he’ll do it for you”, and boom, you have more work to do.

Saying no every so often is one of the best ways to get your time back. Sadly, so few people have the courage to do it. Instead of finding solutions, they find excuses as to why they are different and must remain available to everyone. Good luck with that strategy. I’ve never found anyone who could make that work.

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

And if you have not got your copy of Your Time, Your Way yet, you can get it now. The link is in the show notes.

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

Monday Jun 17, 2024

How To Write A Book (Or Do Any Big Project)

Monday Jun 17, 2024

Three years ago, I began a journey that came to an end last Saturday. Today, I want to share that journey with you, what I learned and how my journey can help you become better at managing your time and ultimately be more productive.

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Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived

Script | 327

My book, Your Time, Your Way, Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived!, was published last Saturday. It is the end result of a three-year journey that began with the idea of putting everything I have learned about better managing time together so you have enough time to spend with your loved ones, enjoy the hobbies you have always wanted to participate in, and so much more without feeling drained, overwhelmed, and rushed.

The book is a manual for taking control of your time and making the things you want to do happen without stress or overwhelm. It gives you a complete roadmap for making time work for you instead of working against you. But more on the contents later.

From a productivity perspective, when you begin a project like writing a book, there is one critical starting point: getting started. What often happens, and is the reason so few people do any of their personal projects or achieve goals, is that too much time is wasted in the thinking and planning stage.

There’s a comfort in dreaming and thinking about landscaping your garden (backyard). That dreaming can be very seductive. It allows you to believe you are doing something about your project—‘I’m doing the planning’—yet nothing is happening. Your garden is not getting landscaped.

This book was two years in the planning stage (I am not immune to being seduced by the dream). I was even telling people, “I’m currently writing a book.” That was a lie. I wasn’t “writing” anything. I was dreaming of writing a book. I was stuck in the planning stage.

To get yourself out of that delusion—as that is what too much planning is, a delusion—you need to start doing something. Every project has a beginning. That could be visiting the local hardware store to purchase the tools you will need or, in my case, when writing a book, to write the introduction (this gives me a mini-outline of what I want to write about). Do that first step.

The next critical part of any project, whether professional or personal, is to decide how much time you are willing to give it each week. You are unlikely to be able to estimate how long a big project will take accurately. There are too many unknowns, and if you involve other people, there will inevitably be delays.

The only thing you have control over is your time. You don’t control other people’s time—even if you are a boss. So, how much time are you willing to or are able to give to the project each week?

Once you know how much time you are giving the project each week, schedule it.

Personal projects can be worked on in the evening and at weekends, while professional ones can be done during work hours.

One thing you will eventually learn about time management is hoping you will find the time to do something is not a good strategy. It never works. If you want time to work on something, anything, you need to protect the time. Whether that is going out for a family walk in the evenings, washing your car or writing a letter to your aunt in New Zealand.

Time management works when you are intentional about it. In other words, you must protect time for the things you want to do.

When the early version of Your Time, Your Way went out to a select group of readers, many commented that it took over fifty pages to get to talking about time. That was intentional.

Too often, books on productivity and time management are about showing you how to squeeze in more and more. That is not the purpose of this book. Not only is that approach unsustainable, it’s also unhealthy. Instead, my approach is to encourage you to start by thinking about your life as a whole. What do you want out of your life? What is important to you?

While we share eight areas—family and relationships, career/business, finances, health and fitness, self-development, lifestyle and life experiences, spirituality, and life’s purpose—how we define these are different for each of us. That means what we want out of these areas will also be different.

The order of priority is also different. As we go through life, the priority of these will change. When you are young, career/business and perhaps lifestyle and life experiences will be high on your list. As you age, health and finances may creep up towards the top. Again, we will all be different here.

Knowing what is important to you is the foundation of a well-lived life. It also shows you how to best use your limited resource of time so you spend more of it doing the things you want to do.

It was very tempting to begin the book with lists of tips and tricks for managing time, but I knew that would not help you in the long term. It’s a quick-fix approach that quickly leads to slipping back into old habits.

When you begin by identifying what is important to you, you give yourself a self-generating motive for getting out of bed with enthusiasm, and it naturally gives you a purpose each day. You are spending a large portion of your day on the things you know are important to you.

But more than that, knowing your areas of focus and what they mean to you gives you clarity that helps you make decisions. If you have identified your family and friends as being important to you and you work in a company that expects you to work late and at weekends, you may wish to consider looking for an alternative job. That could mean you need to change companies or perhaps your career.

