Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script | 311

Hello, and welcome to episode 311 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

A few weeks ago, I posted a video on YouTube that demonstrated how I have gone back to using a pen—or rather, a few of my old fountain pens—and some paper to start planning a project. I’ve since added doing my weekly planning on paper too.

This video and a subsequent follow-up video garnered a lot of interest and some fantastic questions. It also goes back to a question I was asked on this podcast last year on whether it was possible to create an analogue version of the Time Sector System.

This week’s question is a follow-up to that question, and I hope my answer will encourage you to explore some of the unique ways the humble pen and paper can aid in your productivity journey.

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

This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks, hi, Carl, I recently saw your video on going back to pen and paper. What was your thinking behind that decision?

Hi Tom, thank you for your question.

In many ways, the reason for the “experiment” was something I tried when I was flying over to Ireland for the Christmas break. I decided to take a pen and notebook with me to see if my planning and thoughts would flow better on paper rather than how I usually do it through a keyboard.

The idea came from a video I had seen with Tim Ferriss, where he discussed how he finds his ideas flow better when he puts pen to paper. Plus, I have seen Robin Sharma, Tony Robbins, Andrew Huberman and read about many historical figures such as Presidents Kennedy and Nixon as well as Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming and Charles Darwin all take copious notes on paper.

I wondered if there was something in it.

When you think about it, the chances are you spend far too long in from of a screen these days. If it’s not your computer, it’s going to be your phone or TV. We just don’t seem to be able to get away from them. When you pick up a pen and a pad of paper, you are no longer looking at a screen. The whole effect on your eyesight is going to change.

This is certainly something I was beginning to feel. Pretty much everything I do involves a screen. There’s even a heads-up display in my car! I just don’t seem to be able to get away from them.

Then there’s the type. I was recently looking through some of my old planners from 2009 and 2010 and found myself being transported back fifteen years to what I was thinking back then. It was a wonderful, nostalgic journey. My handwriting was unique; I could tell which pen I used and even the ink I was using back then.

I can look at a digital document I created ten years ago, and it’s boring Helvetica in black. It pretty much looks the same as any document I create today. There’s nothing nostalgic.

There’s a wonderful video on YouTube by Adam Savage (yes, the Adam Savage formerly of Mythbusters) where he shows an exact copy of one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codecs. WOW! I was blown away. It looked gorgeous—even though Da Vinci wrote backwards. The aged paper, the diagrams, the pen strokes. Everything looked so beautiful.

So, as I was thinking about how I could bring pen and paper back into my system, I realised the one area where paper, for me, always works better than digital is in planning—well, certainly the initial planning stages. I also find despite Apple’s attempts at creating quick notes using the Apple Pencil, it’s still not faster than having a notebook next to you on your desk with a pen.

Now, one problem many people face with using pen and paper is you end up with a load of half-empty notebooks all over the place. I can assure you if you think there are too many productivity apps around, wait until you begin going down the notebook rabbit hole. There’s thousands of different styles, colours and papers. You’ll learn about the incredible quality of Japanese paper and what constitutes fountain pen-friendly papers. You’ll learn about dot grids, grids, graph and lined paper. Then there are the covers—leather bound, ring bound, sewn, bonded and WOW! So many decisions.

You’ve been warned.

And if you start investigating fountain pens, you’ll find yourself in serious trouble. YouTube is full of videos on what constitutes the best pens for all kinds of writers. You’ll learn about grail pens—pens everyone wants in their collection. I confess I have a soft spot for the Namiki Urushi and a Montblack 149.

Anyway, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Now, back to how I am utilising pen and paper in my system.

I have two notebooks. The main one is my planning book. This is an A4 lined notebook where I will begin any planning session. I write the title of what I am planning at the top and then brainstorm in one colour—usually blue.

Now, I find the best place to do this is at the dining table, not at my desk. There are no screens on the dining table. So all I have is my notebook and my blue inked fountain pen. This is what call my first pass.

Now, the trick here is to write whatever comes into your head and write anywhere on the page. Remember, this is the first pass. It doesn’t matter how good or bad any idea is. Just get it out of your head. Even the craziest ideas may contain a seed of something special.

Once you’ve finished and can think of nothing else, close your planning book and leave it for twenty-four hours. Let your subconscious brain do its thing.

After twenty-four hours or so, come back to your note and, with a different colour pen, expand your initial thoughts. You could also bring your highlighters to the table if you prefer.

One reason I use royal blue as an ink colour for my first session, is a simple pencil looks great next to royal blue. But I do like to use black, green colours too.

What you will find is you’ll begin adding more ideas, and the initial ideas you had will sprout new, better ideas.

This is what I call the first pass. If there is time pressure, I will move on to the next step now. However, I prefer to have time to run a second and third pass just to get all my ideas out.

So, what is the next step? This is where I scan the paper note into my notes app. From here, I can pull out the key points and ideas and begin developing the project or video idea. There’s often research to be done at this stage and also to decide what action steps I need to take. All of which will likely require a computer.

The second notebook I have is my scratch pad. Now, this could be down to my age, but even at school, I always had a pad of paper and pen next to me for jotting down quick notes and random thoughts. There’s something comforting about having it next to you. I could, for instance, be writing this script and suddenly have an idea, and I can quickly write it down on my scratch pad for later. Once it’s written down, it’s not going to be forgotten. I can deal with it later.

This notebook is an A5 ring-bound notebook. It’s a perfect size for scratching down ideas, and the ring binding allows me to lay the book flat on my desk.

At the end of the day, I will go through the captured notes to see if anything needs to be transferred to my task manager. Anything I have dealt with previously, I will simply cross out.

However, the most important thing here is stepping away from the screen, and all the distractions a computer will throw at you and just focusing on thinking about the project, goal or whatever you need to think about.

There’s something about the feel of a pen on paper that no digital tool can replicate. I’ve tried things like Remarkable 2 and many of the other so-called “paper replacements”. Sorry, but they cannot replicate that exquisite feel of a fountain pen nib flowing across paper. I suspect this is why fountain pens are still popular among so many writers today.

Handwriting is in our DNA - from the thousands of years old cave paintings to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics we’ve been writing for years. Keyboards and typing are relatively modern, and anything you type looks the same—after all we generally use the same fonts for everything.

With handwriting, you’re creating art. It’s unique. Each new note is going to look different from a previous note. You can choose different pens and colours and take them anywhere and just sit and write. It is such a different experience from sitting at a computer screen and typing. That difference will give you different ideas and thoughts.

Funnily enough, I have returned to writing my journal by hand again after five years in the digital journaling world. While it was very convenient to be able to add a photo to each new journal entry, I realised when I was reading through my old planners and handwritten journals there was something so different about what I was reading. I rarely read through my old typed journal entries, but I was captivated by my old-written journals. I could have sat there for hours reliving my life though a handwritten page.

So, there you go, Tom. That is why I have returned to the analogue world.

I would also add, that I have started doing my weekly planning on paper too. If you are familiar with my Weekly Planning Matrix. You can draw out the four squares in your planning notebook and give yourself twenty minutes to think about what needs to be done next week. If feels like you are tapping into a different way of thinking which is clearer, more focused on the bigger picture and in a way more emotional than trying to do this digitally.

I hope that has inspired many of you to go out and get yourself a notebook and pen. Have a go at it. See what happens. You might just fall in love with pen and paper all over again. Just be careful, there’s a whole world out there of notebooks and pens. For me, my trusty old fountain pens and some Rhodia notebooks do the trick. (Although, O confess I’ve ordered some of the famous Japanese paper to test)

Thank you, Tom, 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 Feb 05, 2024

Stop Being So Strict With Yourself (It'll only end in disappointment)

Monday Feb 05, 2024

Are you restricting yourself too much? Attempting to stick to a too-embracing structure? It might be time to loosen up a bit.

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The 2024 ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP

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Script | 310

Hello, and welcome to episode 310 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

Having some kind of structure or routine built into your day is important if you want to consistently get the important things done. The trouble starts when you try to stick to that structure or routine too rigidly. It begins to limit what you can do and holds you back from accomplishing the things you set out to accomplish. Plus, if your plan is interrupted by the inevitable “emergencies”, the plan is usually thrown out the window, and everybody else’s problems become the focus.

