Your Time, Your Way

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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Script | 322

Hello, and welcome to episode 322 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 huge benefits of the Time Sector System is that it removes the tyranny of task-based productivity and replaces it with something more concrete: time.

You see, tasks will never stop coming at you. Your kids’ toys need to be picked up, the laundry needs to be done, your bed needs to be made, and you’d better check the refrigerator to see what you need to pick up from the supermarket. And that’s before you start your work day.

If you base your productivity system on the tasks you need to do, you will wear yourself out. It’s impossible because it’s never-ending. There are no barriers, and you will see this rather quickly if you use a task manager. Task managers fill up, and everything is screaming at you to be done.

But then you’re faced with the question: where am I going to find the time to do all these tasks?

It always comes back to time.

This week’s question asks how you can transition away from this tyranny of task-based productivity and bring a sense of control and calm into your world.

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

This week’s question comes from Jens. Jens asks, hi Carl, I am always overwhelmed with tasks and never able to get all my work done. I am also constantly interrupted by messages and emails and never seem to be able to get a quiet moment. How would you handle this situation?

Hi Jens, thank you for your question.

You describe a real problem today. Over the last fifteen years or so, technology has broken down the barrier between our work and personal lives. Long gone are the days where when we finished work for the day we really did finish work. If we needed to respond to a work email, it had to be done from our office computer. Once we had gone home, that was it. No more work email.

Sure, there were other issues—people staying late in the office for one, but at least when you left your place of work for the day, that was it. You left work at work. (Or it certainly felt like it.)

So, what can you do today to establish some barriers so you do not always feel pressure to do more?

A few years ago, I discovered that if you base your system on task management, you will lose. Tasks are never-ending, and there will always be more to do than time available to do them.

It was that phrase—“always more to do than time available” that gave me a clue towards the solution. If tasks were unlimited, then perhaps I could work on the one area that was limited—time.

Working with time gave me natural limits or constraints. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and during that time, I need to eat and sleep at the very least. That then gave me a new number to work with. Given that I personally need around seven hours of sleep and, let’s say, ninety minutes for eating, then all I had left was fifteen and a half hours for everything else.

Once you work out how much time you need for sleep and eating, plus time for personal hygiene, you likely will have around fourteen hours a day to work with.

So the temptation is often how much work can you fit into fourteen hours, yet that’s probably not the best place to work from.

Work is just one part of your life. It’s an important part, but so is time spent with your family, getting a little exercise and perhaps some relaxation activities such as watching TV, reading a book or watching your favourite sports team.

When you add up all the time you need for these activities, your work day will likely be around eight to ten hours.

So, what can you do in, say, nine hours?

Well, let’s break things down a little further.

Email and Slack or Teams messages will probably be a big part of your work—particularly if you are a knowledge worker—i.e. you are employed for your brain rather than your physical strength. That being the case, how much time do you need to be able to stay on top of all these messages and emails?

In my case, I need about an hour a day to respond to my actionable emails. You will likely be around the same figure. Think of it this way: if you had one uninterrupted hour each day for responding to your actionable emails, would you be able to stay on top of it?

If that’s the case, then you need to protect an hour a day for managing your communications. If you accept you need an hour yet do not protect that hour, what’s likely to happen?

At the very least, you’ll need two hours the next day, three the day after that and so on. Where will you ever find two or three hours in a day for nothing but email and messages?

Not protecting time for these activities is not sustainable. That’s how backlogs build up, and that just drains you.

One of the first things I advise my coaching clients to do is protect some time each day for communications. This one positive action can bring huge benefits.

The first is that you stop worrying about what’s lurking in your inbox. You know you have time protected to deal with it. This means you are going to be much more focused on the work you want to get done. The second is that it starts to reduce the “addiction” of going in and out of your inbox “checking” to see if anything important has come in.

All that checking is creating havoc in your cognitive abilities to focus on what needs to be done. It’s hugely inefficient and drains your mental energies.

Try to think of it in terms of the gears in your car. If you are constantly changing gears, you are going to run out of fuel much faster than if you get into top gear and stay there. You may not be accelerating as fast, but you are running at a much more efficient rate, which conserves energy.

Constantly switching your attention to check email or messages does the same thing to your brain as if you were going up and down the gears. It’s highly inefficient and drains you of energy.

But we keep checking because we don’t feel confident that we have sufficient time at the end of the day to clear any actionable email.

The key to time-based productivity is to identify the types of work you are expected to do. For example, if you are a designer, how much time do you want to spend on design work each day?

Imagine you protected four hours each day for doing focused design work; this means you could focus all your efforts on doing the work you were employed to do. From 8:30 am to 12:30 pm, you would block that time on your calendar as focused design work.

Now, all you need is a list in your task manager called “design work”, and you can pick which you will work on that day.

Now, I know many of you will immediately tell me that’s impossible. Okay, it might be in your situation. But rather than dismiss this idea, perhaps you could play with it.

Perhaps instead of blocking the first four hours of your day for focused work, you could break it down into two-hour segments. You could do two hours of focused work and one hour of miscellaneous work, such as communicating with your clients and colleagues. Then do another two hours in the afternoon.

That would still leave you with four hours for meetings, returning calls and messages, and handling emails.

I promise you that one change will radically improve your productivity and leave you a lot less exhausted at the end of the day.

If this is so effective, why do so few people do it? Fear.

It’s the fear of saying no to someone who wants to interrupt your protected time. And that’s hard. There’s an element of FOMO—the fear of missing out, but also a deeper human instinct to be alert for danger. That danger today, is not some predatorial mammal but angry bosses, upset clients and people thinking you’re being lazy because you’ve disappeared.

However, when it comes to your evaluation as an employee, no one remembers whether you answered an email in thirty minutes or less. You will always be assessed on your results.

People will always remember when you failed to meet a deadline or didn’t deliver an order on time. Saying, “But I replied to your emails and messages within a few minutes,” isn’t going to wash.

The only way to get results is to do your work. If you’re wasting precious time allowing yourself to be interrupted and distracted, something is going to have to change.

So, yes, if you base your productivity on the number of tasks you have to do, you will feel overwhelmed and stressed out. There’s only one end result—burnout, and that’s not very pleasant.

Instead, make a list of your core work activities—the work you are employed to do and a list of the things you want to spend time doing—your non-work related activities.

