Your Time, Your Way

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

Script | 327

Hello, and welcome to episode 327 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Jun 10, 2024

Managing Competing Demands and Other Deadlines.

Monday Jun 10, 2024

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

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Script | 326

Hello, and welcome to episode 326 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Max, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best thing you can do is plan for them.

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

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

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

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

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

The key is consistency. Be consistent with your constants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Jun 03, 2024

The Subtle Art Of Slowing Down

Monday Jun 03, 2024

This week, it’s time to slow down.

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Script | 325

Hello, and welcome to episode 325 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi John, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

So what can you do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday May 20, 2024

How To Easily Build Your Own Productivity System

Monday May 20, 2024

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

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Script | 324

Hello, and welcome to episode 324 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Frank, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

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

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

What does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, what about all your old stuff?

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

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

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

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

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

Monday May 13, 2024

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

Monday May 13, 2024

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

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Script | 323

Hello, and welcome to episode 323 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Keith, thank you for your question.

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

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

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

Let’s step back a little first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday May 06, 2024

Task-Based -Vs- Time-Based Productivity

Monday May 06, 2024

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

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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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