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.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 287 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 286 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. When I began my journey into the digital time management and productivity world in 2009, there was a lot of information on how to use the new technology emerging with smart phones. This evolution (or maybe revolution) in the world of productivity was exciting and blogs and podcasts were full of information on turning your digital devices into productivity powerhouses that promised to automate the work we were doing.  The trouble is, back then, as now, much of that information was contradictory. Common ones are things like don’t check mail in the morning, (silly advice) and micro-manage your calendar (more silly advice).  The reality is when it comes to productivity and managing your time it’s important to find a way that works for you. It’s about knowing when you are at your most focused and when you are easily distracted. Trying to squeeze yourself into the way other people work is not going to work for you and the way you work.  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 Michael. Michael asks: hi Carl, over the last year or so I’ve become so overwhelmed with my work and life. I was given more responsibilities at work and at the same time my wife gave birth to twin daughters that need a lot of attention. I began reading and watching content on getting better organised and being more productive and have just become so confused. Everyone is giving different advice. How would you build better habits and routines that would make you more productive?  Hi Michael, great question.  In many ways, I am lucky because my journey into becoming better at managing time and being more productive began in the late 1980s / early 90s. There were no blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels then. All we had were books and the occasional article in magazines and newspapers. This meant, while there were still contradictions, it also slowed us down and allowed us time to test ideas and concepts and give them enough time before attempting to try something else. And that is often the first big mistake people make. Not giving a concept or idea long enough to work.  Change is hard. Changing behaviour is even harder and takes time. You are not going to get a new concept working in 24 hours, a week or even two or three months. You need to give anything new at least six months. You need to learn to use the system, develop the habits and muscle memory.  And that means if you change an app, you put yourself under a moratorium for six months. You do not change it for six months. This has two benefits. It gives you time to really learn how to use the app and it causes you to hesitate before changing something. If you know that by changing your task manager means you are stuck with whatever you change to for six months, you will question yourself about whether the time and energy cost is worth it.  Now watching and learning from others is actually a good idea. But, it’s not about copying their system and tools, it means seeing how they overcome similar problems to you. Not all people talking about productivity and time management have the same issues as you. I remember four or five years ago, I liked how Thomas Frank did his videos, but what he was teaching was how to manage time as a student. I was not a student, however, there were some ideas Thomas gave me about managing information that I did incorporate into my own file management system.  I learned a lot of my time management concepts from people like Hyrum Smith, Stephen Covey, Brain Tracy, Jim Rohn, David Allen and Tony Robbins. These are the pioneers of modern day time management and productivity and you only need to look at the results they have achieved individually to see their systems and methods work.  A lot of what you see on YouTube, for example, are videos on how other people manage their work and they make it look slick, efficient and beautiful. But that’s not always a system. That’s video editing. With the power of video editing you can make anything look fantastic. It does not mean it works in the real world.  I saw a comment on one of my videos recently that made me smile because the person who wrote it has got it. The quote comes from the movie Maverick and it’s: "It's not the plane, it's the pilot." And when it comes to apps, it’s never the tool that causes the problem. It’s how you use the tool that does most of the damage. A hammer will put a nail into a hole very easily. Used incorrectly, though, the hammer can do a lot of damage—although a good beating on the cylinder head with a hammer did solve the problem my old Mitsubishi Colt used to have.  One the earliest lessons I learned about time management and productivity was that the work won’t get done if all I do is rearrange lists and organise my stuff. The only way work gets done is if I do the work.  All you need to know, when you begin the day, is what needs to be done today. Not, necessarily, what you would like to do today. Then, get on and do it.  Now there are different strategies for doing your work. For instance, you may be more focused in a morning. If that’s so, you can take Brian Tracy’s concept of beginning the day with the hardest, most difficult task—the Eat The Frog concept. But, if you find yourself more focused in the afternoons, then you could schedule time in the afternoon for a couple of hours focused work. Find the time you are at your best and do your best work then.  Let’s return to the heart of your question, Michael. How would I build better habits and routines to become more productive? I would first read three books. David Allen’s Getting Things Done because that will give you insights into task management and collecting your commitments and deciding what needs to be done. I would read James Clear’s Atomic Habits, because that will show you how to build habits that stick and also gives some fascinating insights into your own psychology. And finally, I would read Brian Tracy’s Eat The Frog as that will explain the importance of doing over everything else.  Armed with the knowledge you will gain from those three books, you can then set about building a system that works for the way you work.  The objective is to get the right things done each week and to eliminate the unnecessary. Rushing to do everything is not the best strategy because what you think may need doing now, often doesn’t need doing at all if you leave a couple of days—things have a habit of sorting themselves out (a lot more than you think)  Right now, with your twin daughters, I would say that family is your number one priority. The question then is how can you maximise your time with your family? As that involves your daughters and wife, you want to be working with them and making sure you are there when they need you. It may mean you have to be very strict about when you do your work and when you are not at work.  One thing I would not reject out of hand is working later in the evening. I remember reading about Michael Dell (of Dell computers). Back in the 1990s when he had a young family he would ensure he was home by 6pm every day to be with his family. His kids were usually in bed by 9:30pm and once they were asleep, he would spend an hour dealing with his emails and other matters before ending the day. It’s surprising how much work you can get done in the evening when things have settled down. I know I’ve done some of my best work later into the evening when everything quietens down.  That was a trick I learned from Winston Churchill. He was a prolific writer as well as a politician and he would retire to his study at 10pm every evening to do work for two hours. It must have worked because over his lifetime Churchill published over forty books and they were not small books. His book on the Duke of Marlborough, for example, was over a million words long!  However, if you are a morning person, perhaps getting a couple of hours in before your kids wake up would work. Tim Cook of Apple begins his work day at 4 AM and then goes to the gym at 6 AM.  This is why reading about successful people and how they manage their time will give you ideas and insights. Try them. Remember, you won’t see results immediately, you are building habits and that takes time. Be patient.  Much of what I do today is very different from what I did five years ago. For example, I didn’t journal. I have added that to my repertoire in the last four years. It’s habit I love doing now and I am still excited to start my day by writing in my journal. I learned about the importance of journaling by reading Ryan Holiday’s books on Stoicism and Robin Sharma’s 5 AM Club.  Ten years ago, I didn’t plan my day the night before, now it’s a habit and I cannot go to bed without knowing what two things I must get done the next day. (It took around six months to develop that habit). If I remember, I got that idea from reading about NLP—Neuro-linguistic Programming. That concept teaches you that you can get your subconscious brain to a lot of the hard work while you are sleeping by using something called “Intention Implementation”.  So, what I do recommend is you read the three books above, study successful people and how they managed their work. Charles Darwin is a great example of structuring days. You can Google Charles Darwin’s daily routine. His daily walks and time spent with his rock—his wife, had a huge impact on his output.  From these resources, you can develop your own habits and structures that may need modifying over time, but begin with what is important to you and build on that.  Thank you, Michael 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. 

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.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/email-productivity-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Email Mastery Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 287 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 286 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. When I began my journey into the digital time management and productivity world in 2009, there was a lot of information on how to use the new technology emerging with smart phones. This evolution (or maybe revolution) in the world of productivity was exciting and blogs and podcasts were full of information on turning your digital devices into productivity powerhouses that promised to automate the work we were doing.  The trouble is, back then, as now, much of that information was contradictory. Common ones are things like don’t check mail in the morning, (silly advice) and micro-manage your calendar (more silly advice).  The reality is when it comes to productivity and managing your time it’s important to find a way that works for you. It’s about knowing when you are at your most focused and when you are easily distracted. Trying to squeeze yourself into the way other people work is not going to work for you and the way you work.  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 Michael. Michael asks: hi Carl, over the last year or so I’ve become so overwhelmed with my work and life. I was given more responsibilities at work and at the same time my wife gave birth to twin daughters that need a lot of attention. I began reading and watching content on getting better organised and being more productive and have just become so confused. Everyone is giving different advice. How would you build better habits and routines that would make you more productive?  Hi Michael, great question.  In many ways, I am lucky because my journey into becoming better at managing time and being more productive began in the late 1980s / early 90s. There were no blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels then. All we had were books and the occasional article in magazines and newspapers. This meant, while there were still contradictions, it also slowed us down and allowed us time to test ideas and concepts and give them enough time before attempting to try something else. And that is often the first big mistake people make. Not giving a concept or idea long enough to work.  Change is hard. Changing behaviour is even harder and takes time. You are not going to get a new concept working in 24 hours, a week or even two or three months. You need to give anything new at least six months. You need to learn to use the system, develop the habits and muscle memory.  And that means if you change an app, you put yourself under a moratorium for six months. You do not change it for six months. This has two benefits. It gives you time to really learn how to use the app and it causes you to hesitate before changing something. If you know that by changing your task manager means you are stuck with whatever you change to for six months, you will question yourself about whether the time and energy cost is worth it.  Now watching and learning from others is actually a good idea. But, it’s not about copying their system and tools, it means seeing how they overcome similar problems to you. Not all people talking about productivity and time management have the same issues as you. I remember four or five years ago, I liked how Thomas Frank did his videos, but what he was teaching was how to manage time as a student. I was not a student, however, there were some ideas Thomas gave me about managing information that I did incorporate into my own file management system.  I learned a lot of my time management concepts from people like Hyrum Smith, Stephen Covey, Brain Tracy, Jim Rohn, David Allen and Tony Robbins. These are the pioneers of modern day time management and productivity and you only need to look at the results they have achieved individually to see their systems and methods work.  A lot of what you see on YouTube, for example, are videos on how other people manage their work and they make it look slick, efficient and beautiful. But that’s not always a system. That’s video editing. With the power of video editing you can make anything look fantastic. It does not mean it works in the real world.  I saw a comment on one of my videos recently that made me smile because the person who wrote it has got it. The quote comes from the movie Maverick and it’s: "It's not the plane, it's the pilot." And when it comes to apps, it’s never the tool that causes the problem. It’s how you use the tool that does most of the damage. A hammer will put a nail into a hole very easily. Used incorrectly, though, the hammer can do a lot of damage—although a good beating on the cylinder head with a hammer did solve the problem my old Mitsubishi Colt used to have.  One the earliest lessons I learned about time management and productivity was that the work won’t get done if all I do is rearrange lists and organise my stuff. The only way work gets done is if I do the work.  All you need to know, when you begin the day, is what needs to be done today. Not, necessarily, what you would like to do today. Then, get on and do it.  Now there are different strategies for doing your work. For instance, you may be more focused in a morning. If that’s so, you can take Brian Tracy’s concept of beginning the day with the hardest, most difficult task—the Eat The Frog concept. But, if you find yourself more focused in the afternoons, then you could schedule time in the afternoon for a couple of hours focused work. Find the time you are at your best and do your best work then.  Let’s return to the heart of your question, Michael. How would I build better habits and routines to become more productive? I would first read three books. David Allen’s Getting Things Done because that will give you insights into task management and collecting your commitments and deciding what needs to be done. I would read James Clear’s Atomic Habits, because that will show you how to build habits that stick and also gives some fascinating insights into your own psychology. And finally, I would read Brian Tracy’s Eat The Frog as that will explain the importance of doing over everything else.  Armed with the knowledge you will gain from those three books, you can then set about building a system that works for the way you work.  The objective is to get the right things done each week and to eliminate the unnecessary. Rushing to do everything is not the best strategy because what you think may need doing now, often doesn’t need doing at all if you leave a couple of days—things have a habit of sorting themselves out (a lot more than you think)  Right now, with your twin daughters, I would say that family is your number one priority. The question then is how can you maximise your time with your family? As that involves your daughters and wife, you want to be working with them and making sure you are there when they need you. It may mean you have to be very strict about when you do your work and when you are not at work.  One thing I would not reject out of hand is working later in the evening. I remember reading about Michael Dell (of Dell computers). Back in the 1990s when he had a young family he would ensure he was home by 6pm every day to be with his family. His kids were usually in bed by 9:30pm and once they were asleep, he would spend an hour dealing with his emails and other matters before ending the day. It’s surprising how much work you can get done in the evening when things have settled down. I know I’ve done some of my best work later into the evening when everything quietens down.  That was a trick I learned from Winston Churchill. He was a prolific writer as well as a politician and he would retire to his study at 10pm every evening to do work for two hours. It must have worked because over his lifetime Churchill published over forty books and they were not small books. His book on the Duke of Marlborough, for example, was over a million words long!  However, if you are a morning person, perhaps getting a couple of hours in before your kids wake up would work. Tim Cook of Apple begins his work day at 4 AM and then goes to the gym at 6 AM.  This is why reading about successful people and how they manage their time will give you ideas and insights. Try them. Remember, you won’t see results immediately, you are building habits and that takes time. Be patient.  Much of what I do today is very different from what I did five years ago. For example, I didn’t journal. I have added that to my repertoire in the last four years. It’s habit I love doing now and I am still excited to start my day by writing in my journal. I learned about the importance of journaling by reading Ryan Holiday’s books on Stoicism and Robin Sharma’s 5 AM Club.  Ten years ago, I didn’t plan my day the night before, now it’s a habit and I cannot go to bed without knowing what two things I must get done the next day. (It took around six months to develop that habit). If I remember, I got that idea from reading about NLP—Neuro-linguistic Programming. That concept teaches you that you can get your subconscious brain to a lot of the hard work while you are sleeping by using something called “Intention Implementation”.  So, what I do recommend is you read the three books above, study successful people and how they managed their work. Charles Darwin is a great example of structuring days. You can Google Charles Darwin’s daily routine. His daily walks and time spent with his rock—his wife, had a huge impact on his output.  From these resources, you can develop your own habits and structures that may need modifying over time, but begin with what is important to you and build on that.  Thank you, Michael 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.

Why Is It So Confusing?

Do you feel overwhelmed by all the things you have to do? Well, this week’s podcast is just for you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 286 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 286 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 number one reason someone comes to me for help is because they feel stressed out and overwhelmed by everything they have to do. They have thousands of emails sitting in their inbox, hundreds of Slack or Teams messages asking for things and a long list of to-dos that never seems to shrink. It’s enough to make anyone scream out of sheer desperation.  The good news is it’s not impossible to regain some control. The bad news is you will need to stop and step back a little. And often it’s that stopping and stepping back that people find most difficult.  When you face an impossible situation, the temptation is to keep digging. The problem is what got into the situation you are trying to dig your way out of is precisely what you are continuing to do. Digging.  You need to stop digging so you can look up and see what you are trying to accomplish and restart with a clearer direction.  This week, I’m going to give you a roadmap you can follow to get yourself out of this hole so you are working towards a less overwhelming and clearer place.  And that means, it’s time for me now to h and you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Enrique. (엔리캐), Enrique asks, hi Carl, I really need your help. I feel so overwhelmed and stressed because my list of tasks keep getting longer and longer and I never seem to be making it smaller. It feels for every five tasks I do, fifteen new ones get added. My boss is always sending me messages and asking for updates so I never have time to do any focused work. How can I stop all this from happening?  Hi Enrique, thank you for your question. Firstly, fear not, there is a solution to this for you but you will need to do something a little uncomfortable. I need you to stop for a day or two.  When anyone gets into a situation where far more is coming in than going out, continuing to do what you are currently doing is not going to solve the problem. The only way you will solve a problem like this is to stop and draw a line under it all, while you fix the underlying problem. If you don’t stop, you have no chance to break the vicious circle that has grown. You have to break the circle and to do that you need to press pause.  Now, once you have stopped, you need to first look at the foundations of your system. Tasks and emails are different things so let’s look at your tasks first.  How are you collecting, organising and doing your work—the principles of COD.  Collecting everything is important, but it does not necessarily mean everything you collect needs to be done immediately or at all. A lot of what you collect can be done later. Quite a few of the tasks you collect may even be deleted because on reflection you realise you either do not have the time or resources to complete them or they do not need doing at all. Do not be afraid to delete these. If they are important, they will come back.  The delete key is your friend.  Organising is how you organise all the things you have decided do need to be done. There are only two questions here: what exactly needs to be done and when are you going to do it?  When you do it will depend on a two factors. Deadlines and available time. Now, here you will come up again the time V Activity conundrum, where the time side of the equation is fixed and there is nothing you can do to change that—that’s the natural laws of time and physics. But, you do have complete control over the activity side. The activities you do in the time you have available.  Now as an aside here, how long does a task take? For quite a few tasks it’ll be likely you will not know before you begin the task. And therein lies the answer… “before you begin the task”. Let’s say your boss asks you to prepare a report on a recent sales campaign you delivered. If you write in your task manager “Write report on recent sales campaign”, it will stress you. Unless you regularly write sales campaign reports you won’t know how it will take you and your brain will tell you “It’s going to take a long time”. That now means every time you see that task in your task list, you will convince yourself you have no time to write it today, so it gets rescheduled for tomorrow.  You will not know how long this task will take until you start it. So, rather than writing the task as “write sales campaign report” you add an extra word: “start writing sales campaign report”.  What you have now done is taken the emphasis away from completing the task, to just starting the task. How long does it take to start a task like this? A few minutes at most. You may only set up a Word document, give it a title and write the introduction, but it’s a start. Now, when you have finished, all you need do is change the task from “start writing sales campaign report” to “continue writing sales campaign report and schedule it for another day.  The benefit of writing tasks like this is as you start and continue to write the report, you will quickly be able to anticipate how long the whole task will take and that will take a lot of the pressure off. If you were to spend thirty-minutes each day for five days on the task, you will have spent two-and-a-half hours on it. That’s a lot better than doing nothing because you kept rescheduling it.  Let get back to the principles of COD.  The doing part is where your calendar comes in to play. Based on what you have decided needs to be done today, where do you have the time to do it?  It’s no good starting the day with thirty tasks you have convinced yourself need to be done today, yet have six hours of meetings. Your day’s destroyed before it starts. You need to be more strategic than that. In this situation you have two choices (and ONLY two choices). Either you cancel some of those meetings or you reschedule some of those tasks. I suppose you could do both as a third choice.  This is where things can become uncomfortable because sometimes we have to let people down and that’s hard to do. However, people are a lot more accommodating that we imagine. If we have promised someone to get a piece of work to them by the end of the week, yet, by Wednesday we know that’s not going to happen, it’s far better to reach out and renegotiate the deadline. In 90% of cases, people are perfectly happy with the renegotiated deadline.  What’s the worst that can happen if you do reach out? They could say no, I MUST have the work by Friday. Okay, now you have a hard deadline and you can renegotiate some of your other work instead. You may have to work an extra few hours that week to meet the deadline. As long as you are not working extra hours every day, that should not be a big issue.  Now, that brings me on to your email, and messages.  How much time do you need each day to stay on top of your email? When I ask people this question the reply is usually “it depends”. Yet, if you were to analyse it, you would find an average. For me, I need around forty-five minutes a day to respond to my actionable email. Some days, I only need twenty-five minutes, others I need an hour.  With that information, I can now block that time out on my calendar. I have one hour each day set aside for communications. I rarely need to full hour, but it’s there if I do need it.  Now with email, there’s a process for this. This process has worked for hundreds of years because it was devised when we received a lot of regular mail, and it’s only two steps.  The first is to process what you received. This is, in effect filtering out the actionable from the non-actionable. You can do this by asking two questions: What is it? Is it actionable?   If it’s actionable—ie you need to do something with it—it goes to an Action This Day folder. If it’s not actionable you only have two choices; delete or archive it and that will depend whether you may want to reference it later or not.  Now, with your actionable email, you reverse the way the folder shows you the mail. You want it to show the oldest at the top. This means when you sit down to deal with your email, you begin at the top—it’s the oldest email there so in theory it is the most urgent—and work your way down the list.  Because they are ordered oldest to newest, if you are unable to get to the bottom of your list for the day, it won’t be a problem because the ones you did not get to will be at the top of your list tomorrow.  When you become consistent with this, you will find email is no longer a problem.  In your case Enrique, one of the things you must do is to clear your inbox and that may take a morning or afternoon to do—it may even take you a whole day, but the only way you will ever get on top of it, is to stop, and clear that inbox.  This may involve declaring email bankruptcy. With that you have a choice you can choose to do a hard bankruptcy—that involves deleting all mail older than ten days. The other choice is to do a soft email bankruptcy, which involves taking all mail older than ten days and moving them into a folder called “Old Inbox”. You can then process that over time. (Although, I find most people end up deleting that folder after a few months) If you want to earn more about managing email, you can join my Email Mastery course. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for you.  Now there are other things you can do Enrique, you do need to know what your core work and areas of focus are so you can ensure you are working on these. But if you want to get back in control of everything the place to start is to stop. Step back and put in place COD and some better email management practices.  It will take time, but developing the processes and habits will soon have you in control and no longer feeling overwhelmed with everything you have to do. I hope that has helped and than you for sending in you question. Thank you also to you too for listening. It just remains for now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Do you feel overwhelmed by all the things you have to do? Well, this week’s podcast is just for you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/email-productivity-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Email Mastery Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 286 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 286 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 number one reason someone comes to me for help is because they feel stressed out and overwhelmed by everything they have to do. They have thousands of emails sitting in their inbox, hundreds of Slack or Teams messages asking for things and a long list of to-dos that never seems to shrink. It’s enough to make anyone scream out of sheer desperation.  The good news is it’s not impossible to regain some control. The bad news is you will need to stop and step back a little. And often it’s that stopping and stepping back that people find most difficult.  When you face an impossible situation, the temptation is to keep digging. The problem is what got into the situation you are trying to dig your way out of is precisely what you are continuing to do. Digging.  You need to stop digging so you can look up and see what you are trying to accomplish and restart with a clearer direction.  This week, I’m going to give you a roadmap you can follow to get yourself out of this hole so you are working towards a less overwhelming and clearer place.  And that means, it’s time for me now to h and you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Enrique. (엔리캐), Enrique asks, hi Carl, I really need your help. I feel so overwhelmed and stressed because my list of tasks keep getting longer and longer and I never seem to be making it smaller. It feels for every five tasks I do, fifteen new ones get added. My boss is always sending me messages and asking for updates so I never have time to do any focused work. How can I stop all this from happening?  Hi Enrique, thank you for your question. Firstly, fear not, there is a solution to this for you but you will need to do something a little uncomfortable. I need you to stop for a day or two.  When anyone gets into a situation where far more is coming in than going out, continuing to do what you are currently doing is not going to solve the problem. The only way you will solve a problem like this is to stop and draw a line under it all, while you fix the underlying problem. If you don’t stop, you have no chance to break the vicious circle that has grown. You have to break the circle and to do that you need to press pause.  Now, once you have stopped, you need to first look at the foundations of your system. Tasks and emails are different things so let’s look at your tasks first.  How are you collecting, organising and doing your work—the principles of COD.  Collecting everything is important, but it does not necessarily mean everything you collect needs to be done immediately or at all. A lot of what you collect can be done later. Quite a few of the tasks you collect may even be deleted because on reflection you realise you either do not have the time or resources to complete them or they do not need doing at all. Do not be afraid to delete these. If they are important, they will come back.  The delete key is your friend.  Organising is how you organise all the things you have decided do need to be done. There are only two questions here: what exactly needs to be done and when are you going to do it?  When you do it will depend on a two factors. Deadlines and available time. Now, here you will come up again the time V Activity conundrum, where the time side of the equation is fixed and there is nothing you can do to change that—that’s the natural laws of time and physics. But, you do have complete control over the activity side. The activities you do in the time you have available.  Now as an aside here, how long does a task take? For quite a few tasks it’ll be likely you will not know before you begin the task. And therein lies the answer… “before you begin the task”. Let’s say your boss asks you to prepare a report on a recent sales campaign you delivered. If you write in your task manager “Write report on recent sales campaign”, it will stress you. Unless you regularly write sales campaign reports you won’t know how it will take you and your brain will tell you “It’s going to take a long time”. That now means every time you see that task in your task list, you will convince yourself you have no time to write it today, so it gets rescheduled for tomorrow.  You will not know how long this task will take until you start it. So, rather than writing the task as “write sales campaign report” you add an extra word: “start writing sales campaign report”.  What you have now done is taken the emphasis away from completing the task, to just starting the task. How long does it take to start a task like this? A few minutes at most. You may only set up a Word document, give it a title and write the introduction, but it’s a start. Now, when you have finished, all you need do is change the task from “start writing sales campaign report” to “continue writing sales campaign report and schedule it for another day.  The benefit of writing tasks like this is as you start and continue to write the report, you will quickly be able to anticipate how long the whole task will take and that will take a lot of the pressure off. If you were to spend thirty-minutes each day for five days on the task, you will have spent two-and-a-half hours on it. That’s a lot better than doing nothing because you kept rescheduling it.  Let get back to the principles of COD.  The doing part is where your calendar comes in to play. Based on what you have decided needs to be done today, where do you have the time to do it?  It’s no good starting the day with thirty tasks you have convinced yourself need to be done today, yet have six hours of meetings. Your day’s destroyed before it starts. You need to be more strategic than that. In this situation you have two choices (and ONLY two choices). Either you cancel some of those meetings or you reschedule some of those tasks. I suppose you could do both as a third choice.  This is where things can become uncomfortable because sometimes we have to let people down and that’s hard to do. However, people are a lot more accommodating that we imagine. If we have promised someone to get a piece of work to them by the end of the week, yet, by Wednesday we know that’s not going to happen, it’s far better to reach out and renegotiate the deadline. In 90% of cases, people are perfectly happy with the renegotiated deadline.  What’s the worst that can happen if you do reach out? They could say no, I MUST have the work by Friday. Okay, now you have a hard deadline and you can renegotiate some of your other work instead. You may have to work an extra few hours that week to meet the deadline. As long as you are not working extra hours every day, that should not be a big issue.  Now, that brings me on to your email, and messages.  How much time do you need each day to stay on top of your email? When I ask people this question the reply is usually “it depends”. Yet, if you were to analyse it, you would find an average. For me, I need around forty-five minutes a day to respond to my actionable email. Some days, I only need twenty-five minutes, others I need an hour.  With that information, I can now block that time out on my calendar. I have one hour each day set aside for communications. I rarely need to full hour, but it’s there if I do need it.  Now with email, there’s a process for this. This process has worked for hundreds of years because it was devised when we received a lot of regular mail, and it’s only two steps.  The first is to process what you received. This is, in effect filtering out the actionable from the non-actionable. You can do this by asking two questions: <ul><li>What is it?</li> <li>Is it actionable? </li> </ul> If it’s actionable—ie you need to do something with it—it goes to an Action This Day folder. If it’s not actionable you only have two choices; delete or archive it and that will depend whether you may want to reference it later or not.  Now, with your actionable email, you reverse the way the folder shows you the mail. You want it to show the oldest at the top. This means when you sit down to deal with your email, you begin at the top—it’s the oldest email there so in theory it is the most urgent—and work your way down the list.  Because they are ordered oldest to newest, if you are unable to get to the bottom of your list for the day, it won’t be a problem because the ones you did not get to will be at the top of your list tomorrow.  When you become consistent with this, you will find email is no longer a problem.  In your case Enrique, one of the things you must do is to clear your inbox and that may take a morning or afternoon to do—it may even take you a whole day, but the only way you will ever get on top of it, is to stop, and clear that inbox.  This may involve declaring email bankruptcy. With that you have a choice you can choose to do a hard bankruptcy—that involves deleting all mail older than ten days. The other choice is to do a soft email bankruptcy, which involves taking all mail older than ten days and moving them into a folder called “Old Inbox”. You can then process that over time. (Although, I find most people end up deleting that folder after a few months) If you want to earn more about managing email, you can join my Email Mastery course. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for you.  Now there are other things you can do Enrique, you do need to know what your core work and areas of focus are so you can ensure you are working on these. But if you want to get back in control of everything the place to start is to stop. Step back and put in place COD and some better email management practices.  It will take time, but developing the processes and habits will soon have you in control and no longer feeling overwhelmed with everything you have to do. I hope that has helped and than you for sending in you question. Thank you also to you too for listening. It just remains for now to wish you all a very very productive week.