Then, open up your calendar and find time for those activities.

With your core work, I recommend you fix it as repeating blocks on your calendar where possible. Find a time in the day when you are least likely to have meetings and block it out now.

You may find that a fixed time is not possible because of the dynamic nature of your work; in that case, block sufficient time out on a week-to-week basis for you to get your work done. It’s an extra planning task, but it’s worth it.

For the tasks you want to complete, place them in your task manager in folders designated by when you will do them: this week, next week, etc. Then, label or tag the task by the category of work it relates to.

Is the task related to communication or administration? Does it relate to your core work as a designer, salesperson, or manager? On your calendar, create blocks of time for each of these categories. When the time comes, the only list you need to look at is the list of tasks for that particular category. Then, do as many of them as you have time.

If you remain consistent with this process and don’t cherry-pick the easy tasks, your output will soon shift upwards. I know; I’ve seen it time and time again. It works, and very few people ever complain you are no longer as available. And the few that do, once you explain you need quiet time to get on and do your work effectively, they soon stop complaining.

Switching away from unsustainable task-based productivity is easier than you may think. It does take a positive effort, though. To start, decide how much time you need each day to fulfil your work commitments and go from there. Once you see it working, you will be encouraged to add more focused time blocks.

Thank you Jens, for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me know to wish you all a very very productive week.

Monday Apr 29, 2024

How To Get Your Notes Organised Once and For All.

Monday Apr 29, 2024

If your notes are a disorganised mess, this episode is the one for you.

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Script | 321

Hello, and welcome to episode 321 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.

This week, I have a special episode for you. No question; instead, I want to share a way to think about your productivity tools, particularly how your notes app fits into the whole scheme of things.

There is a trinity of productivity tools—your calendar, task manager, and notes app—that when connected, will enhance your overall effectiveness by reducing the friction between organising and doing work.

Today, I want to focus on the notes app because this is the tool that is most often neglected.

Within this Trinity of tools, your calendar is number 1. Everything flows from your calendar because that is the tool that will prevent you from being overly ambitious and give you the reality of the day. There are twenty-four boxes in your calendar, each representing an hour, and that’s all you get each day.

You cannot change that, for time is the fixed part of your productivity system.

Your task manager tells you what tasks you have committed to and when you will do those tasks. Its relationship with your calendar is critical because if you have seven hours of meetings, you’re committed to picking your kids up from school, and you have a hundred tasks to do; you will know instantly you have an impossible day. You can then either reschedule some meetings or reduce your task number.

So, where do your notes come into this trinity?

Your notes support your tasks. It’s here where you will manage your projects, interests, goals and areas of focus. It’s also where you can keep your archive, which, if used well, will become a rich resource of inspiration, ideas and creativity. But more on that later.

Of all the productivity tools you use, your notes app is the one where you can be a little relaxed. Your notes do not need to be perfectly curated and organised. Most notes apps today have powerful search built in, and I would argue that the ability to search within your notes is a critical part of your choice when choosing a notes app.

I suspect Evernote’s popularity over the years (despite its recent changes) is due to two factors: its search, which is arguably still the best in the field, and its brilliant web clipper.

The ability to search your notes means that as long as you give any note a sufficiently descriptive title, you will be able to find it quickly and effortlessly.

As a side note, I highly recommend that you learn all the different ways your notes app can search for your notes. Just Google your notes app of choice’s search functions. For instance, you can search “OneNote search” or “Notion search”. Learning this will save you a lot of time in the future.

Evernote has a keyboard shortcut on the Mac operating system that I’ve been using for years. However, for a brief period in 2019, this feature stopped working while Evernote was transitioning from the old “legacy” version to the new Evernote 10, which was very frustrating.

During that six-month period, I realised how important it was to be able to search your notes quickly in terms of overall productivity.

Your notes do not just support your projects. They can also support multiple parts of your life, from tracking your goals to keeping your eight areas of focus front and centre of your life.

Moreover, you can keep track of your hobbies, wish lists, book notes (if you read Kindle books), self-development topics, and interests. And all this information can be taken with you wherever you are through your mobile phone.

All this is great, but what if you have a notes app up and running, but it has become neglected and lacking in a little TLC (tender loving care)? Well, fear not. As you do not need to be as strict about how tidy your notes are, getting things back on track can be a little project you do over a few weeks or months.

Here’s how to get things started.

First, create five folders. What these are called in your own notes app will depend on the app you are using. If your preference is OneNote, this would be your notebooks, Evernote would be stacks and Apple Notes would be folders. To help you, this is the highest level you have in your notes app.

These five folders should be named as follows:

Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources, and finally, your Archive. Again, depending on what app you are using, you will also need an Inbox for collecting your notes.

To give you a quick summary of what goes in each folder, for your goals, this is where you put the goals you are currently working on. Really, this is a place where you keep track of your goals. For example, if you are saving money, you can track how much you are saving each month. Similarly, if you are losing weight, you can track your weight each week and add the numbers here.

Your areas of focus is where your eight areas go. If you are unaware of these, you can download my free areas of focus workbook from carlpullein.com. What you do with this folder is create a subfolder for each area and have a note in each defining what each area means to you and what you need to do to keep it in balance.

Next up, your projects folder. For each project you are currently working on, you would have a subfolder. There, you can keep notes on any meetings you attend, checklists, links to any files you need, copies of relevant emails and contact details for collaborators.

You can also keep a master projects list here, which will give you quick access to any of the projects you are working on.

Then, there is your resources folder. This is for your interests, hobbies, further education, and anything else you want to keep. Think of this as your commonplace notebook area. If you are not sure what a commonplace book is, here’s the Wikipedia definition:

“Commonplace books are a way to compile knowledge, usually in notebooks. They have been kept from antiquity and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.”

Your resources folder is unique to you, and you don’t want to overthink it. I love all things related to James Bond, and I have a subfolder of articles, links, and videos related to all things James Bond. There’s stuff in there about the films and locations, clothing and props, and products the James Bond from the books used.

It’s a gold mine of information related to something I have a deep interest in and it’s unique to me.

And your archive. Contrary to popular belief, this is not one step away from the trash. Your archive is a rich resource of discarded ideas, old projects, and stuff you were once interested in. It’s here where you can potentially make connections only you could make. Your life experiences, knowledge, and way of thinking make you who you are, and many of the ideas and things you were once interested in may be the spark to something very special.