I’m all for building a structure around your day and week. It’s this structure that will ensure you get the right things done on time every time. But sometimes, something will inevitably come along and stop you from sticking to your routine or structure, and then, if you don’t have built-in inflexibility, everything will come crashing down. Either you drop everything, which leads to a build-up of backlogs, or you’ll stay too rigid and miss an opportunity that could lead to bigger and better things.

This week’s question goes to the core of this dilemma, and I hope to give you some ideas to prevent it from happening to you.

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

This week’s question comes from Andre. Andre asks, Hi Carl, I love the idea of having a structured day, but I am having a hard time sticking to my plan. I never seem to have enough time to get all my work done, and I have a huge backlog of emails and project work to catch up on. It’s causing me so much stress and worry. Do you have any advice?

Hi Andre, thank you for your question.

You are right to create a structure around your day and week. Aside from weekly planning, I would say if anyone wants to become better at managing their time and ultimately more productive, they are going to need some form of structure to their day.

However, as with most things, this can be taken too far. Take time blocking, for example. Time blocking is an excellent way to make sure you have enough time to do the critical things that need doing, yet if you try to micromanage your day—that is, you block your whole calendar—you only need one meeting or one task to overrun by just a few minutes and your day is destroyed. For time blocking to work effectively, you will need plenty of blank spaces.

For example, you may wish to block two hours for some deep work in the morning, say, between 9:30 and 11:30, then an hour for managing your communications and an hour for clearing your admin tasks for the day. That way, if you work a typical eight-hour day, you have four hours for anything else that may come up.

However, this rigidity may also be coming from outside forces.

I love reading contemporary history. My favourite era is between 1945 and 1990. These were transformative years in both the US and Europe. I am particularly interested in how creative people, like Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, managed their days.

What was noticeable was with few exceptions, there were no rigid working hours. If you worked in a factory doing physically demanding work surrounded by dangerous machinery, there were laws in most countries preventing you from being forced to work beyond eight hours. For the rest, you worked until the work got done.

And between 1940 and 1980, there were no computers helping you to do your work. If you needed to write a report, you either sat down at a typewriter and typed it yourself (no delete key with typewriters—if you got a page wrong, you began again), or you may have been lucky and were allowed to hand the work to the typing pool for typing up—and then you either needed to handwrite the report or dictate it.

And don’t let anyone tell you that people got less mail in those days. People got a ton of mail each day (often quite literally). It wasn’t electronic mail; it was physical mail, and responding to that wasn’t as simple as hitting the reply key and typing. There were conventions to a written letter. You could never write, “Please find attached the file you requested”. You had to include a greeting and an ending, then sign it by hand, stick it in an envelope and take it to to post room.

There were a lot of late nights in the office getting work finished back then. Probably a lot more than we have today. I also remember in the 1990s regularly having to come into the office on a Saturday to clear files that needed clearing before the start of a new week.

Yet people adapted, and the work got done.

In many ways, we might be attempting to structure our days in the wrong way. Let me give you an example.

I’ve recently been reading a biography of Winston Churchill. Now, Churchill had an unusual structure to his day. He would wake up around 8:00 and while in bed, read the newspapers and deal with his communications. He’d read his letters, call a secretary into his bedroom and dictate the replies.

He would get out of bed at 11 am and take a bath. Often, he’d have a secretary outside the bathroom door taking more dictations—that could be a speech he was preparing or one of the many articles or books he wrote.

Let me pause here. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, only a privileged few could afford to hire their own secretaries or assistants. Today, it’s relatively affordable to hire a virtual assistant, or you could learn to use the dictation features on your digital devices. This means you could dictate in a Churchillian way—while taking a bath and while reading your emails in bed.

After his bath, Churchill would come downstairs for lunch. This wouldn’t be a sandwich while sat at his desk. It was a full hour affair with wines and champagne. After lunch, he’d walk around his garden, feed the fish in his pond, and often paint. This was his rest time. A time when he spent some time thinking and relaxing.

Then, at 4:30 pm, it was nap time, and again, this wasn’t a quick twenty-minute nap. It was a full ninety minutes. After his nap, it was another bath, then some card games with his guests or family before a full dinner—including an array of alcoholic drinks.

At 10 pm, Churchill would disappear into his home office (or “factory” as he called it), where he would work solidly for the next four to five hours. Then it was back to bed.

If you look at Churchill’s daily structure, it was solid. It got the important work done, and it was conducted on his terms. It was unconventional by the standards of those days. His “class”—the upper class—would usually disappear to their clubs after dinner for meetings and socialising. Yet, Churchill got a huge amount of work done. He wrote almost fifty books in his lifetime, thousands of articles for newspapers and was a full-time parliamentarian.

I tell you about Churchill because his daily structure is a great illustration of what you can do when you work within your own ideals. Churchill was a night owl, not a morning person. He took advantage of that by doing his most important creative work late at night. Tim Ferriss, the author and entrepreneur, is another person who likes to do his creative work late at night.

When people see my calendar, they think I am working too much. Yet, if you look closely, I do my creative work in the mornings, then take the afternoon off (in the same way Churchill did) then return to my work after dinner. I get four or five hours of rest from work every day and can enjoy it in daylight when the cafes are open and when I can actually enjoy living close to the beach. I am also a night owl.

What Churchill did was have some solid structures in his day. These were his wake-up time (8:00 am), lunch and dinner times. If he had guests for dinner, he would stay talking with his guests until late into the evening but would still return to his home office to work until he was tired enough to go to bed.

I fear many people have come to believe it is bad to work after they finish work. But do you really ever finish work? I’m not suggesting you always take work home with you, but if you have backlogs and project deadlines approaching, perhaps giving yourself an extra hour or two in the evening to do a little more work isn’t such a bad thing.

Think about that for a moment. You have the choice of two evils. The stress and anxiety of worrying about all the work piling up and not getting done. Or extra time in the evenings to get on top of the work. One will lead to health issues, and the other is inconvenient.

I remember reading about Michael Dell’s work routines when his family was still young. He would ensure he was home by 7 pm every evening for the family dinner. After dinner, he would play with his kids until they went to bed and then go to his home office to work until midnight.

Hopefully, your days won’t be destroyed too often, Andre, but it is going to happen—that’s inevitable. The key is to be flexible. Over time, you will learn to distinguish between the genuinely urgent and the false urgencies. The thing is, and the reason I told you about Winston Churchill, is you have options beyond nine til five.

Tim Cook is famous for waking at 3:30 am and doing his email—he is clearly a morning person. Former President Jimmy Carter would go to the Oval Office at 7 am every morning to read through the reports he needed to know about that day before having a meeting with his security advisor at 8:30 am.

Productive days are not built by accident. They are built on structure. We can learn from immensely productive people like Churchill and build a structure around meal times and rest.

Insisting you must not work in the evenings is admirable, but if you have outstanding work to be done and a backlog of emails and other messages, what is that doing to your stress levels? Would it not be better for your long-term mental health to spend a few evenings or early mornings getting on top of that backlog so you give yourself less stress and more free time in the long-term?

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

Monday Jan 29, 2024

Efficiency by Design: Crafting an Organised Life.

Monday Jan 29, 2024

How much time do you spend organising and reorganising your work each day? A key question to ask if you are seeking better productivity and time management.

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The 2024 ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script | 309

Hello, and welcome to episode 309 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

Deciding to get organised and better at managing your time is a good goal to have. After all, when you know where everything is and what needs to be done, you will see an exponential increase in your productivity, and that means, if managed well, your time management will also improve.

However, there is a fine line between spending too much time managing your stuff and not enough time doing your stuff. When you get caught up in that trap, you are lulled into feeling you are being productive when, in fact, you are not getting anything important done.

There are many reasons why this happens, the most common of which is becoming obsessed with tools—the apps and technology that promise to make organising and doing your work easier. No, this does not happen. Sure, a solid set of tools can help, but these tools will never do the work for you. Some of the worst tools will cause you to waste a lot of time organising and maintaining them instead of helping you to do your work more effectively.

