Your Time, Your Way

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Hello, and welcome to episode 296 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading, watching and studying time management and productivity strategies and practices. And while a lot of what I’ve read rarely works in the real world, there are many that do and most of these are time tested and have been around for a long time.

For example, use a calendar. People have carried around calendars for decades—well before the digital age. It’s logical when you think about it. Have a single source that tells you where you need to be and when and make sure you carry that with you everywhere you go.

Of course, being humans and having a natural instinct to over-complicate things, digital calendars are now trying to do everything for us and as a result they have become less helpful. Cramming your day full of appointments and tasks you don’t really need to do, has made the calendar a place few people enjoy going to anymore. What’s worse is delegating responsibility for your time to other people by allowing them to schedule appointments for you. Gee why did it go so wrong?

There is one time management and productivity practice that technology has so far been unable to influence. It’s the one skill that the most productive people have mastered above everything else and if you are not skilled and confident enough to do it, you will never be productive and worse, ever be successful in your work.

However, before we get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, Hi Carl, I’ve always wanted to ask you what you consider to be the critical skill needed to be good at managing time and being productive?

Hi Greg, thank you for your question.

That’s something I’ve spent years trying to figure out, and there is one skill I have noticed in all incredibly productive people that very few people seem to possess.

That’s the ability to make decisions quickly.

You see, if you want to be more productive and less overwhelmed by what you have to do, quickly (and confidently) deciding what to work on right now is the only thing you can do.

Naturally, executing on that decision is the next important thing, but you first need to make a decision about what you will do right now. Writing this script at this moment was a decision I made twenty minutes ago, and writing it was the execution of that decision.

There are a multiple other things I could be doing right now—walking my dog, going to the gym, taking a nap, responding to my email etc. But I made the decision to sit down and write this script. It’s got to be done sometime, right? Why not now? (Although asking for an excuse why you should not be doing something is probably the wrong question to ask)

The time it took me to make that decision and begin writing was perhaps three seconds. And that is how productive people become productive. They make a decision and execute immediately.

What will hold you back and prevent you from being productive is being unable to make a decision about what to do now.

So, if you asked what skill you could develop that would radically improve your time management and productivity skills, I would say become better at making decisions.

But it is a bit more than that. You see, making decisions is something you will already be able to do. Even the most indecisive people make decisions. What time you rolled out of bed this morning was a decision, what you ate for breakfast was a decision. We are making decisions all the time.

However, the skill you need to develop is the skill of confidently making decisions. Writing this script was a confident decision. I have around twenty actionable emails sitting in my Action This Day folder, I have four unread messages in my messaging app and fifteen tasks to do in my task manager. But I am writing this right now. That’s because I am confident that writing this is the best use of my time, currently.

Everything else I have to do today can wait. Most of it will get done, some of it won’t and I am comfortable with that.

That’s the state you want to be training yourself to be in. And I use the work “training” intentionally.

Your brain has a natural tendency to overthink things. It has no sense of past, present or future. So as far as your brain is concerned, everything must be done right now. That’s why it’s important to get everything on your mind out of your mind and into an external place. A task manager or notes app or a piece of paper. It’s there where you can make the right choices about what to work on next.

But how do you make the right choices?

That begins with your Areas of Focus and core work. Knowing what these mean to you is a brilliant way to pre-decide what to work on next.

Your areas of focus shows you your priorities based on the eight areas of life we all have in common. Things like your finances, family and relationships, career and purpose. When you know what these areas mean to you, decisions based on what to do next become obvious.

For instance, if a client wants to have a dinner meeting with you on Wednesday and that’s your wedding anniversary and you’ve promised to take your partner out for dinner what do you do? If you prioritise your career above your family and relationships, then you will have dinner with your client. You may not want to admit that, but if you make that choice, that’s effectively what has happened. Your career is more important than your family and relationships.

However, if your family and relationships are more important than your career, you ask your client if you can have dinner on an alternative night, or if they are only in town for one day, perhaps you can have lunch or a coffee in the afternoon.

Knowing your core work works in the same way. Your core work is the work you are employed to do. That does not mean extra meetings, chatting with your colleague about next week’s off site event or reorganising your documents and emails.

Core work requires time and that’s why it’s important that before the week begins you have the time blocked out for doing your core work. No excuses. get that time protected. Once it’s protected, you now have less decisions to make. If you should be finishing off a client proposal and you are asked to join meeting about next quarter’s targets, you don’t go to the meeting, you write the client proposal. The proposal writing is your core work, the meeting is not. You can always ask a colleague to give you a copy of their notes.

If you observe the most productive people, you will notice they know what is important and are obsessively focused on getting the important stuff done. They don’t become distracted by trivialities such as email and Teams or Slack messages when they are working on their important tasks for that day.

Those decisions are made before the day begins. Which is why planning the day becomes a critical part of your end of day routine. Plan the day before you finish the previous day and you will sleep better (always good for being productive) will be a lot less stressed and much more focused.

So, the way to become better at managing your time and being more productive is to know what is important and what is not. What can wait and what needs dealing with immediately. And the easiest way to determine that is to know what your areas of focus and core work are.

That means you do need to allow some time to work on your areas of focus and core work. This is what I call the backend work. Spend a couple of weekends determining these areas of your life and the time investment you make will reward you massively later.

The issue I find is the people who most need to do this, are the ones who make the excuse they are too busy to do it. It seems like a luxury they cannot afford to do because they have too much to do already.

But why do you have too much to do? That’s because you don’t know what is important and what is not which means everything’s important. and when everything’s important, nothing is. And now you’re stuck in a vicious cycle that can only be broken if you stop, step back and work on your areas of focus and core work.

Now, the good news is that we have entered the annual planning season. The three months before the start of a new year. If you want to go into 2024 with a focus, a lot less stress and a determination to move your goals and projects forward, use the remaining days of 2023 to build out your areas of focus and core work.

Work out what tasks you need to do to keep these areas in balance, get them into your task manager and set them to repeat as often as they need to be repeated. This will give you consistency and when you get consistent with something you can refine and develop processes for getting this work done without much effort at all.

Ultimately, it will come down to how effective your processes are. With a process you can improve and refine them so you become faster at doing them. I have a process for doing my daily admin. Six years ago when I began doing my daily admin, it took me around an hour and half to do the tasks. Today, I can do the same tasks in the same order in less than twenty minutes. That has only happened because I have consistently done the work and refined the process for doing the work.

So there you go, Greg. Those are the critical skills. The most important one of all, though is making decisions quickly and confidently and anyone can learn to do that. All it takes is a little bit of practice.

I hope that has helped. 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 Oct 16, 2023

How To Be More Efficiently Productive.

Monday Oct 16, 2023

This week, what’s holding you back from becoming better at managing your time and ultimately being more productive?

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Hello, and welcome to episode 295 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

A lot of getting better with your time management and being more productive is finding ways to do your work more effectively and quicker. I was reminded of that last weekend when the McLaren Formula One team broke the world record for a pit stop. They managed to change four tired in 1.8 seconds. Think about that for a moment. In the time it takes you to pick up your coffee cup, take a sip and put it back on the table, the McLaren pitstop crew will have taken four tires off and put four new ones on.

How did they do that? Well, it’s more than just practising. Of course, practising will play a large part in it, but it will start with someone breaking down the process and looking for better and faster ways to do each part.

Now, how much of the work you do is similar in nature? My guess is it will be 80 to 90%. You may not think so, but if you are a salesperson, there is a process to selling. If you are a doctor, there is a process for diagnosing a patient, and if you are a designer, there will be a process you follow to create your designs.

Now, each customer, patient and design will be different, but how you begin and do your work will be the same steps.

It’s here where you will discover ways to do your work more efficiently, and that leads to you having more time for other things and giving you a wealth of information you can use to make your processes better and faster. That’s how McLaren broke the world pitstop record, and it’s how you can save yourself a lot more time.

Now, before I get into the details, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, hi Carl, I’ve been following you for a long time now, and I’ve always wanted to ask you, how do you become more efficient at getting your work done?

Hi Ryan, Thank you for your question.