STOP! How To Remove Overwhelm.

Podcast 285 This week, it’s all about what should and should not go on your To-Do list. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 285 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 285 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 have too many tasks in your task manager? It’s one thing committing to using one, it’s an entirely different thing ensuring the right kind of tasks are on your list. Get this part wrong and you are going to soon find yourself overwhelmed.  I regularly see a common type of task on a to-do list that really should not be there, and I see quite a lot of tasks on a calendar that should be on a to-do list.  I know, it sounds confusing, but once you learn this strategy, you will soon find your task list reduces and you feel a lot less anxious and overwhelmed.  Now, before we get to the question and answer, let me just inform you that on Friday (that’s the 4th August for those of you in the US) My next Ultimate Productivity Workshop begins. That’s a 90 minute live workshop via Zoom where over the four Fridays of August, we cover how to get the most out of your calendar and task manager as well how to better manage your email and messages and finally in the fourth week, we cover planning.  As part of this workshop you have access to my Mini-Course set—that’s four of my most popular mini-courses—AND you get to download the workshop itself so you can keep it for later reference (and also if you are unable to attend one or more sessions)  Places are limited now, but there are a few still available. If you want to take your own time management and productivity to the next level, then get yourself signed up now and I’ll see you on Friday. More details on the workshop plus how to register are in the show notes.  Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Grace. Grace asks, Hi Carl, I began using Microsoft’s ToDo app last March and at first it really helped. But now, I find it’s become so overwhelming. I hate going in there because it reminds me how much I still have to do. Do you have any tips on making my ToDo better? Hi Grace, thank you for your question. This is something that happens to so many people. There’s the initial excitement of being able to put all the things we feel we have to do into a simple app, and to add dates to when we will do these tasks. And because at first we rarely put too much in there, our daily lists are not too bad. They are doable and if we do reschedule something, it doesn’t feel too bad because we got at least 80% of what was on the list done.  It’s a great feeling, yes? However, over time, we add more and more stuff. We start to add things we don’t want to forget about such as an upcoming event, anniversary or birthday. We then start to fiddle with the projects area and start adding more and more and more.  And eventually, we find ourself with an endless list of projects with a lot of unclear tasks telling to do something we cannot remember why we needed to do them in the first place.  We also begin adding random dates to tasks in a vain attempt to prevent us from forgetting something. Of course, when those task appear on our today list we just reschedule them again because we’re now trying to keep our heads above the water and as these tasks are not urgent or they don’t have a clear deadline, they can be sacrificed today. And that, just kicks the problem down the road.  Eventually, what most people do is blame the tool because that’s much easier than blaming the real culprit, and they go back to YouTube and watch their favourite YouTubers and see what they are reviewing now. And lo and behold, these people are talking about the latest new app that promises to make you more productive, more relaxed and do the work for you.  So, it’s switch time and the the cycle is complete and ready to be repeated.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.  In my podcast from a couple of weeks ago, I talked about what David Allen taught me over a lunch we had back in 2016. That was the forget the tools and focus on developing your system.  You see the problem is never the tools. You could very easily create your own digital task manager using Google Sheets, Excel of Apple Numbers. Sure, there’d be a bit of setting up work and some fine tuning, but it’s certainly doable and I know a lot of people who have done this perfectly fine.  The problem is with your system and more specifically what you are collecting into your task manager.  Let’s look at the different types of tasks commonly found in a task manager. There are the obvious ones like; “send document to Jenny” or “buy bracelet for Claire’s birthday”. These are clear and very specific. Then you will likely have your routines in there such as take the garbage out, do the laundry or complete my expense report.  Hopefully, you will also have your areas of focus tasks in there. Tasks such as schedule this week’s exercise programme, send money to savings account and call parents.  Now, the other types of tasks are often where the problems begin. These are tasks that involving decisions or thought. If you see a task such as “think about where to go for our summer holiday”, you’re in trouble.  You see a task like this is not actionable. It’s not something you can actually do. It’s something you need to be away from your desk and in a place where you are better able to think. It’s also something that needs a bit of time to do.  For a task like this, you would be better off creating a task such as “create list of possible places to go for our summer holiday” and move over to your note app to create the list.  Similarly with your “decide” type tasks. Again, this is not really actionable. It’s something you need to contemplate and weigh the pros and cons of your options. Again, this should be in your notes app.  Now, I know why these kind of activities are in task managers. It’s because people are afraid they will forget about them. And that’s a valid fear. However, there are two options you have here. The first is to create a recurring task in your task manager to remind you to review you thinking or decision list. The second is to use the all day event space in your calendar and add them there.  In both cases you will not forget them. They will always be visible every time you open your notes or calendar.  Now, what about time specific tasks. Tasks such as pick up Tommy from swimming class? These are not tasks, they are events and should be in your calendar. Watch out for these. We often add them to our task managers because it’s easier than adding them to our calendar. Sure, use your inbox to collect the item, but when you process your inbox, move it over to your calendar. Another way you can overwhelm your task manager is adding individual communication items in there. I frequently see people having ten to twenty tasks a day that begin reply to this email, or email that person. This is guaranteed way to overwhelm your system.  Email replies should not need to be in a task manager. You already have a great tool for managing emails, and messages for that matter. Whether you use Gmail, Outlook or Apple mail, there’s a built in inbox, the same goes for Slack, Teams and Twist. Transfer items from those inboxes to another inbox, is simply duplicating and adding additional steps you do not need.  Instead you can simply have a single task in your task manager reminding you to clear your email and messages. That will then trigger you to move over to your mail or message app and you can focus your attention there.  Now if you take all or some of these tips, Grace, you are going to reduce the number of tasks in your task list immediately.  However, there is one more tip. This tip will remove overwhelm and any anxiety you may have about the number of tasks you need to do each day. Sadly, 95% of you will not do it. Instead you will find an excuse.  This tip is, give yourself five to ten minutes at the end of the day to review you tasks for tomorrow and make sure it is not overwhelming. Now you need to be realistic. You should check your calendar to make sure you have the time to complete what you have on your list and if not, trim down the list to a more realistic one.  Like I said, most people will not do this, and so they begin the day overwhelmed and no idea where to start. When you do allow those five to ten minutes, when you start the day you know exactly what you will start with, you have a manageable list and you there’s no procrastination.  It’s brilliantly simple, works every time, yet, sadly, not sexy. So, few people ever do it. Instead, it’s far easier to blame the tool, or your boss for giving you too much work. That might be true in some cases, but you will be a lot more focused and productive if you can add those five to ten minutes.  So, Grace, I would recommend you go through your tasks in ToDo and look for tasks that require you to think or decide and move them to your notes app. I would also look for anything that is not clear. Tasks that say something like “call George”, that’s not an a task, it’s a statement that gives you no information. Call George about what? Make it clear.  Unclear tasks require you to think and try and remember what it is you need to do. Remove that thought process and make it clear. Call George about next month’s offsite meeting” will prevent any hesitation and give you a much clearer idea how long it will take.  And, remove all tasks that no longer need doing. It’s surprising how quickly these can accumulate. Clear them. Don’t worry about them because if they are important, they will come back and you can add them again.  I hope that helps, Grace. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Podcast 285 This week, it’s all about what should and should not go on your To-Do list. You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://www.carlpullein.com/ultimate-productivity-2023" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Ultimate Productivity Workshop</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 285 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 285 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 have too many tasks in your task manager? It’s one thing committing to using one, it’s an entirely different thing ensuring the right kind of tasks are on your list. Get this part wrong and you are going to soon find yourself overwhelmed.  I regularly see a common type of task on a to-do list that really should not be there, and I see quite a lot of tasks on a calendar that should be on a to-do list.  I know, it sounds confusing, but once you learn this strategy, you will soon find your task list reduces and you feel a lot less anxious and overwhelmed.  Now, before we get to the question and answer, let me just inform you that on Friday (that’s the 4th August for those of you in the US) My next Ultimate Productivity Workshop begins. That’s a 90 minute live workshop via Zoom where over the four Fridays of August, we cover how to get the most out of your calendar and task manager as well how to better manage your email and messages and finally in the fourth week, we cover planning.  As part of this workshop you have access to my Mini-Course set—that’s four of my most popular mini-courses—AND you get to download the workshop itself so you can keep it for later reference (and also if you are unable to attend one or more sessions)  Places are limited now, but there are a few still available. If you want to take your own time management and productivity to the next level, then get yourself signed up now and I’ll see you on Friday. More details on the workshop plus how to register are in the show notes.  Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Grace. Grace asks, Hi Carl, I began using Microsoft’s ToDo app last March and at first it really helped. But now, I find it’s become so overwhelming. I hate going in there because it reminds me how much I still have to do. Do you have any tips on making my ToDo better? Hi Grace, thank you for your question. This is something that happens to so many people. There’s the initial excitement of being able to put all the things we feel we have to do into a simple app, and to add dates to when we will do these tasks. And because at first we rarely put too much in there, our daily lists are not too bad. They are doable and if we do reschedule something, it doesn’t feel too bad because we got at least 80% of what was on the list done.  It’s a great feeling, yes? However, over time, we add more and more stuff. We start to add things we don’t want to forget about such as an upcoming event, anniversary or birthday. We then start to fiddle with the projects area and start adding more and more and more.  And eventually, we find ourself with an endless list of projects with a lot of unclear tasks telling to do something we cannot remember why we needed to do them in the first place.  We also begin adding random dates to tasks in a vain attempt to prevent us from forgetting something. Of course, when those task appear on our today list we just reschedule them again because we’re now trying to keep our heads above the water and as these tasks are not urgent or they don’t have a clear deadline, they can be sacrificed today. And that, just kicks the problem down the road.  Eventually, what most people do is blame the tool because that’s much easier than blaming the real culprit, and they go back to YouTube and watch their favourite YouTubers and see what they are reviewing now. And lo and behold, these people are talking about the latest new app that promises to make you more productive, more relaxed and do the work for you.  So, it’s switch time and the the cycle is complete and ready to be repeated.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.  In my podcast from a couple of weeks ago, I talked about what David Allen taught me over a lunch we had back in 2016. That was the forget the tools and focus on developing your system.  You see the problem is never the tools. You could very easily create your own digital task manager using Google Sheets, Excel of Apple Numbers. Sure, there’d be a bit of setting up work and some fine tuning, but it’s certainly doable and I know a lot of people who have done this perfectly fine.  The problem is with your system and more specifically what you are collecting into your task manager.  Let’s look at the different types of tasks commonly found in a task manager. There are the obvious ones like; “send document to Jenny” or “buy bracelet for Claire’s birthday”. These are clear and very specific. Then you will likely have your routines in there such as take the garbage out, do the laundry or complete my expense report.  Hopefully, you will also have your areas of focus tasks in there. Tasks such as schedule this week’s exercise programme, send money to savings account and call parents.  Now, the other types of tasks are often where the problems begin. These are tasks that involving decisions or thought. If you see a task such as “think about where to go for our summer holiday”, you’re in trouble.  You see a task like this is not actionable. It’s not something you can actually do. It’s something you need to be away from your desk and in a place where you are better able to think. It’s also something that needs a bit of time to do.  For a task like this, you would be better off creating a task such as “create list of possible places to go for our summer holiday” and move over to your note app to create the list.  Similarly with your “decide” type tasks. Again, this is not really actionable. It’s something you need to contemplate and weigh the pros and cons of your options. Again, this should be in your notes app.  Now, I know why these kind of activities are in task managers. It’s because people are afraid they will forget about them. And that’s a valid fear. However, there are two options you have here. The first is to create a recurring task in your task manager to remind you to review you thinking or decision list. The second is to use the all day event space in your calendar and add them there.  In both cases you will not forget them. They will always be visible every time you open your notes or calendar.  Now, what about time specific tasks. Tasks such as pick up Tommy from swimming class? These are not tasks, they are events and should be in your calendar. Watch out for these. We often add them to our task managers because it’s easier than adding them to our calendar. Sure, use your inbox to collect the item, but when you process your inbox, move it over to your calendar. Another way you can overwhelm your task manager is adding individual communication items in there. I frequently see people having ten to twenty tasks a day that begin reply to this email, or email that person. This is guaranteed way to overwhelm your system.  Email replies should not need to be in a task manager. You already have a great tool for managing emails, and messages for that matter. Whether you use Gmail, Outlook or Apple mail, there’s a built in inbox, the same goes for Slack, Teams and Twist. Transfer items from those inboxes to another inbox, is simply duplicating and adding additional steps you do not need.  Instead you can simply have a single task in your task manager reminding you to clear your email and messages. That will then trigger you to move over to your mail or message app and you can focus your attention there.  Now if you take all or some of these tips, Grace, you are going to reduce the number of tasks in your task list immediately.  However, there is one more tip. This tip will remove overwhelm and any anxiety you may have about the number of tasks you need to do each day. Sadly, 95% of you will not do it. Instead you will find an excuse.  This tip is, give yourself five to ten minutes at the end of the day to review you tasks for tomorrow and make sure it is not overwhelming. Now you need to be realistic. You should check your calendar to make sure you have the time to complete what you have on your list and if not, trim down the list to a more realistic one.  Like I said, most people will not do this, and so they begin the day overwhelmed and no idea where to start. When you do allow those five to ten minutes, when you start the day you know exactly what you will start with, you have a manageable list and you there’s no procrastination.  It’s brilliantly simple, works every time, yet, sadly, not sexy. So, few people ever do it. Instead, it’s far easier to blame the tool, or your boss for giving you too much work. That might be true in some cases, but you will be a lot more focused and productive if you can add those five to ten minutes.  So, Grace, I would recommend you go through your tasks in ToDo and look for tasks that require you to think or decide and move them to your notes app. I would also look for anything that is not clear. Tasks that say something like “call George”, that’s not an a task, it’s a statement that gives you no information. Call George about what? Make it clear.  Unclear tasks require you to think and try and remember what it is you need to do. Remove that thought process and make it clear. Call George about next month’s offsite meeting” will prevent any hesitation and give you a much clearer idea how long it will take.  And, remove all tasks that no longer need doing. It’s surprising how quickly these can accumulate. Clear them. Don’t worry about them because if they are important, they will come back and you can add them again.  I hope that helps, Grace. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

What Not To Put In Your Task Manager.