Now, before we get to the question, I’d just like to give you a heads-up about this year’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop. This will be held on Friday the 9th and 16th February. Starting at 7:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (A little under two weeks away), This workshop will cover your calendar and task management in week one. In week two, we will look at how to manage email and other communications, as well as the all-important daily and weekly planning. By the end of these two sessions, you will have the know-how to build your very own “perfect” productivity system.

But what’s more special about this workshop is when you register, you get access to four of my mini-courses for FREE, as well as a workbook for all sessons. PLUS, you get a chance to ask me anything about time management and productivity.

Now, places are going fast, so if you don’t want to be disappointed, get yourself signed up now. Full details for the workshop are in the show notes below.

So, what do you need to do to ensure you are spending the appropriate amount of time doing your work and managing the work coming in? Well, before we get to answering that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Kris. Kris asks, Hi Carl, is there a right balance between keeping my tasks and notes up to date and organised and doing the work? I find that keeping everything up to date takes me at least an hour a day and sometimes longer. It’s very frustrating.

Hi Kris, thank you for your question.

I am always very careful with these types of questions because it is a good thing to use a few tools to help you with your organisation. For instance, a well-maintained notes app will do a lot for your overall productivity because note apps today have incredible search functionality. This is far better than when we were trying to keep all our notes up to date in paper notebooks and file folders.

However, because of this search functionality, we no longer need to spend a lot of time organising notes into folders (or notebooks, as some note apps call them) and tagging. All we need to do today is make sure we are making the title of the note easily searchable. That involves ensuring you have a keyword you would naturally search for and perhaps the date in the title.

After that, all you would need to have in your notes app is a simple folder structure, so you have at least the remnants of a system. A simple work and personal folder system would work today because search is so powerful.

The more complex you make your folder structure in notes, the longer it will take you to keep things organised.

One other tip on notes. It’s likely that anything you put in your notes is not going to be urgent. Urgent things are normally things we have to do, and we would put those into our task manager or calendar. This means when it comes to cleaning up what you collected, you can do this once a week. I do this on a weekend when I do my weekly planning.

Another issue I come across is prioritising the task manager above the calendar. If you stop and think for a moment, this does not make a great deal of sense. A task is something that can be done at any time. It may need to be done on a given day, but when on that day you do it is not important. For example, you may need to call a client, but no time has been specified. This means you could call them at 9 am or at 2:30 pm. All that matters is you call them that day.

But if you were meeting a client for lunch, that would be a different matter. You would need to be in a specific place on a given day and time. That would be in your calendar.

In those two scenarios, the lunch meeting would naturally take priority over the phone call.

This means your calendar is at the top of your productivity tools hierarchy.

If I were to choose one tool that was kept up to date at all times, it would be my calendar, and to do that will likely only take two or three minutes a day.

But let’s step back a little here and look at the process for managing your tasks. If you’re listening to this, you will probably be aware of the COD system. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do. We need to be collecting the stuff we need to do, then allocate a little time for organising that stuff and finally, we need to do the work. The ideal split between organising and doing is 95% of your time doing and 5% organising. That works out at around twenty minutes a day organising your stuff and the rest of the time doing.

You are collecting all the time, and your process for collecting needs to be quick and with a minimum of friction. Here, technology helps you because you will likely be carrying your phone with you everywhere you go. This means your phone becomes your UCT—Ubiquitous Collection Tool.

To ensure that your phone is optimised for this role, you want to make sure collecting tasks, notes and events is as easy as you can make it.

However, once you have all this stuff collected, when will you process it? I do my processing in the evening. It’s quieter, and I can process all the stuff I have collected without distractions.

Now, processing is not about moving all your stuff from your inbox to your folders. The emphasis needs to be on eliminating, not accumulating. Your thinking should be around asking yourself, “Do I really need to do this task?” not where can I put it?

There will always be more stuff to do than time available to do it, so eliminating as much as you can at this processing stage will save you a lot of anxiety and overwhelm—lists have a habit of growing uncontrollably if not checked.

The great thing about focusing on eliminating rather than accumulating is it reduces the need to spend time organising. The delete key is a lot easier to operate than adding additional information and ensuring the tasks are written in a way you will understand what they mean next week.

The thing is, if you get your processing right the first time and you are not arbitrarily adding dates so you don’t forget a task (as opposed to adding a date because the task genuinely needs doing on that date), you will not have too much reorganising to do.

I see a lot of people having to spend a lot of time rescheduling tasks every day because they were being a bit over-ambitious about what they could accomplish in a day. On a given day, that may not seem like a lot of time, but it adds up, and by the end of the week, you will have spent thirty to sixty minutes just rescheduling.

There’s an old carpenter’s saying, “Measure twice, cut once.” Well, in productivity terms, this would equate to thinking twice before dating a task and doing the task once. Every time you reschedule a task, you will mentally picture yourself doing the task and deciding you don’t have time for it right now, so it gets rescheduled. Not a very effective way to manage your time.

Think of organising tasks as collect fast, process slow. This way, you will find yourself less likely to waste time reorganising and rescheduling stuff. There’s a better chance you will get it right the first time. An extra few minutes when you process will save you a lot of reorganising later.

And now the elephant in the room—the tools you are trying to use to organise all your stuff. Be careful here. The more complex and pretty an app is, does not necessarily mean it will be better for your productivity. In fact, I find the more complex an app is, the slower you will be. All those bells and whistles mean more buttons to push.

When I compare my coaching clients’ speed at being able to find things, Apple Notes seems to be the fastest, and that is the simplest. Notion, Evernote and Obsidian may have a lot more features, but all those extra features mean it’s harder to remember where something is stored. And if you become adept at using search, you will find the complexity of getting something into your system slows you down. Avoid these attractive yet complex apps. They are procrastination traps, and it will take a superhuman effort to avoid playing and fiddling with them when you are tired or not in a very productive state.

I hope that has helped, Kris. If you get your collecting, organising and doing right, you will only need around twenty minutes a day to organise your stuff. The rest of the time, you can spend getting your work done.

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

Monday Jan 22, 2024

Who Controls Your Time?

Monday Jan 22, 2024

Podcast 308

If you’re not in control of your time, who is? That’s what we’re looking at this week.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Script | 308

Hello, and welcome to episode 308 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

One of the most common comments I get on my YouTube videos is about who controls your work day. The answer to that question is you. It’s always been you.

Even at its most basic level, you accepted an offer to work where you work at some point, which was a choice you exercised. Similarly, as each day begins, you could choose to stay in bed and fake sickness—not something I would recommend, of course, but you always have that choice.

And, you always have the nuclear button option—to quit at any time—although I hope it doesn’t need to come to that.

The problem with all these choices—choices you make every day—is while you are free to make these choices, you also have to accept the consequences of your decisions. So, what you are really doing is calculating the cost/benefit of the decision you make.

Staying in bed might seem a great idea on a cold, wet morning, but you probably know that by 11 am, you’ll be feeling guilty, and when thought about further, you will likely begin to feel a little anxious about all the things you might be missing out on.

But one thing you should never tell yourself is you have no choice. You do, and you always will.

Let’s put it this way: you may have an important, critical meeting with your CEO arranged at 11:00 am tomorrow morning, but if a close family member—your son or daughter, mother or father—is taken seriously ill overnight, you’re going to choose to be at the hospital with your family. (Well, at least I hope you are)

In that situation, you are exercising your choice. You cannot be in two places at once, and therefore, you have to choose your priority.

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

This week’s question comes from Isaac. Isaac asks, hi Carl, I have tried time blocking, but my boss won’t let me. Every time I sit down to get on with some deep work, he’ll call or message me, and I have to answer immediately. How do you deal with these scenarios?

Hi Isaac, thank you for your question.

One of the benefits of getting organised and in control of your day is you get to clearly see what needs to be done each day. Being able to see everything that needs to be done allows you to prioritise your work.

The problems we face, though, rarely come from the work we have to do. They come from the interruptions and distractions coming at us from other people.