One of the things I’ve always found fascinating is observing how skilled, productive people get their work done. That could be an author, a bricklayer or a Formula One Mechanic. There’s an art to doing our work; it’s how we become better and how we master the skills we have.

I feel so fortunate that I have been able to work for large and small companies. To watch brilliant people do their work. I remember working in a very fancy restaurant many years ago as the bar manager, and each day, I got to see one of the UK’s top chefs do his work. The food he created was exquisite, and how he created it was simply brilliant.

I got to see how he chose ingredients, how he experimented with ideas and how he designed the food he served to customers. It was an obsessive attention to detail, breaking down the ingredients, creating the recipes and workflows to cooking the food and ensuring the standards were always maintained.

Three or four times a year, he would change the menus, and the process (there’s that word again) of changing the menus was followed each time. He learned the process from his mentor, and he passed it on to the chefs he was mentoring.

One thing I noticed was none of them ever considered it as a project. It was simply a process. When the season began to change, there was a week when the kitchen team disappeared in the afternoons and tested, experimented and appeared to have a lot of fun. It was hard work; these chefs were starting early and finishing late, but at the end of the week, there was a finished new menu.

Today, I will consume as many videos and articles as I can find on how successful people do their work. These people are successful because of what they do, and I want to know how they do it. How did they learn their skills, and more importantly, what do they do each day to master their skills?

So, Ryan, a lot of my ideas have come from other people.

One thing that stands out about highly efficient people is they are incredibly strict about how they use their time. They say “no” far more than “yes”, and rather than accept a meeting request, will challenge the host to justify their presence (even if it’s their boss) Most people will not do that. They are afraid to challenge and question. There seems to be a preference to complain rather than take action.

This is about knowing the value of your time. This was probably the hardest thing to learn. Once you know the value of your time and that one day, you will no longer have any time left, you start to realise all those yeses need to mean something important.

The most productive people I have learned about, both historical and contemporary, have something in common. They value their solitude. They will lock themselves away for several hours a day to do their work without distractions. I found it interesting that Jeffrey Archer, the author, will not have a phone or computer in his writing room. He writes by hand. Similarly, John Grisham’s writing room has no internet or telephone. The thinking is writing time is sacred, and nothing should be allowed to interrupt that.

How could you better protect your time? You don’t have to be extreme. You only need to find an hour or two each day. Could you do that?

However, one other way I can improve the way I work is not to be afraid to experiment. It’s through experimentation that I learn what works and what does not.

My email process was developed ten years ago. I was getting thirty to fifty emails a day, and it was becoming overwhelming. I needed a better way to manage it all. So, I did some research, tested a few different approaches, and eventually, Inbox Zero 2.0 was born. It’s simple, fast and has meant email is never overwhelming. Today, I get around 120 to 150 emails a day, and it’s never a problem.

But that did not happen overnight. It took many months of practice, evolution and adjustments. It also meant I had to stick to a single email app. The only way this would work is the tools I used needed to be consistent.

Think about it for a moment: would McLaren have been able to break the world record for pitstops if they were constantly changing the equipment? No chance. The wheel gun operator knows their wheel gun intimately. They’ve used it thousands of times, and they have a feel for it. They know how to micro-adjust it so it hits the mark perfectly.

This is the same thing with your tools. You need to get a “feel” for them. To understand them inside out so when things go wrong, and they will go wrong, you can fix the problem in minutes instead of wasting a whole day searching around on YouTube or Google trying to figure out how to fix the problem.

Ultimately, it all comes back to processes. As I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of what you day at work will be a process, not a project. The key is to find that process, externalise it by writing out the steps and then looking at each one to see where you can do it better.

One key part of this is timing. For me, I am at my most creative in the mornings. I’ve tried doing creative work in the afternoons and struggled. I also find I am creative in the evenings too. Armed with this information, has meant I can structure my day to optimise my effectiveness.

It turns out most people are at their most creative in the mornings; it’s when your brain is at its freshest. So, spending all morning dealing with email and sitting in meetings is such a waste of your creative energy. Far better to push meetings and email writing until the afternoons when that little extra stimulation from other people can help you push through the afternoon slump.

And then there are the three unsung heroes of productivity—sleep, diet and movement. If you think you are going to be productive on two and a half hours of sleep, you’re fooling yourself. You will not be. Likewise, if your lunches are a feat of carbohydrates, you’ve just destroyed your afternoon. You’ll spend all afternoon struggling to keep your eyes open. And if you rarely move from your seat, all your blood will drain to your feet, and you’ll run out of creative energy. (Not really, but it will feel like that).

You need enough sleep, a low-carbohydrate diet and movement. Even walking up the stairs once or twice between sessions of work will do wonders for your productivity. You don’t need to go to the gym or out for a run. You just need to move.

And that’s really about it, Ryan. A willingness to experiment, defaulting to finding the process rather than thinking everything is a project. Figuring out where I can make those processes more efficient and making sure I know the tools I use inside out.

Everything productive people do is doable by you. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. Avoiding distractions, protecting your time and getting very good at saying “no”.

Plus, understanding your own biorhythms. When are you at your most productive, and when not? Then, structure your day around your most focused times. Make it easy for yourself rather than fighting between wanting to check Instagram and doing the focused work you know you need to do.

And trust me, if you take a stand on your time and challenge people to justify “stealing” your time, they will fall into line—even your boss!

I hope that helps, Ryan 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 Oct 09, 2023

How To Manage The Unknowns.

Monday Oct 09, 2023

This week’s question is all about managing the unknown “urgencies” that will come up each day.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Hello, and welcome to episode 294 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

How often are your planned days destroyed by something you never even considered when you began your day? It’s likely to be frequent. That’s just the nature of life. It’s always been that way, and it always will be that way. It’s something we need to work with, though, and to develop ways to overcome the worst effects of these unknowns.

That’s one of the reasons why the Time Sector System can be so powerful. If you set things up—knowing what your areas of focus and core work are, then you have a built-in prioritisation method that will help you to sort the important urgencies from the less important ones.

I have to be honest. I have never worked in a job where everything was predictable. There has never been a day where nothing unexpected happened. Take today as an example. When I began the day, I had four hours of meetings booked in the morning and three hours in the evening. By the time I had completed my morning routines, half of those morning meetings had been cancelled.

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

This week’s question comes from Alex. Alex asks, Hi Carl, I like the idea of the Time Sector System, but the bit I am not sure about is how you deal with all the unknown tasks that need to be done in a given week. What do you do with those tasks?

Hi Alex, thank you for your question.

This has always been an issue for people since the first humans evolved many hundreds of thousands of years ago. After a night’s rest, we would wake up with the plan to find food. If, during the night, you were surrounded by some hungry predators, your focus at that moment was no longer on finding food but on finding safety. Your survival instincts kicked in and overrode your hunger instincts.

Today, while things are no longer as black and white, we are still facing similar dilemmas. Now, instead of a choice between food and safety, we are faced with a choice between writing the report that needs to be finished tomorrow or dealing with our boss’s demand for an update on a project you are working on.

Or, as in the case of a client of mine attending a meeting or dealing with a flat tire she just discovered.

It’s very rare for your day to go according to plan, yet I would still recommend you make a plan.

Making a plan is less about what you intend to do and more about setting the direction for the day. For example, one of my tasks today is to write this podcast script. It would be fantastic if I were able to finish it in a single day, but the chances of that happening are slim. However, if I can make a start on it and get, say, 30 or 40% of it written before the day’s end, that would be good enough. I would be happy with the outcome.

The Time Sector system is about setting yourself realistic expectations about what can be accomplished in the week. It’s about identifying what is really important and being able to recognise when something that appears important is not really important at all. Once you know what is important, you very quickly learn what is not and can either ignore it or delegate it.

Let’s imagine you have decided that anything your boss asks you to do on top of the work you are employed to do is urgent and important; then what you have decided is to allow yourself to be overwhelmed and stressed. There’s a limit to what you can do each day and week. If you prioritise the unknown over the known, you’ve just set yourself up for a very stressful life.

The Time Sector System teaches you to quickly identify what is important so that when something does come across your desk (or through Teams or email), you can identify whether it needs your attention right now or can wait until another day.