Is what you want to get accomplished this week realistic, or are you setting yourself up for disappointment? That’s what we are looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 284 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 284 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. What do you want to get accomplished this week? What are the “big rocks” you want to deal with so you end the week knowing you have got what needed to be done, done? If you don’t know, your week is already destroyed. It’s destroyed because if you don’t know what you want to get completed that week, then someone else will tell you what to do. And that means you are working on other people’s agenda and benevolently helping them to achieve their goals.  But where does that leave you? When it comes to promotion opportunities who’s going to get the promotion? You who are running around dealing with everyone else’s issues and work and as a consequence not getting much done. Or the person who is getting their tasks completed on time and consistently moving things forward each week? Ultimately, all this comes down to making a decision. Will you spend thirty minutes or so at the end of the week looking ahead and establishing some objectives for the following week or not? Only you can make that decision or find an excuse. Either way, on this issue, only you can make that choice. And so, this naturally leads to me handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I know weekly planning is important, and I try to do it, but when I get to the end of the week, I am just so relieved the week is over and the last thing I want to do is think about the next week. I know this is impacting my career prospects and was wondering if there is something I can do that will motivate me to do something about planning the week.  Hi Julie, thank you for your question.  Firstly Julie, this is an area I know so many people struggle with. I think everyone knows the advantages and importance of having some kind of plan for the week, yet it can be hard to motivate ourselves to spend a little time looking ahead and deciding what needs to get done the following week.  However, before we can get to the planning stage there is something very important that needs addressing. That is asking yourself what can you realistically get done the following week. I suspect most people don’t do, or stop doing a weekly plan, because they very rarely, if ever, accomplish anything they plan anyway.  If you spent an hour or two (and yes, some people do waste that much time planning the week) and then never get close to completing that plan, what’s the point? Why bother in the first place?  This is why you do not want to be spending hours and hours on a weekly plan. It’s a waste of time. You see, there are far too many unknowns. You have no idea how many emails you will get on Tuesday morning, let alone what your boss with ask you to do via WhatsApp or Slack on Monday afternoon.  In a way, this is the missing piece of planning a week that almost everyone overlooks. All the unknowns that will be thrown at you throughout the week. It’s these that have an enormous impact on what you can and cannot get done in a week. I recently learned that author Jeffrey Archer disappears to Marbella from 27th December to around the first week of February to completely focus on his writing. During those five to six weeks he does nothing else but write. He effectively removes himself from the possibility of distractions in order to get his work done. It’s this that allows him the confidence to know that he will complete his first draft in those few weeks. It’s unlikely you have the luxury to be able to disappear and remove all possibility of distraction to focus on your work, which means you also lose the confidence to know with almost complete certainty what you will be able to accomplish in a given week.  But that’s okay because you don’t need to know with absolute confidence what you can accomplish in a week. All you need to know is what you want to get accomplished in a week.  Now, this begins with knowing what your core work is—that is the work you are employed to do—the absolute basics.  For me, that means writing a blog post, two newsletters. The script for this podcast and recording two YouTube videos.  I also have between fifteen and twenty hours of meetings each week and I need around an hour a day to deal with my communications. In total, I need around thirty three hours each week to complete my non-negotiable work.  Now, let’s say I want to work on some projects too, if I were to work a forty-hour week I still have seven hours to play with. That’s an hour a day on average for project work and to deal with the unexpected. I’ve found that’s more than enough to keep things moving forward.  Sure, from time I need more time to deal with an emergency or to unstick a project. But that doesn’t happen every week, so on average when I begin each week, I know as long as I have a plan to cover my core work and get that done, I have enough time.  However, if you do not have a plan, you introduce the biggest problem. Uncertainty.  How much time are you losing each day trying to decide what to do? Should you do this or should you do that? Perhaps you should make a start on that thing, but then you had better finish this thing off first. No wait! You’d better check your email—there might be something important in there! How many times a day do you have that conversation with yourself?  It’s conversations like that that demonstrates clearly the disadvantages of not knowing what you want to get done that week.  When you know that Project A needs to be moved forward this week, that conversation does not happen. You know you need to move it forward, so you open up your project notes and get started. If you’ve done a plan for the week you know what you want to do. It could be you want to get the design proofs off to your boss for approval, or it might be to send out a tender to five contractors. If you’ve done a plan for the week you know precisely what you want to get done and there’s no uncertainty or hesitation. The only decision you need to make is when will you sit down and do the work. And making decision is considerably easier than trying to decide what to do in the first place.  Deicing what to do in the moment is hard. It’s what I would describe as a pressure decision. With no plan you are rushed into making a decision based on very limited information. It’s like trying to make a decision about which direction to go in the bottom of foggy valley. When you do a weekly plan, that’s your chance to clamber up the highest peak of the valley and look ahead with clear blue skies. You can see all around you, where the dangers are, which direction to go and where you currently are. It’s a much clearer view than what you get at the bottom of the valley where the fog is settled.  The resistance to planning the week can be attributed to many things. The idea you don’t want to think about work at the end of the week, or the thought it’s going to take you two or three hours to do it properly. And that understandable. After all, if you’ve read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done or read an article about the weekly review, it’s likely you think two or three hours is normal.  But it’s not. Sure the first time you do plan the week it could take you two or three hours (or more), but that’s just the first time you do it. You’re unsure, you’re don’t where to start to where to look. And of course, you will be slow.  Let’s be honest, when you took your first steps in from of your parents, I bet you didn’t walk across the room particularly fast did you? No. You stubbed, fell down and walked very steadily. It’s the same with weekly planning the first and second ones will be slow. But by the time you do your third one you will have cut the time down significantly and the more times you complete one, the faster you will get.  To give you a reference point. My weekly planning takes on average thirty minutes. I know were to look, I know what to look for and I know how to add dates to the things that need to be done the following week.  And now, when should you do the weekly planning.  Okay, so I did a lot of research into this a couple of years ago. I’ve also experimented on myself. What I’ve found is the best time to do your weekly planning is Saturday morning.  Now for those of you who have strict rules about work and personal life and have just spat out a mouthful of your coffee, hear me out. Why Saturday morning? Well, the first thing is you’re not not going to be tired. That excuse is squashed. You can sleep an extra hour wake up slowly and gently—well, you can if you don’t have a young family.  More importantly, though, you get it done early so you can then enjoy the weekend without sudden anxiety attacks about what you think you must get done next week. You prevent that from happening because you will already have cleared your mind and can then relax and actually enjoy the weekend without worrying about what you may or may not need to get done the following week.  Saturday morning is also a time when the week just gone by is still fresh in your mind and you are not going to be disturbed.  Now, all you are asking for is thirty minutes. That’s a small sacrifice for a weekend free of anxiety and worry isn’t it?  This is why I don’t recommend doing your planning on a Sunday evening. That leaves you at the mercy of worrying thoughts about the week ahead all weekend. That’s not going to give you a pleasant weekend and it’s very difficult to pick yourself up off the sofa and go power up your computer and start planning the week after a lovely, relaxing weekend.  No, get it done early so you can relax and enjoy the weekend free from thoughts about work and horrors that may reveal themselves to you at 8:30am on Monday morning.  So there you go, Julie. I hope that helps and gives you a little motivation for doing a weekly planning session. Enjoy it, put on some of your favourite music, make yourself a lovely cup of tea and smile. You know you are doing the right thing.  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. 

Is what you want to get accomplished this week realistic, or are you setting yourself up for disappointment? That’s what we are looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 284 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 284 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. What do you want to get accomplished this week? What are the “big rocks” you want to deal with so you end the week knowing you have got what needed to be done, done? If you don’t know, your week is already destroyed. It’s destroyed because if you don’t know what you want to get completed that week, then someone else will tell you what to do. And that means you are working on other people’s agenda and benevolently helping them to achieve their goals.  But where does that leave you? When it comes to promotion opportunities who’s going to get the promotion? You who are running around dealing with everyone else’s issues and work and as a consequence not getting much done. Or the person who is getting their tasks completed on time and consistently moving things forward each week? Ultimately, all this comes down to making a decision. Will you spend thirty minutes or so at the end of the week looking ahead and establishing some objectives for the following week or not? Only you can make that decision or find an excuse. Either way, on this issue, only you can make that choice. And so, this naturally leads to me handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I know weekly planning is important, and I try to do it, but when I get to the end of the week, I am just so relieved the week is over and the last thing I want to do is think about the next week. I know this is impacting my career prospects and was wondering if there is something I can do that will motivate me to do something about planning the week.  Hi Julie, thank you for your question.  Firstly Julie, this is an area I know so many people struggle with. I think everyone knows the advantages and importance of having some kind of plan for the week, yet it can be hard to motivate ourselves to spend a little time looking ahead and deciding what needs to get done the following week.  However, before we can get to the planning stage there is something very important that needs addressing. That is asking yourself what can you realistically get done the following week. I suspect most people don’t do, or stop doing a weekly plan, because they very rarely, if ever, accomplish anything they plan anyway.  If you spent an hour or two (and yes, some people do waste that much time planning the week) and then never get close to completing that plan, what’s the point? Why bother in the first place?  This is why you do not want to be spending hours and hours on a weekly plan. It’s a waste of time. You see, there are far too many unknowns. You have no idea how many emails you will get on Tuesday morning, let alone what your boss with ask you to do via WhatsApp or Slack on Monday afternoon.  In a way, this is the missing piece of planning a week that almost everyone overlooks. All the unknowns that will be thrown at you throughout the week. It’s these that have an enormous impact on what you can and cannot get done in a week. I recently learned that author Jeffrey Archer disappears to Marbella from 27th December to around the first week of February to completely focus on his writing. During those five to six weeks he does nothing else but write. He effectively removes himself from the possibility of distractions in order to get his work done. It’s this that allows him the confidence to know that he will complete his first draft in those few weeks. It’s unlikely you have the luxury to be able to disappear and remove all possibility of distraction to focus on your work, which means you also lose the confidence to know with almost complete certainty what you will be able to accomplish in a given week.  But that’s okay because you don’t need to know with absolute confidence what you can accomplish in a week. All you need to know is what you want to get accomplished in a week.  Now, this begins with knowing what your core work is—that is the work you are employed to do—the absolute basics.  For me, that means writing a blog post, two newsletters. The script for this podcast and recording two YouTube videos.  I also have between fifteen and twenty hours of meetings each week and I need around an hour a day to deal with my communications. In total, I need around thirty three hours each week to complete my non-negotiable work.  Now, let’s say I want to work on some projects too, if I were to work a forty-hour week I still have seven hours to play with. That’s an hour a day on average for project work and to deal with the unexpected. I’ve found that’s more than enough to keep things moving forward.  Sure, from time I need more time to deal with an emergency or to unstick a project. But that doesn’t happen every week, so on average when I begin each week, I know as long as I have a plan to cover my core work and get that done, I have enough time.  However, if you do not have a plan, you introduce the biggest problem. Uncertainty.  How much time are you losing each day trying to decide what to do? Should you do this or should you do that? Perhaps you should make a start on that thing, but then you had better finish this thing off first. No wait! You’d better check your email—there might be something important in there! How many times a day do you have that conversation with yourself?  It’s conversations like that that demonstrates clearly the disadvantages of not knowing what you want to get done that week.  When you know that Project A needs to be moved forward this week, that conversation does not happen. You know you need to move it forward, so you open up your project notes and get started. If you’ve done a plan for the week you know what you want to do. It could be you want to get the design proofs off to your boss for approval, or it might be to send out a tender to five contractors. If you’ve done a plan for the week you know precisely what you want to get done and there’s no uncertainty or hesitation. The only decision you need to make is when will you sit down and do the work. And making decision is considerably easier than trying to decide what to do in the first place.  Deicing what to do in the moment is hard. It’s what I would describe as a pressure decision. With no plan you are rushed into making a decision based on very limited information. It’s like trying to make a decision about which direction to go in the bottom of foggy valley. When you do a weekly plan, that’s your chance to clamber up the highest peak of the valley and look ahead with clear blue skies. You can see all around you, where the dangers are, which direction to go and where you currently are. It’s a much clearer view than what you get at the bottom of the valley where the fog is settled.  The resistance to planning the week can be attributed to many things. The idea you don’t want to think about work at the end of the week, or the thought it’s going to take you two or three hours to do it properly. And that understandable. After all, if you’ve read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done or read an article about the weekly review, it’s likely you think two or three hours is normal.  But it’s not. Sure the first time you do plan the week it could take you two or three hours (or more), but that’s just the first time you do it. You’re unsure, you’re don’t where to start to where to look. And of course, you will be slow.  Let’s be honest, when you took your first steps in from of your parents, I bet you didn’t walk across the room particularly fast did you? No. You stubbed, fell down and walked very steadily. It’s the same with weekly planning the first and second ones will be slow. But by the time you do your third one you will have cut the time down significantly and the more times you complete one, the faster you will get.  To give you a reference point. My weekly planning takes on average thirty minutes. I know were to look, I know what to look for and I know how to add dates to the things that need to be done the following week.  And now, when should you do the weekly planning.  Okay, so I did a lot of research into this a couple of years ago. I’ve also experimented on myself. What I’ve found is the best time to do your weekly planning is Saturday morning.  Now for those of you who have strict rules about work and personal life and have just spat out a mouthful of your coffee, hear me out. Why Saturday morning? Well, the first thing is you’re not not going to be tired. That excuse is squashed. You can sleep an extra hour wake up slowly and gently—well, you can if you don’t have a young family.  More importantly, though, you get it done early so you can then enjoy the weekend without sudden anxiety attacks about what you think you must get done next week. You prevent that from happening because you will already have cleared your mind and can then relax and actually enjoy the weekend without worrying about what you may or may not need to get done the following week.  Saturday morning is also a time when the week just gone by is still fresh in your mind and you are not going to be disturbed.  Now, all you are asking for is thirty minutes. That’s a small sacrifice for a weekend free of anxiety and worry isn’t it?  This is why I don’t recommend doing your planning on a Sunday evening. That leaves you at the mercy of worrying thoughts about the week ahead all weekend. That’s not going to give you a pleasant weekend and it’s very difficult to pick yourself up off the sofa and go power up your computer and start planning the week after a lovely, relaxing weekend.  No, get it done early so you can relax and enjoy the weekend free from thoughts about work and horrors that may reveal themselves to you at 8:30am on Monday morning.  So there you go, Julie. I hope that helps and gives you a little motivation for doing a weekly planning session. Enjoy it, put on some of your favourite music, make yourself a lovely cup of tea and smile. You know you are doing the right thing.  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.

Not Doing A Weekly Planning Session? This For You.

David Allen

This week’s question is all about what is important in your time management and productivity system.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 283 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 283 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. With the constant influx of new productivity tools it can be difficult to settle on a set of tools because you are worried that you might be missing the boat or there could be something out there that is better than what you are using now and could, in theory, make you even better at managing your time and being more productive.  But wait, do all these new tools really offer you the opportunity to improve your time management or productivity? Have you considered the time cost penalty of switching and then learning the new way to find what you need and organise everything?  The truth is not what you may think and it’s something I learned several years ago. Once I did, my productivity shot through the roof. I was better organised and I quickly discovered I had more time to do the things I loved doing. Which was a bit of a shock.  So that brings me to this week’s question, it’s also a question I frequently get on YouTube comments, and I thought it would be a good idea to share my discoveries with you so you can make your own decision.  So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question come from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I’ve always wondered why you don’t use apps like Notion and Obsidian. I notice a lot productivity YouTubers use these apps, but you seem to stick with the same apps. Is there a reason you don’t check these apps out?  Hi Kevin, thank you for your question.  To answer your question directly, the reason I don’t switch my apps is because David Allen told me not to.  Now, for those of your who don’t know, David Allen wrote the “bible” of time management and productivity: Getting Things Done and he is considered the Godfather of today’s productivity systems.  Back in 2016, David visited Korea and I reached out to him and I got to meet him. We had lunch together, and we inevitably talked productivity. The conversation soon got onto tools and I asked him if he really does still use eProductivity—an app that was an offshoot of the old Lotus Notes. He confirmed he did. Now at that time, I was still on my productivity tools journey. I don’t think I stuck with a task manager for longer than three of four months before I was searching around for a new one to “play with”.  I was curious, and asked him if he’d ever considered using something else—something that was available on his iPhone or iPad as as well as his computer. (eProductivity was only available on a computer) and he said: Why?  I was a bit stuck there, but he added why would he change something that works? Something that he’d learned to use inside out and could pretty much use with his eyes closed. He also pointed out that eProductivity was reliable, it didn’t rely on syncing (which back in 2016 was not particularly reliable for anything) and he couldn’t remember the last time it crashed.  As our conversation continued, David elaborated on his system. He carried with him a leather wallet that contained a little note pad and pen. If he thought of something he’d write it down on the notepad and when he got back to his office (or hotel room) he would tear out the notes and add them to his inbox (or traveling inbox if he was on a business trip).  Later when he had time he would transfer those notes to eProductivity. This gave him an opportunity to filter out the stuff that didn’t need any action and decide whether something was a note or a task.  That process wasn’t something he’d developed overnight. It took twenty years or more. Refining and developing the so called muscle memory to automatically add something to the note pad when anything came up isn’t something you will develop over a few weeks or months. It takes years.  But more importantly, the method David Allen had created for himself ensured he was always asking the right questions about something. If you’ve read the Getting things Done book, he writes about these questions. They are:  What is it? Is it actionable? If so, what needs to happen?  It was during our conversation, I told him of my dilemma at that time which was Todoist or OmniFocus? David answered, “pick one and stick with it.”  It was that that revolutionised my productivity. “Pick one and stick with it” has been my mantra since then. This is why I still use Todoist and Evernote to this day.  Everything David told me, happened. My productivity went through the roof. I was no longer searching around looking for something better, I was focused on, forgive the pun, getting things done.  Suddenly, I was able watch a little TV in evenings instead of reading about new productivity tools. I started having longer and better conversations with my wife because I wasn’t distracted playing around with another new toy.  I’m sure it’s no coincidence that from around late 2016 early 2017, I was able to run two businesses, produce two YouTube videos a week and write a blog post as well as start this podcast. None of that would have been possible if I were still searching and looking for new and better tools.  You the see the time cost involved in switching your tools every few months is ridiculous. There’s the searching around and watching countless YouTube videos. Then there’s the switch cost, where you move everything across and organise things how you want it (which ironically is rarely different from the way you organised it before) and finally, the biggest time suck of all, learning to use the new app. That can take weeks, if not months to get up to the speed you were at using your previous app.  Oh, and there’s all that researching trying to figure out how to do something you were able to do in your previous app, which you now discover is not available in your new app.  Do I want to go through all that again? No thank you. Now, that’s not to say there are no reasons for changing your tools. Evernote is a classic example. A few years ago they changed their app considerably when Evernote changed to Evernote 10. The early versions were horrible and everything I’d learned in the previous eight years changed and I was faced with relearning how to use Evernote. I was very tempted to change to Apple Notes at that time. I didn’t because I know the penalties of changing and I’m glad I didn’t. Evernote 10 is now reliable and robust and I’ve had three years to learn how to use Evernote 10.  But, had Evernote not solved those initial problems, I would have changed. I need my tools to work so I can work. I don’t want to spend time in the day trying to figure out how to fix a broken app.  The more I research productive people, the more I see tools are not important. Recently, I researched author Jeffrey Archer. He began writing his books in the 1970s and wrote them by hand. He still does today. In interviews, he talks about having a system that works, so why change it.  John Grisham writes his books in Word—there are loads of new writing apps that are possibly better than Word, yet he knows Word, it works, so why change it? For him, Word is a part of his writing process, and over 50 books later, why change that system?  For me, Todoist and Evernote are all a part of my process. Todoist tells me what I need to work on, Evernote contains my notes on whatever I am working on, whether that is a YouTube video, this podcast, a blog post or a course. It’s seamless, it works and can all be done in less than two seconds. Why would I want to change that?  A client of mine is a screenwriter and he’s been using Final Draft for over twenty years. Can you imagine how quick he is getting down to writing his scripts?  I worked with a copywriter who had used Apple’s built in Text Edit app for fifteen years and would not contemplate using anything else to do her work because as a simple text file her work was transferable to any computer system or app. The brilliance was in the simplicity of her system.  I’ve worked with photographers who can do incredible magic with Adobe’s Lightroom at lighten speed because they’ve used it every day for over ten years.  It all comes down to what you want. Is it the thrill of playing with something new? There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need need to be honest about it. You do not want to be fooling yourself in to believing that the next new app will make you more productive. It won’t.  What will make you more productive is the system you put in place. Going back to Jeffrey Archer, his writing system is simple. He disappears on the 27th December to his house in Mallorca, where for the next five weeks he will follow the same process each day, By the 2nd or 3rd February, he has a completed first draft of his next book. All handwritten on a large bundle of paper.  That’s how you become more productive. Focus on your process for doing your work. Whether you are a salesperson, an interior designer, a doctor or a software developer. Pick tools that will work for you for many years to come and focus on doing your work not the tools. The simpler your system, the better and faster you will be.  All you need is a calendar, a task manager and notes app for your productivity tools. These days, I would advise these are all available on each of the devices you have, so you have everything you need with you at all times. Pick tools that work for you and stick with them. By sticking with them, your system will develop, grow and adjust and that pushes you towards focusing on your work—which is the secret to becoming more productive and better with managing your time.  Thank you Kevin for your question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s question is all about what is important in your time management and productivity system.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 283 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 283 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. With the constant influx of new productivity tools it can be difficult to settle on a set of tools because you are worried that you might be missing the boat or there could be something out there that is better than what you are using now and could, in theory, make you even better at managing your time and being more productive.  But wait, do all these new tools really offer you the opportunity to improve your time management or productivity? Have you considered the time cost penalty of switching and then learning the new way to find what you need and organise everything?  The truth is not what you may think and it’s something I learned several years ago. Once I did, my productivity shot through the roof. I was better organised and I quickly discovered I had more time to do the things I loved doing. Which was a bit of a shock.  So that brings me to this week’s question, it’s also a question I frequently get on YouTube comments, and I thought it would be a good idea to share my discoveries with you so you can make your own decision.  So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question come from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I’ve always wondered why you don’t use apps like Notion and Obsidian. I notice a lot productivity YouTubers use these apps, but you seem to stick with the same apps. Is there a reason you don’t check these apps out?  Hi Kevin, thank you for your question.  To answer your question directly, the reason I don’t switch my apps is because David Allen told me not to.  Now, for those of your who don’t know, David Allen wrote the “bible” of time management and productivity: Getting Things Done and he is considered the Godfather of today’s productivity systems.  Back in 2016, David visited Korea and I reached out to him and I got to meet him. We had lunch together, and we inevitably talked productivity. The conversation soon got onto tools and I asked him if he really does still use eProductivity—an app that was an offshoot of the old Lotus Notes. He confirmed he did. Now at that time, I was still on my productivity tools journey. I don’t think I stuck with a task manager for longer than three of four months before I was searching around for a new one to “play with”.  I was curious, and asked him if he’d ever considered using something else—something that was available on his iPhone or iPad as as well as his computer. (eProductivity was only available on a computer) and he said: Why?  I was a bit stuck there, but he added why would he change something that works? Something that he’d learned to use inside out and could pretty much use with his eyes closed. He also pointed out that eProductivity was reliable, it didn’t rely on syncing (which back in 2016 was not particularly reliable for anything) and he couldn’t remember the last time it crashed.  As our conversation continued, David elaborated on his system. He carried with him a leather wallet that contained a little note pad and pen. If he thought of something he’d write it down on the notepad and when he got back to his office (or hotel room) he would tear out the notes and add them to his inbox (or traveling inbox if he was on a business trip).  Later when he had time he would transfer those notes to eProductivity. This gave him an opportunity to filter out the stuff that didn’t need any action and decide whether something was a note or a task.  That process wasn’t something he’d developed overnight. It took twenty years or more. Refining and developing the so called muscle memory to automatically add something to the note pad when anything came up isn’t something you will develop over a few weeks or months. It takes years.  But more importantly, the method David Allen had created for himself ensured he was always asking the right questions about something. If you’ve read the Getting things Done book, he writes about these questions. They are:  What is it? Is it actionable? If so, what needs to happen?  It was during our conversation, I told him of my dilemma at that time which was Todoist or OmniFocus? David answered, “pick one and stick with it.”  It was that that revolutionised my productivity. “Pick one and stick with it” has been my mantra since then. This is why I still use Todoist and Evernote to this day.  Everything David told me, happened. My productivity went through the roof. I was no longer searching around looking for something better, I was focused on, forgive the pun, getting things done.  Suddenly, I was able watch a little TV in evenings instead of reading about new productivity tools. I started having longer and better conversations with my wife because I wasn’t distracted playing around with another new toy.  I’m sure it’s no coincidence that from around late 2016 early 2017, I was able to run two businesses, produce two YouTube videos a week and write a blog post as well as start this podcast. None of that would have been possible if I were still searching and looking for new and better tools.  You the see the time cost involved in switching your tools every few months is ridiculous. There’s the searching around and watching countless YouTube videos. Then there’s the switch cost, where you move everything across and organise things how you want it (which ironically is rarely different from the way you organised it before) and finally, the biggest time suck of all, learning to use the new app. That can take weeks, if not months to get up to the speed you were at using your previous app.  Oh, and there’s all that researching trying to figure out how to do something you were able to do in your previous app, which you now discover is not available in your new app.  Do I want to go through all that again? No thank you. Now, that’s not to say there are no reasons for changing your tools. Evernote is a classic example. A few years ago they changed their app considerably when Evernote changed to Evernote 10. The early versions were horrible and everything I’d learned in the previous eight years changed and I was faced with relearning how to use Evernote. I was very tempted to change to Apple Notes at that time. I didn’t because I know the penalties of changing and I’m glad I didn’t. Evernote 10 is now reliable and robust and I’ve had three years to learn how to use Evernote 10.  But, had Evernote not solved those initial problems, I would have changed. I need my tools to work so I can work. I don’t want to spend time in the day trying to figure out how to fix a broken app.  The more I research productive people, the more I see tools are not important. Recently, I researched author Jeffrey Archer. He began writing his books in the 1970s and wrote them by hand. He still does today. In interviews, he talks about having a system that works, so why change it.  John Grisham writes his books in Word—there are loads of new writing apps that are possibly better than Word, yet he knows Word, it works, so why change it? For him, Word is a part of his writing process, and over 50 books later, why change that system?  For me, Todoist and Evernote are all a part of my process. Todoist tells me what I need to work on, Evernote contains my notes on whatever I am working on, whether that is a YouTube video, this podcast, a blog post or a course. It’s seamless, it works and can all be done in less than two seconds. Why would I want to change that?  A client of mine is a screenwriter and he’s been using Final Draft for over twenty years. Can you imagine how quick he is getting down to writing his scripts?  I worked with a copywriter who had used Apple’s built in Text Edit app for fifteen years and would not contemplate using anything else to do her work because as a simple text file her work was transferable to any computer system or app. The brilliance was in the simplicity of her system.  I’ve worked with photographers who can do incredible magic with Adobe’s Lightroom at lighten speed because they’ve used it every day for over ten years.  It all comes down to what you want. Is it the thrill of playing with something new? There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need need to be honest about it. You do not want to be fooling yourself in to believing that the next new app will make you more productive. It won’t.  What will make you more productive is the system you put in place. Going back to Jeffrey Archer, his writing system is simple. He disappears on the 27th December to his house in Mallorca, where for the next five weeks he will follow the same process each day, By the 2nd or 3rd February, he has a completed first draft of his next book. All handwritten on a large bundle of paper.  That’s how you become more productive. Focus on your process for doing your work. Whether you are a salesperson, an interior designer, a doctor or a software developer. Pick tools that will work for you for many years to come and focus on doing your work not the tools. The simpler your system, the better and faster you will be.  All you need is a calendar, a task manager and notes app for your productivity tools. These days, I would advise these are all available on each of the devices you have, so you have everything you need with you at all times. Pick tools that work for you and stick with them. By sticking with them, your system will develop, grow and adjust and that pushes you towards focusing on your work—which is the secret to becoming more productive and better with managing your time.  Thank you Kevin for your question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

The Life Changing Tip David Allen Gave Me.