But let’s get serious here. Most of us are not working in jobs that involve the life or death of patients. It’s not like someone in need of urgent attention from us is being wheeled into our offices for our immediate attention. So, let’s get real about how much time we have to do the work that comes at us.

Your boss might like you to respond immediately, but I am sure they can wait, and if you have allowed them to become accustomed to your quick responses, perhaps it’s time to slowly ween them off that expectation.

In my experience, bosses who demand instant attention from their team have been conditioned to expect instant responses. It’s not often your boss’s fault; it’s yours because you do it, therefore they expect it.

In this situation, you have two options. You can have a face-to-face meeting with your boss and explain the difficulties they create when they expect instant responses and how the quality of your work and productivity would improve if they allowed you some breathing room.

The second option is to re-train them. Slowly, over a few weeks, lengthen your response times. Begin with five minutes, then ten, then fifteen and so on until you find the right balance. When I’ve tried this experiment on bosses in the past, I’ve found anywhere between fifty minutes and three hours can be gained here. If you’re lucky, you may find you have a boss who forgets they ever asked you and never chases you up. (Although, I admit they are rare)

However, Isaac, I was a little concerned with your choice of words, “I have to”. Do you? I mean, really, do you “have to”? In life, there rarely are any “I have tos”; these are concepts created by ourselves to create a sense of urgency.

If you’re listening to this podcast, you live in a free society, and that means you always have a choice. When we use the words “I have to”, we are delegating responsibility for our choices to other people. If you do that, you are never going to find a sense of peace or fulfilment. You’ll always be waiting for instructions from someone. It’s never “I have to”; it should always be “I choose to” because that is the truth. You choose to allow your boss to interrupt you.

When you reframe things to “I choose”, you take responsibility for your actions and that will give you a little more assertiveness when it comes to working with your boss or customers and clients.

One of the most effective things I ever did when working in a law firm with demanding clients and bosses was to create what I called “protected time”. I learned this when I was working in sales. If I didn’t have an hour or two each day when I wasn’t available for customers, I would drop the ball on almost everything. I needed that time to sort out the sales admin and to ensure the deliveries to my customers were on time.

When working in a busy law office, I came across the same issue. Always being available meant too many things were not getting done. Sure, I was a hero to my colleagues and clients until they found I didn’t get around to doing what they were asking me to do. I was prioritising the here and now, instead of what was genuinely important—ie the commitments I’d already made.

You cannot sustain that. Allowing all these interruptions is going to catch up with you and not only leave you exhausted and stressed out, but it will also destroy your career.

Now, you’re not likely to be able to suddenly impose one or two hours of protected time each day if you’ve allowed yourself to always be available. You’ve set expectations, and you are going to have to change those expectations. The most effective way to change things is to have a talk with your boss. Explain your dilemma and ask him (or her) to allow you one or two hours a day for deep, focused work. Explain to them how this will benefit them and how it will ensure you will be able to produce better quality work and service to your customers.

You could ignore this advice. But if you want things to change, something’s going to have to change that change must begin with you and the way you approach your day.

The only way I was able to get control was to initiate the “protected time” protocol. I chose the quietest time of the day to do this. When I was in sales, that was from 9:00 to 10:30 am. When I was in the law office, it was 8:30 am to 11:00 am. After that, the phones lit up, and it was go go go.

But I was relaxed. I’d got the most important work done that day, and aside from answering some random questions about ongoing cases, it was plain sailing. Sure, there were some days that it didn’t work; emergencies inevitably crop up from time to time. But you just deal with those when they come up. They don’t happen every day, and if they do seem to happen every day, you can look at your strategies and see where you can make changes.

If you’ve got overlapping commitments on your calendar and no space to get on and do the work you’re employed to do, you’ve got serious time management problems. It’s time to stop, look at your calendar and decide what you can and cannot attend.

I know it’s hard. It’s very hard. As humans, we are naturally wired to please people. But you’re not pleasing people when you let them down by not being able to carry through with your commitments. And then consider the toll on your family life. If you leave yourself exhausted at the end of the day and have to take work home with you, what does that say to your family about your priorities?

I like to think of it this way. I was not employed to be a people pleaser. I was employed to do a job. That could be selling a lot of cars or helping people with their legal problems. That does not mean you should not be polite and respectful, but when someone interrupts you, they are not respecting your time, and that needs to be addressed.

I’ve often said that the best time management hack is the learn to say no politely. The best strategy I’ve found is to say yes but impose your time frame. For example, if a colleague or boss asks you to do something, you can say you will do it once you have completed your current work or project. Then tell them you can do it next week. That often gets them to pause and then say, “Don’t worry, I’ll get someone else to do it.”

That’s not a poor reflection on you; you will soon begin to shine because the quality of your work will improve. You’ll not miss deadlines, and your reliability will increase. It’s a win-win for everyone in the end.

Ultimately, it comes down to you deciding where your priorities lay. I’m reminded of the story of the consultant working for a large famous consultancy who was asked to come in on a Saturday to help prepare for an important presentation the following Monday. She apologised and said, I’m sorry, I cannot come in on Saturday as I have an agreement with my husband to spend Saturday with him and our daughter. Her boss was frustrated at first but accepted her reason. A few days later, he called the consultant into his office and thanked her. Her refusal to come in on Saturday because of the agreement with her family inspired him, and he decided he would never ask his team to come in on a weekend. He even imposed the family rule on himself, which he later credited for saving his marriage.

I’m not suggesting taking action on this with your boss will change the culture in your company, but that story is a good example of how sticking to your principles can earn you a lot more respect from your peers.

I hope that helps, Isaac. And thank you for your question.

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

Monday Jan 15, 2024

Master Productivity | What Really Matters.

Monday Jan 15, 2024

How much time do you spend organising and shuffling your work? And how much time do you spend doing the work? That’s what we’re looking at in this week’s episode.

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Script | 307

Hello, and welcome to episode 307 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

One of the great things about deciding to get organised, becoming better at managing time and being more productive is a sense of being in control and on top of everything coming at us. Nothing beats that feeling of knowing what needs to be done and that you have sufficient time today to get it done.

However, there is a dark side to all this. That is elevating the tools and practices above actually doing the work. It’s great that all your tasks are neatly organised in a task manager, and your notes are all perfectly tagged and in their respective folders. But is the return on the time invested in maintaining all that worth it?

I would go as far as to say that with all the technology built into your apps’ search engines, 90% of what you are doing to maintain all these apps and tools is wasted time. You don’t need to spend all that time doing it because a couple of hours spent learning how to search on your devices will render most of these maintenance activities redundant.

And that is where this week’s question comes in. How much time do we need to spend each day organising and processing? The answer to that is probably a lot less than you think.

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 Alysha. Alysha asks, hi Carl, I have been on a quest to get myself organised and become better at managing my time, but all the books and articles I read seem to tell me I have to spend hours each week organising, tagging and filing and I wonder if that is actually the best use of my time. Do you have any thoughts on this area?

Hi Alysha, you make a very good point and one I often find myself despairing at when I see some of the questions I get in the comments section on my YouTube videos.

It seems a lot of people are not actually interested in getting better at managing time or being more productive. They are much more interested in playing with the tools instead of doing the work.

Let me explain. The tools and devices you use to be more productive are around 0.005% of what it takes to be more productive.

To be more productive is about what you are producing. It's not about how well your task manager is organised or how precisely you have your notes tagged or organised.

I mean, let’s be honest here, you can be exceptionally productive armed only with a paper notebook and a calendar. You don’t need anything more. All these wonderful digital tools are great, don’t get me wrong, but if they become the main focus of your whole system, then they become the distraction and prevent you from doing what needs to be done to be productive—that’s doing the work.

Recently, I’ve been re-reading some older time management and productivity books. Books from the late 1980s and early 90s. These books were written before the massive advances in computer technology in the workplace and yet, the problems people were facing back then are the same fundamental problems people are facing today.

There are the parents who are trying to juggle their career with raising their children. There’s the busy executive who is struggling to get their core work done because they are always having to be in meetings or dealing with clients calling them all the time. And there are the people struggling to respond to all the letters and messages they receive each day.

The tools and channels may have changed, but the problems in managing all this work have not. It’s still there, and I am sure it will still be there in fifty or a hundred years’ time.