Not identifying what is important to you will likely leave you stuck in a job or career that leaves you feeling deflated, unhappy and trapped. Showing you how to do more in less time is not going to help you in that situation. All it will do is leave you feeling more unhappy, trapped and lost.

Your Time, Your Way takes you through the key time management techniques of COD (Collect, Organise and Do) and the Time Sector System. It explains how to choose the right UCT (Universal Collection Tool) for you and how to plan your week and day using the Planning Matrix.

Yet, more than that, it also shows you how to develop a morning routine that will set you up for the day and give you some time for yourself—something often lost when we begin a career and a family and are trying to juggle getting kids ready for school, with ensuring you have saved the presentation file you need today to your OneDrive account.

I’ve also included a chapter on managing your email. I know so many people struggle to stay on top of emails and other messages. It can be a never-ending struggle. Yet, the process I teach you in the book will give you a framework you can adopt that will ensure you are never behind with your communications, and you will begin to enjoy communicating through email and other messaging services (no, really you will, I promise)

One of the chapters many of the pre-readers say they enjoyed most was the chapter on common pitfalls. This chapter lists the most common issues you will face as you develop your own system and shows you how you can avoid them or, if they are already embedded, how to get out of them so you unblock any problems quickly and effectively.

This chapter draws on my experience working with people from all walks of life and multiple different jobs, from senior executives to stay-at-home parents, all of whom face different challenges as well as some common ones.

Ultimately, though, no matter how much you have to do, you still only have twenty-four hours each day. Understanding that and knowing what you want time for will give you a huge advantage over your peers—well, the ones who don’t read this book.

It gives you a framework on which to create a structure that safeguards time for the things you want time for—not just in your personal life—which often gets sacrificed by our work life—but also for the critical things in your professional life, such as career development, having enough time each day to deal with communications, and your all-important core work—the work you were employed to do.

While writing this book, I quickly learned that many productivity best practices are not just best practices but laws. To write a book, you need to write. Wasting time trying out different writing tools does write a book. The only way to write a book is to write. That’s the same for anything you want to do. To landscape your garden, you need to get outside and dig, build and plant.

To do that, you will need to protect time. That means blocking out time on your calendar that is dedicated to doing the work.

And, the best law of all—it will always take you longer to do than you imagine. I expected this book to take around twelve to eighteen months. It took nearly forty. I laugh at myself now for being so optimistic. But now the book is available, I can honestly say that the journey has been incredible. Frustrating at times, yes, but that was always going to be part of the journey.

Whatever you want to do, please enjoy the journey. Find the time, protect it and just start. You will discover things about yourself you never knew. You’ll learn patience, how to deal with setbacks and frustration and, more importantly, how to overcome those setbacks. Each project, whether it is writing a book, landscaping your backyard or building a career, will teach you things that you can take with you into your next endeavour and give you skills and know-how for the next time you embark on a journey.

All that remains for me to do now is to ask you to buy Your Time Your Way: Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived! Get control of your time so you can live the life you want to live. The link to purchase the book is in the show notes.

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

Monday Jun 10, 2024

Managing Competing Demands and Other Deadlines.

Monday Jun 10, 2024

This week’s question is all about unpredictability and the struggle to find some kind of structure in your day.

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Script | 326

Hello, and welcome to episode 326 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 of this show.

In an ideal world, we would be able to set our calendar for the week and allow it to flow from one event to another while getting all our work done in a timely and relaxed way.

Sadly, that ideal world does not exist and never will. Life is unpredictable, and for the most part, we are dealing with other people who likely do not share our priorities or long-term vision and, in some cases, expect you to drop everything to deal with their crisis or problem.

This week’s question goes to the heart of these issues: how do you cope when your carefully laid plans are destroyed by events and the urgencies of the people around you?

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

This week’s question comes from Max. Hi Carl, I work in a job with competing demands. I can plan most things ahead but occasionally get asked, often at the last minute, to complete tasks that require an immediate or 24-hour turnaround. How do I fit these into my planning schedule so my other work plans are not thrown into chaos?

Hi Max, thank you for your question.

When asked what was most likely to blow governments off course, former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan replied, "Events, dear boy, events."

Well, the truth is, it’s not just governments that can be blown off course; we as individuals can also be blown off course by events, too.

Around three years ago, I carefully planned a day to record the update to my Apple Productivity course. I had set up the studio the night before, checked my notes, and went to bed comfortably with the knowledge that nothing could stop me from getting the recording done the next day.

Around 7:00 am, I woke up and noticed our beloved Yorkshire Terrier was looking very sick. He had thrown up his food and was unable to get up off the floor.