This week, what can you do when the demands of others prevent you from doing your work. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 282 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 282 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 have a boss or a customer that expects you to be available 24/7? Perhaps, your boss always wants to know where you are and what you are doing or they rely on you to get them information because they are too lazy, or unable, to look up the information themselves.  These demands and distractions are a common intrusion and do prevent you from getting on with your work. It could be you are being invited to meetings you have little to contribute to but feel you must attend because your boss sent the invitation.  And on the other side, there are clients and customers who expect you to drop everything in order to serve them.  It’s these interferences into our carefully curated schedules that cause a lot of our time management and productivity issues. You are willing, but outside forces prevent you from getting on with your most important work. What can you do? Well, that’s the issue in this week’s question.  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, I’d just like to mention that My Ultimate Productivity Workshop is returning in August. For the four Friday evenings in August I invite you to settle in for a ninety-minute intimate workshop with myself where we cover your calendar, task manager, communications and the daily and weekly planning sessions.  In all, this workshop will give you the know-how to build your own, personalised productivity system—a system that will grow with you over many years.  And not only that, when you register for the workshop, you get free access to my mini-course bundle as this will be important for getting the most out of the workshop.  I hope you can join me, and if you are unable to attend one or more of the sessions, do not fear, you can email me any questions and I will answer them in the session and you can get the recording of the session almost immediately after the session ends.  Anyway, back to this week’s podcast question and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from George. George asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried to implement a lot of what you teach but always come up with a problem. My manager expects me to answer her questions immediately and that stops me from being able to focus on my core work or use time blocking. How have you overcome managers like this in the past?  Hi George, thank you for your question.  You are not alone. This is a pernicious problem I see with a lot of companies these days. And it’s not just micro-managing bosses, but can also be caused by demanding customers and clients who expect you to be available whenever they have a question.  Fortunately, I have experienced these types before, and over the years developed a number of strategies to prevent the interruptions and demands.  I’m surprised this is still happening. I am frequently reminded that companies these days are more considerate about their employee needs and welfare, yet at the same time, old-fashioned managers who feel they need to know what each of their direct reports are doing and where they are are still employed.  If you are a manager who needs to know what their team are doing at all times, then you have a trust issue. Either you are unable to trust your team, or you are employing the wrong people. Either way, the problem is with you. If you want your team to flourish, grow and produce the results you employed them to produce, you need to let them free and get on with it. Trust they will do their part of the work.  Now, in your case, George, you have identified the problem, which is a great start. From that start, you can now begin to come up with some ideas that may reduce the interference from your boss.  The first step, and the one that has always worked for me, is to have a sit down conversation with your manager. Ask her what she expects of you, where she feels you are not performing and what you can do to change that. Never point the finger at your boss, let her tell you what she expects and where she would like to see improvements.  The first things she tells you will not be the real problem. The real problem will be the second and third issues. We all feel uncomfortable criticising other people, so we tend to begin with the gentler, less negative issues. Push her to continue, ask questions about why she feel that way and listen carefully to what she tells you.  This approach will be uncomfortable for you too. Nobody likes to hear criticism, particularly if you pride yourself on being organised and productive. You do not have to accept all the criticisms. A lot will not be fair or true. But it is important for you to listen.  The final few items will not be real issues. We add them to pad out our criticisms, and to make the list, if you like, appear bigger than it really is.  Once you know where your boss feels there are issues, suggest remedies. Think about how you can change things so these issues disappear. Use the If I… Will you.. Approach.  This means when you make a concession, (If I…) you ask for a concession in return (will you…)  For instance: If I commit to updating the CRM system at the end of each day, will you allow me to focus on my work from 10:00am to 12:00pm without disturbing me?  Now you may find you have to negotiate a little. For example, if your boss does not want you to ’disappear’ for two hours each morning, try one hour.  Once your boss begins to see results, she will concede more trust to you. She will give you greater freedom to organise your own schedule. But, it takes time and the onus is on you as much as it is with your boss.  Now, to a related matter. What about clients and customers. How do you deal with their demands? This is an expectations issue and one that can be easily resolved through good, clear communication.  When I worked in law, the barristers we worked with (that’s legal counsel in the UK, not coffee brewers) made it very clear they were in court between 10:30am and 12:30pm and between 2:00pm and 4:30pm each day. We knew we could not contact them between those times. We were the client for these barristers, yet I never remember any barrister not telling us when they would be available. I suspect it was part of their legal training to make sure clients were informed when they were not available.  That has always appeared to be a common sense approach to me, it just made sense. Yet so many people when working with customers and clients cause themselves problems by promising the world knowing deep down they could never keep that promise.  It’s far better, when starting a new relationship with a client or anyone else related to your work, for that matter, to inform them of your availability up front. Tell them the best way to contact you and when. Explain there will be times you are unavailable and what you and they can do in those situations.  I live on the opposite side of the world to the majority of my clients, which means I am between 17 and 8 hours ahead. When it’s 10pm at night for me, it’s 9am in New York, 2pm in London and 6am in LA. To overcome any communication issues, I inform all my clients to email me any questions and promise to respond within 24 hours.  In order to comply with my own ‘rules’, I need to allocate an hour of my day to dealing with communications. That’s blocked off in my calendar and so I know when it’s 4:30pm, it’s time to sit down and respond to my messages. This means whenever a client wakes up, they will see my reply in their inbox waiting for them.  It’s not sustainable to be always available at a moment’s notice for your boss or customers. That’s how things get missed, backlogs build and ultimately your performance at your job will suffer. You need to find time to focus on your important work. Abraham Lincoln is attributed as saying” Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” It makes sense, yes? You are going to be more productive chopping down trees if your axe is sharp. Well, I’ve noticed that the most successful people in business do something similar with their time.  Stella Rimington, the former head of the UK’s Security Service would arrive in her office at 7:00am each day in order to get two hours deep focused work done before the day began. She would read the overnight intelligence reports and use the time to prepare for her work day.  Time Cook at Apple, does something similar. He also arrives in the office early (some say 6:30am other claim it’s 7:30am) and uses the time before the work day begins to get a grip on the day and to ensure he has everything prepared.   Now, if you work purely for the financial compensation, this will not work. For you, working an extra two hours or ninety minutes each day would be sacrilege. But if you are developing a career, using your employment to learn and grow yourself, then this is something worth considering. Perhaps begin your day thirty or sixty minutes earlier and use that time for focused work.  It gets you ahead of the day, it means you have time to process all the information needed to make the most of your day and you are not going to be disturbed. It’s surprising how much you can get done in just a couple of hours early in the morning.  So there you go, George, a few ideas you can use to take control of your day. The most powerful one is to have that conversation with your boss. Reset expectations and use the “If I… Will you…” approach. Tell everyone when and when you are not available. You can even put that into your email signature.  Demanding bosses can be ‘controlled’, just like customers and clients can be controlled. I don’t mean control in a dark and evil way, I just mean in terms of their expectations. Don’t make promises you cannot keep, and be ruthless in the way you apply your rules.  It will be uncomfortable at first, but you will be surprised by the amount of respect you receive and the results you start to get.  Thank you for your question, George and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, what can you do when the demands of others prevent you from doing your work. You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 282 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 282 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 have a boss or a customer that expects you to be available 24/7? Perhaps, your boss always wants to know where you are and what you are doing or they rely on you to get them information because they are too lazy, or unable, to look up the information themselves.  These demands and distractions are a common intrusion and do prevent you from getting on with your work. It could be you are being invited to meetings you have little to contribute to but feel you must attend because your boss sent the invitation.  And on the other side, there are clients and customers who expect you to drop everything in order to serve them.  It’s these interferences into our carefully curated schedules that cause a lot of our time management and productivity issues. You are willing, but outside forces prevent you from getting on with your most important work. What can you do? Well, that’s the issue in this week’s question.  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, I’d just like to mention that My Ultimate Productivity Workshop is returning in August. For the four Friday evenings in August I invite you to settle in for a ninety-minute intimate workshop with myself where we cover your calendar, task manager, communications and the daily and weekly planning sessions.  In all, this workshop will give you the know-how to build your own, personalised productivity system—a system that will grow with you over many years.  And not only that, when you register for the workshop, you get free access to my mini-course bundle as this will be important for getting the most out of the workshop.  I hope you can join me, and if you are unable to attend one or more of the sessions, do not fear, you can email me any questions and I will answer them in the session and you can get the recording of the session almost immediately after the session ends.  Anyway, back to this week’s podcast question and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from George. George asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried to implement a lot of what you teach but always come up with a problem. My manager expects me to answer her questions immediately and that stops me from being able to focus on my core work or use time blocking. How have you overcome managers like this in the past?  Hi George, thank you for your question.  You are not alone. This is a pernicious problem I see with a lot of companies these days. And it’s not just micro-managing bosses, but can also be caused by demanding customers and clients who expect you to be available whenever they have a question.  Fortunately, I have experienced these types before, and over the years developed a number of strategies to prevent the interruptions and demands.  I’m surprised this is still happening. I am frequently reminded that companies these days are more considerate about their employee needs and welfare, yet at the same time, old-fashioned managers who feel they need to know what each of their direct reports are doing and where they are are still employed.  If you are a manager who needs to know what their team are doing at all times, then you have a trust issue. Either you are unable to trust your team, or you are employing the wrong people. Either way, the problem is with you. If you want your team to flourish, grow and produce the results you employed them to produce, you need to let them free and get on with it. Trust they will do their part of the work.  Now, in your case, George, you have identified the problem, which is a great start. From that start, you can now begin to come up with some ideas that may reduce the interference from your boss.  The first step, and the one that has always worked for me, is to have a sit down conversation with your manager. Ask her what she expects of you, where she feels you are not performing and what you can do to change that. Never point the finger at your boss, let her tell you what she expects and where she would like to see improvements.  The first things she tells you will not be the real problem. The real problem will be the second and third issues. We all feel uncomfortable criticising other people, so we tend to begin with the gentler, less negative issues. Push her to continue, ask questions about why she feel that way and listen carefully to what she tells you.  This approach will be uncomfortable for you too. Nobody likes to hear criticism, particularly if you pride yourself on being organised and productive. You do not have to accept all the criticisms. A lot will not be fair or true. But it is important for you to listen.  The final few items will not be real issues. We add them to pad out our criticisms, and to make the list, if you like, appear bigger than it really is.  Once you know where your boss feels there are issues, suggest remedies. Think about how you can change things so these issues disappear. Use the If I… Will you.. Approach.  This means when you make a concession, (If I…) you ask for a concession in return (will you…)  For instance: If I commit to updating the CRM system at the end of each day, will you allow me to focus on my work from 10:00am to 12:00pm without disturbing me?  Now you may find you have to negotiate a little. For example, if your boss does not want you to ’disappear’ for two hours each morning, try one hour.  Once your boss begins to see results, she will concede more trust to you. She will give you greater freedom to organise your own schedule. But, it takes time and the onus is on you as much as it is with your boss.  Now, to a related matter. What about clients and customers. How do you deal with their demands? This is an expectations issue and one that can be easily resolved through good, clear communication.  When I worked in law, the barristers we worked with (that’s legal counsel in the UK, not coffee brewers) made it very clear they were in court between 10:30am and 12:30pm and between 2:00pm and 4:30pm each day. We knew we could not contact them between those times. We were the client for these barristers, yet I never remember any barrister not telling us when they would be available. I suspect it was part of their legal training to make sure clients were informed when they were not available.  That has always appeared to be a common sense approach to me, it just made sense. Yet so many people when working with customers and clients cause themselves problems by promising the world knowing deep down they could never keep that promise.  It’s far better, when starting a new relationship with a client or anyone else related to your work, for that matter, to inform them of your availability up front. Tell them the best way to contact you and when. Explain there will be times you are unavailable and what you and they can do in those situations.  I live on the opposite side of the world to the majority of my clients, which means I am between 17 and 8 hours ahead. When it’s 10pm at night for me, it’s 9am in New York, 2pm in London and 6am in LA. To overcome any communication issues, I inform all my clients to email me any questions and promise to respond within 24 hours.  In order to comply with my own ‘rules’, I need to allocate an hour of my day to dealing with communications. That’s blocked off in my calendar and so I know when it’s 4:30pm, it’s time to sit down and respond to my messages. This means whenever a client wakes up, they will see my reply in their inbox waiting for them.  It’s not sustainable to be always available at a moment’s notice for your boss or customers. That’s how things get missed, backlogs build and ultimately your performance at your job will suffer. You need to find time to focus on your important work. Abraham Lincoln is attributed as saying” Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” It makes sense, yes? You are going to be more productive chopping down trees if your axe is sharp. Well, I’ve noticed that the most successful people in business do something similar with their time.  Stella Rimington, the former head of the UK’s Security Service would arrive in her office at 7:00am each day in order to get two hours deep focused work done before the day began. She would read the overnight intelligence reports and use the time to prepare for her work day.  Time Cook at Apple, does something similar. He also arrives in the office early (some say 6:30am other claim it’s 7:30am) and uses the time before the work day begins to get a grip on the day and to ensure he has everything prepared.   Now, if you work purely for the financial compensation, this will not work. For you, working an extra two hours or ninety minutes each day would be sacrilege. But if you are developing a career, using your employment to learn and grow yourself, then this is something worth considering. Perhaps begin your day thirty or sixty minutes earlier and use that time for focused work.  It gets you ahead of the day, it means you have time to process all the information needed to make the most of your day and you are not going to be disturbed. It’s surprising how much you can get done in just a couple of hours early in the morning.  So there you go, George, a few ideas you can use to take control of your day. The most powerful one is to have that conversation with your boss. Reset expectations and use the “If I… Will you…” approach. Tell everyone when and when you are not available. You can even put that into your email signature.  Demanding bosses can be ‘controlled’, just like customers and clients can be controlled. I don’t mean control in a dark and evil way, I just mean in terms of their expectations. Don’t make promises you cannot keep, and be ruthless in the way you apply your rules.  It will be uncomfortable at first, but you will be surprised by the amount of respect you receive and the results you start to get.  Thank you for your question, George and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

Managing The Demands Of Others.