The thing is, it’s never been about the tools. You can have the best, most advanced tools available today, but if you are not getting on and doing the work, you will still have backlogs and be overwhelmed. If you are not keeping control of your calendar and allowing other people to schedule meetings for you, you will be overwhelmed and unable to do your core work.

I was reminded of this recently when listening to David Goggins on the Andrew Huberman podcast. In one part, they talk about all the supplements and protocols we are supposed to be taking and doing. Yet, unless you put on your running shoes and get out and do the run, none of these supplements or protocols will help you. They should never be used as an excuse not to do the work.

Yet, that is what so many people are doing today. They are using the tools to avoid doing the hard thing. The actual work.

If you have a twenty-page report to write for your boss, open up your computer, click on the Microsoft Word icon and write it. If you need to email a client, open up your email app and write it. You do not need to have a thirty-minute debate with yourself about which is the best tool to use to write the report, and you don’t need to clear your email inbox to send the email to your client.

What I have noticed over the last few years is a lot of people are using their tools as an excuse to procrastinate on doing the hard work. People will spend hours on YouTube or an app-finding website looking for the miracle app that will somehow miraculously do the work for them.

It’s a little like the person who wants to lose weight and get fit and invests all their time and money in supplements and training gear but never goes out and does any exercise. You know that will never work. You’ve got to do the work.

Planning and organising do have their place. It is important to know where everything is and what needs to be done. But that should never be at the expense of doing the work.

Yesterday, as I was recording and editing this week’s YouTube video, my little studio was a mess, and my desktop was covered in footage and screenshots. Everything appeared disorganised and messed up. Yet, the video was recorded, and the editing was done. During the five or six hours I was working on that video, my only focus was the output. I didn’t care about how untidy everything looked. That did not matter. What mattered was the video was recorded, edited and posted.

When I’d finished, then I could clean things up. Move all the stuff from my desktop to the folder and cross off the task in my task manager. Job done.

The focus is always on getting the work done, not how beautifully everything is organised.

One of the biggest problems with digital tools these days is the battle app developers are having to stand out in a very crowded productivity field. In order to stand out, they are adding more and more features, and that leaves us with more and more things to fiddle with.

I see people spending a lot of money on apps like Super Human and Hey email apps. These apps claim to sort your email for you, moving to the top of the list of the emails they think are the most important. Now, I am sure most of the time, they get this right, but the reality is you can do this yourself in apps like Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail. You do not need expensive apps for this.

But as a new toy to play with, these apps are great. They will stop you from getting on and clearing your backlog and give you something new and interesting to play with. But is that the goal? I hope not.

If you want to clear your email backlog, you have to get on and clear it. No app will ever do that for you.

If you have subscribed to hundreds of newsletters and signed up to get the news delivered to your inbox every morning and are overwhelmed by the hundreds of emails you are receiving, perhaps the problem is not the tool but you. You signed up for these. You can give yourself an hour or two and unsubscribe from them any time.

One of the most common questions I get is about how to organise projects. Now, many projects have a lot of moving parts, and tasks need to be done in order to keep them moving forward so the deadlines are met.

But do you really need a complex system to organise these projects? I have a project at the moment to update my free COD course. I have my notes and the outline neatly organised, and each week, I review the project. Yet this week, the project hasn’t moved forward. Why? Because I am ignoring the obvious thing. I need to do the work. I need to set up my studio and begin recording it.

I can spend the next six weeks shuffling files, but that won’t result in an updated course. The only way that will happen is if I go into the studio and record it.

And that’s the same for you, too. If you want to be more productive, then you need to do productive things. That means doing the work. There is no other way, and there certainly is no app out there that will do that for you.

If your car needs washing, then take your car to the car wash centre.

If you need to clean up your home, then when you get home today, do it.

If your email is out of control, then open up your email and get it under control.

If you need to lose weight, put down the cookie, put on your exercise gear and exercise.

None of this is complex. It might be difficult, and you may not want to do it, but if it needs to be done, you will have to do it sometime. Why not now?

The bottom line is if you genuinely want to get control of everything going on in your professional and personal life, you need to do the work. Planning, organising and searching for better tools will not do that. They are less than 1% of what it takes. The only thing that worked forty years ago is the same thing that only works today. Doing the work.

I know this may not be what you want to hear. But the reality is the miracle tool does not exist, and if it did, you would soon find yourself out of a job.

The most effective way to become more productive and better at managing our time is to develop processes for doing your work so you become more effective and efficient at doing it. That way, you will get faster, and that, in turn, will leave you less overwhelmed and with more time to do the things you want to do.

Thank you, Alysha, for your question, and thank you too for listening.

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

Monday Jan 08, 2024

Getting Control Of Your tasks Once And For All.

Monday Jan 08, 2024

Are you guilty of attempting to do too much each day? If you are, you may be suffering from something called “hero syndrome”, and it’s not a very productive way to manage your life.

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Script | 306

Welcome to episode 306 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

I remember a few years ago someone commented on a post I had written about only having 24 hours a day. The lady suggested that this was not strictly true because some people had more privileges than others. For instance a CEO might have an army of assistants, or a wealthy individual may have cooks, nannies and butlers in their home to do a lot of the work less privileged people need to do.

I don’t disagree with her. What she pointed out is true. But, no matter who you are, you still only get 24 hours. A CEO is employed to make decisions, meet with key people within the organisation which their army of assistants cannot do for them, and if the wealthy individual wants to sit around all day with nothing to do drinking champagne and canapés, then good luck to them. It’s not a life I would like to live.

The key to becoming more productive and better at managing your time is in how you make the most of your twenty-four hours. Knowing what your essentials are would be the first step, but what else can you do to ensure you are making the most of each day while ensuring you are getting enough rest and relaxation? Well, that’s the subject of this week’s question.

Speaking of which, that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery podcast voice.

This week’s question comes from Richard. Richard asks, hi Carl, I’ve always struggled to get everything I need to do done and when I get home at the end of the day, I’m just too exhausted to do anything but crash on the couch. Do you have any suggestions on better managing my time?

Hi Richard, thank you for your question.

It looks like what you describe is part of the journey to becoming better at managing your time. The first step is to acknowledge that things could be better. Your question suggests you are at that stage.

One thing I would recommend is to do a task audit. What tasks are you trying to complete each day? Are they strictly necessary and if they are, could you group similar tasks together so you develop processes for getting them done.

Let me give you an example.

Most days I cook my own dinner. I also like to do my fair share of the house chores. So, I found a way to group cleaning up the kitchen and dining room while I cook my dinner. At first it felt a little overwhelming—watching my dinner cook while I was cleaning down the fridge or vacuuming the floors, yet today, it’s just something I automatically do. I no longer need to think about what I am doing.

I’ve also taken to sorting out the laundry at the same time now. The laundry room is just off from the kitchen so it just seemed logical to either put a load of washing on or to fold the freshly laundered clothes. Now, I am cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen and dining area and checking the washing.

Now if I put all those tasks onto a task list, it would look ridiculously overwhelming. Yet it isn’t. It’s surprising what you can do in three and 3/4 minutes while you wait for your eggs to boil.

The great thing is, I no longer need any of these chores on my list. When I make dinner, that’s my trigger to do the chores.

Doing a task audit will likely highlight a lot of inefficiencies. I certainly found a lot. The key is to look at different areas of your life and work and to find better ways of doing it.

It will naturally feel strange at first. You’re changing a habit and that’s always hard. Yet, the long-term benefits are huge.

I’m reminded of a story about the former Ferrari Formula 1 Technical Director, Ross Brawn. When he started his own team, Brawn Racing in 2009, he quickly discovered that he didn’t have time to read all the documents and emails he was receiving. One of his team members suggested printing out all the documentation and emails and placing them in a folder he could then read as he was commuting in to work. The commute was one hour each way, so this gave him two hours of reading time each day.

Being self-employed, I generally eat my lunch alone. I use this time for reading articles related to my work. This gives me around forty-five minutes each day for reading.

This way of managing our work is called leveraging time. We cannot change the amount of time we have each day, but we can seek ways to maximise what we do in the time we have.