When Steve Jobs was at university, he took a calligraphy class. At that time, it was a passing interest, yet several years later, when they were designing the Mac User interface, many of the things he learned in that class came back to him. Today, whether you use a Mac or Windows machine, you can thank Steve Jobs that you have hundreds of fonts to choose from.

Nobody had made the connection that multiple fonts to choose from would allow people to use their computers to be creative. Perhaps nobody would have done had Steve Jobs not taken that calligraphy class.

That’s the power of your archive. Yes, I know Steve Jobs didn’t have the benefit of Apple Notes in the early 1980s, but that passing interest sparked an idea we all benefit from today.

It’s the randomness of your archive, built up over many years, that will become a place for you to, at the very least, reminisce. This is where you have the freedom to dump stuff. You never know when or if any of what you put in there will become useful again.

Once you have your folder structure set up, you can go through all your old notes and move them into your new structure. Now, I want to stress that you do not need to do this in one go. Take your time, enjoy the process and reminisce as you go through your old notes. This should never be a chore; it should be treated as a fun project.

Remember, because of the powerful search your notes app has, all your notes, new and old, are searchable. So there is no rush to do this. You could decide to do this while watching TV in the evening or perhaps while commuting to work if you use a bus or train. Maybe you have a long flight coming up; you could use some of that time to go through your notes.

One tip I can give you here is that as you go through your old notes, you should ensure that the titles of your notes mean something to you. If you come across notes with an image, for example, you may find that the title is something IMG6654. You want to change that title as it won’t be searchable in that format.

You can also add tags if you wish to. Be careful not to tag something with the same name as the name of your folder or subfolder. To give you an example from my James Bond subfolder, I use tags to denote whether something is related to a book, film prop or location. I use a coded tagging system. So, anything related to a location would be tagged JB Location. Anything related to a film would be tagged JB Films.

Likewise, I have a subfolder in my resources called Places to Visit. The tags I use here are the place names. So, I have tags for Paris, London, Seoul, Tokyo etc.

Your tags are there to aid search, so if you decide to use tags, make sure you use names that mean something to you. You do not want to be too clever here. A good adage to go by is, “When tagging, tag as if you were being your dumb self.”

Now, if you want to learn more and go into more detail, I have just published a brand new course called Mastering Digital Notes Organisation. In this course, I go into detail on setting up your notes, how to process new notes, and the importance of the three underlying foundations of provenance, categories, and series.

This course will also show you how to build a rich resource of information that you will want to revisit repeatedly. Details on how to join the course are in the show notes, or you can go directly to my website, and the links and everything you need to know will be right there.

Thank you for listening, and I wish you all a very, very productive week.

Monday Apr 22, 2024

Overcoming The Fear Of Saying "No"

Monday Apr 22, 2024

Setting up a structured day makes sense. It reduces decision-making and helps you prioritise your work. But how strict should you be with this structure? That’s the question I answer this week.

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Script | 320

Hello, and welcome to episode 320 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.

The change that has given me the biggest productivity benefit over the years was giving my calendar priority over every other productivity tool. This means that if my calendar tells me it’s time to buckle down and do some focused work, I will do that. If a customer or boss asks for a meeting when I have scheduled time to work on a project, I will always suggest an alternative time.

This single change has meant I get all my work done (with time to spare), I can plan my days and weeks with a reasonable amount of confidence, and I rarely, if ever, get backlogs.

However, when you adopt this method, the temptation is to adhere to it rigidly. And that is where things begin to go wrong.

This week’s question is on this very question. How strict should you be with the plan you have for the week? So, with that said, literally, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Lucas. Lucas asks, hi Carl, I love your idea of blocking time out for your core work each week. The problem I have is I feel guilty now whenever I ignore a message or refuse to meet someone when I have a time block. What do you do to overcome this feeling of guilt?

Hi Lucas, thank you for your question.

Having structure in your day (and week) lets you know with a strong degree of confidence that you have sufficient time each day to do your work.

Let me give you an example. Pretty much all of us get email each day. It’s just one of those inevitable parts of life. Now, if you are a typical knowledge worker, you will be getting upwards of 80 emails each day. Let’s say, of those 80 emails, half of them are non-actionable, 10 of them are for reference, and the remaining emails (thirty) require a response of some sort from you.

How long will it take for you to respond to thirty emails? An hour? An hour-and-a-half? However, how long it will take you is rather less important. What matters is that at some point in the day, you will need to deal with those emails. If you don’t allocate some time, you will require double the amount of time tomorrow because you will have to deal with all the emails you didn’t deal with today.

That’s how backlogs build: by being unrealistic about the amount of time you need to protect to stay on top of things like email and your admin.

It would be easy for me to sit here and tell you to find an hour a day and dedicate it to responding to your emails. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, life will get in the way. It always does.

And even if life doesn’t get in the way, you may be exhausted, or something could be worrying you. All of which will conspire to slow you down and make you less efficient.

Instead of strictly sticking to a plan, you will find it better to work on the principle that one is greater than zero. In other words, while you may like to have an hour to manage your emails, on those days that you don’t, give yourself twenty or thirty minutes instead.

The goal is not necessarily to clear your actionable email each day. The goal is to stay on top of it. This means that if you are unable to clear all your actionable emails today when you come to deal with your email tomorrow, you begin with the oldest and work from there.

This way, no one will ever wait longer than twenty-four hours for a reply.

This approach gives you the flexibility to deal with requests as and when they come in—and they will come in. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of waking up with a clear plan of action for the day, only to begin your work day and be told some catastrophic mistake has happened and all hands are required to get things back under control.

That’s life for you. As the saying goes. “No plan survives the first shot being fired.”

Getting comfortable with this reality means you retain some degree of flexibility to deal with colleagues’ and friends’ requests in a way that doesn’t make you feel guilty.

But let’s look at this a little deeper.

Attending meetings and answering messages and emails is what Call Newport describes as the administrative tax you pay for agreeing to do a project. Unless you are working on your own project, there will always be some form of communication that, while important, will stop you from doing actual work on the project.

Your colleagues may be very happy to see you in the meeting or to receive your message responses in a timely manner, but how will they feel if you are unable to meet your deadlines?