This week’s question is all about breaking tasks down into manageable chunks and how to organise your academic studies. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 281 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 281 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. An area I find most people struggle with is breaking bigger tasks down into manageable chunks. How do you determine something like “write report on Quarter 1 Marketing campaign” when you may not know where to start? While it might be clear what needs to be done, it may not be clear how long something like this would take.  In many ways this comes about because we are not prioritising correctly. If your number one task for the day is to complete a report, or write a paper for your professor, why would an email or message become more important. You have no idea what or how many emails and messages you will get each day, you only know you will get some, but email and messages can never be your priority for the day. They don’t move things forward for you. They might help other people, but if your number one priority is the report, why change your plan?  Anyway, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Meghan. Meghan asks, Hi Carl, thank you for your recent podcasts on core work. One area I struggle with is knowing how long a task will take. Should I be allocating time for each task or just doing what I can. Additionally, how would a Ph.D student define their core work?  Thank you Meghan for your question.  Let me begin with the second part of your question first. What is the core work of a Ph.D student?  This is going to relate to your chosen topic. What are you studying? The vast majority of your work here is going to be researching, taking notes and perhaps conducting studies. This is primarily likely to involve a lot of reading. So how much reading do you feel you need to do each week?  This needs time allocating to and that’s where you calendar comes in. Let’s imagine you want to spend four hours a day reading. How will you break that down? If you were an early bird—someone who likes to start their day early, you may choose 6am to 8am as your reading time. You could then perhaps set aside a further two hours later in the afternoon. That would still leave you with plenty of time for dealing with communications, socialising and meeting with your professor.  If you are not an early bird and prefer doing your reading later in the day you can schedule it for late evening,  Working on any studies you are conducting or papers you are writing should also be scheduled in your calendar.  With these two activities your calendar will tell you your writing and reading blocks and that’s all they say. You task manager and notes will indicate what you will read or write.  Now, onto establishing how long a task should take you. That’s going to be very different most of the time. However, it’s not really about how long you should spend doing a task, it’s more about how much time you have available to spend on that task.  Let me give you a personal example from this podcast. It takes me around two hours to write the script for this podcast. Some days I can write it faster, other days I may need more time. Every Tuesday morning, I have a two hour writing block in my calendar and for the most part I can get this script written. However, this week, I was only able to schedule an hour on Tuesday morning, which meant the script was only half done. I then needed to find another hour later in the week to finish it off.  When looking at my calendar, I discovered that the only time I had available was Saturday evening. Now that raises a question. Do I use time I generally protect for other things, or do I allocate an hour to writing the script? Well, as I need to record and publish the podcast on Sunday afternoon and Sunday morning I have a lot of meetings, the only time I had was Saturday. The decision was made.  I could of course have decided not to publish a podcast this week, but I see this podcast as part of my core work and therefore non-negotiable. So, the decision was easy, block an hour off on Saturday evening.  The truth is that doesn’t happen very often, so it’s not like I have to regularly write this script in my rest time, but if it must be done, it must be done.  Now, for the first part of your question, Meghan. How do you determine how long a task will take? For most of you a lot of what you do will be predictable. A simple example, would be doing a weekly grocery shop. I know, for instance, I need an hour for this. Similarly, taking my dog for a walk will be an hour.  You will also find a lot of the work you do is part of a process. If you were a graphic designer, perhaps much of your work would be sending concepts and ideas to your clients and awaiting their approval. If you been designing for a long time you will likely know how long a piece of work will take. I know, for instance, I need an hour to write my weekly blog post. It’s not an exact science, some days I can write it in forty minutes, other days I need ninety minutes. On average, though, it takes around an hour.  I watched an interesting talk by Jeffrey Archer. Jeffrey Archer is a prolific author having written over forty books in the last forty years. He has an interesting schedule for doing his work.  He will wake up at 5:30am, and begin writing at 6AM. He writes for two hours (by hand, not keyboard) and then take a two hour break. Then from 10am to 12pm he will write some more before taking another two hour break. He will do another two hour session from 2 til 4 and finally between 6pm and 8pm he will read through what he had written for that day.  The interesting thing here is he is not counting the amount of words he writes. That depends on the flow. Somedays he will write a lot, other days it will be a struggle. The key for him is he follows the process each day. He knows, after forty books, it will take him around 1,000 hours to write a book and see it on the bookshelves.  I know after nearly 800 blog posts that a blog post from first draft to publication takes two hours.  Notice that Jeffrey Archer gets six hours of writing in each day and has plenty of time in the breaks to make phone calls, write emails and deal with other administration tasks. He’s focused on the 1,000 hours over six months, not worrying about how many words he will write each day.  So, what about you, if you have a task to do when does it need to be finished by? Imagine you have a task to do and you need to deliver it by the end of the week. The best day to start is today. First task, look at what needs to be done. Do you need to do some research? If so, how much time can you dedicate to the research? Perhaps you can only do two hours. That’s fine, block research time off in your calendar. How much time will you need to prepare the finished task? If its a written piece or a presentation, how long do you need?  If you leave that to Thursday, you are going to find yourself in trouble. My advice is to start writing it no later than Wednesday. It’s likely you will only know how much time you need when you begin the work. I find if I am designing a workshop for a company, I only know how long it will take once I develop the outline. Once I have that I can anticipate how much time I need.  There’s always going to be something in the work you do that will give you an indication how long something will take. Let’s imagine you have a difficult customer. When you first learn of the problem, you will have no idea how long you will need to resolve the problem. You will not know that, until you speak to the customer. So, speak with the customer at the earliest opportunity. From that conversation, you will now have some idea about what needs to be done and how long it will take.  If you delay having that conversation, all you will be doing is guessing. And, worse, your brain will be warning you that you need a lot of time. It’s likely you won’t need a lot of time, but our brain is not logical, it panics until you can give it something solid to work with. So, make the call or open your notes and make a decision on what you will do first and when you will do it.  However, the only way you will learn how long something will take is to develop a process for doing your work. It’s through processes that you will learn how long something will take. When I was teaching English, I used to do seminars for companies in different aspects of English communication. The first time I put together a seminar, I didn’t know how long it would take. The first one took me around twenty hours, the second and subsequent ones took on average sixteen.  Once I knew that, I could plan out my preparation time and refine things. I also focused on the process for building the seminar, so I was able to break down the components parts and make those more streamlined and gave me a better understanding how long each part would take.  It also taught me I needed a minimum of two weeks to prepare the seminar. It was possible to do it in a week, but that would mean working longer hours than I wanted to. I ended up with a process that took sixteen hours spread out over two weeks.  And that’s what I would suggest you do with the work you are doing. Track what you do, how long each part takes and look for ways to naturally break it down. You an then use your calendar to spread out the different parts so they get done.  I hope that has helped, Meghan. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s question is all about breaking tasks down into manageable chunks and how to organise your academic studies. You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 281 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 281 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. An area I find most people struggle with is breaking bigger tasks down into manageable chunks. How do you determine something like “write report on Quarter 1 Marketing campaign” when you may not know where to start? While it might be clear what needs to be done, it may not be clear how long something like this would take.  In many ways this comes about because we are not prioritising correctly. If your number one task for the day is to complete a report, or write a paper for your professor, why would an email or message become more important. You have no idea what or how many emails and messages you will get each day, you only know you will get some, but email and messages can never be your priority for the day. They don’t move things forward for you. They might help other people, but if your number one priority is the report, why change your plan?  Anyway, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Meghan. Meghan asks, Hi Carl, thank you for your recent podcasts on core work. One area I struggle with is knowing how long a task will take. Should I be allocating time for each task or just doing what I can. Additionally, how would a Ph.D student define their core work?  Thank you Meghan for your question.  Let me begin with the second part of your question first. What is the core work of a Ph.D student?  This is going to relate to your chosen topic. What are you studying? The vast majority of your work here is going to be researching, taking notes and perhaps conducting studies. This is primarily likely to involve a lot of reading. So how much reading do you feel you need to do each week?  This needs time allocating to and that’s where you calendar comes in. Let’s imagine you want to spend four hours a day reading. How will you break that down? If you were an early bird—someone who likes to start their day early, you may choose 6am to 8am as your reading time. You could then perhaps set aside a further two hours later in the afternoon. That would still leave you with plenty of time for dealing with communications, socialising and meeting with your professor.  If you are not an early bird and prefer doing your reading later in the day you can schedule it for late evening,  Working on any studies you are conducting or papers you are writing should also be scheduled in your calendar.  With these two activities your calendar will tell you your writing and reading blocks and that’s all they say. You task manager and notes will indicate what you will read or write.  Now, onto establishing how long a task should take you. That’s going to be very different most of the time. However, it’s not really about how long you should spend doing a task, it’s more about how much time you have available to spend on that task.  Let me give you a personal example from this podcast. It takes me around two hours to write the script for this podcast. Some days I can write it faster, other days I may need more time. Every Tuesday morning, I have a two hour writing block in my calendar and for the most part I can get this script written. However, this week, I was only able to schedule an hour on Tuesday morning, which meant the script was only half done. I then needed to find another hour later in the week to finish it off.  When looking at my calendar, I discovered that the only time I had available was Saturday evening. Now that raises a question. Do I use time I generally protect for other things, or do I allocate an hour to writing the script? Well, as I need to record and publish the podcast on Sunday afternoon and Sunday morning I have a lot of meetings, the only time I had was Saturday. The decision was made.  I could of course have decided not to publish a podcast this week, but I see this podcast as part of my core work and therefore non-negotiable. So, the decision was easy, block an hour off on Saturday evening.  The truth is that doesn’t happen very often, so it’s not like I have to regularly write this script in my rest time, but if it must be done, it must be done.  Now, for the first part of your question, Meghan. How do you determine how long a task will take? For most of you a lot of what you do will be predictable. A simple example, would be doing a weekly grocery shop. I know, for instance, I need an hour for this. Similarly, taking my dog for a walk will be an hour.  You will also find a lot of the work you do is part of a process. If you were a graphic designer, perhaps much of your work would be sending concepts and ideas to your clients and awaiting their approval. If you been designing for a long time you will likely know how long a piece of work will take. I know, for instance, I need an hour to write my weekly blog post. It’s not an exact science, some days I can write it in forty minutes, other days I need ninety minutes. On average, though, it takes around an hour.  I watched an interesting talk by Jeffrey Archer. Jeffrey Archer is a prolific author having written over forty books in the last forty years. He has an interesting schedule for doing his work.  He will wake up at 5:30am, and begin writing at 6AM. He writes for two hours (by hand, not keyboard) and then take a two hour break. Then from 10am to 12pm he will write some more before taking another two hour break. He will do another two hour session from 2 til 4 and finally between 6pm and 8pm he will read through what he had written for that day.  The interesting thing here is he is not counting the amount of words he writes. That depends on the flow. Somedays he will write a lot, other days it will be a struggle. The key for him is he follows the process each day. He knows, after forty books, it will take him around 1,000 hours to write a book and see it on the bookshelves.  I know after nearly 800 blog posts that a blog post from first draft to publication takes two hours.  Notice that Jeffrey Archer gets six hours of writing in each day and has plenty of time in the breaks to make phone calls, write emails and deal with other administration tasks. He’s focused on the 1,000 hours over six months, not worrying about how many words he will write each day.  So, what about you, if you have a task to do when does it need to be finished by? Imagine you have a task to do and you need to deliver it by the end of the week. The best day to start is today. First task, look at what needs to be done. Do you need to do some research? If so, how much time can you dedicate to the research? Perhaps you can only do two hours. That’s fine, block research time off in your calendar. How much time will you need to prepare the finished task? If its a written piece or a presentation, how long do you need?  If you leave that to Thursday, you are going to find yourself in trouble. My advice is to start writing it no later than Wednesday. It’s likely you will only know how much time you need when you begin the work. I find if I am designing a workshop for a company, I only know how long it will take once I develop the outline. Once I have that I can anticipate how much time I need.  There’s always going to be something in the work you do that will give you an indication how long something will take. Let’s imagine you have a difficult customer. When you first learn of the problem, you will have no idea how long you will need to resolve the problem. You will not know that, until you speak to the customer. So, speak with the customer at the earliest opportunity. From that conversation, you will now have some idea about what needs to be done and how long it will take.  If you delay having that conversation, all you will be doing is guessing. And, worse, your brain will be warning you that you need a lot of time. It’s likely you won’t need a lot of time, but our brain is not logical, it panics until you can give it something solid to work with. So, make the call or open your notes and make a decision on what you will do first and when you will do it.  However, the only way you will learn how long something will take is to develop a process for doing your work. It’s through processes that you will learn how long something will take. When I was teaching English, I used to do seminars for companies in different aspects of English communication. The first time I put together a seminar, I didn’t know how long it would take. The first one took me around twenty hours, the second and subsequent ones took on average sixteen.  Once I knew that, I could plan out my preparation time and refine things. I also focused on the process for building the seminar, so I was able to break down the components parts and make those more streamlined and gave me a better understanding how long each part would take.  It also taught me I needed a minimum of two weeks to prepare the seminar. It was possible to do it in a week, but that would mean working longer hours than I wanted to. I ended up with a process that took sixteen hours spread out over two weeks.  And that’s what I would suggest you do with the work you are doing. Track what you do, how long each part takes and look for ways to naturally break it down. You an then use your calendar to spread out the different parts so they get done.  I hope that has helped, Meghan. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

Breaking Tasks Down And Timing Tasks

This week, how do you motivate yourself when you are just not in the mood to do any work? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 280 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 280 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 do you wake up in the morning with a long list of to-dos and just want to crawl back under your duvet? Or come back from lunch, look at your desk and just go “naw, just not in the mood”? If it’s more times that you would like, you are not alone. If you are a living human being, it’s going to happen. You are going to have good days and bad. It’s perfectly normal and not something you should beat yourself up about. However, sometimes that lack of motivation to do the work, can be untimely. You may have a deadline, an urgent matter to deal with or some preparation for a meeting to complete. What can you do in these circumstances? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s podcast.  And so, to get things started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Mohammed, Mohammed asks, Hi Carl, how do you stay so motivated each day? I really struggle with this. When I get up in the morning, I feel demotivated and just don’t want to get up. Do you have any suggestions on how to wake up feeling more motivated?  Hi Mohammed, thank you for your question.  There are a number ways you can wake up feeling more motivated and energised for the day. One simple trick is to make sure you get enough sleep. We all need between six and eight hours of sleep each night although we differ on the optimum number—for example, I discovered I needed seven hours, twenty minutes, not the six I thought I needed, I’ve learnt if I sleep less than seven hours, I will not have a very productive day and will likely need to take a nap sometime in the early afternoon.  You can discover your optimum daily sleep hours by doing a simple test. For one week, sleep with no alarm and track how many hours you sleep. At the end of the seven days, total up the number of hours you slept and divide it by seven. That will give you the number of hours you actually need, rather than guessing the number.  Once you know your optimum number of sleep hours, set yourself a going to bed time (thirty minutes before you need to be asleep) and stick to it.  I know this may require you to change a few things. If you are in the habit of scrolling social media or watching TV late at night, you may need to adjust the amount of time you spend doing these things. But I can assure you once you dial in your sleep patterns, you will soon find yourself waking up feeling a lot better than you likely do right now.  While sleep is not going to affect your motivation, it will ensure you have the energy to get through the day.  Now, what about motivation. This has everything to do with your mindset about the work you do. If you see your work purely in monetary terms, you are going to feel demotivated. Money as has been discovered is a poor long-term motivator. Sure if someone offered you a lot of money to do something, it’s probable you will do it as long as it does not conflict with your personal values—after all the saying “everyone has their price” is largely true. But is it the money that motivates you or what you think you could do with the money?  As Daniel Pink discovered several years ago, there’s an amount of money you need to earn to live and anything above that figure will not motivate you. Daniel Pink set that amount at around $70,000 per year. Beyond that, because it does not affect your ability to eat, have a roof over your head or the financial ability to take a holiday once or twice a year, money no longer provides an incentive. (Although we think it does) It might be nice to buy an expensive watch or to own a luxury beach-side villa in the Mediterranean, but your needs—food, and shelter are taken care of and material things are not going to motivate you when it comes to getting up in the morning to do your work.  I’m currently reading about Robert Maxwell. In case you do not know, Robert Maxwell was the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s. (If you are listening in the US, Maxwell also bought the New York Daily News) Maxwell, it turns out was a crook. He was stealing money from not only his public companies, he also stole his employees pension funds and owed multiple banks many millions of dollars when he died in 1991.  Maxwell didn’t steal all this money because he wanted more material things. He already had a helicopter, private jet, a yacht and multiple homes. He stole this money because he desperately wanted to maintain his identity and reputation. His self image prevented him from being able to cut back his excesses and it ultimately destroyed him and many thousands of Mirror Group employees’ pensions.  Maxwell’s motivation each day was his need to maintain his empire and his image as a high-flying successful business giant. It ultimately failed and he was soon exposed for the person he was.  However, beyond narcissism—which can be a very powerful motivator, What does motivate people is the sense we are doing something worthwhile. And that is controlled by what we want to accomplish in life.  My first job was cleaning the changing areas in a hotel health club. It was three hours a day six days a week and I loved it. It was not the work that I loved, that was hard, but I saw it as an education. I was given autonomy on what I cleaned and when and that allowed me to feel I was in control. I took pride in ensuring the showers were spotless when I had finished. That the floors were clean and the towels were neatly stacked in each changing room. I learned about systems and processes for getting my work done and it began my fascination with how to accomplish my work in the most efficient way.  All my early jobs taught me valuable lessons. I saw each one as an education and valuable experience. Working in hotels taught me the importance of standards. Selling cars taught me about the art of selling, working in law taught me about integrity and professionalism.  No matter what work you do, whether you love it or hate it, it is giving you an education. You don’t become the CEO directly out of university, you have to learn through experience, make mistakes and understand the intricacies and nuances of managing people. You don’t become a surgeon straight out of medical school. You have to do your shifts in the emergency rooms, do the rounds and learn from your peers.  When you begin the day, you have a new opportunity to learn something and move your career forward. You also have the choice to go into to work and complain about how much you hate it, come home, scroll through social media looking at people doing what you want to do and feeling jealous and thinking about how unfair life is.  You also have the choice to go into work and instead of hating what you do, look for ways to improve it. It wasn’t pleasant scrubbing walls in the showers, but I learned how to do it better and even today, I use what I learned when I clean my bathroom. Weirdly, I feel a sense of pride in my abilities to clean a bathroom and make a bed (another thing I learned working in hotels)  What else can you do to motivate yourself to get up in the morning? One trick that works is to have a morning routine you love doing. Something you look forward to doing. For instance, making my morning coffee, writing my journal and cleaning my email inbox is pure joy for me. I look forward to sitting down with my coffee and writing whatever’s in my mind into my journal. I also enjoy clearing my email inbox. I have no idea what will be in there. There could be problems, kind comments, newsletters and spam. Each day is different. I also gamify it by timing how fast I can clear my inbox. I especially enjoy the days where I have 100+ emails to process. Learning those in less than 25 minutes always makes me smile.  What would you love doing in a morning that will take less than forty-five minutes? Experiment, and see what excites you.  Another way to avoid that dread of a new day is to ensure you have a plan for the day before you go to bed. This is a psychological trick you can use that will motivate you in a morning called “implementation intention”. Your plan for the day gives you the intention to get it done. Writing these out in a journal in a morning reinforces it. For instance, I could have begun today by planning to write this podcast script. I would have make sure that was flagged in my task manger before I finished the previous day and when I wrote my journal I would write it out again.  Be careful here, if you write more than two or three things you will fail. There are too many unknowns that could come at you in the day, so limiting it to two tasks makes it doable no matter what is thrown at you.  Finally, what are your long term goals. Where do you want to be in five, ten or twenty years time? If you don’t know what’s the point of getting up in a morning? You don’t have to have lofty expansive goals, it could be you want to learn something new such as photography, or graphic design. Perhaps you would like to learn to swim or play golf. Having something to aim for gives you purpose and purpose gives you motivation and motivation gives you energy.  So there you go, Mohammed. Make sure you are getting enough sleep, you have the right mindset for your work or studies, that you have a plan for the day and you have something long-term to aim for. It surprising how these can transform your life and make getting up in the morning something you are excited about.  Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, how do you motivate yourself when you are just not in the mood to do any work? You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 280 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 280 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 do you wake up in the morning with a long list of to-dos and just want to crawl back under your duvet? Or come back from lunch, look at your desk and just go “naw, just not in the mood”? If it’s more times that you would like, you are not alone. If you are a living human being, it’s going to happen. You are going to have good days and bad. It’s perfectly normal and not something you should beat yourself up about. However, sometimes that lack of motivation to do the work, can be untimely. You may have a deadline, an urgent matter to deal with or some preparation for a meeting to complete. What can you do in these circumstances? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s podcast.  And so, to get things started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Mohammed, Mohammed asks, Hi Carl, how do you stay so motivated each day? I really struggle with this. When I get up in the morning, I feel demotivated and just don’t want to get up. Do you have any suggestions on how to wake up feeling more motivated?  Hi Mohammed, thank you for your question.  There are a number ways you can wake up feeling more motivated and energised for the day. One simple trick is to make sure you get enough sleep. We all need between six and eight hours of sleep each night although we differ on the optimum number—for example, I discovered I needed seven hours, twenty minutes, not the six I thought I needed, I’ve learnt if I sleep less than seven hours, I will not have a very productive day and will likely need to take a nap sometime in the early afternoon.  You can discover your optimum daily sleep hours by doing a simple test. For one week, sleep with no alarm and track how many hours you sleep. At the end of the seven days, total up the number of hours you slept and divide it by seven. That will give you the number of hours you actually need, rather than guessing the number.  Once you know your optimum number of sleep hours, set yourself a going to bed time (thirty minutes before you need to be asleep) and stick to it.  I know this may require you to change a few things. If you are in the habit of scrolling social media or watching TV late at night, you may need to adjust the amount of time you spend doing these things. But I can assure you once you dial in your sleep patterns, you will soon find yourself waking up feeling a lot better than you likely do right now.  While sleep is not going to affect your motivation, it will ensure you have the energy to get through the day.  Now, what about motivation. This has everything to do with your mindset about the work you do. If you see your work purely in monetary terms, you are going to feel demotivated. Money as has been discovered is a poor long-term motivator. Sure if someone offered you a lot of money to do something, it’s probable you will do it as long as it does not conflict with your personal values—after all the saying “everyone has their price” is largely true. But is it the money that motivates you or what you think you could do with the money?  As Daniel Pink discovered several years ago, there’s an amount of money you need to earn to live and anything above that figure will not motivate you. Daniel Pink set that amount at around $70,000 per year. Beyond that, because it does not affect your ability to eat, have a roof over your head or the financial ability to take a holiday once or twice a year, money no longer provides an incentive. (Although we think it does) It might be nice to buy an expensive watch or to own a luxury beach-side villa in the Mediterranean, but your needs—food, and shelter are taken care of and material things are not going to motivate you when it comes to getting up in the morning to do your work.  I’m currently reading about Robert Maxwell. In case you do not know, Robert Maxwell was the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s. (If you are listening in the US, Maxwell also bought the New York Daily News) Maxwell, it turns out was a crook. He was stealing money from not only his public companies, he also stole his employees pension funds and owed multiple banks many millions of dollars when he died in 1991.  Maxwell didn’t steal all this money because he wanted more material things. He already had a helicopter, private jet, a yacht and multiple homes. He stole this money because he desperately wanted to maintain his identity and reputation. His self image prevented him from being able to cut back his excesses and it ultimately destroyed him and many thousands of Mirror Group employees’ pensions.  Maxwell’s motivation each day was his need to maintain his empire and his image as a high-flying successful business giant. It ultimately failed and he was soon exposed for the person he was.  However, beyond narcissism—which can be a very powerful motivator, What does motivate people is the sense we are doing something worthwhile. And that is controlled by what we want to accomplish in life.  My first job was cleaning the changing areas in a hotel health club. It was three hours a day six days a week and I loved it. It was not the work that I loved, that was hard, but I saw it as an education. I was given autonomy on what I cleaned and when and that allowed me to feel I was in control. I took pride in ensuring the showers were spotless when I had finished. That the floors were clean and the towels were neatly stacked in each changing room. I learned about systems and processes for getting my work done and it began my fascination with how to accomplish my work in the most efficient way.  All my early jobs taught me valuable lessons. I saw each one as an education and valuable experience. Working in hotels taught me the importance of standards. Selling cars taught me about the art of selling, working in law taught me about integrity and professionalism.  No matter what work you do, whether you love it or hate it, it is giving you an education. You don’t become the CEO directly out of university, you have to learn through experience, make mistakes and understand the intricacies and nuances of managing people. You don’t become a surgeon straight out of medical school. You have to do your shifts in the emergency rooms, do the rounds and learn from your peers.  When you begin the day, you have a new opportunity to learn something and move your career forward. You also have the choice to go into to work and complain about how much you hate it, come home, scroll through social media looking at people doing what you want to do and feeling jealous and thinking about how unfair life is.  You also have the choice to go into work and instead of hating what you do, look for ways to improve it. It wasn’t pleasant scrubbing walls in the showers, but I learned how to do it better and even today, I use what I learned when I clean my bathroom. Weirdly, I feel a sense of pride in my abilities to clean a bathroom and make a bed (another thing I learned working in hotels)  What else can you do to motivate yourself to get up in the morning? One trick that works is to have a morning routine you love doing. Something you look forward to doing. For instance, making my morning coffee, writing my journal and cleaning my email inbox is pure joy for me. I look forward to sitting down with my coffee and writing whatever’s in my mind into my journal. I also enjoy clearing my email inbox. I have no idea what will be in there. There could be problems, kind comments, newsletters and spam. Each day is different. I also gamify it by timing how fast I can clear my inbox. I especially enjoy the days where I have 100+ emails to process. Learning those in less than 25 minutes always makes me smile.  What would you love doing in a morning that will take less than forty-five minutes? Experiment, and see what excites you.  Another way to avoid that dread of a new day is to ensure you have a plan for the day before you go to bed. This is a psychological trick you can use that will motivate you in a morning called “implementation intention”. Your plan for the day gives you the intention to get it done. Writing these out in a journal in a morning reinforces it. For instance, I could have begun today by planning to write this podcast script. I would have make sure that was flagged in my task manger before I finished the previous day and when I wrote my journal I would write it out again.  Be careful here, if you write more than two or three things you will fail. There are too many unknowns that could come at you in the day, so limiting it to two tasks makes it doable no matter what is thrown at you.  Finally, what are your long term goals. Where do you want to be in five, ten or twenty years time? If you don’t know what’s the point of getting up in a morning? You don’t have to have lofty expansive goals, it could be you want to learn something new such as photography, or graphic design. Perhaps you would like to learn to swim or play golf. Having something to aim for gives you purpose and purpose gives you motivation and motivation gives you energy.  So there you go, Mohammed. Make sure you are getting enough sleep, you have the right mindset for your work or studies, that you have a plan for the day and you have something long-term to aim for. It surprising how these can transform your life and make getting up in the morning something you are excited about.  Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

How To Stay Motivated.