Wealthy people do this by hiring people to do work for them, we probably do not have that luxury, but we can still leverage our time by being smart about how we use time.

Now, life is not just about doing our employed work. There is a lot more to living life. There’s time spent with the people that matter to us and exercise, for example. Where do we fit all that in when we are already busy?

You mentioned in your question you are “too exhausted” to do anything other than crash on the couch when you get home. Now, unless you are working a job that involves a lot of running around, that tiredness is likely mental tiredness. I would suggest in the evenings you get out and move. Do some form of exercise. This could be taking a walk, or doing a few body-weight exercises for twenty-minutes or so.

I know this will go against every instinct. You’re exhausted and all you want to do is crash. The problem with this is once you stop and slow down your body is not going to want to get up again. This is when you will likely get caught in the cycle of mind numbing scrolling and streaming TV shows. While there is a time for this kind of activity, doing it every day is not going to be healthy for you in the long-term.

Physical activity in whatever form will help to prevent you crashing at the end of the day. It will reduce your stress levels and help you to sleep better. It will also give you what is called a “second-wind” where your energy levels will rise a second time in the day. It will also leave you feeling a lot more positive which in turn will help your relationships because you will be much more engaged in any conversation.

Earlier, I mentioned building processes to help you to maximise your time. I remember discovering processes as the key to becoming much more efficient with the work I do. For instance, I used to get anxious about all the admin tasks that seemed to build up each day. It wasn’t until I realised that admin was a part of life that would never go away that I decided to do something about it. Admin tasks are relentless and never go away. Sure, some days you may not have much, but others you will—I refer you to the tax submission season, for example.

Now, I have a block of one hour each day dedicated to dealing with admin. Most days, I don’t need the full hour, but it’s there if I need it. What this has done is taken the anxiety of not having enough time away. I know I have time. I have up to seven hours a week for it, and that’s more than enough to manage all those little admin tasks.

I do this with email, too. Communication is an inevitable part of your life today. If it’s not emails, it’s text messages. The question is, how much time do you need each day to keep on top of it?

The problem with not having a dedicated time for responding to your messages is you will allow incoming messages to distract you. I recently read that the average person is checking email every six minutes! Wow! How on earth would you ever be able to get any meaningful work done if you were allowing yourself to be distracted that often?

Not just the fact you are being interrupted, it’s also the mental energy required to do that much task switching. If you are doing this, Richard, no wonder you are crashing at the end of the day. Your brain was not designed to work that way.

Here’s the science bit. Our brains work in cycles of 90 minutes—interestingly it does this in sleep as well. You can focus your attention on deep meaningful work for around 90 minutes. After that you will be fatigued and need to rest. Now that rest does not mean you check email or scroll social media, it means you should switch things around. So, you could break your day up into 90 minute segments. Deep work followed by something light and physical. You do not need to do physical activity for 90 minutes, but a ten to twenty minute walk would do wonders for your focus, mental energy and overall feeling of wellbeing. It gets the blood flowing and clears out your brain ready for the next session of work.

One final bit of advice I can give you is to start with what you want time for. Work is generally eight hours of your twenty-four. Aside from work, what do you want time for? Start with that. Build that into your calendar first. The great thing about our employed work is that time is already fixed. Using the tips I’ve shared with help you manage your work there.

So what do you want time for? How much sleep do you need or want? Get these fixed into your daily routine and calendar and build from there. You’ll be much happier and more energetic this way. The only thing you need do then is to experiment, find the right balance and pretty soon all that end of day exhaustion will disappear.

I hope this has helped, Richard, Thank you for sending your question in and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very very productive week.

Monday Jan 01, 2024

The Secret To Sticking With Your New Year Goals: Finding Your Why and Your How.

Monday Jan 01, 2024

Hello and welcome to 2024! And in this episode, I’m answering a question about sticking with your New Year plans.

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Script | 305

Welcome to episode 305 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

So, 2024 is here. A New Year with a lot of potential new opportunities and plans. The challenge you will face (because we all face this challenge) is executing on all the ideas and plans you have for this year without a loss of enthusiasm or energy.

And that will happen because no matter how well you have planned the year, things will not work out as you imagine. Some things will go exactly how you expect them to, but most will not. And that’s the same for everyone. If you deliver all your plans and projects exactly as conceived, you are not ambitious enough to move forward. You’re making things too easy.

So how do you avoid the loss of enthusiasm and energy that you will need to see you through the year? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s question, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for the question.

This week’s question comes from Carrie. Carrie asks, hi Carl, every year I get excited about all the things I want to do, and when it gets to February or March, I lose all my enthusiasm because I haven’t done anything I had planned to do. Do you have any advice on avoiding this?

Hi Carrie, thank you for your question and Happy New Year to you too.

One thing I can tell you straight up is you are not alone. It turns out 92% of those who set New Year goals or resolutions have given up by 16th February. Only 8% manage to achieve some of their goals.

This means we need to learn what those eight percent do that is different from the 92%.

The first thing I discovered about the 8% is they have no more than three goals for the year. And those three are very specific. For example, they may have a financial, a physical and perhaps a career goal. And that’s it.

If we use these as an example, the financial goal is possibly the easiest. Imagine your financial goal is to save $5,000 this year. You can break that down into twelve months and send $417.00 per month to your savings account. On the 31st of December, you will have a little over $5,000 in it.

On a task level, this is a 30-second task once a month where you send the $417.00 to your account.

Now, if your finances are tight, you may have to review what you are spending money on and make some changes to what you spend, but the action to take is just thirty seconds per month.

Physical goals can be a little more complex. Not everyone does exercise to lose weight. Some just want to improve their overall health; others would like to challenge themselves physically by running a marathon or climbing a big mountain. However, whatever the purpose or “what” the goal is, physical goals mean you need to find time for regular exercise. The essence of the goal is to find the time and do the exercise, and that will almost certainly achieve your goal.

The difficulty with these types of goals is the starting point. If you have not exercised for a number of years and are not in great shape, it is going to be hard. This is like pulling a large truck. The hardest part of pulling a truck is the start. When the rope you are attached to takes the strain to get the truck moving, it takes an inordinate amount of strength. However, once the truck begins to move, it gets easier and easier. The difficulty then becomes stopping the truck.

Starting an exercise programme is the same. It’s incredibly hard to begin with. The first session’s never that bad until you wake up the following morning. When you step out of bed, your muscles scream out in pain, and you’ll wonder how on earth you will be able to repeat your exercise again today.

The thing is, getting fit and staying fit is the same. It’s all about turning up and doing the exercise. But it doesn’t have to be the same exercise each day. Jog one day, walk the next. Then perhaps go for a swim or do some light weights in the gym on other days. Fitness is all about movement, so find time each day for movement.

What I’ve discovered about fitness is that it’s all about routine. It needs to be built into your day, and the time of day you do it needs to work for you. Once it becomes a routine and you get through the first fourteen days, it becomes much easier, and there’s rarely any muscle soreness (and when you do get sore, you feel a sense of achievement because you know you had a good session the day before).

What about a career goal? This is likely to be the most complex of goals. There are likely to be multiple different parts to it. Skills acquisition, experience and time are all involved. So, finding out what skills you need to move up the corporate ladder would be one task. Arranging a meeting with your boss or HR to discuss your goal would be a first step.

Once you know what you need to do, you can then formulate a plan to make it happen. If you need to go back to school, then you can research how best to do that. Then you will need to find the time to study. Again, like exercise, this needs to be scheduled. You won’t achieve educational goals by winging it. You need to set aside dedicated time for studying.

A number of my coaching clients have dedicated days for learning. Two of my clients use the weekends for studying and taking courses or having coaching sessions. Saturday mornings seem to be the most common time for this, but it will depend on your own schedule.

Just one piece of advice here, avoid Sunday nights. These are not the best times for studying. You’ll be distracted by what you have to do next week and likely be tired from all your social activities. The thought of sitting down to study after an eventful weekend would be off-putting for most.