He was old and suffered from a heart condition, and I knew something was terribly wrong. My wife was 50 miles up the coast staying with a friend, so I called her immediately, put Barney into the car and set off to pick my wife up before going to the vet.

Barney passed away that day, and for the next two days, I was certainly not in the mood to record anything. The whole day was a nightmare.

Later that day, I looked at my appointments for the next day and cancelled them all. No one objected; everyone understood, and I was able to mourn the passing of my best friend (anyone who has a dog will understand that one) for a couple of days without the worry of work.

Whenever you are thrown off course by events, and your plans for the week get destroyed, it’s easy to think everything’s destroyed. Yet, is it? You see, we always have the power to renegotiate deadlines, put off a few things for a day or two, stop and review what has happened and reschedule a few of the lower-value things.

However, probably the most powerful thing you can do is to build some structure into your day. I learnt this from possibly the most productive and relaxed person I have ever worked with.

Andrew was one of the first bosses I ever had, and he would arrive at work at 8:30 am each day, walk into his office and close the door for 15 minutes. That was his sacred time, and everything could wait until he was finished.

What Andrew was doing was going through his mail (it was paper back then—no email in those days), reviewing his calendar (a beautiful A4 leather folio with a week to view) and writing down the five most important things that needed to be done that day.

He would then open his door, and he was available again.

Andrew would block time out on his calendar each day for doing those five or six tasks. Some would be lengthy, requiring an hour or two; others may be a simple follow-up call with one of his leadership team members.

On the occasions I saw Andrew’s diary, I saw that he always had at least thirty minutes between meetings and blocked time. The time blocks were written in pencil, and the meetings were in blue ink. As he completed his tasks, he would cross them out.

Those gaps in his diary were to deal with the unknowns that inevitably came up each day. The chairman may have called and demanded a change to the marketing plan for that week, or there may have been an accident in the workshop that needed dealing with. None of these were predictable and my guess is you also have a few unpredictable tasks and events occurring each day.

The best thing you can do is plan for them.

While you may not know the precise nature of these unknowns, what you do know is that there will always be a few each day. You will likely not know what the crisis will be, but if you work on the principle that there will be a crisis each day, you can at least leave sufficient time to deal with it.

What about the constants in your day? We all have communications to deal with—email, Teams or Slack messages—and admin.

These are what I call my constants, and as such, I know I will need some time each day to deal with them.

As I’m sure you’ve discovered already, skip responding to your messages for one day, and you have double the amount to do the next day—which means you need double the amount of time as well. If you are already squeezed, how will you find double the amount of time tomorrow? You won’t. And that leads to backlogs building up.

If, in an ideal world, you would like an hour a day for managing your communications, but owing to interruptions and emergencies, you only have thirty minutes one day, take it. Thirty minutes is better than nothing. Doing a little each day will keep the mountain from becoming impossible.

The key is consistency. Be consistent with your constants.

In my world, there’s always content to create. Blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, and newsletters don’t create themselves. Content creation is a daily constant, so I set aside two hours each day for it. For the most part, my content creation time is 9:30 to 11:30 am each weekday morning. However, owing to some unknown, there will always be one or two days when that will not be possible. Okay, so All I need do is look for another suitable time that day, and if that’s not possible, I will have to look for another day.

Every productive person I have met or learned about does this, and every unproductive, disorganised person I have met or learned about doesn’t.

The artist Picasso was available for anyone and everyone until after lunch. Once lunch was over, he’d disappear into his studio and paint for four or more hours without allowing anyone to disturb him. Maya Angelou hid herself away in a local motel bedroom from 7 am until 2 pm. It was only after she emerged from that room that she was available to other people.

You do not have to be that extreme, but the point is if you have work to do, Max, you need to protect time to do it. No one can escape that. Hoping time will miraculously appear is not a great strategy.

The only strategy that works is protecting time and respecting that time.

What I have discovered is that when someone asks you to do something by a certain time, the deadline they give you is based on their estimation of how long the task would take them to complete, given their current workload. It is not based on your current workload or ability to complete the task.

Recently, I was asked to record a two-minute video for a partner. The person asking me had never recorded and edited a video like this before and asked if I could send it over by the end of the week. Given that I was asked to do the task on Thursday evening, I instantly knew it would be a tall order to complete the task. Recording the video would take fifteen to twenty minutes, and the editing would likely take three or four hours.

I accepted the task but asked if I could send the edited video over the next week. The response was, “Great! Thank you so much for doing this for us.”

That was an easy negotiation. Yet, unless you try, you will never know.

I could have panicked, removed some of my planned work, and completed the video by the end of the week, but, as so often is the case, the deadline was not really a deadline; it was a guess and an attempt to make me treat the task as urgent.