Podcast 279 In this week’s episode, I share with you what happens when everything begins to work as it should. Be prepared; this episode is scary.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 279 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 279 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’s question comes from a coaching client of mine who has worked with me for a few months and has developed a system and a way of working that has enabled him to get on top of his work, but has also left him feeling anxious and uncomfortable. He told me there’s a sense of missing something, that he should be doing more.  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 Gary. Gary asks, Hi Carl, my system is working perfectly, but I feel there’s something missing. It’s like I have this feeling I am not doing enough. Is this normal? Hi Gary, thank you for allowing my to share this on my podcast.  So why is Gary feeling as if he should be doing more? Well, it’s likely he’s become addicted to the stress caused by feeling overwhelmed and busy. That sense of not being in control, which means each day he felt he was being pulled from one crisis deadline to another without ever feeling he had time to work on what was important or even a chance to take a break.  If you think about it for a moment, when you’ve spend a large part of your working life reacting to events, when you finally reverse that and start to anticipate events so they do not overwhelm you, it is going to feel weird at first. It may even frighten you. You stress levels drop—often suddenly—and that can cause anxiety. If your body has become used to dealing with a lot of stress, not having that around is going to be strange and that is why we often feel something’s missing. There is, it’s called stress. It’s gone.  In many ways, as you become better organised and more productive, you need to prepare yourself for the withdrawal effects of a reduced amount of cortisol (the stress hormone) surging through your bloodstream. These withdrawal effects are often the reason why so many people unconsciously self-sabotage their efforts. They will do things like change their task manager or notes app. Not because the new app is any better than the ones they used before, but because it gives them a sense of doing something constructive—yet, transferring all your notes and tasks to a new app is not a constructive use of your time.  The real question to ask yourself is what can you do with all the extra time you will have once the way you do your work becomes more efficient?  This is where you can look at your areas of focus. Only one part is related to your work, yet, depending where you are in life it’s likely that will be the area that is taking up a disproportionate amount of your time. But what else is there in your areas of focus that is not getting the attention it deserves? For example, a lot of people would like to spend more time with their friends and family. Is there anything you can do to be able to spend more time there?  Perhaps you could pick your kids up from school or call round to see your parents more often.  What about hobbies? I know we don’t talk about these a lot these days, but hobbies are a great way to reduce stress, relax and take your mind off things. Now if you are working in an office environment, how about doing some mentoring? One of the roles leadership involves is mentoring the next generation. Even if you are not a leader, yet, helping your colleagues develop their skills is a great way you can make use of your extra time. The great thing about mentoring is not just what you teach, but also what you learn. Coaching, has not only given me a way to help others, I have also learned an incredible amount from the people I talk to every day.  Something you could consider is to work on your education. Now, I am not talking about formal education, but more unusual fields. For instance, advertising and marketing company, Ogilvy’s vice-chairman, Rory Sutherland has spent the last twenty-years or so learning about behavioural psychology. This is the study of why we do what we do and it has not only been a fascination for him, it’s helped him in his work and given him an avenue to develop a side business public speaking and entertaining people with his observations. If you haven’t already watched his TED talk from 2009, I highly recommend you do so.  He’s also written a book, called Alchemy, which I would also recommend.  The point is, you have the ability to take control of what you do with your time. And, with the way we work changing at a rapid rate—whether we like it or not—and the potential for artificial Intelligence causing some radical changes to the types of jobs available, the people who will succeed are the ones who have the time to look ahead and make choices based on analysis rather than being forced to change.  So, how do you get to this point?  Well, this podcast has given a lot of advice over the last five years on how to get control over your time but the one thing that I live by is to eliminate not accumulate. This insight came from my project a few years ago when I decided to try out minimalism. I read the books, watched the videos and I followed a lot of the advice and paired down my wardrobe and possessions. I also adopted a one in one out policy. So, if I buy a new pair of jeans, I will throw out an old pair. Or, if I buy a new computer, iPad or phone, then the old one goes out.  The temptation when you become better organised is to add more and more stuff to your task manager and notes app. After all, you have a system that will take all that stuff in, but do you really want it to? The more you put in, the more you have to deal with at some point.  I am always looking at ways to reduce the time it take to do things. For instance, I love it when I wake up to an inbox of 100 plus emails. I set a timer and see how fast I can clear them from my inbox. I see this as training, because being fast at making decisions about whether something is important and needs a response or not will help with other areas of my life. The same goes with my daily and weekly planning, I’m always looking at ways to speed it up. Do I really need to go through and review every project? (No you don’t, by the way).  Daily planning can be done in less than five minutes if you have a process for doing it. Mine is simple, Calendar to see where my appointments are for tomorrow and Todoist to review my task list and to ask myself is this realistic.  But one of the greatest benefits of adopting an eliminate not accumulate philosophy is a lot of the stuff you may be collecting today is likely to sort itself out it you leave it alone. I learned this with my online course learning centre. Occasionally, someone will have difficulty logging in to their account—they may have forgotten their password or are using the wrong email address. They send me an email asking to help.  In the past I would rush to respond. Now I wait an hour. I’ve discovered nine times out of ten I soon get a follow up email saying they’ve figured out the problem themselves.  Best advice here is slow down. A lot of what you are asked to do is a reflex and if you slow down, people will often find the solution themselves.  Another tip for you is to make yourself less available. I learned this from reading about the routines of successful people. Authors such as Stephen King and John Grisham lock themselves away when they are writing. No internet or phone. Just a quiet room so they can spend three or four hours focused on their writing.  How much work could you get done if you had just two hours each day where you knew no one can disturb you? Being less available is scary at first, but you soon become used to it and the best thing you boss and colleagues will begin to respect your focus time because they see the results you are producing.  Don’t ever accept the thinking you have to be available all the time for your colleagues and customers. You don’t. Set some boundaries. Experiment and see what people will accept or not. You might be surprised how accepting people are.  So there you, when you make the decision to become better organised and more productive you are setting yourself on a course where some big changes will happen. You will have more time, be a lot less stressed and it will feel uncomfortable at first. However, don’t let that stop you and certainly don’t self-sabotage your hard work. The anxiety and feeling uncomfortable is just your brain’s way of adjusting to the new you. A person in control of their time and not stressed.  Thank you Gary and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Podcast 279 In this week’s episode, I share with you what happens when everything begins to work as it should. Be prepared; this episode is scary.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 279 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 279 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’s question comes from a coaching client of mine who has worked with me for a few months and has developed a system and a way of working that has enabled him to get on top of his work, but has also left him feeling anxious and uncomfortable. He told me there’s a sense of missing something, that he should be doing more.  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 Gary. Gary asks, Hi Carl, my system is working perfectly, but I feel there’s something missing. It’s like I have this feeling I am not doing enough. Is this normal? Hi Gary, thank you for allowing my to share this on my podcast.  So why is Gary feeling as if he should be doing more? Well, it’s likely he’s become addicted to the stress caused by feeling overwhelmed and busy. That sense of not being in control, which means each day he felt he was being pulled from one crisis deadline to another without ever feeling he had time to work on what was important or even a chance to take a break.  If you think about it for a moment, when you’ve spend a large part of your working life reacting to events, when you finally reverse that and start to anticipate events so they do not overwhelm you, it is going to feel weird at first. It may even frighten you. You stress levels drop—often suddenly—and that can cause anxiety. If your body has become used to dealing with a lot of stress, not having that around is going to be strange and that is why we often feel something’s missing. There is, it’s called stress. It’s gone.  In many ways, as you become better organised and more productive, you need to prepare yourself for the withdrawal effects of a reduced amount of cortisol (the stress hormone) surging through your bloodstream. These withdrawal effects are often the reason why so many people unconsciously self-sabotage their efforts. They will do things like change their task manager or notes app. Not because the new app is any better than the ones they used before, but because it gives them a sense of doing something constructive—yet, transferring all your notes and tasks to a new app is not a constructive use of your time.  The real question to ask yourself is what can you do with all the extra time you will have once the way you do your work becomes more efficient?  This is where you can look at your areas of focus. Only one part is related to your work, yet, depending where you are in life it’s likely that will be the area that is taking up a disproportionate amount of your time. But what else is there in your areas of focus that is not getting the attention it deserves? For example, a lot of people would like to spend more time with their friends and family. Is there anything you can do to be able to spend more time there?  Perhaps you could pick your kids up from school or call round to see your parents more often.  What about hobbies? I know we don’t talk about these a lot these days, but hobbies are a great way to reduce stress, relax and take your mind off things. Now if you are working in an office environment, how about doing some mentoring? One of the roles leadership involves is mentoring the next generation. Even if you are not a leader, yet, helping your colleagues develop their skills is a great way you can make use of your extra time. The great thing about mentoring is not just what you teach, but also what you learn. Coaching, has not only given me a way to help others, I have also learned an incredible amount from the people I talk to every day.  Something you could consider is to work on your education. Now, I am not talking about formal education, but more unusual fields. For instance, advertising and marketing company, Ogilvy’s vice-chairman, Rory Sutherland has spent the last twenty-years or so learning about behavioural psychology. This is the study of why we do what we do and it has not only been a fascination for him, it’s helped him in his work and given him an avenue to develop a side business public speaking and entertaining people with his observations. If you haven’t already watched his TED talk from 2009, I highly recommend you do so.  He’s also written a book, called Alchemy, which I would also recommend.  The point is, you have the ability to take control of what you do with your time. And, with the way we work changing at a rapid rate—whether we like it or not—and the potential for artificial Intelligence causing some radical changes to the types of jobs available, the people who will succeed are the ones who have the time to look ahead and make choices based on analysis rather than being forced to change.  So, how do you get to this point?  Well, this podcast has given a lot of advice over the last five years on how to get control over your time but the one thing that I live by is to eliminate not accumulate. This insight came from my project a few years ago when I decided to try out minimalism. I read the books, watched the videos and I followed a lot of the advice and paired down my wardrobe and possessions. I also adopted a one in one out policy. So, if I buy a new pair of jeans, I will throw out an old pair. Or, if I buy a new computer, iPad or phone, then the old one goes out.  The temptation when you become better organised is to add more and more stuff to your task manager and notes app. After all, you have a system that will take all that stuff in, but do you really want it to? The more you put in, the more you have to deal with at some point.  I am always looking at ways to reduce the time it take to do things. For instance, I love it when I wake up to an inbox of 100 plus emails. I set a timer and see how fast I can clear them from my inbox. I see this as training, because being fast at making decisions about whether something is important and needs a response or not will help with other areas of my life. The same goes with my daily and weekly planning, I’m always looking at ways to speed it up. Do I really need to go through and review every project? (No you don’t, by the way).  Daily planning can be done in less than five minutes if you have a process for doing it. Mine is simple, Calendar to see where my appointments are for tomorrow and Todoist to review my task list and to ask myself is this realistic.  But one of the greatest benefits of adopting an eliminate not accumulate philosophy is a lot of the stuff you may be collecting today is likely to sort itself out it you leave it alone. I learned this with my online course learning centre. Occasionally, someone will have difficulty logging in to their account—they may have forgotten their password or are using the wrong email address. They send me an email asking to help.  In the past I would rush to respond. Now I wait an hour. I’ve discovered nine times out of ten I soon get a follow up email saying they’ve figured out the problem themselves.  Best advice here is slow down. A lot of what you are asked to do is a reflex and if you slow down, people will often find the solution themselves.  Another tip for you is to make yourself less available. I learned this from reading about the routines of successful people. Authors such as Stephen King and John Grisham lock themselves away when they are writing. No internet or phone. Just a quiet room so they can spend three or four hours focused on their writing.  How much work could you get done if you had just two hours each day where you knew no one can disturb you? Being less available is scary at first, but you soon become used to it and the best thing you boss and colleagues will begin to respect your focus time because they see the results you are producing.  Don’t ever accept the thinking you have to be available all the time for your colleagues and customers. You don’t. Set some boundaries. Experiment and see what people will accept or not. You might be surprised how accepting people are.  So there you, when you make the decision to become better organised and more productive you are setting yourself on a course where some big changes will happen. You will have more time, be a lot less stressed and it will feel uncomfortable at first. However, don’t let that stop you and certainly don’t self-sabotage your hard work. The anxiety and feeling uncomfortable is just your brain’s way of adjusting to the new you. A person in control of their time and not stressed.  Thank you Gary and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

What Happens When You Do Master Your Time? (It’s not pleasant)

Are you the master or slave of your task manager? In this week’s episode, I’m going to show you how to take control of your tasks.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 278 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 278 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. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people were busy, much as we are today, yet we never began the day with to-do lists of twenty-plus tasks. That wasn’t the way we used to-do lists. To-do lists were for the essential, must not forget to do tasks.  Most desk diaries at that time only had space for around six tasks at the bottom of each day’s column. Ironically, six tasks was the number Ivy Lee recommended when he devised the Ivy Lee method for Bethlehem Steel in 1918. That method worked then and it still works today.  So what has happened over the last fifteen years or so? Have our brains diminished somehow? I don’t think so. I suspect the reason why we are struggling now is because we believe everything that must be done should be added to the to-do list, yet does it? How effective would you be if the only things you saw on your list each day were the things that really mattered? I know you would be a lot more focused.  That’s what we’ll be looking at this week, so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Michelle. Michelle asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried so many times to use a to-do list and it always begins well, but after a few days, it becomes overwhelming. I know how helpful they are and I wondered if you could break down what should and should not be in a to-do list.  Hi Michelle, thank you for your question.  Let’s go back to Ivy Lee. While we don’t know why Ivy Lee chose six tasks to add to a to-do list, what we do know is anyone who has used this method almost always complete the six tasks and has enough time at the end of the day to plan the next six.  Ivy Lee’s method is simple. At the end of the day, write down, in order of priority, the six tasks you want to complete tomorrow. Leave that piece of paper on your desk so when you arrive back at work in the morning, the first thing you see are those six tasks. Then, you begin at the top and work your way down the list until you have all six crossed out.  Think about that for a moment. How confident are you at being able to consistently complete six tasks each day?  Let’s imagine for a moment you are a university professor. Today, you have two ninety minute lectures to give from 9:00am. Your lectures will finish at 12:15pm and then you have to arrange some meetings with your Ph.D students, mark some papers, spend a little time writing your own paper, respond to your email, prepare for your lectures tomorrow and exercise. That’s six tasks. Do you have time for anything else? If you work a typical eight or nine hour day, three hours have already gone lecturing, which leaves you with five to six hours to do everything else.  Exercise can be done after you finish for the day, but marking papers, writing your own paper and responding to email are not five minute tasks. I would say, if you try and cram anything else into your day, you’ve already lost the day.  The key to this Michelle is to understand that time is limited. We do not have an infinite amount of time each day. Sure, you can work eighteen hours a day trying to do everything, but that is not sustainable. You might be able to that for a couple of days, but eventually you will break. You are not a machine and there needs to be balance between work and rest. (Whether you like that or not).  But look at the professor’s day, if she were to do the tasks she had set for herself, she would be moving important things forward. She might not be able to finish everything, that’s fine as long as she’s consistently working on the important things.  In many ways, we are our own worst enemies. Thinking that everything has to be finished in one day will always lead to overwhelm and in the worst case scenario, burnout. It’s not possible to complete everything at the first try. Sometimes you need to continue with a task on another day.  Now, there is something else at play here. How are you writing your tasks? You are not going to do very well at the supermarket if all that was on your list was: food, drink toiletries. Sure you would pick up something, but more than likely you would pick up all the wrong things. Instead, we need to be smarter than that and be more specific. Apple, bananas, chicken, salmon, broccoli, sprouts, red wine and shampoo would give you a better (and faster) experience at the supermarket.  The same applies to your to-do list. Writing things like; Ph.D curriculum, Bathroom and Board meeting, on your to-do list is not going to help you. What do you need to do related to the Ph.D curriculum? What does the “bathroom” mean? Perhaps what you mean is you want to redecorate the bathroom. Great, what does that mean at a task level? Pick up some paint swatches? Buy paint and brushes? What?  Another thing about writing vague words down on your task list is you will have no idea how long it will take you. Ph.D curriculum, how long will that take you? How about if instead of writing a statement, you wrote something like: continue writing Ph.D curriculum”? Now you can decide how long you will spend writing the curriculum. Using the word “continue” (or begin) here puts you in control of the time you spend on the work. A simple change, but one with a huge benefit when it comes to reducing an overwhelming to-do list.  Now, let’s go back to the number of tasks you are putting on your to-do list. Many to-dos have what I would describe as a natural trigger. For instance, your garbage can needs taking out when it is full. I know I see my garbage can every day, so I can tell when it needs taking out. Similarly, I know when my car needs washing every time I drive it. It would be pointless add these as tasks to my task manager.  How about email? Do you send all your actionable email to you to-do list? Why? You already have the mail in your email app, why do you need to duplicate it in your to-do list? All you need is a folder in your email app, called something like “Action This Day”. Any email that requires action can be placed in there and if you dedicate a given amount of time each day for dealing with your actionable emails, you can simply go to that folder and work from there.  Now, I know there can be an issue with emails that contain a bigger task. For instance if your boss emails you and asks you to prepare a report for this month’s board meeting. That’s not going to be a five minute task. However, rather than sending the email to your to-do list, add the task itself and archive the original email. You can then make a decision about when you will write the report. Once the report is finished, you can retrieve the original email from your achieve (it’s simple to do with search) and send the report.  Now, I know I may have made this sound easy, the trouble is it’s not. To reduce your to-do list requires a change in approach. If you’ve been told to capture everything, it will seem counterintuitive to not do so.  I advise to look at all your tools. For instance, if you need around an hour a day to respond to your email and messages, then schedule that hour in your calendar. There’s no point in saying you cannot find an hour for emails and messages, when you still need an hour. That’s fighting against time itself, you will never win that battle. To give you an example, generally, I set aside 4:30 to 5:30pm each day for responding to messages and emails. For the most part I can be consistent, but occasionally, I have to move the time around. That’s fine. The objective is to do it, not necessarily do at 4:30pm.  Exercise can also be put on your calendar. I’ve found if you put exercise on a to-do list, you will find an excuse not to do it. On your calendar, and it’s unlikely you will find an excuse.  Project notes are a great place to put your dependent tasks. A dependent task is a task that cannot be done until something else has been done. For example, you cannot complete a sales report until all the sales data has been collected. Or you cannot redecorate the bathroom until you have bought the paint.  Another tip I would give is to keep your grocery list separate from your task list. For example, I use Todoist as my to-do list, but my grocery list is in Apple Reminders. I wear an Apple Watch and to add an item to the list is as simple as raising my wrist and asking Siri to add something to the list. You can also keep a shopping list in your notes app if you prefer.  If you are struggling with your to-do list, remember the only list that matters today is your today list. Nothing else is important. If you are planning the week and giving yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to review your tasks for tomorrow you can make sure you have not over-committed yourself before the day starts. You should not be working from your folders. That’s a sign you have not planned the week. Weekly planning gives you time away from the noise to calming decide what needs to be done next week. That will go a long way towards reducing your daily list.  I hope that helps, Michelle. That you for your question. And thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Are you the master or slave of your task manager? In this week’s episode, I’m going to show you how to take control of your tasks.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 278 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 278 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. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people were busy, much as we are today, yet we never began the day with to-do lists of twenty-plus tasks. That wasn’t the way we used to-do lists. To-do lists were for the essential, must not forget to do tasks.  Most desk diaries at that time only had space for around six tasks at the bottom of each day’s column. Ironically, six tasks was the number Ivy Lee recommended when he devised the Ivy Lee method for Bethlehem Steel in 1918. That method worked then and it still works today.  So what has happened over the last fifteen years or so? Have our brains diminished somehow? I don’t think so. I suspect the reason why we are struggling now is because we believe everything that must be done should be added to the to-do list, yet does it? How effective would you be if the only things you saw on your list each day were the things that really mattered? I know you would be a lot more focused.  That’s what we’ll be looking at this week, so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Michelle. Michelle asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried so many times to use a to-do list and it always begins well, but after a few days, it becomes overwhelming. I know how helpful they are and I wondered if you could break down what should and should not be in a to-do list.  Hi Michelle, thank you for your question.  Let’s go back to Ivy Lee. While we don’t know why Ivy Lee chose six tasks to add to a to-do list, what we do know is anyone who has used this method almost always complete the six tasks and has enough time at the end of the day to plan the next six.  Ivy Lee’s method is simple. At the end of the day, write down, in order of priority, the six tasks you want to complete tomorrow. Leave that piece of paper on your desk so when you arrive back at work in the morning, the first thing you see are those six tasks. Then, you begin at the top and work your way down the list until you have all six crossed out.  Think about that for a moment. How confident are you at being able to consistently complete six tasks each day?  Let’s imagine for a moment you are a university professor. Today, you have two ninety minute lectures to give from 9:00am. Your lectures will finish at 12:15pm and then you have to arrange some meetings with your Ph.D students, mark some papers, spend a little time writing your own paper, respond to your email, prepare for your lectures tomorrow and exercise. That’s six tasks. Do you have time for anything else? If you work a typical eight or nine hour day, three hours have already gone lecturing, which leaves you with five to six hours to do everything else.  Exercise can be done after you finish for the day, but marking papers, writing your own paper and responding to email are not five minute tasks. I would say, if you try and cram anything else into your day, you’ve already lost the day.  The key to this Michelle is to understand that time is limited. We do not have an infinite amount of time each day. Sure, you can work eighteen hours a day trying to do everything, but that is not sustainable. You might be able to that for a couple of days, but eventually you will break. You are not a machine and there needs to be balance between work and rest. (Whether you like that or not).  But look at the professor’s day, if she were to do the tasks she had set for herself, she would be moving important things forward. She might not be able to finish everything, that’s fine as long as she’s consistently working on the important things.  In many ways, we are our own worst enemies. Thinking that everything has to be finished in one day will always lead to overwhelm and in the worst case scenario, burnout. It’s not possible to complete everything at the first try. Sometimes you need to continue with a task on another day.  Now, there is something else at play here. How are you writing your tasks? You are not going to do very well at the supermarket if all that was on your list was: food, drink toiletries. Sure you would pick up something, but more than likely you would pick up all the wrong things. Instead, we need to be smarter than that and be more specific. Apple, bananas, chicken, salmon, broccoli, sprouts, red wine and shampoo would give you a better (and faster) experience at the supermarket.  The same applies to your to-do list. Writing things like; Ph.D curriculum, Bathroom and Board meeting, on your to-do list is not going to help you. What do you need to do related to the Ph.D curriculum? What does the “bathroom” mean? Perhaps what you mean is you want to redecorate the bathroom. Great, what does that mean at a task level? Pick up some paint swatches? Buy paint and brushes? What?  Another thing about writing vague words down on your task list is you will have no idea how long it will take you. Ph.D curriculum, how long will that take you? How about if instead of writing a statement, you wrote something like: continue writing Ph.D curriculum”? Now you can decide how long you will spend writing the curriculum. Using the word “continue” (or begin) here puts you in control of the time you spend on the work. A simple change, but one with a huge benefit when it comes to reducing an overwhelming to-do list.  Now, let’s go back to the number of tasks you are putting on your to-do list. Many to-dos have what I would describe as a natural trigger. For instance, your garbage can needs taking out when it is full. I know I see my garbage can every day, so I can tell when it needs taking out. Similarly, I know when my car needs washing every time I drive it. It would be pointless add these as tasks to my task manager.  How about email? Do you send all your actionable email to you to-do list? Why? You already have the mail in your email app, why do you need to duplicate it in your to-do list? All you need is a folder in your email app, called something like “Action This Day”. Any email that requires action can be placed in there and if you dedicate a given amount of time each day for dealing with your actionable emails, you can simply go to that folder and work from there.  Now, I know there can be an issue with emails that contain a bigger task. For instance if your boss emails you and asks you to prepare a report for this month’s board meeting. That’s not going to be a five minute task. However, rather than sending the email to your to-do list, add the task itself and archive the original email. You can then make a decision about when you will write the report. Once the report is finished, you can retrieve the original email from your achieve (it’s simple to do with search) and send the report.  Now, I know I may have made this sound easy, the trouble is it’s not. To reduce your to-do list requires a change in approach. If you’ve been told to capture everything, it will seem counterintuitive to not do so.  I advise to look at all your tools. For instance, if you need around an hour a day to respond to your email and messages, then schedule that hour in your calendar. There’s no point in saying you cannot find an hour for emails and messages, when you still need an hour. That’s fighting against time itself, you will never win that battle. To give you an example, generally, I set aside 4:30 to 5:30pm each day for responding to messages and emails. For the most part I can be consistent, but occasionally, I have to move the time around. That’s fine. The objective is to do it, not necessarily do at 4:30pm.  Exercise can also be put on your calendar. I’ve found if you put exercise on a to-do list, you will find an excuse not to do it. On your calendar, and it’s unlikely you will find an excuse.  Project notes are a great place to put your dependent tasks. A dependent task is a task that cannot be done until something else has been done. For example, you cannot complete a sales report until all the sales data has been collected. Or you cannot redecorate the bathroom until you have bought the paint.  Another tip I would give is to keep your grocery list separate from your task list. For example, I use Todoist as my to-do list, but my grocery list is in Apple Reminders. I wear an Apple Watch and to add an item to the list is as simple as raising my wrist and asking Siri to add something to the list. You can also keep a shopping list in your notes app if you prefer.  If you are struggling with your to-do list, remember the only list that matters today is your today list. Nothing else is important. If you are planning the week and giving yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to review your tasks for tomorrow you can make sure you have not over-committed yourself before the day starts. You should not be working from your folders. That’s a sign you have not planned the week. Weekly planning gives you time away from the noise to calming decide what needs to be done next week. That will go a long way towards reducing your daily list.  I hope that helps, Michelle. That you for your question. And thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

HowTo Take Control Of Your To-Do List

Answering your productivity and self-development questions every week.