I saw that someone had written on a discussion board that the Time Sector System doesn’t work because it does not allow for sudden tasks coming in. That’s not an accurate assessment of what the Time Sector System is. What is an accurate description is you prioritise the important so that when something new does come in, you can make a qualified decision based on what you have identified as being important that week.

Right now, my accountant is drawing up my annual accounts. Each day, she sends me requests for further information, which I need to action that same day. I have no idea what she will ask me for; all I know is there will be something requested. There’s no point in me scheduling time each day for this, as sometimes it may only require ten minutes; other times, it could require an hour to find the information. However, when a request comes in, I measure its importance against what else I have planned for the day and can decide whether I need to reschedule something or work a little longer that day.

The important thing is I know what I want to and need to do that day before I begin the day. If I have sudden urgent requests to deal with, then great, I can decide that is where I will apply my time that day.

Whether you use the Time Sector System or not, you will still need to deal with a lot of unknowns. These are a part of life and always will be. Having a method or a strategy for handling these is a critical step to becoming more productive.

It’s also important to ensure you have a solid collecting system. Many things will come at you today while you are working on something important or are with a customer. You are not going to be able to stop and deal with that immediately, so you should be collecting it somewhere where you can assess its importance when you finish what you are doing.

However, before you can accurately assess what is important, you need to know what important looks like. This is why there are two critical preliminary parts to creating a solid productivity system. That is to identify and define what your areas of focus are—while we all share the same eight areas, how we define these will be different for all of us. Equally, the action steps we need to take to keep these in balance will also be different. The second part is to define what your core work is—the work you are employed to do.

If you want to learn how to define and develop your areas of focus, you can download the FREE Areas Of Focus Workbook from my website’s downloads page. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes

If you skip working on these two parts, everything that comes at you will be considered important. You have no frame of reference to determine what is critical and what is not. This means a demand from a boss or client will be very loud, and you’ll panic and rush to get whatever you are being asked to do done instead of pausing and assessing whether it is important or not.

Now, if you have decided dealing with any request from your boss or customers is part of your core work, then fine. You made that decision, and when a demand comes in, you deal with it. However, for the most part, requests from customers and bosses are not always going to be “urgent”; they can wait until you have finished whatever it is you are doing or what is the most important thing that needs doing right now.

Another reason why you should be pausing and not rushing to deal with demands as they come in is you miss the opportunity to chunk similar tasks together. Chunking (or grouping) similar tasks is one of the most effective and efficient ways to deal with your work. It prevents context switching—which is very draining on your mental energy—and because you are working on similar tasks at the same time, you will be more focused.

A good example of this is managing messages. It’s accepted that going in and out of your email and Teams inbox all day is not a very effective strategy if you want to get important work done. It’s why one of the best new features in the last ten years or so has been the ability to turn on Do Not Disturb so you can focus on the work in front of you instead of being inundated with notifications and distracted.

How often do you use this feature?

Managing email and messages should be broken down into two parts. The processing—where you decide what something is and what needs to be done with it—and the doing, where you deal with all your actionable messages.

Processing can be done anytime, although I recommend you do this in between sessions of work. For example, when in a meeting, you turn on Do Not Disturb so you can focus on the meeting. Once the meeting ends, you can open up your mail and messages and move anything actionable into an Action this Day folder.

Then, later in the day—as late in the day as you feel comfortable with, you set aside time to focus on dealing with those messages. I’ve found that those who do this are more focused and less stressed. Those that don’t are not.

At it’s very basic, Alex; you collect throughout the day, then before you finish, you go through what you collected and decide what needs to be done and when you will do it. If it needs to be done this week, then you can decide when you will do it based on the other work you have and what your calendar tells you about how much time you have available. If you are squeezed and have little time, you always have the option to “negotiate” with the other person about when you will do it—and that means your bosses and clients. You’ll be surprised how accommodating people are—after all, they are likely to be just as busy as you.

I hope that has helped, Alex. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all. Very, very productive week.

Monday Sep 25, 2023

Time Management Strategies: From Chaos to Control.

Monday Sep 25, 2023

This week, I’m answering a question about the fundamentals and why it’s important to master the basics before worrying about everything else.

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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Hello, and welcome to episode 293 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

Last week, in my newsletter, I wrote about the lessons I learned from rushing about looking for quick fixes and hacks to improve my productivity. In many ways, I was lucky I was doing this in the 1990s before the plethora of digital tools were available, yet the mistakes I made back then are the same mistakes I see so many people making today.

There’s a lot to say about the advantages of hindsight and experience. It does help you to avoid mistakes made in the past and gives you a level of knowledge that helps you to assess new ideas through a framework of experience. What works and what does not work.

For example, I’ve learned the more complexity and levels a task management system has the less likely you will use it effectively in the future. It’s exciting a fun to play with in the beginning, but once it comes face to face with a busy day or week, it breaks down, you stop using it and you then lose trust in it.

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

This week’s question comes from Jono. Jono asks, hi Carl, I see you often talk about keeping things simple, and I was wondering what you consider to be a simple system. I try to keep mine simple, but it is so hard to do so with so many new tools coming out each month. A little help here would be appreciated.

Hi Jono, thank you for your question.

To answer your question for me a simple system is one that works in the background so you can focus on your work without feeling overwhelmed, stressed out or swamped. The trouble is to get to that level, you will need to go through a few gates and that means initially things will not feel simple.

Take the first stage of getting something into your system, the collecting stage. If you’ve never used a task manager before, one of the most difficult habits to build is to collect everything that comes across your desk into an inbox.

If you’ve spent a large part of your life trying to remember to do something and never writing it down, doing the opposite will feel unnatural. I remember when I turned to a completely digital system and pulling out my phone every time I remembered to do something felt very unnatural. Having a laptop or later an iPad in a meeting felt uncomfortable.

Today, almost everyone is in a meeting with a laptop or iPad, but twelve years ago, it was not common at all. There was a fear that people felt you were doing your email or responding to Facebook massages while in the meeting. It was uncomfortable.

And that is where one of the initial problems lie. Changing an old behaviour.

However, the good news is it only take a few weeks for it to become natural. It’s funny today, when my wife asks me to do something and I don’t immediately pull out my phone, my wife will stop and say: are you going to write it down? Not only has my behaviour changed, so has hers. She knows if I put it into my phone I will not forget. If I don’t, I will forget.

However, that means the way you collect stuff needs to be fast and easy. Back in the days when I travelled around the city visiting clients, I used the subway and bus system. I carried a bag (I hate backpacks, they destroy the cut of your suit—which weirdly I no longer wear) This meant I needed to be able to collect ideas and tasks while moving from one train to another or walking through a subway station.

I developed a test I called the changing train test. The test was could I collect a task into my task manager while I was changing trains? If I needed to stop walking, it failed the test. This was one of the many reasons why Todoist became my task manager of choice. It was simple and fast to get stuff into it.

The introduction of Siri in 2014 really helped. I was able dictate my tasks to my phone and later, when Siri developed, I was able to set it up with Apple’s Shortcuts to make collecting even faster.

So the first test for me is to ensure collecting is optimised to be fast and require as few button taps or pushes to get get something into my system.

Today, it’s all about getting things into my system using my laptop computer as that is where I am mostly when doing my work. I no longer visit clients. The principles, though, have not changed. Speed and simplicity. Using keyboard shortcuts to get things into my system is critical to me today. Again, simple, and fast.

The philosophy I follow is the less time I spend in my productivity tools, the more time I have for doing the work. The more time I spend doing the work, the more time I have at the end of the day for other things like hobbies, interests and family.

This means that the next step, the organising also needs to be simple.

I’ve travelled down the road of building complex organisation structures in my notes and files. I remember around seven years ago the trend of developing a complex tagging structure in Evernote. That all began from a blog post Michael Hyatt posted in 2016 where he explained how he used Evernote notebooks and tags. Oh how we all jumped on that ship. It was so much fun creating hierarchical tags structures.

The problems was, it took hours each week just to maintain it. When You collected a new note you had to go through your tagging structure to ensure you attached the right tags to the note or the system would fail.