Nobody will remember you skipped a meeting or two or were a little late responding to a message. But I can assure you they will remember if you cannot meet your deadlines. That will leave them feeling disappointed and tarnish your reputation as a productive and effective employee.

Time blocking does not mean you block out every day for specific types of work. Allocating two hours for focused work and an hour each for communications and admin would only take four hours out of a typical eight-hour working day.

That would ensure you are consistently on top of your work and still allow you four hours for meetings, responding to quick requests and answering your phone.

The only area where someone may feel put out is if they want to hold a meeting at 10:00 am and you tell them you cannot do so but will be happy to meet at 11:30 am instead. Yet, with that said, I’ve never come across anyone who got offended because I suggested an alternative time.

And remember, if they pull rank on you, so to speak—i.e. your boss tells you that you must attend the meeting at 10:00 am, okay, you have no choice so attend the meeting and readjust your focus time. Either you can reduce the time that day, or you reschedule it for another time in the day.

When you plan your core work for the week, you do so knowing that your plan will likely need to change. That does not mean you don’t plan the week.

Planning out when you will do your core work for the week means you know you begin the week with enough time to get that important work done. If, or rather, when something comes up that requires you to adjust your schedule, that’s fine. Look at your calendar and see where you can move a focused time block. If you cannot, look at reducing the time block.

If none of that is possible, delete the time block altogether. It’s one day, and you may create a small backlog for a day or two. But if you are consistent and you stay with your plan where possible, you will soon find yourself clearing any backlog.

It’s interesting that you assume there’s a feeling of “guilt”. I must admit I did feel uncomfortable when I began implementing these practices. I went from being always available for anyone to being selectively available. But I don’t remember ever feeling guilty.

The people demanding my time wanted me to do some work for them. The thing is, talking about work is not doing work. Sitting in a meeting delayed the work. It was easy to overcome any risk of guilt by telling myself that by making it difficult for me to be in a meeting with them, I was able to do what they wanted me to do better and faster.

Life is always going to be full of difficult choices. Do I take my dog for a walk now or later? When do I go to the supermarket? Do I work on this project or that one? It’s never-ending.

Yet, a plan for the week reassures you you have the time set aside. And once that plan is in place, you do whatever you can to protect it.

That does not mean you stubbornly stick to it. There will always be a need for flexibility. But, if you give yourself ten minutes or so before the end of the day, you can look at what you didn’t do and reschedule what you can.

The best special forces teams always begin a mission with a clear plan of action. Yet they know that once the mission begins, that plan will change. Part of their training is to learn how to adapt to the changing nature of the battlefield quickly. Intelligence may have been incorrect, a weapon may malfunction, or a team member may take a hit and be rendered out of action. The skill is in quickly evaluating the changing nature of the plan and adapting your actions to adapt to the new set of circumstances you face.

You will not be able to do that in a week or a month. It’s something you will always be working on. But with practice and focus, you will soon find yourself becoming more adaptable. Better at making decisions about where to apply your time and feeling less guilty about being less available than you used to be.

Good luck, Lucas and thank you for your question.

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

Monday Apr 15, 2024

What Are Your Categories Of Work?

Monday Apr 15, 2024

So, your calendar and task manager are organised, and you have enough time to complete your important work. But how do you define what your individual tasks are? That’s what I’m answering this week.

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Script | 319

Hello, and welcome to episode 319 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 most powerful ways to improve your effectiveness is to ensure you have sufficient time each day protected for your important work. Some of these tasks will be obvious. If you’re a salesperson and one of your customers asks you to send them a quote for a new product you are selling, that will come under the general category of “customers”. As this is an important part of your work as a salesperson, your “customer” category will have time protected each day. Well, I hope it does.

Then there will be your general communications and admin to deal with. We all have these categories of tasks to do each day. There’s no point in sticking your head in the sand, as it were, and hoping they will go away. Emails demanding a reply do not disappear. Ignore these for one day, and you’ll have double the amount to do tomorrow. This means you will need double the amount of time, too—time you likely do not have.

What this all means is that if your task manager supports tags or labels (and most do), you can use these for your categories.

This week’s question is about how you choose which category for your tasks.

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

This week’s question comes from José. José asks, Hi Carl, I am struggling to define which tasks are admin, consulting, or sales-related. How do you go about choosing categories for your tasks?

Hi José, thank you for your question.

Let me first explain the different categories of work you may have.

The concept here is that every task you have will come under a particular category. Those categories could be communications or admin, but they could also be sales activity, writing, designing, or marketing. Your categories will depend on the kind of work you do.

Once you have established your categories, you protect time each day (or week) to work on those categories.

For example, I have a category for “projects.” I block Wednesday mornings for project work. This means that when I plan for the week, the majority of my project tasks will be scheduled for Wednesday.

The important thing is you do not add too many categories. The less, the better. To give you a benchmark, I have eight categories. Mine are:

Writing

Audio/visual

Clients

Projects

Communications

Admin

Planning

Chores

It can be difficult to establish your categories at first, and the temptation will be to add more categories than you need. This is a mistake because very soon, you will have too many categories, which slows down your processing.

If you’re familiar with COD (and if you are not, you can take the free course—the link is in the show notes), the purpose of Organising is to get everything in the right place as quickly as possible. If you have too many categories, it will slow you down and involve far too many choices. You may experience the paradox of choice, where too much choice paralyses your thinking.

So, what are your categories? Well, you will likely have communications and admin. We all have to communicate, and email and Teams/Slack are pernicious and never-ending. Having some time protected each day to deal with your communications will keep you on top of these and prevent you from being overwhelmed.

And there will always be bits of admin to deal with. Requests from HR, banking, filing, and expenses to process etc. You may not need a great deal of time for admin each day, but it’s worth protecting thirty minutes or so to stay on top of this.

However, aside from your communications and admin, what other categories do you need? This depends on your core work.

For instance, if you are a journalist, two categories spring to mind: research and writing. This is the core of your employed work and is what you are paid for. If you spend six hours out of an eight-hour working day in Teams or Zoom meetings, that leaves you with just two hours to manage your communications and admin AND do some writing.

No chance. It’s not going to happen. Something will have to change if you want to spend more time doing what you are employed to do.

One way to do that is to ensure before the week begins, you have enough time to meet your core work objectives. That comes first. After that, you will see how much time you have left for meetings.