Ultimately, if you want to successfully achieve your goals in 2024, then you will need to establish some habits and routines. This does not need to be overwhelming. You can do as much or as little as you feel capable of. For example, if you plan to read twenty-five books in 2024, that’s one book every two weeks. If you spent an average of forty-five minutes reading each day, you would easily accomplish that goal. This means the only question you need to answer is, when? When will you do your reading?

Perhaps you could include this as part of your morning routine, or instead of watching TV late at night, you read a book.

I will confess that in the last six months, I have spent far too much time watching TV in the evenings. In 2024, instead of watching TV, I intend to read. I have already prepared a comfortable corner to read. It’s a place Louis, my little dog, likes to cuddle up to me in the evenings, and I’m already looking forward to it.

I will still watch TV. However, I have created a list of TV shows and YouTube videos to watch, and I have allocated Saturday evenings to TV watching. If I find I have the urge to watch something, I will add it to the list, and then on Saturday, I can open the list and choose from that list.

What about daily and weekly planning? This is something that will bring you so many rewards. Having a plan for the week is a no-brainer for me. I know what happens when I don’t have a plan. The week goes south very quickly and then I am in overwhelm territory just trying to keep up with silly little things.

When I have a plan for the week, I am more focused. The right things get done, and I have the mental space to deal with the unknowns and urgencies of others without losing focus.

This is something I would recommend to everyone. Make it a habit in 2024 to do both the weekly and daily planning sessions. This one habit will do so much for you when it comes to achieving your goals in 2024.

One thing I must stress, though, is to keep your list of goals as short as you can. Two or three goals is about the right number. Any more than that, and you will be overwhelmed and unable to stay focused on what needs to be done.

Remember, we are all a work in progress. You do not have to change everything in twelve months. Pick the two or three things that are most on your mind right now.

I neglected my fitness in 2023, and regaining my fitness is my number one goal in 2024. Today, I will be heading out for a run, no matter what the weather is. It’s the first day of the year, and it’s not about how well or far I run; it’s about re-establishing the habit of exercising each day. Get the 1st of January in the bag, and tomorrow I can do a few push-ups or go for a long walk.

My goal in January is to do some form of exercise every day. I’m not worried about February right now. If I get through January having done exercise on 25 or more days, that’s a result I will accept. It’s not perfect, but it’s 25 days of exercise—that’s something to celebrate! I can then decide what I will do in February to maintain my momentum.

And that’s what setting and achieving goals is all about. You are not going to be perfect every day or week. But that does not mean you failed. It just means you had a bad day. You can pick it back up the next day or week. It’s not what you achieve in one day; it’s what you have accomplished over 365 days. (Or 366 days this year)

So there you go, Carrie. Keep your list of goals short, and look for habits and routines you can build so that the action you need to take becomes automatic. And remember, just because you had a bad day or week doesn’t mean you failed. You can pick yourself up at any time and get moving again.

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 2024.

Monday Dec 18, 2023

Building A Productive Retirement.

Monday Dec 18, 2023

In this week’s episode, how can you stay motivated and productive in retirement?

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Script | 304

Hello, and welcome to episode 304 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.

We often think time management and productivity are the realms of students and busy people trying to maintain a growing career and balance a growing family. The truth is once we begin making decisions for ourselves, how we use our time becomes a deciding factor in what we do each day.

This means once we leave the workforce and take full responsibility for what we do each day, managing our time becomes even more important. If you think about it, when we are in work, there’s often a time we need to be in the office, an array of meetings and deadlines for projects that need to be completed. These deadlines and commitments are often given to us by our bosses and customers.

Once you retire, those deadlines are no longer handed out by bosses and customers. Now you have complete control over what you do each day. You can go to bed and wake up whenever you like; you no longer need to wait for the weekends or evenings to meet up with friends, and all those activities you promised yourself you would do once you retire can now be done.

Just because you are retired and no longer working does not mean you no longer need to worry about how you manage your time. In many ways, now you have complete control over what you do each day time management and productivity practices are more important than ever.

And that neatly leads me to this week’s question, and to give you the question it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.

This week’s question comes from Kai Yee. Kai Yee asks: Hi Carl, how would you suggest a person apply your systems after they have retired?

Hi Kai Yee, thank you for your question.

One of the things I’ve learned is that no matter where you are in life, there will always be things to do. In many ways, when you are working, managing your time is much easier because your work gives you structure to your day. You have a time to wake up, a regular place to be at a set time each day and a finish time.

When you retire, that structure disappears, and it can be disorientating. You no longer need to wake up to be somewhere at a given time, and without a plan or a reason to get up, time will disappear incredibly fast.

So the first thing you should do is to give yourself a solid structure which means bringing your calendar into play.

What do you want time for each day? You could begin with your wake-up and going-to-sleep times. Get these fixed into your calendar. If I were in the fortunate position to retire today, I would set my wake-up time at 8:30 am and bedtime at 1:00 am. I love the quiet between 11 and 1 am, and I get a lot of reading or learning done at that time. Your wake-up and going to bed times will act as the bookends for your day.

One of the most important things you can do when you retire is to find time each day for exercise. And as I have mentioned before, exercise does not necessarily mean going to the gym or out for a run. All it means is movement.

When you don’t have any commitments for the day, it can be tempting to wake up, make your morning beverage sit down and not do anything all day. Time will just slip away.

I experience this frequently when I head over to Ireland for the Christmas holidays. I don’t have a structure, so after waking up, I will make coffee, sit down and read the news or scroll social media and before I know it, it’s lunchtime, and I haven’t done anything. To overcome this, I give myself some structure.

This year, for example, my wife and I have decided we will go out for a morning run as soon as the sun comes up. The act of getting into our running gear, going out for thirty to forty minutes, coming back and preparing for the day will give us structure and ensure we don’t gain too much weight over the holidays.

What is your preferred way to get some movement into your day? That could be going out for a walk or a bike ride. It could mean you go to a gym or an exercise class. Or perhaps you do some resistance band exercises. Maintaining your mobility is going to be very important, and that means you can use movement and exercise as part of your daily structure.

What else would you like time for each day? Perhaps there will be things that don’t necessarily need to be done daily but weekly. Get these into your calendar. All of these things are going to give you structure.

There are a number of things that will always form a part of your life. Movement, eating, sleeping, learning, hobbies and socialising. All these are important. The question is, where will you put them into your calendar?

One thing I noticed with my parents, who are both retired, is they still have tasks to do. My father, for instance, has maintained his love of animals and still runs a small farm, not for profit, but to give him something he enjoys doing. Waking up and going out to feed the animals is all a part of his structure, but each week he needs to go and buy feed and do maintenance tasks around his small farm. Repairing fences, fixing leaking roofs and cleaning up are always on his list of things to do.

It’s easy to imagine that once you retire, you no longer need to keep up with your calendar or task list. Would it be that simple? Just because you stop working, it doesn’t mean there in nothing to do. In reality, while some things will drop off your lists, other things will replace them.

I know a lot of people say when they retire, they will redecorate their home and do up the garden (back yard if you live across the pond), yet when the time arrives, nothing happens. It all seems overwhelming. Yet, if you set about planning out your projects and making sure your areas of focus remain the central part of your life, you will have the structure to ensure these things happen. This means you will still need a way to manage all those tasks and appointments.

Always remember, the work won’t get done unless you do the work.

In many ways, the biggest challenge you will face is no longer having someone to keep you accountable for your projects. Instead of a boss or customers expecting things from you, the only person holding you accountable is going to be you, and that can be hard. This is why building structure into your days is going to be so important.

What time will you begin the day? What kind of things will you do in the morning? When will you eat? What time will you finish t the day?

There are a lot of questions you can ask yourself that will help you to build some structure into your day. As with when you were working, consistency and a structured plan are going to ensure the right things are getting done each day.

When you finally finish your working life, it doesn’t mean life ends. In fact, a lot of what you likely planned to do in life will suddenly become doable. You have the time and, hopefully, the financial resources to do those things. The only question you need to answer is when? When will you do those things? Once you know when you can then go about working on the how. How will you do them?

All of these questions are no different from when you were in full-time employment.

It’s easy to believe when you retire, things will change. And sure, they do change, but you will still have stuff to do. That will never change.