Fortunately, Evernote helped to wean us off that method by significantly improving their search. Today, I have a very loose notebook structure and use search to find what I need. It’s much faster and simpler and means I have very little organising to do.

Similarly with Todoist, removing all the old project folders and focusing on when I will do a task and slimming down the number of labels I use (I use eight and no more) processing my inbox takes a fraction of the time it used to.

Everything is geared towards simplicity and speed so I spend more time doing the work and less time “playing” with the tools that organise my work.

Over the last few months, I’ve been creating content encouraging people to discover the processes for doing their work. That simplifies how you do your work and when that is simplified you are on the way to speeding it up. However, the great thing about having processes is you can take a single part of you process and find ways to make it better.

This, I realise is what I do with my whole productivity system. I have broken it down in to three parts: collecting, organising and doing. If I feel organising my work is too slow, I can look at how I am organising my work and find a better faster way. I will do that every three months or so. I look at the whole system, and ask the question, how can I do this better.

As the tools I use are being updated regularly, I find every three months enables me to review the updates to see if anything that has been changed helps me to make the system faster. For example, Evernote have recently introduced AI. This has given us faster search results AND, you can use their AI to organise an individual note into a cleaner order.

This means I can take scattered meeting notes and let Evernote organise those notes into a cleaner, more logical order. It puts the highlights at the top of the note which makes for faster scanning for the important points. This means less time organising and more time doing. Always a win.

However, all this comes back to keeping things as simple as possible. We know the less moving parts a motor has, the less likely it will go wrong. That true for motors, it’s also true for your productivity system. The less you have, the less there is to go wrong.

This is why I ditched add ons and plugins a long time ago. I used to use IFTTT to connect different apps together. Unfortunately, these often stoped working or lost the connection and that broke my system. Removing these from the critical tools (task manager, notes and calendar) and allowing them toward independently of each other meant no more stoppages or issues.

Instead, I bought a 32 inch monitor and when I do my planning I have the screen real-estate to have my calendar and task manager open side by side. Remove as many moving parts as possible and there is less to go wrong.

And finally, all the new tools coming out. Yes, it’s exciting and very tempting to keep trying all these new tools. However, what is your objective here. To get your work done as quickly as possible to the highest standards or to play with new tools.

None of these new productivity tools will do the work for you—never forget that. I have asked myself in the past does Notion do what Evernote does for me significantly faster and better? The answer was and is no. Does Tick Tick organise my tasks significantly better and faster than Todoist? No. So there’s not need for me to change.

Changing tools slows you down. There’s the transfer cost, the learning cost and the unfamiliarity cost. All of which dramatically slows things down and I do not want to be spending more time doing work when I could be with my family enjoying an evening stroll by the beach or cooking a surprise dinner for them.

So there you, Jono. I hope that has helped a little. Thank you for your question.

And just a heads up, over the last two years or so, I have been asked for some kind of membership programme in my learning centre. It’s taken me a while to find the right programme for such a membership. But now I am happy to announce that you can join a membership programme.

The purpose of the programme is to give you access to all my courses and workshops when and how you want to access them. But, the biggest part of the programme is the coaching element. My goal is to keep you accountable for your goals and productivity aspirations.

The membership runs for one year. During that year, you will get a monthly coaching call with me, where we discuss how you performed that month. And find simple changes you can make to improve things where they need improving.

Because of the individual coaching, I have limited the membership to twenty people initially. There are a few places left if you want to join., and I urge you to act quickly. These places will and are running out fast.

Oh, and you also can join my exclusive community where you can ask me anything, chat with other members and get the occasional unique content. It’s a brilliant programme, and I hope you will consider joining and allowing me to help you become better organised and more productive.

You can get full details at my website carlpullein.com or in the show notes.

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

Monday Sep 18, 2023

THe Art Of Getting Stuff Done. (And Not Procrastinating)

Monday Sep 18, 2023

Are you planning, playing and fiddling, or are you doing? That’s what I am looking at in this week’s episode.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

The All-New Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 292 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 292 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

The area of time management and productivity is like many areas in that there is a lot of planning, thinking, tools and systems to play with and much more that is anything but doing.

Yet of all the different areas, time management and productivity is the one that is meant to focus on execution and getting stuff done. Sadly, over the last twenty years or so, certainly since the digital explosion began around the mid-1990s, the focus seems to have moved away from doing the work and more towards organising the work.

Now a limited amount of organising is important, after all, knowing where something is does help you to be more productive. But, moving something from one area to another is not being productive. It’s just moving stuff around. It’s not doing the work. A document that needs to be finished, needs to be opened and finished. Moving it from one folder to another will not write the document. All it does is moves it from one place to another. That’s not being productive. That’s procrastination.

And it’s on this subject that this week’s question is about. How to focus less on the minors and more on the majors—the activities that get the work done.

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

This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, hi Carl, I recently took your COD course and I am struggling to meet the target of only spending 20 minutes a day on organising and planning my day. I find I need a lot more than twenty minutes. Is there a reason why this is important?

Hi Caroline, thank you for your question.

The twenty-minute rule, so to speak, is not necessarily a strict number, it more a way to help people understand that planning and organising, if not checked, will become a dangerous form of procrastination.

We often use the excuse of something needing more time for planning or thinking about to avoid doing the work. If you think about it, how long does it take to decide something? The answer is no time. You either do it or you don’t. Now that does not mean some things need researching, but researching is different from thinking about and planning.

To give you an example. One of my bigger projects this year was to redesign my website. It’s been on my list since January the first, and I’ve used the excuse all year that I need to think more and plan what to put there and what to remove.

Yet, really, I already know those answers and I could very easily have written them out in around ten minutes. That extra thinking time was just an excuse to avoid doing the many hours of work that I know is involved in redesigning a website.

In the end, I decided to just get it started. I opened up a Keynote document, planned out the design, asked my wife to choose three complimentary colours (she’s better with colours than I am) and mapped everything out. That took one hour (I felt a fool—not only did it only take an hour, I really enjoyed it.)

The next evening, I sat down and cleaned up my website—removing old pages and cleaning up all the others and implemented the typeface and colour changes. That was two hours of pure joy (really, silly me. There I was procrastinating on the project most of the year and it turned into a very enjoyable project).

A couple of days later the hard lift work had been done and all I was left with was the tidying up. Project completed in just over a week.

There really was no excuse. It turned out easier than I imagined, it was fun and it was completed in less than ten days.

Looking back now I feel such a fool. I procrastinated most of the year because I thought it would be long, difficult and boring and it turned out to be the opposite of that.

How many projects do you have lying around sitting there in your projects list with nothing happening? Why? What’s stopping you from starting the project?

Try this little experiment. Pick one of those projects you feel needs more thinking and planning, open up your notes and write out what you think needs to be done to get it started—the very first thing. You do do not need to worry about the second task or the third. Just focus your attention on the very next task to get it started and do that task. That is doing.

The issue with trying to plan out every individual next step is you will be wrong. Many of those steps you think you need to do will not need doing and things you never thought of will need doing.

With my website redesign, I guessed right on about 30% of the tasks. The remaining 70% came up as I was working on the project. You do not want to be wasting time trying to think of all the steps you will have to take. Just do the first one. The next tasks will present itself before you finish the first. This is also a great way to prevent procrastinating on a complete project.

Let’s be honest here, you cannot do a project. You can only do the tasks required to complete that project. So, focus on the next task. Don’t worry too much about what comes next.

Strange how old sayings keep coming back. Saying like:

A journey of a 1,000 miles begins with the first step.

Well, that very true for your projects. You just have to start wit the first step. The next step will present itself before you finish the first.

Imagine you decide to decorate your living room. You’ve chosen the colour, so the next step is to clear or cover the furniture. While you are doing that you can be planning which wall you will begin with. You do not need to waste time sitting in front of a screen planning out what steps you will take. Begin with the first. Get the furniture out or covered and then tape over the fixed furnishings and power sockets.

The great thing with beginning like this is once you’ve started you’re committed. You’re not going to leave your living room furniture stacked up outside your living room. You’re going to get the painting done as quickly as possible so you can get the furniture back in.