Simple, yes. To put into practice, perhaps a lot more difficult. But it’s one of those important adjustments worth working on.

This means, if you were a journalist, you would have your writing and research categories blocked in your calendar before the week begins.

Now, in your case, José, you mentioned how to determine what type a task is. I would see any task that comes from a customer or client as something more than admin unless it was updating a customer relationship manager or a spreadsheet—which would be admin.

If a client requests a copy of an invoice or receipt, I would categorise that as client work. It’s important because it’s a request from a client. It might be small to you, but your client may need that invoice or receipt urgently. (Remember, not everyone is as efficient as you are.)

It’s also a quick win for you, as a task like this would be a quick task.

Consulting is an interesting category. That perhaps is something you do as part of your client work. For example, I don’t consider my coaching work a separate category. Coaching is relatively straightforward as I am with the client. It’s an appointment on my calendar. The resulting feedback I write for the client comes under the category “Writing” - As I have four or five coaching appointments per day, this means I have four or five feedback reports to write each day. Hence, I have a writing block on my calendar most days.

Similarly, with sales, is that a category of task, or is it an appointment with clients? Sales activity may be prospecting, writing proposals or following up with clients (although that could be under the category of communications)

Now, this leads me to an important aspect of this. You do not need to be absolute here. What matters is that the work gets done. Whether something is categorised as communications or sales activity doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the task gets done when you intend it to happen.

There inevitably will be some grey areas. You could say that writing feedback for my coaching clients is a communication task—after all, it involves writing to the client. However, I chose to categorise the task as a writing task.

And that’s important. I chose to categorise it that way, and I am consistent with it.

Perhaps in your consultancy work, José, you prepare reports for your clients. How would you categorise writing those reports? Is it writing, or is it client work? How you categorise it doesn’t really matter as long as you are consistent with your categorising.

Why go to the trouble of categorising your work in the first place?

Well, doing so helps you to prioritise your work more effectively. For instance, as a consultant, your top priority each day could be your client’s work. When you begin the day, and you see three tasks related to client work, you know, without any further planning, that those three tasks will be your priority for the day.

Likewise, chores could be low-priority tasks for you, in which case you can decide whether you will call the bank at lunchtime or leave it until later in the week.

Categorising your work is another way to automate the decision-making process. Having to decide what to do based on a long list of potential things to do overwhelms you and leaves you exhausted at the end of the day. By pre-determining what your core work is—the work that is important as opposed to work that feels important but, in reality, is disguised low-value busy work.

At the heart of this method is pre-determining what is important and what is not. Only experience will tell you this to any accurate degree, and there will always be some grey areas. Fortunately, with experience, these instances of grey areas will reduce.

If you are moving away from trying to decide what to do from a long list of tasks each day, moving to a categorised list will be uncomfortable at first. You will make mistakes and miscategorise tasks. That’s fine. It’s certainly nothing to worry about. It’s by making mistakes you will learn for the next time.

And, I should mention, you will never be perfect. There are too many different types of tasks coming at us each day that may defy a category. The important thing is not to worry too much about these. They will be rare, but will happen.

So, if you are new to the idea of categorising your tasks, the way to set this up is to create tags or labels in your task manager for the types of tasks you generally get. Try to avoid being too specific. Your tasks are specific—for instance, “call Jenny about next week’s board meeting” would come under your category communications. Likewise, your follow-ups would be communications too.

It’s also a good idea to keep these labels or tags to a minimum. The more you have, the slower you will be.

Once you have your tags set up, you then create time blocks in your calendar for working on those types of tasks. So, in my case, I have an hour each day set aside for communications. This means when my communication time comes up, I only need to see my list of communications for that day. Nothing else matters for the next hour. I know if I stick with this each day, I will never have a backlog or be overwhelmed, even if, on some days, I am unable to clear them all.

All this ultimately comes back to defining your role at work. Most of us are pretty clear about our roles in our personal lives (e.g., mother/father, son/daughter, community member, etc.). It’s our work roles that we struggle with.

Giving yourself some time to think about your roles will help you to develop the right categories for your work, and that, in turn, will help you to organise your task list so it works for you rather than be a source of stress and overwhelm.

I hope that has helped, José. Thank you for sending in 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 Apr 08, 2024

How To Impliment COD Into Your System

Monday Apr 08, 2024

This week, it’s COD week. In a special episode, I’ll walk you through the fundamentals of what all solid productivity and time management systems have.

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Script | 318

Hello, and welcome to episode 318 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.

Now, some of you may be wondering what COD means. Well, it’s not a type of fish. COD stands for Collect, Organise, and Do, and these three parts of a productivity system are the critical foundations you need to develop if you want your system to work effortlessly.

COD came about several years ago following a research project I did. In it, I went back to 1960 (not literally) and looked at all the time management and productivity systems I could find to see if there were any common denominators.

There were multiple systems and approaches, from Hyrum Smith’s Franklin Planner system to Stephen Covey’s First Things First and Jim Rohn’s notebook and planning method. And, of course, I didn’t neglect to look at GTD (Getting Things Done) and the multiple variations that came from that.

There were four standout features of all these systems. The first was to collect everything into a trusted place. The second was to organise or process what you collected. The third was to plan the day, and finally, there was doing the work.

When I developed COD, I wanted to give you a simple framework on which to build your own system. A system based on how you prefer to do your work. Many of you will like routine, others perhaps like flexibility. What COD does is give you a three-step process you can customise to work in the way you want to work.

Let me begin with collecting.

Nothing will work if you don’t collect whatever comes your way in a trusted place. Here, there are two key parts. Collect everything and put it somewhere you trust you will see later in the day.

Scribbling tasks and ideas onto PostIt notes can work, but I have observed that they often get stuck on computer monitors, whiteboards, and many other places, which means you don’t trust that you will see them later in the day.

What works best is having a central place for all these tasks, appointments, and ideas. That could be a task manager on your phone and computer or a pocket notebook you carry with you everywhere you go.

What matters is you use it consistently, and you trust it. This may mean you need to practice to develop the right habits. But this practice is well worth it.

The second thing about your collecting tool (or UCT, as I call it, Universal Collecting Tool) is that it should be fast. If there are too many buttons to press or you keep a notebook in your bag and you have to retrieve your bag to get your notebook, you will resist and start to believe you will remember whatever you were going to collect in your head. And that will never serve you. It will forget to remind you to add it to your inbox.