You owe it to yourself to explore the potential for negotiation on deadlines.

Every one of us will be different. We do different jobs, and we have multiple responsibilities related to family, friends and our work. Just because I think you can do something by tomorrow doesn’t mean you can. Only you know if something is possible.

And always remember, if you are given 24 to 48 hours’ notice of a deadline, the problem is not yours. It’s the person who left it so late to ask you for help. You are always in a stronger negotiating position in these circumstances.

Now this is entirely different to being reminded of an impending deadline that you have known about for several weeks. That’s on you and is your mistake.

In these circumstances, that would be an indication that your weekly planning is failing and needs looking at.

Ultimately, Max, if the work you do involves frequent last-minute deadlines when you plan the week, these need to be taken into account. I have a flexible day on a Thursday to catch up. I don’t plan any content work on Thursdays. I try to schedule meetings and leave enough free space to catch up on anything that may be behind schedule for the week.

This week, I used that time to send my accountant the VAT receipts she’d asked for and finish this script. Next week? Who knows what I will need the time for?

I hope that has helped, Max. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.

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

Monday Jun 03, 2024

The Subtle Art Of Slowing Down

Monday Jun 03, 2024

This week, it’s time to slow down.

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Script | 325

Hello, and welcome to episode 325 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 of this show.

How often have you rushed to complete a task only to find you did it wrong or misunderstood what was required and wasted several hours doing something that wasn’t required? It happens to all of us, yet it can be one of the biggest drags on your overall productivity. But here’s the reassuring part: it has an easy fix. A simple change in approach can make a significant difference in your productivity and time management.

One of the advantages of the Time Sector System is it helps you to slow down by asking when you will do something rather than saying “yes” to everything and finding you have no time to do it. This then causes you to rush to complete urgent tasks (which may not be important tasks), leaving behind the important tasks.

Speed kills productivity, which may sound ironic, given that we think of productivity as doing things quickly and efficiently. And that is true, but speed ignores the “efficiency” part. Targeted speed is what you want, but to get fast at something takes practice and following a process. Without that practice and a process to follow, you leave yourself wide open to time-destroying mistakes that will need more time to rectify.

And this is what this week’s question is all about.

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

This week’s question comes from John. John asks, Hi Carl, I have so many tasks, and whenever I try to get them done, I end up having to redo them because I rushed and misunderstood the task or the request was unclear. How do you overcome these kinds of problems?

Hi John, thank you for your question.

This is a speed issue. Now, this might be part of your work culture, or it could be the expectations of your customers and bosses. The demands of others can create a sense that everything is urgent, and this leads to trying to do something that requires a little thought too fast. The result being mistakes are made or the wrong thing getting done.

One of the most important parts of becoming more productive and better at managing time is slowing down. I know that might sound contrary to what you think improving productivity is all about, but you will only improve your productivity if what you do each day is the right thing and at the highest quality you are capable of.

If Toyota wanted to increase the speed at which they produced a car, they could easily do it. Instead of screwing on the front bumper with twenty turns of the screw, they could reduce that to ten. On one car, that might save one or two seconds, yet over hundreds of thousands of cars, that adds up to hours saved.

Yet, it would be a false economy. Within a few weeks, many of those cars would be returning to their dealerships with hanging-off front bumpers. The impact on their dealership’s time and costs would be huge. Plus, it would destroy their reputation for quality. It would be disastrous for them in terms of costs, productivity and reputation.

Yet, so many people fall into this trap every day. They think if they rush and take shortcuts to get more things done, their productivity will improve. It won’t. What it will do is create a lot of unnecessary work fixing the mistakes that were made in haste.

So what can you do?

The first step is to look at the work you regularly do. Where are the processes? We all get email, Slack and Teams messages. What’s your process for handling these?

There are two approaches to your communications. You can react instantly each time a message comes in. We often think this looks good. It shows we are on the ball, quick and efficient. Yet are you? Sure, some messages may require a quick yes or no, but what about those messages asking for your thoughts on something? Do you ever stop and think about your response?

And then what happens to your other work? The work that is likely to be much more important? All this stopping to respond to a message and then starting again is slowing you down considerably. Of course, at the moment, you don’t notice that slow down. After all, you’re rushing from one thing to the next. You’re busy, and you’re moving fast.

But what’s happening to the important work in front of you? It’s not moving forward. You stop, respond to a message, then you come back to the work, and you have to refresh yourself—where were you, what were you writing, where are the reference materials? It’s so easy to lose an hour or two just getting back to where you were before you allowed yourself to be interrupted.