I wasn’t going to leave my website redesign half finished. Once I began, I was committed and it had to get finished as quickly as possible. No chance of further procrastination then.

Now organising tasks in a task list can be fun when you have just switched your task manager to a new one. All those new bells and whistles to play with. It’s a lot of fun. We convince ourselves that once we’ve moved everything over to our new app, then we will be productive. Trouble is, we’re not.

The reason people keep switching apps is because they don’t want to do the work, and moving everything around is just an excuse for not doing the work.

And have I repeated that mistake a lot? I’ve been down that road too many times. Feeling great because I can collect all these new tasks and ideas and it all looks nice and pretty, yet what I forget to notice is while I am admiring my organisational work, the real work is not getting done.

This is the reason I emphasise the importance of restricting your organising time. It’s the easy part of having a productivity system. The hard part is just doing the work. It can be boring, time consuming and difficult. The trouble is the organising can wait, the work rarely can.

The key to better productivity, less overwhelm and improved time management is more time doing the work and less time organising it.

I know this is not for everyone, but I love sitting down on the sofa after a hard day’s work and cleaning everything up. The work for the day has been done, I can put something mildly interesting on the TV, have my laptop on my knee and simply move files, and other stuff to their rightful place.

It’s being away from my usual work environment and in a more relaxed state that makes this process fun. I usually process my Todoist inbox at this time too. As I say, that might not be for everyone, but this means that the work comes first. The cleaning up and organising comes later.

Now, if you are starting out with a new system, there’s a learning curve to go through and that curve is slow. When I devised my email process, for example, clearing forty emails from my inbox would take thirty minutes or so. Today, having run the process every day (almost) for the last eight years, I can process 120 emails in less than twenty minutes. It’s repeating the same process every day for a period of time that speeds you up.

My daily closing down admin routines used to take an hour. Now it can be done in little more than fifteen minutes. Over time I have improved my process for doing that routine. It’s admin, it’s non-critical on a daily basis, but if I allow it to build up over a few days, it’s no longer a fifteen minute task, it’s more than an hour. Now my brain is not going to want to do an hour of boring admin tasks and will try and convince me to put it off again. Nope. I’ve learned that lesson. Far better to have fifteen minutes of boring admin than over an hour of it.

So, Caroline, if you are just starting out on your COD journey, your organising and processing at the end of the day will take longer than twenty minutes. The important thing is you stick with it and build so called muscle memory. Very soon you will notice you get faster at it and the time it takes begins to tumble.

Really, that’s the secret to better productivity and time management. Building processes, running them consistently so you get faster at them.

With all that said, the focus should always be on getting the work done first. If you need to spend a little extra time organising, that could be a sign you are getting a lot of work done. However, never mistake activity for motion. Be hyper aware of what you are doing the majority of your time. Are you moving the right things forward? If not, and you are spending too much time planning, organising and thinking about how to complete a project, that’s when you want to stop, look for the very next tasks and do that.

I hope that helps, Caroline. Than 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 Sep 11, 2023

Calendar Events -V- Tasks (And why tasks do NOT belong on your calendar)

Monday Sep 11, 2023

When does a task become an event, and when does an event become a task? That’s the question I am answering this week.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

The All-New Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 291 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 291 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

Last week, in my YouTube video, I shared how to get the most out of Todoist’s latest new feature, task duration. This feature allows you to add a duration time to your task so you can estimate how much time you will need. As I explained in the video, this is not a feature I personally would use but I know a lot of people have been requesting this for some time.

This sparked a lot of comments on the subject of Todoist introducing a calendar so people can drag and drop tasks onto a calendar and I know this type of feature appeals to a lot of people. However, there are problems with this approach to task management and this week’s question asks me to explain why this would be a problem. So, I decided to oblige and explain why this is something you do not want to be doing.

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

This week’s question comes from Steve. Steve asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say in the past that you should not be putting tasks on your calendar and events onto you to-do list. Could you explain your thinking behind that approach?

Hi Steve, thank you for your question.

In the early days of Mac OS 10, in the early 2000s, Apple brought tasks into their calendar app and they lived on the right hand side of the calendar. It seemed logical. Here was a list of all your appointments and on the right hand side there was a list of all the things you needed to do that day.

It soon became apparent that this was not working. You see tasks and appointments are two very different things. An appointment is a commitment to another person or persons that you will be in a specific place at a specific time. That could be a meeting room, a place or in front of your computer with either Zoom or Teams open.

A task on the other hand is something you decide needs doing but can be done at any time. You might find you have twenty minutes while waiting for a doctors appointment and you could call the people you need to call or send out those emails you need to send.

In my case, I might have a blog post to write but it doesn’t matter whether I write it in the morning, afternoon or evening. The only thing that matters is I write it. I could decide to postpone it until tomorrow because I have too many appointments today and that would be fine. I am not letting anyone down.

The way I look at it is, my calendar is there to tell me what I have committed to and with whom. My task manager tells me what I need to do when I have some free time.

Now, time does not accept a vacuum. We cannot do nothing, ever. If you think about it laying on the sofa mindlessly scrolling through news or social media feeds is doing something. Similarly, taking an afternoon nap is still doing something. You are always doing something whether you are consciously aware of it or not.

Now, one of the most important things you can do if you want to be on top of your work is to maintain flexibility. Flexibility means you can direct your attention where it needs to be when it needs to be there. If you cram your calendar full of tasks, you immediately lose that flexibility. It also means if one or two of your meetings overrun, you get held up in a traffic jam or something goes wrong with your company’s CRM system, your carefully curated tasks and appointments are destroyed.

Now that in itself is not really a disaster, you can reschedule all those tasks, but now you’ve just added another step. Instead of being able to pick the tasks you are able to do in the moment—responding to your messages while being stuck in a traffic jam, for instance, you begin to panic about how much time you are losing and all the work you will now have to reschedule on your calendar.

This also means you calendar loses it’s power. If you schedule tasks to be done at say, 2pm but you are running behind so you ignore those tasks, what’s the point of your calendar? You took the time to put those tasks there but you just ignore them, what’s the point?

Because you are human, you need flexibility. You want to be able to choose the right work for the way you are feeling and what’s on your mind at that moment.

Then there is the human factor. You are not a machine. When planning your day, you will be thinking you will be fully alert, energetic and focused. When you are working the day, you will be tired, distracted and suffering from diminishing energy levels. What you really need is to take a break, but no! You have tasks to complete because you calendar tells you at 2pm you have to spend the next ninety minutes doing your tasks.

Finally, when you look at your calendar and you see almost ever minute of your day taken up with appointments and tasks it can be demoralising. It just drags you down and leaves you feeling busy, stressed and overwhelmed. Not a great state to be in if you want to make the right decisions about what to do with a clear mind.

One way to prevent this from happening, and I alluded to this in my YouTube video, is to operate a time blocking system in your calendar.

What this means is if you have a number of similar tasks to perform, you can block time out for doing this kind of work. For instance, let’s say you need an hour a day for doing your admin and an hour a day to deal with your messages and emails. You could put time blocks in for these.

I do this every day. At 4pm I have an hour time block for communications. This means I have a dedicated amount of time each day for managing my messages. At 4pm, I will sit down and clear my action folders. Sometimes most of that time is spent in email, other days it might be mainly spend in my messaging apps.

When I start the day, I have no idea how many communication tasks I will have, but I don’t need to worry because I know I have an hour to deal with them later that day.

I also have an admin hour blocked in my calendar each day. This hour is for dealing with any administrative tasks I need to do for my accountant, or clients that require a particular type of tax receipt.

I also use time blocks for the kind of work I do. For example, I do a lot of writing, so I have three, two hour blocks in my calendar. One on Monday, one on Tuesday and one on Friday. In my task manager, I have a label for all the writing tasks I have to do and all I need do is search for any writing tasks dated for that day and I can choose which ones to do. I have the flexibility. If I am feeling great, full of energy and focused I will pick the hardest ones. If I am not feeling great, lacking in focus and tired, I will choose the easier ones. I know I have more writing blocks in the week so it really doesn’t matter which ones I do.