The second part of the process is organising what you collected. Here, you want to choose something that works for you. I recommend using the Time Sector System, but you may find organising things by project works better for you.

What matters when it comes to organising is that you can quickly organise what you collected that day into their appropriate places. For instance, a task would go into your task manager, an event would go to your calendar, and an idea would go into your notes app. Where you put them will depend on how you have each of these tools set up.

With your task manager, what matters is the things you need to do show up on the days they need to be done. Nothing else really matters.

A side issue is that if you are going in and out of your task manager looking for things to do in individual projects or lists, you will be less effective. When you are tired, you will just scroll through your lists of tasks, causing you to feel depressed about how much you have to do and how little time you have to do them.

This is why being clear about when something needs to be done prevents that scroll. You trust that what you have on your list of things to do today is the right thing to do today.

That’s why I recommend the Time Sector System as your organisational system. It focuses on when you will do something, not how much you have to do.

There are only twenty-four in a day, and you’re not going to be able to get everything done in a day. Be realistic about what you can and cannot do in a day.

And then there’s the doing.

And this is what it’s all about. You’ve collected all this stuff, and it’s organised, so you know where everything is, what appointments you have, and what tasks need to be done today. If you have ensured the first two parts—the collecting and organising—have been done, the doing part will largely take care of itself.

But what is important about doing? That’s doing the things that matter, and remaining focused on what you have decided is important.

When you don’t have any kind of system for collecting and organising, you will find you get pulled into doing things for other people at the expense of what you are meant to be doing. It can be easy to spend four or five hours helping someone else to get their work done, only to find yourself with precious little time left to do the work you are expected to do.

This is where you will find yourself building mountains of backlogs and with no time to get them under control.

It doesn’t mean that you cut yourself off from other people. What it means is you begin the day with a clear idea of what needs to be done.

If you do have everything organised and you are spending five or ten minutes each day planning the next, you will find that out of a typical eight-hour day, you will likely need three or four hours for your own work. That still leaves you with four or five hours where you are available for other people. If you are structured and disciplined, you will find managing your own work and the requests of others easily manageable.

Yet all this begins with the collecting and organising.

That is the most powerful part of COD. It’s essentially a process you follow that ensures the right work is getting done at the right time.

And that is the way to think about it—a process. Throughout the day, you collect. Then, at the end of the day, you spend ten minutes or so organising what you collected, and for the rest of the time, you do the work.

There are other parts to building a productivity system. Ensuring you have enough time protected each day for doing your important work, which means blocking time on your calendar.

I find it interesting that with the advancement of technology, we have focused on doing more rather than using technology to protect our time for the important things in life.

I remember years ago envying bosses who had secretaries. Secretaries protected their bosses’ calendars by making it difficult for people to make demands on their time. Technology can do this for you today. Services like Calendarly allow you to specify when you are available for meetings with other people, and they can choose a suitable time from a list of available times.

There are Do Not Disturb features on your phone and in internal messaging services that tell people you are busy. Technology can do all the things the best secretaries did twenty to thirty years ago. Use them. They will make your life a lot less stressful.

The final part of doing is the art of prioritisation. In the COD course, I have a section on the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. This is a simple method for choosing what to work on each day. The principle is that each day, you dedicate ten tasks to be done. These tasks do not include your routine tasks—the low-value maintenance tasks. These are bigger projects or goal-moving tasks.

Two of those tasks will be nominated as your must-do tasks for the day. These are the tasks you absolutely must do that day, and you will not stop until they are done. For instance, today, my two must-do tasks are recording this podcast and continuing my research into the profession of archiving.

When I did my planning last night, I highlighted these two tasks in my task manager and blocked time out on my calendar for getting them done.

There are other things I need to do today, but those two tasks are the must-dos.

This is how COD helps you. It gives you a framework and a process for doing your work and living your life.

If you adopt COD, you will find you have a system for managing your workload. However, beyond COD, there are a few other things you need to develop.

The first is how you will manage your tasks. As I mentioned before, I recommend the Time Sector System, which emphasises what needs to be done this week and pushes everything else off your list until it becomes relevant. This act alone significantly reduces that sense of overwhelm and encourages you to be realistic about what can be completed in a week.

Then there are the higher-level objectives in your life—your long-term vision and goals for getting to where you want to be.

However, without the basics in place, you do not have steps to get there. After all, a goal without a set of steps to achieve it is a delusion.

If you are struggling to get things working for you, I encourage you to take the COD course. Even if you already have a system, the course will give you ideas and methods that will help you make your system even better.

It’s a free course and will take less than an hour to complete. Plus, you get free downloadable guidance sheets and so much more.

The link to the course is in the show notes, and you can get further information from my website, carlpullein.com

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

Monday Mar 25, 2024

How To Organise Your Notes.

Monday Mar 25, 2024

Do you feel your digital notes are not giving you what you want? And, is there a right and wrong way to manage all these notes? That’s what we are looking at today.

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Script | 317

Hello, and welcome to episode 317 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.

Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of discussion around how we manage our digital notes. There have been hundreds, if not thousands of new notes apps promising to do wonderful things for us and there have been numerous ways to organise all these notes from Tiago Forte’s PARA and the Second Brain to the Zettelkasten system.

The question is do any of these apps and systems work?

I feel qualified to answer this question as I have been down every rabbit hole possible when it comes to digital notes. I’ve tried Michael Hyatt’s Evernote tagging system, Tiago’s PARA and I even developed my own system, GAPRA. But, ultimately do any of these work ?

And asking that question; do any of these systems give you what you need? Perhaps is the right place to start. What do you want from a notes app? What do you want to see and how?

Before we get to the answers here, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Susan. Susan asks, Hi Carl, I’m having difficulties trying to understand how best to use Evernote. I just do not know how to organise my notes. I have thousands of notes in there going back at least five years and it’s a mess. Do you have any suggestions on how best to clean all these notes up?

Hi Susan, thank you for your question.

I don’t think you are alone. The popularity of books like Building A Second Brain and the number of YouTube videos on this subject suggests many people are struggling to know how best to organise their digital notes.

But, I wonder if what we are doing is over-complicating something that should be very simple.