This week, how do your task manager, calendar and notes fit together in a time management and productivity system? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 277 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 277 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 frequently asked question is how does everything fit together? By that what is meant, is having three separate productivity tools too much for something as simple as being guided toward what needs to happen next? On the surface it might well look like that. After all, why use three tools when one tool could do it all. Your calendar, could easily manage your appointments and tasks and quite a few task managers have tried this by integrating with the mainstream calendar apps.  However, what is missed is the ability to compartmentalise. To be able to quickly see the big picture of your day and then to drill down deeper to the micro level and make decisions about what you can or should be doing with your time at that moment.  So, that is what we will be looking at today and 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 Andy. Andy asks, Hi Carl, I’m struggling to understand why I need to use a to-do list and a calendar. Everyone seems to talk about this but why not keep everything you need to do on your calendar and dispense with using a task manager?  Hi Andy, thank you for your question.  The truth is you do not need a task manager at all. When I began my time management journey, I used an A4 desk diary that showed a week over two pages. When open on my desk, that diary showed me the whole week at a glance.  At the bottom of each day, there was sufficient room to add a few tasks and that is exactly how I used it. Appointments in their allotted time and to-dos written out at the bottom of each day. It worked brilliantly for over fifteen years.  However, with that said, digital tools have made somethings a lot easier. For instance the digital to-do list allows us to create recurring tasks—tasks we would frequently forget to do. This way we can off load a lot from our brains into a digital system without feeling anxious about whether we will remember to do something or not.  However, why do we need three productivity apps when in theory one could do everything for us?  The biggest problem with having everything contained within one app is the overwhelm it will produce. Seeing everything on one page (and I mean everything) will prevent you from quickly seeing what is important and what is not. Generally, in the hierarchy of tools the calendar gives you the overview of your day. It tells you where you need to be at a given time. For example, if you need to collect your kids up from school at 4pm, that would be on your calendar. Similarly, if you have a meeting with an important customer at 1pm, you need to know about that and you need to see it in the context of your whole day.  With tasks, you likely have ten to twenty tasks to perform each day. These will include big important tasks, such as preparing for an important meeting with your boss, to smaller, less important tasks such as refuelling your car before an early morning start the next day. Preparing for the meeting and refuelling your car can be done at anytime in the day and in terms of priority, will be less important than being outside your kids’ school gates at the correct time. (I hope) If you were looking at a list of all your appointments and tasks for the day, it’s going to look overwhelming—even on the easiest of days. You will have important and not important tasks all mixed up together and being able to quickly distinguish what you should be doing will be challenging.  Instead you can look at your calendar as showing you the big picture of your day. It tells you where you need to be with who and when. It’s a quick reference tool in that you can glance at your calendar and see instantly where you should be next and when. It’s not overwhelming because it only shows you your events and blocks of time where you can do the smaller tasks.  Your task manager is the micro-level of your day. It shows you, at a micro-level, what needs to be done. For instance, today, I have a task reminding me to call into my dog’s vet to pick up some anti-tic tablets (it the tic season here in Korea). This task can be done at anytime as the vet’s clinic is a twenty-minute walk from my home. I’m not going to schedule that as I can do it anytime up to 6pm and I know I will need a break at some point in the day and I can do it then.  My task manager also shows me all the little routines I should do today. From clearing my actionable email and updating my business tracking spreadsheets to scheduling my social media. I do these everyday throughout the day and it’s helpful to see what I have and have not done when it comes to closing down my day.  Your notes is something different. This is a tool that has always been used, whether keeping these in notebooks or on bits of paper, we’ve always kept notes and they have been separated from our productivity tools. As far back as Leonardo Di Vinci or Isaac Newton, notebooks have always been where we kept thoughts and ideas.  In our productivity toolbox, notes are the support for your projects and ideas. You only need these when working on a particular piece of work. The great thing about digital notes is they are searchable and that is where they have a huge advantage over paper notes. It means less time filing and searching.  The key to having all these tools working effectively is in how you use them. I recently looked at replicating my old paper-based desk diary system in my digital calendar and it works exceptionally well—which really shouldn’t have surprised me as it’s simple. The only issue I had was not being able to cross completed tasks out. It was either the task stayed at the top of my calendar or they disappeared, which meant I did not have a record of what had been completed. However, in theory the system would work.  However, the issue of overwhelm raised its head again. Seeing all my appointments and tasks in one view is just not a pleasant experience. It dilutes your attention and will cause you to cherry pick easy tasks just to clear some space. That’s not the more effective way to do your work.  Instead, what I have found works best, is to use tags (or labels) to correspond with my focus work time blocks. Let me give you an example of how this works. On a Monday I have a two hour block on my calendar for writing between 9:30 and 11:30am. In my task manager, I have a label for writing. When I plan my day, all I need do look at my writing tasks for that day and decide which one I will do.  I am not being distracted by emails I may need to respond to—I will do that in my communications hour later in the day—or if I need to do any project work. My calendar tells me I am writing for two hours between 9:30 and 11:30 and as long as I respect my calendar—and after all, I was the one who decided I would be writing at that time—then I know each day I will be working on the right things and not being pulled off onto less important, but perhaps louder tasks.  And that’s an important point. Your calendar is your creation—or at least should be. When you get a calendar invite, you don’t have to accept it. You have a choice: accept, decline or maybe. If the invite clashes with a focus block time, you need to have the courage to stand your ground and request an alternative time. A quick tip here, when suggesting an alternative time, always offer two times. You increase the chances the other person will accept your offer of another time with that technique.  Now if your calendar is “compulsory”—at least once you have finalised your calendar for the day it should be, your task manager is discretionary. Never get upset if you do not complete all you tasks for the day, but hold a full blown investigation if you ignore your calendar.  The reality is, there are too many unknowns that could happen in the day—particularly if you are working with other people—you may begin the day expecting a meeting with an important client, only to find they had to cancel and ask for another day and time. Suddenly the meeting you were going to have this afternoon in another part of the city is cancelled. Now you have three hours, you didn’t expect. What are you going to do? That’s where being able to open up your task manager and bring a few tasks forward is helpful.  It’s quick, and you can quickly rearrange the appointment knowing the important things you had planned for that week will not be interrupted if you have to rearrange a meeting.  Now, I should point out, none of this will work if you are not doing any weekly planning. If you’re not planning you will always be working on the latest and loudest. You will never look at the big picture, and you will always feel overwhelmed. The weekly planning sessions are all about giving you some breathing room to look ahead, see what’s heading towards you and making decisions about what you should be working on.  Not everything is important and a lot of what we think we should be doing will, given time, sort themselves out. But, you will never know what those are without doing a plan for the week.  So, there you go, Andy. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remain s for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, how do your task manager, calendar and notes fit together in a time management and productivity system? You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 277 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 277 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 frequently asked question is how does everything fit together? By that what is meant, is having three separate productivity tools too much for something as simple as being guided toward what needs to happen next? On the surface it might well look like that. After all, why use three tools when one tool could do it all. Your calendar, could easily manage your appointments and tasks and quite a few task managers have tried this by integrating with the mainstream calendar apps.  However, what is missed is the ability to compartmentalise. To be able to quickly see the big picture of your day and then to drill down deeper to the micro level and make decisions about what you can or should be doing with your time at that moment.  So, that is what we will be looking at today and 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 Andy. Andy asks, Hi Carl, I’m struggling to understand why I need to use a to-do list and a calendar. Everyone seems to talk about this but why not keep everything you need to do on your calendar and dispense with using a task manager?  Hi Andy, thank you for your question.  The truth is you do not need a task manager at all. When I began my time management journey, I used an A4 desk diary that showed a week over two pages. When open on my desk, that diary showed me the whole week at a glance.  At the bottom of each day, there was sufficient room to add a few tasks and that is exactly how I used it. Appointments in their allotted time and to-dos written out at the bottom of each day. It worked brilliantly for over fifteen years.  However, with that said, digital tools have made somethings a lot easier. For instance the digital to-do list allows us to create recurring tasks—tasks we would frequently forget to do. This way we can off load a lot from our brains into a digital system without feeling anxious about whether we will remember to do something or not.  However, why do we need three productivity apps when in theory one could do everything for us?  The biggest problem with having everything contained within one app is the overwhelm it will produce. Seeing everything on one page (and I mean everything) will prevent you from quickly seeing what is important and what is not. Generally, in the hierarchy of tools the calendar gives you the overview of your day. It tells you where you need to be at a given time. For example, if you need to collect your kids up from school at 4pm, that would be on your calendar. Similarly, if you have a meeting with an important customer at 1pm, you need to know about that and you need to see it in the context of your whole day.  With tasks, you likely have ten to twenty tasks to perform each day. These will include big important tasks, such as preparing for an important meeting with your boss, to smaller, less important tasks such as refuelling your car before an early morning start the next day. Preparing for the meeting and refuelling your car can be done at anytime in the day and in terms of priority, will be less important than being outside your kids’ school gates at the correct time. (I hope) If you were looking at a list of all your appointments and tasks for the day, it’s going to look overwhelming—even on the easiest of days. You will have important and not important tasks all mixed up together and being able to quickly distinguish what you should be doing will be challenging.  Instead you can look at your calendar as showing you the big picture of your day. It tells you where you need to be with who and when. It’s a quick reference tool in that you can glance at your calendar and see instantly where you should be next and when. It’s not overwhelming because it only shows you your events and blocks of time where you can do the smaller tasks.  Your task manager is the micro-level of your day. It shows you, at a micro-level, what needs to be done. For instance, today, I have a task reminding me to call into my dog’s vet to pick up some anti-tic tablets (it the tic season here in Korea). This task can be done at anytime as the vet’s clinic is a twenty-minute walk from my home. I’m not going to schedule that as I can do it anytime up to 6pm and I know I will need a break at some point in the day and I can do it then.  My task manager also shows me all the little routines I should do today. From clearing my actionable email and updating my business tracking spreadsheets to scheduling my social media. I do these everyday throughout the day and it’s helpful to see what I have and have not done when it comes to closing down my day.  Your notes is something different. This is a tool that has always been used, whether keeping these in notebooks or on bits of paper, we’ve always kept notes and they have been separated from our productivity tools. As far back as Leonardo Di Vinci or Isaac Newton, notebooks have always been where we kept thoughts and ideas.  In our productivity toolbox, notes are the support for your projects and ideas. You only need these when working on a particular piece of work. The great thing about digital notes is they are searchable and that is where they have a huge advantage over paper notes. It means less time filing and searching.  The key to having all these tools working effectively is in how you use them. I recently looked at replicating my old paper-based desk diary system in my digital calendar and it works exceptionally well—which really shouldn’t have surprised me as it’s simple. The only issue I had was not being able to cross completed tasks out. It was either the task stayed at the top of my calendar or they disappeared, which meant I did not have a record of what had been completed. However, in theory the system would work.  However, the issue of overwhelm raised its head again. Seeing all my appointments and tasks in one view is just not a pleasant experience. It dilutes your attention and will cause you to cherry pick easy tasks just to clear some space. That’s not the more effective way to do your work.  Instead, what I have found works best, is to use tags (or labels) to correspond with my focus work time blocks. Let me give you an example of how this works. On a Monday I have a two hour block on my calendar for writing between 9:30 and 11:30am. In my task manager, I have a label for writing. When I plan my day, all I need do look at my writing tasks for that day and decide which one I will do.  I am not being distracted by emails I may need to respond to—I will do that in my communications hour later in the day—or if I need to do any project work. My calendar tells me I am writing for two hours between 9:30 and 11:30 and as long as I respect my calendar—and after all, I was the one who decided I would be writing at that time—then I know each day I will be working on the right things and not being pulled off onto less important, but perhaps louder tasks.  And that’s an important point. Your calendar is your creation—or at least should be. When you get a calendar invite, you don’t have to accept it. You have a choice: accept, decline or maybe. If the invite clashes with a focus block time, you need to have the courage to stand your ground and request an alternative time. A quick tip here, when suggesting an alternative time, always offer two times. You increase the chances the other person will accept your offer of another time with that technique.  Now if your calendar is “compulsory”—at least once you have finalised your calendar for the day it should be, your task manager is discretionary. Never get upset if you do not complete all you tasks for the day, but hold a full blown investigation if you ignore your calendar.  The reality is, there are too many unknowns that could happen in the day—particularly if you are working with other people—you may begin the day expecting a meeting with an important client, only to find they had to cancel and ask for another day and time. Suddenly the meeting you were going to have this afternoon in another part of the city is cancelled. Now you have three hours, you didn’t expect. What are you going to do? That’s where being able to open up your task manager and bring a few tasks forward is helpful.  It’s quick, and you can quickly rearrange the appointment knowing the important things you had planned for that week will not be interrupted if you have to rearrange a meeting.  Now, I should point out, none of this will work if you are not doing any weekly planning. If you’re not planning you will always be working on the latest and loudest. You will never look at the big picture, and you will always feel overwhelmed. The weekly planning sessions are all about giving you some breathing room to look ahead, see what’s heading towards you and making decisions about what you should be working on.  Not everything is important and a lot of what we think we should be doing will, given time, sort themselves out. But, you will never know what those are without doing a plan for the week.  So, there you go, Andy. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remain s for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Why Use Three Tools When One Could Do It All?

This week, we’re looking at how to define your core work and how that translates into what you do each day.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 276 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 276 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. In the Time Sector Course, I introduce the concept of “core work”. The work you are employed to do or perhaps another way to look at it, the things you are responsible for at work. It’s your core work that you will be evaluated on by your employer, and if you are self-employed it is the work that generates your income.  If you were never to define what this part of your work is, you would find yourself caught up in trivialities masquerading as important work. Those petty disagreements between colleagues, most emails and messages and water cooler gossip.  However, defining what your core work is one part of the process. There is another, more important part to understanding your core work, which is what this week’s question is all about. This question also came up in a recent workshop I did. Defining your core work is quite different from knowing how that definition operates at a task level. Today, I hope to illuminate this important step for you. 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 am a Senior Vice President for a small pharmaceutical company. I took your Time Sector Course and have got stuck with my core work. I think I know what that is, but I don’t know how that works day to day. Could you help me with this? Hi Linda, Thank you for your question.  Let’s start with why it’s important to identify your core work. Most of our time management and productivity issues evolve from having too much to do and not enough time to do it. This creates backlogs and that leads to you feeling overwhelmed and anxious about how much to feel you have to do.  Yet, there are different types of tasks we need to do. There are the absolute, the discretionary, and the time wasters. If we do not identify what our absolutes are we end up spending too much time on the discretionary and time wasting tasks.  Spending some time identifying your absolute must do tasks means you can then allocate sufficient time to get these done each week. However, in order to identify what these tasks are, we need to know what we are specifically employed to do.  For example, if you are a salesperson, you primary roll is to sell your company’s products or services. This means your core work is any activity that will potentially lead to a sale. This could be calling prospects, meeting with existing customers and asking for referrals.  Once you know this, you can define what these activities mean at a task level. Calling prospects, for instance, could mean you dedicate one hour each morning to call potential customers and try to arrange appointments. You could also, set aside a hour on a Friday afternoon to contact your existing customers to make appointments to meet with them the following week.  A salesperson core work is not filling out activity reports for their sales manager or sitting in sales meetings. None of these activities risk leading to a sale. However, these might be important, to your sales manager, and you will need time to do them, but they should not take priority over your sales related tasks.  It’s as Brian Tracy and Jim Rohn preached—majors and minors. Major time is being in front of your customer. Minor time is sitting in an office chatting with your colleagues.  Now for you Linda, your roll is a leadership roll. Your core work is likely to be centred around supporting your team so they can do their jobs with as little interruption as possible. Your roll is not to micro-manage your team, your roll is to clear obstacles so they can get on and do their jobs. This will inevitably involve meetings with your team—although not too many so as not to interrupt their work. I’m reminded of how Red Bull Racing’s Team Principle, Christian Horner, organises his work. Christina Horner is not only the Team Principle, he’s also the CEO of the company. In a recent video Red Bull put out we were given an insight into how he divides his time. During a race weekend, he is the Team Principle and will be track-side with the rest of his team. He’s dealing with media responsibilities, leading team briefings and managing race strategy.  When he returns to the team’s base on a Monday or Tuesday, he’s the CEO. His role and core work has changed. Here he will have meetings with his key people to make sure everything is running as it should be and if it isn’t he will discuss strategies to get things moving in the right direction. Christian Horner’s role as the CEO is to keep a focus on the company’s goals and to be guide his team towards achieving their goals.  Christian Horner’s core work as a CEO is to listen to his team, ask question and help to remove blocks to successfully completing projects and goals. His tasks will come from these meetings. He may need to discuss with the board to increase funding for different areas, or he may need to call a key supplier to speed up the delivery of a key component. His core work is to assist his team in solving problems so they can achieve their goals and targets.  A leader’s core work is generally two-fold. To support their team and to report to the board of directors. To support their team, that will involve talking with the key people. So arranging regular meetings with these people is a task. Similarly, serving the board is a core work task. What does the board want? Quite often, information for the board is consistent. Reports, for instance may need to be sent to the board each month. Collecting the information and delivering these reports will be core work tasks. When and how will you do that?  Now an issue I frequently come across is a person identifying their core work, but then not distilling that down to a task level. For instance, I create content. I consider that to be a part of my core work. Yet, just saying I create content is not enough. What does that look like at a task level? For me, that means writing a blog post, two newsletters, recording this podcast and filming two YouTube videos each week. The tasks here are writing, recording and filming. Now I know that, the only question remaining is when will I do that each week.  Now I’ve been creating this content for a long time, I know how long each piece takes, so all I need do now is block time out on my calendar for creating content and make sure the tasks are in my task manager.  So, to give you an example of how this looks, I have two hours blocked out Monday and Tuesday morning for writing. That is sufficient time to get my writing commitments completed. I have three hours blocked out on Friday morning for recording and filming. That takes care of my podcast and YouTube videos.  Core work is non-negotiable, it must be done. This is why once you know how long you need (and you will soon learn how long your core work will take) you make sure you have sufficient time blocked out on your calendar each week for doing it. If I include all the writing, recording and editing, I need around twelve hours each week to do my core work. When you distil your work down to its core level, you will find to complete it requires considerably less time than you think. You soon realise you have plenty of time left over for meetings and other work. By blocking out time each week for your core work, you know before the week begins you always have sufficient time for this important work.  Architects and designers need time to do their creative work and discuss projects with clients. Architects may also need to discuss materials with suppliers. However, the core work—the work that ultimately pays their income—will be the design work. If they have not set aside enough time for doing that work, everything else will be irrelevant.  If we look an example of a hotel general manager, their core work is to ensure the hotel is profitable, and the highest standards are maintained. Describing core work like that is not helpful at a task level. What does ensuring the hotel is profitable look like at a task level? That could be to regularly meet with the hotel’s sales and marketing team to discuss strategy. What about maintaining the hotel’s standards? That would involve walking around the hotel each day inspecting rooms, food service and cleanliness.  I once worked with a general manager who did this every morning before his management meeting. If he spotted anything below standard he would discuss this with the relevant departmental manager in the management meeting. This was not done as a telling off session. It was about highlighting issues with the relevant manager. This method ensured the management team were all focused on the same thing. No manager wanted to be called out in the meeting.  This particular manager went on to have a highly successful career rising to becoming Operations Director of the hotel group.  While leadership roles are different from managerial roles in many ways, the key with leadership is to empower and trust your team will do their jobs to the best of their abilities. As a leader, your job is serve your team and help them do that. It’s not to get in their way or do their jobs for them—if you need to do that, why are you employing them in the first place. I always think of leadership core work as communicating with their team and guiding them to successfully completing their projects. Meetings helps, but can often get in the way of doing the work. Perhaps you could learn from my former general manager and make it a core work principle to do a walk round of your department each morning virtually or in person.  So there you go, Linda. I hope that has helped. It’s likely you have identified the abstract part of your ore work. All you need do is answer the question; what does that look like at a task level?  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. 