I do the same with project and my audio/visual work. I have time blocked in the week for working on these tasks. I also make sure that any focused work (writing and project work) is done in the morning—when I am at my most focused.

However, the key here is blocking time out for the type of work, not the individual tasks. This ensures I maintain flexibility and can decide what to do based on my physical and mental state at that time.

It also means my calendar never looks overwhelming. You want to ensure there are sufficient gaps between time blocks so you have the flexibility to take a break when needed and pick up anything urgent that may have come in that day.

Using this method means I am only managing tasks in one place. When I do my daily planning, I can see on my calendar I have a two hour writing block the next day and I can then choose which writing tasks should be done in that time from my writing list in my task manager. If things change overnight, I have the flexibility to change the tasks around the next day if needs be.

If you go back to the COD principles (Collect, organise and do), you want to be spending a little time as possible organising so you maximise your doing time. I am collecting tasks in my task manager all day, and I will spend around 95% of my work day doing the work. This leaves me with around twenty-minutes each day for the organising and planning. All I need do is look at my calendar for the next day, see what time block I have—lets say an audio visual time block, I can then date any tasks related to audio visual for the next day.

When the next day arrives, I can then decide which of those tasks I will do based on my energy levels, what is important and what deadlines I have.

If you are trying to manage individual tasks on your calendar (as well as your task manager) not only are you now duplicating, but you have just given yourself a lot more organising to do.

I hope that clarifies things for you, Steve. Thank you for your question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Monday Sep 04, 2023

How To Get Your Big Projects Completed.

Monday Sep 04, 2023

Do you have any big tasks or projects that just need a few days of focused work to get completed but you keep putting off? Yep, I think we all have some of those.

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN

Links:

The All-New Time And Life Mastery Course

The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System

Episode 290 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 290 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

One of the best things you can do is to structure your day so you get your core work and routines done almost automatically. This is the most important work you have to do each day and week. But that can often create a Parkinson’s Law situation—where activity fills the time available, which means you don’t have time to work on those unique, one-off projects.

This then leads to those one-off projects being postponed and delayed particularly if there are no hard deadlines for them.

This week’s question is on how to find the time for additional projects when you already have your core work and routines set up and getting done every day.

Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, I would just like to let you know that the all encompassing Time and Live Mastery course, my biggest and best course has just been completely re-recorded.

This course covers everything from discovering what you want out of life to turning what you want into a pathway to accomplishing it. As the headline for the course says: How to create the life you want to live and find the time to live it.

The course includes lessons on COD (Collect, Organise and Do) and building your own Time Sector System. It also also includes the Vision Roadmap, how achieve your goals and so much more.

If you only want one course, a course you can return to over and over again, this is the one for you. You also get incredible bonuses. Free access to my Mini Course Library AND every few months I will be doing a FREE live session where you can ask any questions you have to me directly.

This course will change your life. It will give you a direction and focus and the tools you need in order to achieve the things you want to achieve.

Full details of the course are in the show notes.

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

This week’s question comes from Jen. Jen asks, hi Carl, I took your Time Sector System Course recently and it’s working exceptionally well for me. The only problem I have is getting one off projects completed. I am doing my core work each week, but that leaves me with little time to do some of my projects. Do you have any suggestions on how to include working on these projects?

Hi Jen, thank you for your question.

With the Time Sector System it’s about first making sure you have sufficient time for your critical work each day. If you’re not doing that, everything falls apart because you end up neglecting clients or missing important deadlines for work you are employed to do. It’s often easier to make sure you have the time for that first before moving on to finding time for unique, one-off projects.

However, if you are employing time blocking into your system, you can dedicate an afternoon or a morning one of two times per week for project work. I do this on a Tuesday, for example. On Tuesdays, I have a couple of morning calls that finish at 9:00am, and I keep the rest of the day free for project work. I avoid scheduling meetings after 9:00am on a Tuesday. It’s only one day a week, and that leaves me plenty of spaces the rest of the week for meetings.

However, one of the beneficial things about the Time Sector System is the automation it builds into your week. You are doing the critical tasks at the same time each day or week which means you develop highly efficient processes for doing this work.

For example, I track my subscriber and sales data each day. I have a spreadsheet that I enter this data on and when I first began doing this it would take me around an hour. Today, I can collect all the data and enter it into my spreadsheet in around fifteen minutes. Over the years I have refined and polished my process for collecting and entering this data.

The same goes with managing email. I used to waste so much time checking and responding to emails. Today, it’s ten to fifteen minutes in the morning clearing my inbox and around forty minutes in the afternoon replying to the actionable mails. It’s not something I even think or worry about anymore.

So, if you are new to the Time Sector System, as with anything new, it takes time to bed in and become automatic.

I learned to drive using a manual gearbox (stick shift), I remember when I first began driving I had to keep thinking about the gear I was in and run a mental checklist to change gear each time. It was slow, but after a few weeks, it became automatic. I don’t need to think about when or how to change gear now. It’s purely a feel thing. I can hear the engine, I know where third or fourth gear is without looking at the gear stick and I change gear as soon as I feel it’s time to change.

And that’s what the Time Sector System encourages. Automating your work processes so you know instinctively how long something will take and can accurately schedule sufficient time for doing it.

However, we all have these bigger one-off projects that do not fit neatly into our carefully curated week. The challenge we face is finding time for doing them.

Over the last two weeks I have been working on the Time And Life Mastery Course update. It’s required a lot of hours recording, editing and writing worksheets. I do have a process for creating courses, but this one is five or six time bigger than my usual courses. I calculated it would require around forty hours to complete.

Finding twenty additional hours each week is difficult. However, there are things you can do.

First up is to accept you may have to work a few extra hours each week while you are working on this project. Last week—the final week before launch—I did a couple of sixteen-hour days. That’s not normal for me, but it’s only two days, and I knew I would need to do it if I was to get this project over the line by the end of the week.

You can also look at your core work and decide what can be skipped. There’s always something. For example, I see part of my core work as writing a weekly blog post, doing this podcast and publishing a YouTube video each week.

When you do the weekly planning, you can decide what can be skipped. I chose to skip my blog post. which saved me around three hours. I also reduced the time I was available for coaching calls which meant I had less feedback to write saving me around another six hours that week.

Sometimes, I feel we are guilty of looking at things too narrowly. Does that email from your boss really need to be replied to today? Could it not wait until tomorrow morning? Instinct may tell you it MUST be responded to today, logic will tell you no it doesn’t.

Have you ever noticed the least stressed people always appear to be on top of their work and commitments? The reason is because they structure their days. Satya Nadella at Microsoft has a well structured day that begins with a morning run, breakfast with his family before heading into the office. You can be confident he has a process and system for dealing with his emails and messages.

Maya Angelou had a brilliantly structured way to write her books and poems. She would block out a month in her diary, book herself into a local hotel and write. She still went home at the end of the day, did her grocery shopping, cooked for her family and ate breakfast with them. It was a structured life. She only needed to do that once or twice a year. The rest of the time she got on with her core work and life.

It’s important, Jen, to look at things in the whole. How much time do you need to complete these projects? When do they need to be finished? How long you need may be a guess, but based on your experience it’s likely to be an educated guess.

If you estimate you need twenty hours to complete a project, then break it down over a couple of weeks. That means you need to find ten hours each week. If you accept you may need to work an extra hour each day for the next two weeks, you’ve just found yourself ten hours. Then it’s about finding one extra hour in your day. Could you cancel a few meetings—or postpone them? Could you put other work on hold for a couple of weeks?

There’s a lot of ways to find an extra hour or so each day. However, if you are not sitting down at the end of the week and planning out the next, you will find your week is hijacked by other people and work, and will mean the project does not get done.

I remember when I redecorated the bedroom in my home back in the UK. I blocked a weekend out for doing it. I made sure I had the paint, rollers and brushes before I began and I told all my friends I would not be available that weekend. I planned out that I could strip the wallpaper and apply the undercoat on Saturday. I could eave it overnight to dry and I would apply the top coat on Sunday.