I’ve recently been reading Walter Isaacson’s brilliant biography of Leonardo Da Vinci and on the chapter about his notebooks Isaacson points out that Leonardo Da Vinci instilled the habit of carrying around a notebook into all is students and apprentices. It was something Leonardo did himself and everything he collected, wrote and sketched was random in order.

We are very fortunate that many of these notebooks survive today and what we get to see is the complete randomness of what he collected. In these notebooks there are designs, sketches, thoughts and to-do lists all on the same page. It was this randomness that led to Leonardo discovering new ways to connect ideas to solve difficult problems and to paint in a way no one else had ever done.

And, I think, this is where we have gone wrong with our digital notes. It’s the randomness of your notes that will lead you to discover new ways of doing things. It will help you to be more creative and help you develop your ideas. If you try and strictly organise your notes—something a digital notes app will do—you lose those random connections. Everything will be organised by topic, thought or idea.

That does not mean that you want complete randomness. There will be projects, goals and areas of interest that you will want to keep together. A large project works best when all related notes, emails and thoughts are kept together. After all, they are connected by a common desired outcome. This is where your digital notes will excel—everything together in one place.

This is why having a project notebook or folder is a good idea. You can keep all these materials together and it gives you a central place to review your ongoing projects.

Then, there are what I would describe as critical information materials—things like your clothing and shoe sizes for the various places you buy things from. You may collect your receipts in organised months, and if you trust your digital notes, you may want to keep information such as your ID numbers, driving licence details, and health insurance certificates.

Again, digital notes are great for storing this kind of information as they make it easily retrievable whenever you need it.

What about everything else? The random thoughts and ideas you have. Well, if you want these to be useful to you at some future date, you will want to keep them random. Why is that?

Your brain works at a very high level of illogicality. This is the opposite of what a computer does. A computer operates on very strict logical lines. Even AI works logically. AI will look at data and information and give you answers that are already in existence. This often seems amazing because we had not thought of those ideas before, but someone did. That’s how AI found the answers.

And of course, as we recently discovered with Google’s AI models, there are the biases of the people programming the software—all based on existing thoughts and ideas.

It’s these notes that if you want to develop new, creative ideas that link uniquely together, they want to be maintained in a random way.

Paper notebooks make this easy. Each new thought or idea is added to a page in your notebook chronologically, and over time, your ideas will fill that notebook in the order you have them. There may be blocks of similar thoughts and ideas you collected around the same time, but on the whole, they will be completely random. Perhaps on one page, you have some ideas about how you will redesign your back garden and on another page, you have drafted out some ideas about where you and your family will go on their next holiday.

This becomes a little more difficult with digital notes because your computer and the apps you use will want to organise them logically. However, you can create randomness here, too, if you use an archive folder.

Many people think of their archive as being one step short of the trash. It’s where things you are not sure what to do with go. But stop a moment. Where would historians be without your country’s national archive? What are museums? Essentially, museums are archives of interesting things people may want to see. And there is the archive at the Vatican that holds so many treasures and documents.

An archive is not a glorified trash can. It’s a treasure trove of history. And if you create an archive notebook or folder in your digital notes you will be creating your own digital archive.

Now, because places like the National Archives in the US or UK or the archives at the Vatican City are always adding new stuff, it would be impossible to organise all these documents by theme. They may be tagged by theme, but they are organised by the date they entered the archive. If I wanted to find documents related to the Titanic, I would begin my search around April 1912. If I wanted to get a snapshot of life in 1964, I would just go to the section that housed documents from 1964.

You can do the same with your own archives. Once you have created a notebook or folder called archive, you can create sub-folders or sub-notebooks by year. Then, as you archive notes, you just add them to the year they were created.

This approach will give you the all-important randomness, yet you still have some organisation.

You can tag these notes if you wish; I do. But, and this is an important but, don’t try and be too clever here.

Imagine you were researching the Vietnam War and wanted to know how and why the war escalated in 1965. If you were at the US National Archives, you might begin your research in 1965, then Vietnam. So, the tag would be Vietnam. If you wanted to narrow down your research, you might look at the documents related to President Johnson’s decision-making, so perhaps there would be a tag for presidential papers. Beyond that, you would be trying to fine-tune things too much. You would likely see from the results you get which documents relate to meetings.

In your archive, you may have taken a trip to Paris in 2018, and while there, you came across a fantastic restaurant. Perhaps you took at picture of the menu and saved that into your notes. Now, you have two ways of retrieving that information today. If you remember the year you were in Paris, you could go straight to your 2018 archive, and as your notes will be in date order, you could scroll down to the date you were in Paris.

The alternative is if you tagged the note “Paris”, you could do a search for “Paris”. And within seconds you will have retrieved the information you wanted.

That’s how you want your notes to work. Keep them simple, so that if you want to retrieve information at a later date, you would be able to find things quickly.

What I’ve noticed is when we try and be too strict about how we organise our notes we are always fiddling and changing things. While this can be fun, at first, it becomes a drag on your productivity because the more time you spend organising, the less time you spend doing the work you need to do.

You could create separate notebooks for places and topics, but unless these are lifetime interests, keeping everything in their separate notebooks will not make retrieval any faster, and you lose that all-important randomness.

Another area where randomness really helps is with your ideas and thoughts. I’m sure you’ve had an idea about classes you may want to take or a business idea you want to investigate. You may have had ideas about starting a blog or podcast or writing a book. Many of these ideas will be passing ideas and you soon move on to the next idea. If you were intent on doing something about the idea you would begin. If you don’t begin, it’s likely a passing idea.

These passing ideas are the gold you do not want to delete. They could contain the seeds of something very special. However, on their own, they may seem redundant after a few weeks or months. It’s these notes you want to keep in your archive.

In a year or two, you may feel compelled to skim through one of your archive years, and you begin to see connections between all these ideas. Leonardo Da Vinci, sketched the mouth he eventually gave the Mona Lisa twelve years before he began painting the Mona Lisa.

Individually, these notes may mean nothing. But together, they could be your next great idea.

So, Susan, look at what you want to collect and save. Keep your projects together, these you will be working on frequently. And all those random notes you collect, store them in archives by year. As these build, you will be creating a gold mine of ideas and thoughts you will never regret keeping.

I hope that has helped and 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 Mar 18, 2024

Is There A "Perfect" Productivity System?