That is not being productive. It’s the reverse.

The biggest gain in productivity in car manufacturing plants was the introduction of robots. Robots don’t get interrupted. They do their job without the need to respond to emails, messages and questions from colleagues. They don’t need to attend meetings. As soon as you turn on the robot, it does its assigned job at the correct speed and in the correct order.

If you were to disrupt the assembly line by misaligning a chassis or not placing a wheel in the right place, that mistake would be catastrophic. Everything would come to a halt until the mistake was corrected.

For some reason, we rarely see that in ourselves. Stopping in the middle of doing focused work to respond to an email or message is disrupting your flow in the same way. It takes a disproportionate amount of time to recover and get back online.

The alternative approach is to develop a process for managing your communications. One way, for example, is to start your day by clearing your inboxes. Filter out the messages and emails you don’t need to respond to, delete the junk, and move your actionable messages to an Action This Day folder.

Then, assign thirty minutes to an hour later in the day to respond to those actionable messages. Fixing that time each day helps your reputation, as your colleagues and clients quickly learn your patterns. That may not always be possible, but each day, having an amount of time for managing your communications takes the pressure off having to respond instantly, and it improves your productivity because you can focus on doing your work to the level of quality expected of you.

This also has the advantage of giving you time to think. Because when you are responding to your actionable emails and messages, you’ve had time to think and respond in a clear, considered way. That improved communication means you receive fewer messages asking for clarification.

For the most part, our work does not need speed. Whether you reply to an email now or in a couple of hours is not going to create an issue (seriously, it’s not!) or responding to your boss’s Teams message this second or in twenty minutes.

We may have conditioned ourselves to believe these things need a speedy response, but they don’t. You will not lose a client because it took you two hours to respond to their email, and your boss will not fire you because it took you twenty minutes to reply to their message.

One thing that will happen if you slow down, though, is you won’t make as many mistakes, and the quality of your work will improve. On top of that, when you remove the sense of urgency, you instantly calm down and feel a lot less stressed.

One thing I urge all my coaching clients to do is set aside an hour or two each day for undisturbed focus work. If you work a typical eight—or nine-hour day, protecting two of those hours still leaves you with six to seven hours when you are available for everyone else. Surely that is more than enough time?

Knowing that you have two hours each day without being disturbed relieves a lot of pressure. However, this only works if you take control of your calendar. It means you plan your week—finding two hours a day and protecting them—and then decide what you will do with that time on a daily basis.

And that is a process: weekly planning to ensure you have sufficient time to complete your important work and daily planning to assign work based on the changing priorities that happen to all of us. If you can fix that to the same time each week and day, you will go a long way towards radically improving your productivity.

It doesn’t matter if you are an accountant in a busy accountancy firm, a lawyer or a salesperson. Everything you do on a regular basis can be turned into a process. I have CEOs in my coaching programme who begin preparing for their board meetings fourteen days before the meeting. The preparation time is blocked out in their calendar, and it’s given an appropriate priority. The steps they take to collect all the information and the document they set it out in are the same each time. They follow a process.

Processes reduce the thinking time required to do a task. This naturally speeds up your work performance without compromising quality. Because you follow the same steps each time, you know where you are with the work. It also helps you to identify areas where improvements can be made.

Whenever I watch Formula 1 racing, I’m amazed at the speed at which the pit crews can change four tyres. Two years ago, the McLaren team broke the record with a time of 1.82 seconds. In the last race in Monaco, almost every team was changing the tyres in under two seconds. That wasn’t an accident. That was a process.

The pit crews will have analysed in the minutest of detail how McLaren was able to do 1.82 seconds and changed their processes ever so minutely. That analysis has saved them, on average, three-tenths of a second. A tiny amount, yes, but in Formula 1, every tenth of a second counts.

If you watch the pit crews at work in a race, they are not panicking. Each person knows exactly what to do and in what order. It’s fast because it’s so smooth, and it’s repeated over and over again.

You are not going to be able to turn everything into a process. Many projects you work on are unique. However, if you look at your work as a whole, there will be multiple individual pieces of work you repeat each day. It’s that work you should be looking at for the potential to create a process.

In my work, I’ve turned writing books, blog posts, newsletters and client feedback into processes. I’ve eliminated unnecessary actions and slimmed everything down so that when I sit down to work on something, I can begin instantly without the need to waste time looking for tools and ideas.

That’s the approach you want to be taking, too, John. Begin with your communications—that’s something we all have to do. Where can you build a process?

I hope that helps. Thank you, John, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening.