It didn’t go exactly to plan. Stripping the wallpaper was a lot more difficult than I expected, but after an 18 hour day on Saturday, the room was primed and ready for the top coat on Sunday.

One of the great things about that weekend is I still remember it and I look back on it fondly. It was the first time I had redecorated a room, I had the radio on all day, I got covered in paint and ate an amazing pizza on Saturday night feeling incredibly proud of myself. I didn’t worry about what was going on outside. My total focus was getting the room finished by Sunday night and that is exactly what happened.

And you know what? While I was cocooned in my home painting, the world did not end. Nobody was angry with me because I was not available for a couple of days and life went back to normal that Monday morning, except, I had a completely redecorated bedroom that I completed in the two days I allocated for it.

So, Jen, if you have projects that need completing. Make sure when you do your weekly planning you set aside sufficient time to work on it. If necessary reduce some of your core work and inform the people that matter you will be less available while you complete the project.

I hope that helps and thank you for your question. Thank you to you too for listening and don’t forget to check out the Time And Life Mastery course. It will change your life.

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

Monday Aug 28, 2023

Some Uncommon Ways I Save Time Each Week.

Monday Aug 28, 2023

This week, I am sharing a few ideas you can use to get some time back for the things you want time for.

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7 Tricks That Save Me 16.3 Hours Per Week

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Episode 289 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 289 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

Do you ever wish you had more time each day? Not necessarily time for more work, but just time to do what you want.

Many years ago, this is how I felt. I wished there was more time for doing the things I wanted. I looked at my heroes from the past—being able to come home from a hard day in the factory physically exhausting themselves, to spend the evenings in a garden shed inventing the future. People like Frank Whittle (inventor of the jet engine) and James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner.

I often wondered how they were able to do it. It then dawned on me that we are not able to make more time; that is fixed. People like Frank Whittle, James Dyson, Marie Curie and others had the same amount of time you and I do. However, what these people did was decide what they would and would not do with their time so they could maximise what they had doing the things they loved doing.

Is that not possible for you? Could you decide what you will and will not do with your time? Are you currently doing some things that may not be conducive to what you really want to do?

Well, this week’s question had me thinking more about this, and the results of that thinking are all in this podcast. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Patrick. Patricks asks, Hi Carl, I’ve often wondered if you have any tips on making better use of your time. Is there anything you do that saves you time each day or week?

Hi Patrick, thank you for your question.

I must confess that your question was the inspiration behind the video I posted on YouTube last week on how I can save around 16 hours each week following a few simple practices.

Now, I should point out that some of what I will talk about here may not work for you, how they work for me, but that does not mean they definitely won’t work for you. You can modify them so that do work. All I ask is you keep an open mind and see how you could adopt them into your life.

First up. Always have a plan for the day. I know; I have spoken about this a lot. But it just saves you so much time. It stops you from being dragged off doing unimportant things and keeps you focused on what needs to be done.

Now, I am not suggesting you plan out every minute of the day; that would be impractical and never works. Instead, what I am suggesting you plan out what must be done. The things that need to be done and tasks that will prevent bigger problems in the future. When you start the day, know what you will do and when you will do it.

For example, today, I had a few calls this morning, so I kept my morning free for calls. This afternoon, this script was to be written. Now, it did not matter when precisely I would write this script; all I decided was I would write this script before taking my dog out for his walk.

Beyond that, the only thing that was planned was an hour for responding to my emails and messages and more calls this evening.

The problem you will have when you don’t have a plan is your day will be hijacked by fake urgencies and emergencies from other people. Fake because you will grab onto anything to avoid having nothing to do. Having a plan focuses you and ensures that what you do is relevant to your goals, projects and areas of focus.

All this saves you time because what you do each day is moving the right things forward so they get done on time and without a lot of fuss. And you are not wasting time trying to decide what to do.

The next tip is to reduce the number of channels you are contactable through. I found it amusing a few years ago when everyone was getting excited about apps like WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams and Facebook Messenger.

At the time, I could not understand what all the fuss was about because we already had email, and text messaging was great. You could see what would happen when groups in these new apps were created. Instead of a conversation with one person, there were going to be conversations with numerous people, which meant a message thread would be constantly updating; to catch up with what was going on, you had to scroll back and read through everything.

WOW! The time wasting that happens now because of these so-called marvellous inventions. The best tip I can give you is to avoid these groups as much as possible. I am proud to say I am not a part of any group—well, there is one. I still teach an English class, and the four students in that group and I have a group chat where we can communicate our absences. But that’s it.

Sadly, companies have now jumped on this bandwagon and forced employees to be a part of a Teams or Slack group. Now bosses can constantly check in with you, asking for updates and requesting you do things. And, of course, because our boss expects us to be reading these messages instantly, we have to drop everything to confirm we have received the message and are working on it.

If you want to be productive, being a part of all these channels of communication will destroy any chance. Aside from the attention switching cost, which can be high, it means you are losing as much as three to four hours a day just checking, confirming and replying to these messages.

You need to find a way to remove yourself from these groups or have a set time each day for dealing with them. For instance, if you are part of a work group chat, perhaps you could check and deal with messages twice a day. Mid to late morning and mid to late afternoon.

Don’t worry, your team and boss soon learn your patterns, and once they are used to it, they are unlikely to bother you.

This is one of those that you may be saying to yourself that would be impossible for me. Perhaps, but have you tried? Have you considered a different way from the way things are working right now? Or are you happy losing as much as three to four hours a day? I will leave that one with you.

Here’s one I began using around ten years ago that has saved me hours and hours. Eat the same thing every day. Now, I know with this one, most of you will immediately say, “NO WAY!” But I am going to say it and let you decide if it could work for you.

Eat the same things every day.

Okay, I better explain. First, I am not a foodie. Food doesn’t excite me, and I see it only as fuel. If you are a foodie and love trying new and exciting things, this tip will not work for you, and I would not suggest you change. However, here’s how it saves time.

As I have been eating pretty much the same thing every day for the last ten years or so, I have learned the fastest and most efficient way to cook my meals. It is also easy to ensure I have all the ingredients in stock at home, and I know how long it takes to cook, eat and wash up afterwards.

This means I can use meal times as stakes in the ground for my day. I do intermittent fasting, so my meal times are 11:00 AM for breakfast and 6:00 PM for dinner. So, I have a two-hour session of work in the morning before breakfast, and at 4:30 PM, I stop whatever I am working on for an hour to deal with my communications. After dinner, I have another ninety minutes of work before my evening calls begin.

The biggest time saving here, though, is I do not need to waste time each day trying to decide what to eat or negotiating with my wife about what she wants. She’s more of a foodie and likes to prepare her own meals, and she eats at different times than me. She also does intermittent fasting, but because her mornings are always busy, her eating window is from 2 pm to 10 pm.

We do eat together on Saturdays, though, and I will eat whatever we decide to eat that day. That’s my cheat day.

Next up, use a scheduling service.

This will save you so much time and put you in control of when you are available for meetings. Now, I know not all of you will be able to do this because your work calendar is controlled by other people. But, if you work with clients, this will be a huge time-saving for you.

Scheduling services allow you to allocate slots of time when you are available for meetings, and your clients and colleagues can schedule times with you that are convenient for them as well as you.

Using a scheduling service means you are not going back and forth trying to find a mutually convenient time; instead, the other person can choose a time, and it will be automatically booked on your calendar.

And no, people do not find it rude. Everyone I work with finds it much more convenient because they get to choose and schedule a meeting with you when they are ready rather than wasting time either calling, messaging or emailing you.

Now what about finding time for those side hobbies, the things you want time for? How do you find time for that? If you study people like Frank Whittle, Marie Currie or James Dyson, you will discover they made time for their hobbies. Now, for Marie Currie, there was no TV, and TV was a rare thing during Frank Whittle’s early life. In those days, people found their own entertainment.

There are times in the day when you have complete control over what you do. I remember when I was watching a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk’s YouTube videos, and he preached you should use 11 PM to 1 AM as your development time—when you worked on your “side hustle”.

Today, the word “side hustle” has gone out of fashion somewhat and in many ways, that’s probably a good thing. But as usual, when something goes out of fashion, we throw everything away when there may be some grains of value in it.