So, if you want to get the most out of your retirement, make a plan. Begin at the year level; what would you like to do this year (or perhaps next year now, given that it’s only a couple of weeks away)? Think in terms of projects you want to complete and places you want to visit. Once you have that list, create four boxes, each representing a quarter. Then spread out these projects and activities you want to do across those quarters.

For instance, if you want to work on your garden, perhaps Q2 and Q3 would be the best quarters for that activity. What about the places you want to travel to? When will you do your travelling? And finally, for the winter quarters (Q1 and Q4), what activities could you do in those months?

Having a mapped-out year will give you a sense of purpose. It will give you structure, and it will prevent you from procrastinating.

Procrastination is going to be the biggest challenge you face. You have all this apparent time, no boss shouting at you, and no customers waiting for you. It’s all on you, and without that accountability, you will suffer. Make sure you build it into your day.

So there you go, Kai Yee, just because you are retired, it does not mean you don’t need to maintain your activities. In many ways, it can be harder to motivate yourself. However, with a bit of planning, being clear about what you want and know what needs to be done each day, you will soon find yourself moving towards a healthy, happy and fulfilling retirement,

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

Monday Dec 11, 2023

Weathering the Storm: Practical Tips for Handling Disruptions

Monday Dec 11, 2023

I and many other people in the productivity world talk a lot about planning your day. However, what happens when your plans are frequently destroyed by other people?

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Episode 303 \ Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 303 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.

As the Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote “The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley”. “Gang aft agley” can be translated as go awry. This means that no matter how well you plan your day or week, things are not going to go according to plan. Similarly, one of my favourite quotes that is often attributed to Mike Tyson is, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face.” And it’s so true.

One of the reasons so few people actually do a daily or weekly plan is because they believe that no matter what they plan, it is going to be torpedoed once they begin the day. A simple text message or email can derail the whole day. Yet, I still believe it is important to have a plan. Without a plan, you will be waiting for others to give you something to do. You will feel lost and never get anything important to you done, and you are guaranteed to build horrendous backlogs.

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

This week’s question comes from Sasha. Sasha asks, Hi Carl, what tips do you have for me to harden my system so that it doesn't constantly wobble when life experiences significant deviations outside of the planned week?

Hi Sasha, thank you for your question.

Now, I know there is a little more background to your question. Specifically, managing two young children and both yourself and your wife working full time.

So with that in mind the first problem people face is with being too structured. What I mean by this is being too specific about what you want to get done each day. Most of the things we want to get done around the house do not really need to be done on a specific day. For instance, I like to give my home office a really good clean on a Saturday morning, but more often than not something will come up that prevents me from being able to do that.

Now if I want to follow my calendar religiously, it would annoy me if I was prevented from doing what I had planned, but really, does my office need a good clean specifically on a Saturday morning? No of course not. It would be nice, but it really doesn’t matter if I do it on Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. The only thing that really matters is at some point in the week I do it. (But even then that is debatable).

This problem can be exacerbated if you have young kids. With kids under the age of 13, there’s no way you will be able to maintain a well structured home. Kids were born with the natural ability to destroy all well intentioned plans. And that’s fantastic. It’s all part of the experience of raising children. If it didn’t happen, you’d miss out on one of life’s joys.

I can promise you on the day your kids turn 13 you will miss all that disruption. Your kids are going to go from being entirely dependent on you to wanting to have nothing to do with you as they go through adolescence.

For most of you, I hope, your family comes first. This means if you get irritated because a family member ungently, and unexpectedly, needs you you should be happy. It might be inconvenient, but family comes first. There’s no debate. If there is a debate, then perhaps family (or this particular family member) is not really your number one.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is as soon as you involve another living creature in your plans, you are going to need to be flexible. My wife, for example, has no concept of time when it comes to family plans. She’s spot on with her time when it comes to friends or strangers, but when it comes to her family, her buffer is two or three hours. I remember not long after being married I used to have to lie to her about when we needed to be at the airport. If check in time was at 9:00am I would tell her it was 8:00am. This meant we were able to build buffer time into our plans. Today, she’s much better—I must have coached her well, but it did take ten years to get her to that state.

And there will always be the unexpected. As you say, kids get sick and that changes everything.

Now, as you both work, what contingency plans do you have in place for when a child cannot go to school or daycare centre? This is critical because you cannot plan for a child being sick. This is contingency planning and as soon as the decision to keep you child at home, what needs to happen? Do you call your parents and ask them to take care of your child, or does one of you need to stay at home? Ensuring your contingency plan is in place and ready to roll should the unexpected happen will save you a lot of stress and panic.

Now the question arises; what do you do with all the work you had planned to do when the unexpected takes over your day? Well, if you are planning for the week, all it means is you reschedule what you wanted to do to some other time in the week. It’s likely you will have a few days to reschedule things over and you may be able to renegotiate some of your commitments.

A few years ago we had a family emergency that became apparent at 7:30am. I had a full day of work planned, yet this was family and I immediately took action to deal with the emergency. This essentially destroyed my plan for the day and the repercussions continued into the next day. However, I was able to sit down for ten minutes later in the afternoon and I messaged my appointments scheduled for the next day to tell them I was going to be unable to attend. I was then able to get back to the emergency.

The most important thing is you deal with the issue in front of you first and once everything is back under control, you can review what you have on your plate and reschedule where necessary.

Life is never going to be a straight line and no matter how well planned you are, things are going to go wrong. In a previous episode I spoke with Simon Jeffries, former UK Special Forces officer and Simon mentioned about when in the special forces you know before you begin things are not going to go according to plan. However, the important thing is to know precisely what you objective is and you stay focused on accomplishing that. Special forces soldiers do consider everything that could go wrong and what they would do in those situations, but the most important thing is they keep their eye on the objective.

If you have ever seen the news footage of the the British SAS storming the Iranian Embassy in 1980, you may have seen one of the SAS soldiers getting caught in the rope he was descending on. His colleagues did their best to cut him down, but the mission still went on. They dealt with the emergency quickly and as efficiently as possible then got straight back to doing what they had planned to do.

It’s this approach we want to be bringing to our lives too. Things are not going to go according to plan. However, when you are clear about what must be done that day, you put yourself in a much stronger position because you are more focused and disruptions will just bounce off you.

Now you don’t want to be setting yourself too many objectives. I only set myself one or two. I know that I will get those done 99% of the time. Yesterday was a very disrupted day, yet I had two things to complete. I needed to go to the bank and record and edit my YouTube video. My wife woke up feeling rather unwell, so I took her to the doctors. While she was there I realised I could call in to the bank, so I did that (there’s long queues at this time of the year to see a doctor). Once done at the bank, I picked my wife up from the doctors.

I had to go to the pharmacy to get her prescription once I’d got her home and tucked up in bed. After a short sleep, my wife was feeling a lot better, so I was able to pick up the video recording and editing. There are other things on my list for the day, and a few of those I needed to reschedule, but when I finished for the day, I was surprised how much I’d actually got done.

The important thing is not to panic. Accept the disruption for what it is, a disruption that needs to be dealt with then move back onto your objectives. Things will always calm down and return to normal, so there really is no need to panic. If meetings need to be postponed or cancelled, get on and do it as soon as you can. If planned work needs to be rescheduled, then do that. Just don’t overthink things.

The great thing about having a plan for the week (because you did a weekly planning session) you have a plan to get back on to. This means no matter what disruptions that come your way, you only need a few minutes to review your plan and decide what still must be done and what can be renegotiated.

In worst case scenarios, you may feel the need to do a weekly planning session to get yourself back on track. That’s okay. Sometimes that’s the wisest thing to. I think over the last year, I’ve had to do that once or twice. It’s not something you will need to do often, but if you feel that’s the only way you will get back on track, then by all means do it. You’ll feel a lot better and much more focused.

I hope that helps, Sasha. Thank you so much for your question.

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

Monday Dec 04, 2023

Surviving the End Of Year Overwhelm Storm: Your Resilience Toolkit

Monday Dec 04, 2023

This week, what to do when your day, or week, turns sour and you’re left feeling overwhelmed and stressed out.

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