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

Monday May 20, 2024

How To Easily Build Your Own Productivity System

Monday May 20, 2024

So, you’ve decided to get yourself better organised. What would be the best way to start? That’s the question I am answering this week.

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Script | 324

Hello, and welcome to episode 324 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 of this show.

Whenever I begin working with a new coaching client, one of the first places we often need to start is unpicking the old system that is not working and transitioning into a system that does work.

Everyone is different. We have different times when we can focus, and we do different kinds of jobs. I recently watched an interview with J P Morgan Chase bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon, who wakes up at 4:30 to 5:00 am each morning so he can read the financial news, exercise and have breakfast before the day begins, which inevitably involves back-to-back meetings.

Waking up at 5:00 am may not work for you. You may prefer working late and waking up around 8:00 am.

But wherever you are in your productivity journey, if you want to develop a system that works for you, it will inevitably mean tweaking your old system at least somewhat. That being the case, where would you start?

And that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, Hi Carl, I’ve decided to get myself organised. I’ve tried everything over the years, and I have bits of all sorts of systems everywhere. If you were to start all over, what would you do first?

Hi Frank, thank you for your question.

I approach this by looking at the hierarchy of productivity tools first. There are three tools we can use to help us become more productive: your calendar, task manager, and notes. Of those three, your calendar is the top one. That’s the one tool that is never going to deceive you.

It shows you the twenty-four hours you have each day and tells you what you can realistically do given that time.

Your task manager is the most deceptive tool you have. You can load it up with hundreds of tasks, yet it never tells you if you have the time available to do those tasks. It doesn’t even tell you which tasks would be the right ones to do at any given time. Perhaps AI will help us in the future there, but I doubt it.

I doubt it because while AI could see everything and may know what deadlines you have and where your appointments are, it will not know how you feel. You may be coming down with a cold, might not have slept well, or had a fight with your significant other. Any one of those could derail your effectiveness, and they are things you cannot plan for.

So, when starting out, get your calendar fixed first.

What does that mean?

It means first letting go of all your double-booked times. You cannot be in two places at once, and if you do see a scheduling conflict on your calendar, these need fixing first. This may mean you need to renegotiate a meeting or move something to the all-day section.

I’ve seen people putting their daughter’s driving lesson on their calendars. This often leads to seeing an appointment with a client at the same time as the daughter’s lesson. If you need to know your daughter has a driving lesson at 3:00 pm, put it in your all-day section of your calendar with the time in brackets—preferably in a different colour. You will find this cleans up your calendar significantly.

The next thing I suggest you do, Frank, is to look at all the tasks you have to do and categorise them. It’s likely you will have tasks related to communications—emails, messages and follow-ups, admin, and chores. Beyond that, it will depend on the kind of work you do. A journalist will spend a lot of time writing, a designer will spend time designing, and a lawyer will likely spend a lot of time writing contracts or court documents.

Whether you’re writing, designing, or doing something else, you want to group similar tasks together.

In a task manager such as Todoist and Things 3, you can assign labels or tags to a task. You would use these labels or tags to assign a category to your tasks. This way, you can easily group all similar tasks together.

The next step is to look at your calendar and assign blocks of time for these categories. Some may not need specific time blocks, but I encourage people to allocate blocks of time for communications and admin. These will always need doing. The problem is that if you do not have time assigned for them, the next day, instead of requiring forty minutes or so, you will need double that time just to catch up. This is not a good time management strategy.

One question I often get is about dating tasks. I do recommend that you date tasks, but only for tasks you know need to be done this week.

There’s a lot that can change between this week and next, and what you may think needs to be done the following Thursday could quite easily change to either need to be on Monday or not at all. If a task does not need to be done this week, place it in your next-week folder and forget about it. You can come back to it when you do your weekly plan.

While we are on the subject of dating tasks, beware of the things that are not tasks that can end up in your task manager. Your bill payment dates, your son’s graduation and your next dental appointment are not tasks. These are events and should be on your calendar.

You may need to know day-specific information on a given day. This information should always be on your calendar. I have my wife’s exam week dates, when my parents-in-law are staying, and public holidays on my calendar. None of these would qualify as a task unless I needed to do something on them.

Most of these are simple tweaks anyone can make to their system without the need for a complete overhaul.

The biggest challenge I find people struggle with is stepping away from firefighting addiction. This is where a person is hooked on running around panicking about everything they have to do. This just does not work. It leads to only doing easy, so-called urgent tasks and never getting anything meaningful done.

The next thing to look out for is the dilemma of being able to do anything, just not all at the same time. There’s something inherently faulty with our brains. We believe we can do a lot more than we actually can. No, you cannot complete fifty tasks and attend seven hours of meetings in a day. Not only is it unrealistic, but it’s also a guaranteed way to burn out.