For example, I use the late evening for studying. Sometimes I will read; other times, I will watch educational videos on YouTube. It depends on what I feel like learning. But for me, that study time is precious. It helps me to wind down at the end of the day, and while I am not doing this too late, usually around 10:30 pm to midnight, it still gives me some quiet time for things I am interested in.

However, I like to watch some TV shows, and I reserve them for Saturday nights. This way, I have something to look forward to and can relax.

So these are just a few of the less common ways you can save yourself time. There are a few more in my latest YouTube video; I’ll link to that in the show notes for you. But to give you a flavour, there are chunking similar tasks together, getting outside to do your thinking and decision making and finding the process, not the project.

Hope these help, Patrick and thank you for sending in your question. Thank you to you, too, for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.

Monday Aug 21, 2023

Why You Want To Be Building Processes, Not Projects.

Monday Aug 21, 2023

Are you still creating projects out of the work you regularly do? If so, you might be causing yourself more work than you really need.

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Episode 288 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 288 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

This week, I have an interesting question about why projects are bad, and processes are good. It’s something I discovered around five years ago, yet never realised I had switched away from creating projects for any multi-step job I had to do.

When I look at what I do, for instance, writing a blog post is a process. I sit down at my desk, open my writing software and begin writing. Once the first draft is written around one hour later, I leave it for twenty-four hours before again sitting down and editing it. Once the edit is complete, I design the image and post the blog post. Job done.

I have similar processes for my YouTube videos, this podcast and the newsletters I write.

What I discovered around five years ago is if I treat everything that involved two or more steps as a project, it changed how I felt about the work. I felt there was a need to plan things out, create a list of tasks and choose a start date. All steps that are rendered obsolete when you have a process.

With processes, all you need to know is when you are going to get on and do the work. Because you have a process, you already know what needs to be done, and you can get on and do it without the need for excessive planning and preparation.

But it can be difficult to alter your way of thinking from project to process-based thinking, and that is what this week’s question is all about.

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

This week’s question comes from Linda. Linda asks, Hi Carl, I found your recent newsletter on projects versus processes interesting, but I am struggling to work out how to turn my work into projects. I work with clients, and they each have unique needs, which means I need to treat each one as a project. Do you have any advice that will help me to find the processes?

Hi Linda, thank you for your question.

Working with clients can be challenging when it comes to following a process. Each client likely needs individual attention, and each task related to the client could be unique.

However, looking at it that way does create confusion. Fortunately, Your processes will begin from the moment of your first contact with your client. What do you do at the first contact with a client?

For example, with my coaching clients, the process begins once I receive a completed questionnaire from the client. That questionnaire is placed in a special folder in my email until the first call. Twenty minutes before that call, I retrieve the questionnaire, copy and paste it into a new client note and then archive the original email.

That begins the process. After that, things can go in multiple directions. But during all my coaching calls, I keep notes; if there is anything specific I need to do for the client, I will add it to the note. After the call, the note is flagged until I write my feedback, which I do as a chunk. I have a one-hour block each day for writing feedback, so I will see what I have committed myself to when I write the client’s feedback.

I can then decide what needs to be done to complete that commitment.

Building processes is not about having a single process. It’s about creating multiple processes for the work you regularly do.

Now that may sound very complex or difficult, yet if you stop for a moment and think about it, you are already using processes for almost everything you do. I noticed when I wash my dishes after breakfast or dinner; I wash things in exactly the same way. I don’t stand there, trying to decide what to wash first. I begin with my bowl and then my cutlery, and then my glass. It’s the same when I prepare to go to bed. I brush my teeth and turn off all the lights before getting into bed. It’s the same process each day.

The great thing about processes is they become automatic. You don’t think about each step involved in brushing your teeth. You just do it.

And the same applies to your work processes. I don’t think about what to do when I have a new client. There’s a process I follow.

Now, processes do not work for everything. A process is used for anything you may repeat frequently. It’s unlikely you will redecorate your bedroom frequently. Doing a job like that will be a project. But what would it be if you were a painter and decorator? In that case, you would have a process for decorating different types of rooms. When you begin painting a new room, you would follow the same process. Clear the furniture or cover it with dust sheets, wipe down the walls and set up your ladders, paint and brushes. (That’s a guess. I’m not a painter and decorator).

I recently read about the former Ferrari Formula 1 team’s technical director when they were last dominant in the sport (2000 to 2007). His name was Ross Braun, and he developed a process for preparing the next year’s car.

The FIA, Formula 1’s governing body, would issue the technical directives for the following year at the end of March. Once he received them, he would use April to go through the new rules and regulations and then. there would be a day-long technical team meeting on the first Monday of May each year where they would discuss the new regulations and allocate team members to begin building the new car. By the end of that week, they had started the new car build.

Each different department had a process for making whatever they were responsible for, be that the chassis, engine or aerodynamics. Nothing was considered a project. It was a process that was followed each year.

Now, in Formula 1, the team’s objective is very clear. To build a car that wins. No team goes into building a new car with the thought of coming second or third. They build to win. Motivating team members isn’t particularly difficult.

Every Monday, there was a team meeting to discuss progress and to see where Ross Brawn could help to move things forward. But ultimately, everything was a process.

This quote from the book really nails it for me:

“Develop and apply a set of rhythms and routines. Having established an integrated team and structure, Ross instituted rhythms and routines that ensured the completeness of the process of designing, manufacturing and racing cars. These routines constantly reinforced alignment around a shared vision.”

That shared vision was to have a championship-winning car and driver.

The great thing about building processes is once you have them, you can then isolate areas where things are not working as well as you would like them to.

For example, I came up with my email management system through a series of refinements over a number of years. As the volume of emails increased, I found it increasingly difficult to stay on top of it. My old system, or process, for managing it no longer worked. I need to look at the process and see where I could make it better.

Collecting email was not a problem. That was a part I had no control over, but I did realise that part of the problem with volume was I was too ready to give out my email address to anyone who asked for it. I soon realised that meant my email address was ending up in databases, and that was part of the problem. So, I created a new email address for all non-important occasions when I needed an email address and kept that as webmail only.

Then I looked at how I was processing mail, and that led to my Inbox Zero 2.0 system. It was a refined version of Merlin Mann’s original Inbox Zero methodology. It works effortlessly now and has never let me down since I modified the process around ten years ago.

A good friend of mine is a copywriter here in Korea. She’s a brilliant copywriter, and each new job that comes her way follows the same process. She takes notes in Apple Notes when she meets the client for the first time. She finds out what they want, the tone of the words and anything else relevant.

Then it gets added to her list of work as a task in Reminders. The task is simple: “Work on new client’s job.” And she works through her jobs in chronological order.

Working on the task means she opens Text Edit on her computer and does all her work there until she sends the first draft to the client.

Her whole process works. She’s consistent and on time, and it’s made her life so easy. Her calendar is blocked out for focused work and meetings with clients, and she’s strict about what goes on it. It’s all process. Never a project.

You see, the problem with projects is we waste so much time planning, organising and thinking about what we need to do. We feel obligated to write out what we think needs to happen, much of which does not need to be done anyway, and we then procrastinate about where and when to start.

With processes, you already know where to start, so the only decision you need to make is when to start. There’s no procrastinating because you already know what the first step is.

Plus, you also have a much better idea of how long something will take. Processes are naturally broken down into different components, and the more you run that process, the more you learn how long something will take.

The best way to build processes is to track how you are doing different parts of your work. Where are the natural breaks? As I mentioned with writing my blog posts. There’s writing the first draft (approximately one hour), editing (around forty minutes), image selection, and posting another forty minutes. There are three key parts, so scheduling my work is easy now. I know I need around two-and-a-half hours. And that’s it.

Keep things as simple as possible, and look for the natural components. Then build processes from there.

I hope that has helped, Linda. 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 Aug 14, 2023

Why Is It So Confusing?

Monday Aug 14, 2023

Are you confused with all the time management and productivity advice floating around? I know I was, and all this information can and does cause inaction. This week I will show a way through the deluge of information.

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Links:

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