Monday Mar 18, 2024

This week, I’m answering a question about the basics of building your very own time management and productivity system.

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Script | 316

Hello, and welcome to episode 316 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.

Do you ever feel there is too much conflicting advice on productivity and time management? There are those who tell you never to look at your email first thing in the morning and others who do (me included). Then there are those who advocate time blocking and many who don’t. And there are the proponents of the Getting Things Done system or, as I discovered recently, people who swear by their Franklin Planners.

It’s a confusing landscape, yet if you look at almost any way of doing things, there will always be conflicting advice. That’s because humans have different ways of doing things and varied tastes. There are those who say a stick-shift car is better than an automatic; others will give you different advice on how to raise your children.

So, how do you navigate all the advice on time management and productivity? That’s what we’re looking at this week.

This week’s question comes from Meg. Meg asks, Hi Carl, I’m a recent convert to your YouTube channel, and I wanted to ask if you have any recommendations for time management systems. There’s a lot of different advice, and I just want something I can use and stick to.

Hi Meg, thank you for your question.

I’ve always felt when it comes to time management and, by extension, productivity, the best place to start is with what you want to know and when.

By this, I mean, what do you want to see on your calendar, and when do you want to see it? You can set up notifications on your calendar to alert you to upcoming events, and you can choose when those notifications appear. For instance, if you work from home, perhaps you may only need a fifteen-minute alert before a meeting. If you work in an office or travel to meet clients, you may prefer to see when your next appointment is thirty minutes or an hour before.

Getting fundamentals like this right for you would be a great place to begin.

Next would be how you manage your calendars. You will likely have a work and personal calendar. I know many people also have shared calendars with their families. The question here is how you want to be able to see all these calendars.

Separating them by keeping your work calendar only on your work devices and your personal calendars on your personal devices can give you a nice clean edge between your work and personal life but can also create conflicts.

If you were sent on a one-day training course, you may need to leave home a little early to arrive at the training site. If you were also committed to taking your kids to school on that day without seeing them all on the same calendar, it would be easy to double-book yourself.

Think of it this way: you live one life, not multiple. Yes, you may have different roles in your life—a parent, a brother or sister, a son or daughter and an employee, for instance, but all those roles are just a part of your one life. When thought of that way, would it not make sense to keep that one life on one calendar?

You could separate your roles by creating different calendars within your calendar app. Each role could be allocated a different colour on a single calendar. This way, you would see everything on one calendar and easily manage conflicts, such as attending a training course and taking your kids to school.

If you work with a company that is very strict about sharing company data, you may not be able to have all your different roles in one calendar. If that is you, you could block your work times out on your personal calendar so you can identify when you have work commitments. Your calendar only needs to show you where you are meant to be. You can always refer to your work device for the details.

This will mean a little extra work when you do your weekly planning, but checking your work calendar for any unusual start or finish times shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

How best to manage your notes can be confusing. There is a lot of conflicting advice in this area. There are thousands of different note apps and multiple ways to organise your notes.

But let’s step back a little and think about how YOU want to use your notes.

Some of you may want to store important project information in a single place, and many of you may want to keep your ideas centrally so you can access them when you need new ones. There’s something about seeing all your random ideas together that can create connections between them you never thought of.

Many parents like to keep their kids’ drawings in a digital archive, and a notes app is great for doing that. Imagine all those pictures collected over the years and being able to see them wherever you are, whenever you want. In years to come, you may use them to tease your kids.

The thing is, how do you organise all this stuff?

It’s likely you will be collecting work-related information as well as information you want to use personally. Do you keep these separate or in one place? Again, this will depend on what your employer allows you to access outside of your work devices. You will likely find having everything in one place is the most convenient. This avoids having to remember where you put something and will make finding what you are looking for seamless.

If you have no choice, keeping your work-related notes only on your work devices should not be a big inconvenience. As with having separate calendars, it does mean you will need to review multiple places to ensure you haven’t missed anything important.

Organising your notes can be a bit of a minefield. This is where there are still a lot of ideas and methods.

One way to look at this is how people organised their notes before the digital world. After all, the digital age is relatively new and we are still experimenting with methods. People used old grey filing cabinets for hundreds of years—they must have learned a thing or two about filing effectively.

With filing cabinets the most common way to organise was alphabetically. In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen also recommends organising files alphabetically. Perhaps a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach would work best for you here.

You can keep your folders or notebooks flexible; for example, you may wish to have a folder called “Insurance”, where you keep all documents related to your insurance policies. Remember, unlike filing cabinets, you can find the right document from a simple search using your keyboard so you do not need to create sub-folders for each type of insurance policy.

While there are frameworks such as Tiago Forte’s PARA (PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive) and my GAPRA (GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas, Projects, Resources, and Archive), I’m coming around to believing these more complex structures are unnecessarily complex.

Today’s notes apps have excellent search features. You can add a note, and as long as you remember a title, keyword, or date range, you will be able to find it in seconds.

The biggest difference between the digital and analogue worlds is how the digital world connects. You can have your calendar, to-do list, and all your notes on a single device in your pocket, and anything you collect will be synchronised to all your digital devices. I still marvel at how I can save a blog post or news article for reading later from my phone and move it to my iPad, and the article I just saved is there waiting for me to read.

If I go back to what you want to see and when, you may want to see your calendar in the morning while you are drinking your morning brew. This means having your today’s calendar on your phone makes sense. A quick tap on your calendar app and today’s appointments are there.

What about the things you need to do today? When would you want to see those? Perhaps the first time you need to look at these is when you sit down to begin your work day. Seeing that on your computer before you begin makes sense. A bigger screen will make a list seem less overwhelming, and you can decide when these to-dos will best be done.

The most important thing, Meg, is not to overcomplicate things. When we complicate things, systems and frameworks break. You don’t need overly complex structures for your notes. All you need is a simple alphanumeric filing system that makes sense to you. Your to-do list only needs to show you what needs to be done today. Tomorrow, next week and next month’s to-dos are not relevant today.

The goal should be to begin the day knowing where you need to be and what needs to be done. Anything that supports that will always work. Anything that leaves you having to make too many decisions or think too much about what to do does not.

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

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

Monday Mar 11, 2024

The Tools I Use To Be Productive.

Monday Mar 11, 2024

This week’s question is all about how I use the technology I have to be more productive and better manage my time.

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