Part of the problem is we like to see twenty, thirty or more tasks on our daily to-do list. It makes us feel important and useful. Yet it’s a delusion. You cannot do that number of tasks with a high level of competency.

I find it interesting that people feel ashamed when all they have on their to-do list are three or four tasks. Yet, that is what you want to be trying to get to.

You can accomplish this by moving towards a time-based system and away from a task-based one. This means instead of counting the number of tasks you have to do, you instead allocate blocks of time to specific categories of tasks.

This then allows you to dedicate an hour to responding to your messages, for instance. Then, instead of having a lot of email tasks in your task manager, you have a single task telling you to clear your actionable email folder. Similarly, you can do this with projects. Rather than having fifteen or more tasks related to multiple different projects each day, you have a single task telling you which projects to work on that day.

You will finish more projects faster if you focus on one or two projects each day instead of diluting your effectiveness by trying to work five or six projects each day.

You can then use the third tool in your toolbox, your notes. This is by far the best place to manage your projects. You can keep project and meeting notes, links to documents and emails and checklists of things that may need doing. You then only need to link the project note to the relevant task in your task manager for a single click and in experience.

The advantage here is you avoid the possibility of being distracted by something else. You see a task telling you to work on the next board meeting presentation, and click the link that will take you straight to your project notes, where you will find links to the presentation file, your research and other relevant information.

The alternative is to be clicking around, looking at a long list of tasks which will only demotivate you and waste a considerable amount of time looking for something to do instead of being directed towards the exact task that needs doing next.

Now, what about all your old stuff?

The first thing to know is that the way everything is right now may not be as bad as it first looks. I strongly suggest you consolidate your tools into three—a calendar, task manager, and notes app. If you have multiple different apps, choose one for each and combine everything into one. You do not want to be wasting time trying to remember where everything is.

Then, go through your tasks in your task manager, deleting old tasks that are no longer relevant and cleaning up your calendar.

Your notes are less important. These can be kept as you don’t know which ones may be a source of inspiration in the future. You can move old notes to an archive. There, they will be out of the way but still searchable if you ever need them.

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

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

Monday May 13, 2024

How To Stay Motivated When You're Not in The Mood.

Monday May 13, 2024

How do you create and maintain your motivation once you have your new productivity system in place? That’s what I’m answering this week.

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Script | 323

Hello, and welcome to episode 323 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 of this show.

One of the positive things about creating your productivity system is the excitement you get once you have your new tools and systems set up. We often cannot wait to get started using these tools and systems.

Then, after a few weeks or months, the “newness” wears off, and we are back where we were before—looking for new tools and systems and convincing ourselves that the tools and systems we currently use no longer work.

And if your tools and systems do work, it can be hard to stay motivated once the monotony of doing the same things at the same time each day beds in.

This week’s question goes to the heart of that—staying motivated to do the work we know we should do but just don’t want to do.

So, with that little introduction complete, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Keith. Keith asks, HI Carl, I feel like I’m doing something wrong. When it comes to the time of actually doing work allocated on my calendar, I often feel not bothered and I just simply reschedule it for the next time, I find myself doing that a lot, with both routine and areas of focus tasks and I find it strange that I am able to reschedule it all so easily… do you have any tips on what to do here?

Hi Keith, thank you for your question.

There are two distinct parts here. Your areas of focus should be self-motivating. These are tasks you have identified as important to you and for the life you want to live.

The second, routines, are less important—these are the tasks that just need to be done to maintain life. Things like taking the garbage out, washing the car, doing the laundry or, mowing the lawn, etc.

The more concerning part here is a lack of motivation in your areas of focus. Doing these tasks should be the things you look forward to doing the most. Well, mostly. I know it can be hard to head out for a 10-mile run when it’s pouring down outside and blowing a gale. (Although the way you feel when you get back is fantastic!)

Let’s step back a little first.

When you find yourself rescheduling calendar blocks, that’s not necessarily a bad sign. That’s just life. Emergencies happen, plans are changed, and occasionally, we get sick.

That said, having structure does help you to be consistent. For instance, I recommend you protect time each day for dealing with your actionable emails and messages. Rather than going in and out of your email every few minutes—which is disastrous for your cognitive ability to focus—having time set aside for dealing with these gives you the time and space to get on with your important work.

Similarly, you will likely find that if you can set aside an hour for admin and chores each day, the only thing you then need to decide is what admin tasks and chores you do in that time. Becoming consistent with this results in you rarely needing the full hour.

You may find that if you move these blocks around every day, consistency will be difficult to achieve. The goal of setting aside a little time each day for focused work, communications, and admin is to get them fixed in your calendar.

This is a using a little neuroscience to get your brain working for you. You are using neuroscience when you go to bed at the same time each day. It’s why you begin to feel sleepy at the same time each day. This is the same for meal times. Consistent meal times informs your brain when to tell you that you are hungry.

As an aside, if you take up intermittent fasting, you will find skipping breakfast early in the morning difficult at first. Yet if your eating window is between 11:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., after a few weeks, your brain learns when to tell you to eat. You will no longer be hungry in the morning.

Let’s examine the motivational aspect of this, beginning with your areas of focus.

These activities should be self-motivating. Your areas of focus are the things that are important to you. If you lack motivation here, it’s likely that the way you have defined what each one means to you is not quite right and needs a little refining.

Health and fitness can often be difficult if you find any form of exercise unpleasant. What may be happening if you skip exercise is you are trying to do too much. I have found if you set a minimum—a level you can do very easily will keep you motivated here. For example, you could set a minimum of 5,000 steps per day or 10 push-ups and 10 air squats. Doing that set would count as an exercise session.

Once you’ve completed your 5000 steps, you are likely to do a few more to exceed your minimum. Likewise, with pushups and squats, you are likely to do more than ten just to exceed your minimum.

You will probably have found that starting is the hardest part. Once you have started, you end up doing more, which is where another trick can be deployed.

I mentioned setting aside time each day for communications is a good habit to have. If you know at 4:00pm, you will spend an hour dealing with your actionable messages but are really not in the mood to do it, you can tell yourself I will just respond to the five oldest messages today.

In most cases, once you’ve done those five, you are going to continue for the full hour. And if you don’t continue, you’ve done five. Five is better than none. After all, one is always greater than zero.

Going back to the principle of blocking time out. Try not to be too specific here. Your time blocks should be for specific types of work. For instance, if you are a lawyer who is required to write contracts frequently, you could block two or three hours each week for “Writing”. This then gives you greater freedom on what you will write in that time. Perhaps one day, you need to write a will or an affidavit. By keeping the time block general, you have greater freedom about what you will work on.

This helps with motivation, as you have a greater choice of what to work on. If there is time pressure on a particular part of your work, you can choose to do the most time-sensitive part—which is usually the best motivator. Or, if there is no time pressure, you can choose something you feel like doing.

Another area to look at is timing. For most people, the late afternoon is not a great time to do focused work. You’re likely to get tired and possibly feel frazzled by all the stuff being thrown at you all day. That’s not a motivation issue; that’s just being tired—tired of looking at a screen all day, tired of dealing with other people’s problems, and tired of making decisions. It all adds up.

What I’ve discovered is that doing deeper, focused work in the morning is much easier than trying to do it in the afternoon. You’re fresher and will find it easier to focus. This does not work for everyone. Some people focus better in the afternoons. But as Daniel Pink found when writing his bestselling book When, the number of people who can focus better in the afternoons is less than 2%. The majority of us are either morning or night people.

If it’s possible, try to do your more meaningful work in your natural biorhythm rather than fighting it. Nobody wins the fight against nature.

Finally, look at your processes. Processes are a human form of automation. This is why when you begin your day with a consistent “you” focused morning routine, no matter what is thrown at you, on the whole, you get through the day without too much trouble.

If you wake up late, skip your morning routines, and run out the door to get to work on time, everything seems to go wrong.

Processes ensure that once you begin a piece of work, it’s almost automatic. My favourite routine is email management. You clear your inbox in the morning. This part of the process is all about speed—clearing it as fast as you can. You can add a little incentive here and time yourself to see how fast you can clear fifty or a hundred emails. The second part of the process is about slowing down and clearing your action this day folder.

Because the second part of the process is about slowing down and thinking about your responses, you can begin the process by making yourself a nice cup of tea, putting on some relaxing music and begin.

Rather than focusing on numbers, set yourself a time limit. For instance, if you give yourself forty-five minutes, start with the oldest email in your action this day folder and start. Because you are not focused on how many emails you respond to, you can see the “end of the tunnel” it’s forty-five minutes later.

Again, if you are consistent with this, you won’t lack motivation, particularly with email management. If you skip just one day, you’ve doubled the amount of time you will need tomorrow. Now, that would be demotivating.

I hope that helps, Keith. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.

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

Monday May 06, 2024

Task-Based -Vs- Time-Based Productivity

Monday May 06, 2024

What is “Time-Based Productivity”, and how can you apply it to your daily work? That’s the question I am answering this week.

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