This week, we’re looking at how to define your core work and how that translates into what you do each day.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 276 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 276 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. In the Time Sector Course, I introduce the concept of “core work”. The work you are employed to do or perhaps another way to look at it, the things you are responsible for at work. It’s your core work that you will be evaluated on by your employer, and if you are self-employed it is the work that generates your income.  If you were never to define what this part of your work is, you would find yourself caught up in trivialities masquerading as important work. Those petty disagreements between colleagues, most emails and messages and water cooler gossip.  However, defining what your core work is one part of the process. There is another, more important part to understanding your core work, which is what this week’s question is all about. This question also came up in a recent workshop I did. Defining your core work is quite different from knowing how that definition operates at a task level. Today, I hope to illuminate this important step for you. 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 am a Senior Vice President for a small pharmaceutical company. I took your Time Sector Course and have got stuck with my core work. I think I know what that is, but I don’t know how that works day to day. Could you help me with this? Hi Linda, Thank you for your question.  Let’s start with why it’s important to identify your core work. Most of our time management and productivity issues evolve from having too much to do and not enough time to do it. This creates backlogs and that leads to you feeling overwhelmed and anxious about how much to feel you have to do.  Yet, there are different types of tasks we need to do. There are the absolute, the discretionary, and the time wasters. If we do not identify what our absolutes are we end up spending too much time on the discretionary and time wasting tasks.  Spending some time identifying your absolute must do tasks means you can then allocate sufficient time to get these done each week. However, in order to identify what these tasks are, we need to know what we are specifically employed to do.  For example, if you are a salesperson, you primary roll is to sell your company’s products or services. This means your core work is any activity that will potentially lead to a sale. This could be calling prospects, meeting with existing customers and asking for referrals.  Once you know this, you can define what these activities mean at a task level. Calling prospects, for instance, could mean you dedicate one hour each morning to call potential customers and try to arrange appointments. You could also, set aside a hour on a Friday afternoon to contact your existing customers to make appointments to meet with them the following week.  A salesperson core work is not filling out activity reports for their sales manager or sitting in sales meetings. None of these activities risk leading to a sale. However, these might be important, to your sales manager, and you will need time to do them, but they should not take priority over your sales related tasks.  It’s as Brian Tracy and Jim Rohn preached—majors and minors. Major time is being in front of your customer. Minor time is sitting in an office chatting with your colleagues.  Now for you Linda, your roll is a leadership roll. Your core work is likely to be centred around supporting your team so they can do their jobs with as little interruption as possible. Your roll is not to micro-manage your team, your roll is to clear obstacles so they can get on and do their jobs. This will inevitably involve meetings with your team—although not too many so as not to interrupt their work. I’m reminded of how Red Bull Racing’s Team Principle, Christian Horner, organises his work. Christina Horner is not only the Team Principle, he’s also the CEO of the company. In a recent video Red Bull put out we were given an insight into how he divides his time. During a race weekend, he is the Team Principle and will be track-side with the rest of his team. He’s dealing with media responsibilities, leading team briefings and managing race strategy.  When he returns to the team’s base on a Monday or Tuesday, he’s the CEO. His role and core work has changed. Here he will have meetings with his key people to make sure everything is running as it should be and if it isn’t he will discuss strategies to get things moving in the right direction. Christian Horner’s role as the CEO is to keep a focus on the company’s goals and to be guide his team towards achieving their goals.  Christian Horner’s core work as a CEO is to listen to his team, ask question and help to remove blocks to successfully completing projects and goals. His tasks will come from these meetings. He may need to discuss with the board to increase funding for different areas, or he may need to call a key supplier to speed up the delivery of a key component. His core work is to assist his team in solving problems so they can achieve their goals and targets.  A leader’s core work is generally two-fold. To support their team and to report to the board of directors. To support their team, that will involve talking with the key people. So arranging regular meetings with these people is a task. Similarly, serving the board is a core work task. What does the board want? Quite often, information for the board is consistent. Reports, for instance may need to be sent to the board each month. Collecting the information and delivering these reports will be core work tasks. When and how will you do that?  Now an issue I frequently come across is a person identifying their core work, but then not distilling that down to a task level. For instance, I create content. I consider that to be a part of my core work. Yet, just saying I create content is not enough. What does that look like at a task level? For me, that means writing a blog post, two newsletters, recording this podcast and filming two YouTube videos each week. The tasks here are writing, recording and filming. Now I know that, the only question remaining is when will I do that each week.  Now I’ve been creating this content for a long time, I know how long each piece takes, so all I need do now is block time out on my calendar for creating content and make sure the tasks are in my task manager.  So, to give you an example of how this looks, I have two hours blocked out Monday and Tuesday morning for writing. That is sufficient time to get my writing commitments completed. I have three hours blocked out on Friday morning for recording and filming. That takes care of my podcast and YouTube videos.  Core work is non-negotiable, it must be done. This is why once you know how long you need (and you will soon learn how long your core work will take) you make sure you have sufficient time blocked out on your calendar each week for doing it. If I include all the writing, recording and editing, I need around twelve hours each week to do my core work. When you distil your work down to its core level, you will find to complete it requires considerably less time than you think. You soon realise you have plenty of time left over for meetings and other work. By blocking out time each week for your core work, you know before the week begins you always have sufficient time for this important work.  Architects and designers need time to do their creative work and discuss projects with clients. Architects may also need to discuss materials with suppliers. However, the core work—the work that ultimately pays their income—will be the design work. If they have not set aside enough time for doing that work, everything else will be irrelevant.  If we look an example of a hotel general manager, their core work is to ensure the hotel is profitable, and the highest standards are maintained. Describing core work like that is not helpful at a task level. What does ensuring the hotel is profitable look like at a task level? That could be to regularly meet with the hotel’s sales and marketing team to discuss strategy. What about maintaining the hotel’s standards? That would involve walking around the hotel each day inspecting rooms, food service and cleanliness.  I once worked with a general manager who did this every morning before his management meeting. If he spotted anything below standard he would discuss this with the relevant departmental manager in the management meeting. This was not done as a telling off session. It was about highlighting issues with the relevant manager. This method ensured the management team were all focused on the same thing. No manager wanted to be called out in the meeting.  This particular manager went on to have a highly successful career rising to becoming Operations Director of the hotel group.  While leadership roles are different from managerial roles in many ways, the key with leadership is to empower and trust your team will do their jobs to the best of their abilities. As a leader, your job is serve your team and help them do that. It’s not to get in their way or do their jobs for them—if you need to do that, why are you employing them in the first place. I always think of leadership core work as communicating with their team and guiding them to successfully completing their projects. Meetings helps, but can often get in the way of doing the work. Perhaps you could learn from my former general manager and make it a core work principle to do a walk round of your department each morning virtually or in person.  So there you go, Linda. I hope that has helped. It’s likely you have identified the abstract part of your ore work. All you need do is answer the question; what does that look like at a task level?  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.

How To Establish What Your Core Work Is? (Leadership Edition)

In this week’s podcast, I answer a question about setting some rules of engagement for yourself. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 275 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 275 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. Have you ever stopped to establish some rules by which you do your work and live your life? If not, you could be missing out on something very powerful that helps you to automate what you do and reduce a lot of decision making.  A lot of the issues around productivity and better managing our time comes around because everything we do is treated as unique or new. Yet, a lot of what we do each day is not unique. In fact, we are likely repeating the same steps each day, but because we have not established a routine or process for doing these tasks, they feel cumbersome and that leaves us finding excuses for not doing them.  That then kicks off a cycle of pain. Take email for example, we let it pile up until eventually we are forced to do something about it, and then we waste a whole day (or in some cases a week) just trying to get on top of it and deal with the backlog. That’s not a very productive way of managing your email.  This week’s question is all about how and where to establish some rules of engagement with your work.  So, before we get to the answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Matty. Matty asks, Hi Carl, do you have any suggestions for simplifying tasks and work? I find as soon as the week starts, any plans I may have soon so complicated I never know where I should be starting.  Thank you, Matty for your question.  Interesting you use the words “simplifying tasks and work”, that’s what it’s all about. If we can find a way to simplify the work we do, we become faster at it and it requires a lot less thought—and that’s always a good good thing.  So what can we do to make doing our work easier and more automated?  Let’s begin with email and other messages we receive at work. This is an area that screams out for a process and some rules. Email is coming at us all the time. It never seems to stop. For many of you, you likely get emails through the night as well. If we were to let it pile up it would become a tedious task trying to find the important mails and messages. So, a process here would help you to automate it.  I’ve talked before about setting up an Action this Day folder in your mail for any email that requires some action from you. That could be replying or reading. If you need to take any kind of action, drop it in your action this day folder.  Now the process you follow is at some point in the morning you clear your inbox. And that is clear it, not scan it. Delete emails you don’t need and archive emails you think you may need in the future. Anything you need to act on goes into your action this day folder. Then at some point towards the end of the day, you set aside an hour for clearing your action this day folder.  Now here’s the thing, email is still an important part of our work communication. I know a lot of companies are using internal messaging systems such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, and because of that you want to include any responses to these messages in this time you have set aside. There may be some messages that need responding to more urgently, and you will likely need to deal with these sooner, but for the most part try to push off responding until your dedicated communication time.  If you were to skip your communication time one day, you will find yourself having to double the time you set aside the next day. This is why, it needs to become a rule. No matter what, you will dedicate one hour of your work day for dealing with your communications. If your work involves a lot of email and message interaction, you may need to extend this time, but try it out with one hour first and see how you get on.  Now when it comes to setting rules for communicating here’s something that will help your reputation at work. Set some rules for your response time. Now, it’s important not to be overly ambitious. If you regularly have client meetings that take two or three hours, telling everyone you will reply to your messages within an hour is unrealistic. Here’s my set of communication rules: For email I will respond within twenty-four hours. Now if anyone it trying to engage me to use email as a form of instant messaging I will deliberately slow them down, no matter how important they are. Email should never be used for anything urgent. If your neighbour’s house was on fire you would never email them. You’d call them. There is a hierarchy of urgency. If something’s urgent, make a phone call. If it needs doing today, use instant messaging. Everything else can go by email.  For instant messages, my rule is within four hours and phone calls, I will try to answer immediately, but if I need to get back to someone it will be within an hour.  Whatever rules you apply, tell everyone. You can add your rules as an email signature to reinforce this. Once you’ve set your rules, the first step if for you to begin living them. You’re not likely to be perfect straight away, but just because you missed something, doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Stick with it. You’ll become comfortable with it and as long as you are dealing with your actionable mail each day, you won’t have backlogs building up and that will be one area of your work you now have under control.  Now where else can you apply rules? How about doing focused work in a morning? This is when your brain is at its freshest—after a night’s sleep (even if it wasn’t a good night’s sleep). Take advantage of that and try to block one or two hours a couple of days each week where you will not be available for other people. You will need to be smart about this. Look through your calendar and see where the peak time for your meetings are. If most of your meetings happen in the middle part of your work day, you can make sure your blocked out focus times, are at either side of those peak times.  You know your schedule, so find some blocks of time where you can get some quiet focus time. You do not need to do this every day, although you can try to get there over time.  As an example, I block Monday and Tuesday morning for writing. It blocked out on my calendar and even my wife knows I am busy at those times. Thursdays and Sundays I keep free for meetings and Wednesday is blocked for family commitments—I don’t have weekends off. This is fixed and now it just feels automatic. All I need to know is what day it is. If it’s Monday, I know I’ll be writing. No thinking, no negotiating. It’s Monday. I write.  If you were in sales, you could block 9:00 to 9:30am for calling customers and prospects to set up appointments. If you were to do this every day, that would be two-and-a-half hours a week. If you were to call five people on average each time, that would be twenty-five people. That’s likely to convert into plenty of appointments. And I know from my own experience in sales, appointments lead to sales and sales lead to better bonuses. You’re doing something simple every day that will have an impact on your income. And all you have done is set a rule.  Now, if your calendar doesn’t have a lot of structure, you could just set the daily rule that would call five people each day to set up appointments. When you do this, you get five calls each day to improve your sales calls skills. When you first begin doing this, you may not convert many calls. But over time, you will refine your skills and you will see significant improvement. You can also measure this by calculating your conversion ratio. How many appointments you get from the calls you make. Other areas where you can set rules is with planning sessions. Make it a rule where you cannot finish your work until you have spent ten minutes planning what your must-do tasks for tomorrow will be. Writing these out or saying saying these out loud has been scientifically proven to increase your chances of carrying out the tasks. It’s called “implementation intention”—where you plan out what you will do and when.  You can also use implementation intention for your personal life. Let’s say you’ve neglected to do exercise for a while. You could, as part of your daily planning, say to yourself, “tomorrow I will go for a thirty minute walk immediately after eating lunch”. You can then add that to your calendar, so the time is protected and watch what happens.  Setting standards for yourself is also a way to implement some rules into your life. I was always fascinated when a new coffee shop opened up near where I live. I would watch to see their standards. Usually for the first few weeks or months, you will see the owners wiping down the windows and tables outside every day. The Coffee shops that ultimately failed were the ones where the owners (or employees) stopped doing these little tasks after a few weeks.  If you were lucky enough to be invited to Rolls Royce Motor Cars head office in Goodwood, UK, you could measure the grass outside reception every day and it would be the same length. That’s because Rolls Royce employs a front of house manager, whose job is to measure the length of not only the grass, but also the trees outside over hanging branches. That’s all about ensuring the highest possible standards.  What are your standards?  So there you go, Matty. Simplifying your system is really all about setting yourself some rules and ensuring that each day you live by your own standards. It’s repeating these tasks day in day out that will mean you will have les thinking to do and your work will just run that little smoother.  Than you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

In this week’s podcast, I answer a question about setting some rules of engagement for yourself. You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 275 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 275 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. Have you ever stopped to establish some rules by which you do your work and live your life? If not, you could be missing out on something very powerful that helps you to automate what you do and reduce a lot of decision making.  A lot of the issues around productivity and better managing our time comes around because everything we do is treated as unique or new. Yet, a lot of what we do each day is not unique. In fact, we are likely repeating the same steps each day, but because we have not established a routine or process for doing these tasks, they feel cumbersome and that leaves us finding excuses for not doing them.  That then kicks off a cycle of pain. Take email for example, we let it pile up until eventually we are forced to do something about it, and then we waste a whole day (or in some cases a week) just trying to get on top of it and deal with the backlog. That’s not a very productive way of managing your email.  This week’s question is all about how and where to establish some rules of engagement with your work.  So, before we get to the answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Matty. Matty asks, Hi Carl, do you have any suggestions for simplifying tasks and work? I find as soon as the week starts, any plans I may have soon so complicated I never know where I should be starting.  Thank you, Matty for your question.  Interesting you use the words “simplifying tasks and work”, that’s what it’s all about. If we can find a way to simplify the work we do, we become faster at it and it requires a lot less thought—and that’s always a good good thing.  So what can we do to make doing our work easier and more automated?  Let’s begin with email and other messages we receive at work. This is an area that screams out for a process and some rules. Email is coming at us all the time. It never seems to stop. For many of you, you likely get emails through the night as well. If we were to let it pile up it would become a tedious task trying to find the important mails and messages. So, a process here would help you to automate it.  I’ve talked before about setting up an Action this Day folder in your mail for any email that requires some action from you. That could be replying or reading. If you need to take any kind of action, drop it in your action this day folder.  Now the process you follow is at some point in the morning you clear your inbox. And that is clear it, not scan it. Delete emails you don’t need and archive emails you think you may need in the future. Anything you need to act on goes into your action this day folder. Then at some point towards the end of the day, you set aside an hour for clearing your action this day folder.  Now here’s the thing, email is still an important part of our work communication. I know a lot of companies are using internal messaging systems such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, and because of that you want to include any responses to these messages in this time you have set aside. There may be some messages that need responding to more urgently, and you will likely need to deal with these sooner, but for the most part try to push off responding until your dedicated communication time.  If you were to skip your communication time one day, you will find yourself having to double the time you set aside the next day. This is why, it needs to become a rule. No matter what, you will dedicate one hour of your work day for dealing with your communications. If your work involves a lot of email and message interaction, you may need to extend this time, but try it out with one hour first and see how you get on.  Now when it comes to setting rules for communicating here’s something that will help your reputation at work. Set some rules for your response time. Now, it’s important not to be overly ambitious. If you regularly have client meetings that take two or three hours, telling everyone you will reply to your messages within an hour is unrealistic. Here’s my set of communication rules: For email I will respond within twenty-four hours. Now if anyone it trying to engage me to use email as a form of instant messaging I will deliberately slow them down, no matter how important they are. Email should never be used for anything urgent. If your neighbour’s house was on fire you would never email them. You’d call them. There is a hierarchy of urgency. If something’s urgent, make a phone call. If it needs doing today, use instant messaging. Everything else can go by email.  For instant messages, my rule is within four hours and phone calls, I will try to answer immediately, but if I need to get back to someone it will be within an hour.  Whatever rules you apply, tell everyone. You can add your rules as an email signature to reinforce this. Once you’ve set your rules, the first step if for you to begin living them. You’re not likely to be perfect straight away, but just because you missed something, doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Stick with it. You’ll become comfortable with it and as long as you are dealing with your actionable mail each day, you won’t have backlogs building up and that will be one area of your work you now have under control.  Now where else can you apply rules? How about doing focused work in a morning? This is when your brain is at its freshest—after a night’s sleep (even if it wasn’t a good night’s sleep). Take advantage of that and try to block one or two hours a couple of days each week where you will not be available for other people. You will need to be smart about this. Look through your calendar and see where the peak time for your meetings are. If most of your meetings happen in the middle part of your work day, you can make sure your blocked out focus times, are at either side of those peak times.  You know your schedule, so find some blocks of time where you can get some quiet focus time. You do not need to do this every day, although you can try to get there over time.  As an example, I block Monday and Tuesday morning for writing. It blocked out on my calendar and even my wife knows I am busy at those times. Thursdays and Sundays I keep free for meetings and Wednesday is blocked for family commitments—I don’t have weekends off. This is fixed and now it just feels automatic. All I need to know is what day it is. If it’s Monday, I know I’ll be writing. No thinking, no negotiating. It’s Monday. I write.  If you were in sales, you could block 9:00 to 9:30am for calling customers and prospects to set up appointments. If you were to do this every day, that would be two-and-a-half hours a week. If you were to call five people on average each time, that would be twenty-five people. That’s likely to convert into plenty of appointments. And I know from my own experience in sales, appointments lead to sales and sales lead to better bonuses. You’re doing something simple every day that will have an impact on your income. And all you have done is set a rule.  Now, if your calendar doesn’t have a lot of structure, you could just set the daily rule that would call five people each day to set up appointments. When you do this, you get five calls each day to improve your sales calls skills. When you first begin doing this, you may not convert many calls. But over time, you will refine your skills and you will see significant improvement. You can also measure this by calculating your conversion ratio. How many appointments you get from the calls you make. Other areas where you can set rules is with planning sessions. Make it a rule where you cannot finish your work until you have spent ten minutes planning what your must-do tasks for tomorrow will be. Writing these out or saying saying these out loud has been scientifically proven to increase your chances of carrying out the tasks. It’s called “implementation intention”—where you plan out what you will do and when.  You can also use implementation intention for your personal life. Let’s say you’ve neglected to do exercise for a while. You could, as part of your daily planning, say to yourself, “tomorrow I will go for a thirty minute walk immediately after eating lunch”. You can then add that to your calendar, so the time is protected and watch what happens.  Setting standards for yourself is also a way to implement some rules into your life. I was always fascinated when a new coffee shop opened up near where I live. I would watch to see their standards. Usually for the first few weeks or months, you will see the owners wiping down the windows and tables outside every day. The Coffee shops that ultimately failed were the ones where the owners (or employees) stopped doing these little tasks after a few weeks.  If you were lucky enough to be invited to Rolls Royce Motor Cars head office in Goodwood, UK, you could measure the grass outside reception every day and it would be the same length. That’s because Rolls Royce employs a front of house manager, whose job is to measure the length of not only the grass, but also the trees outside over hanging branches. That’s all about ensuring the highest possible standards.  What are your standards?  So there you go, Matty. Simplifying your system is really all about setting yourself some rules and ensuring that each day you live by your own standards. It’s repeating these tasks day in day out that will mean you will have les thinking to do and your work will just run that little smoother.  Than you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

How To Set Some Rules To Make Your Life A Lot Easier

This week’s episode is all about getting on top of your calendar so you remain in control of your most valuable asset.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 274 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 274 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. Of all the productivity tools you have, your calendar is the one tool that will bring you the biggest benefits. It does this by only telling you the truth.  While your task manager and notes are likely to be feature rich and new innovative ways to manipulate your tasks and notes are being launched every week, the humble calendar has remained much the same for hundreds of years. Today, we may be using digital calendars, but the layout and functionality of these digital calendars work the same way as a paper-based calendar.  And your calendar is a true leveller. No matter who you are, where you live, your educational background or job title, you still get the same number of hours as everyone else.  Theoretically, each day gives you a blank canvas to choose how you will paint it, and your calendar acts very much like your sketchbook. It’s a place where you can design your day, experiment and plan.  Your calendar can take care of the basics by reminding you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries. It can also be used to remind you of bill payment dates, concerts you may wish to go to and your kids’ school terms and holidays. But those are the basics. What else can your calendar do for you? Well, that is the topic of this week’s episode.  So, with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Rob. Rob asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk about the calendar being the most important part of a time management system, but I’ve always struggled to organise my calendar well. Do you have any tips or tricks to help me get more out of my calendar?  Hi Rob, thank you for your question.  Your calendar should be the foundation of your whole time management and productivity system. It is only your calendar, yet, of all the potential tools you may use, it is the only one that shows you how much time you have.  You can fill up a task manager with hundreds of tasks and if you date them for the same day, your task manager will assume that on that day you want to complete hundreds of tasks. It’s not going to warn you that you don’t have enough time or there are important meetings to attend. It just shows you what you tell it to show you. It has no way to inform you that you are being over-ambitious about what you want to get done on any given day.  Your notes is where you store information you may want or need later. It does not have any time management functionality within your system.  The only tool you have that will indicate how much time you have is your calendar. It never lies to you. You get twenty-four hours each day and you get to choose where you spend those hours.  And that’s the power and beauty of the calendar. Because it gives you a blank canvas, you can use it to design your day. Which means, if you delegate responsibility for your calendar management to other people, you are giving away responsibility of your most valuable asset. Time.  So, with that said, how do we take control of our calendar and use it to design our day and week?  When I am working with an individual who has no productivity system in place, the first area I encourage them to work on is their calendar. What we aim to do is to get the basics in first.  Now, I recommend that you first do an exercise and create a new calendar with your calendar app. I like to call this my “Perfect Day” or Perfect Week” calendar. It is here where you can create a week that covers everything you want time for. Try to do this on a larger screen than your phone—your computer or tablet—because you want to be able t clearly see the whole week in one view. Now, begin with how much sleep you would you like to get? This is not about how much sleep you are currently getting, rather, ho much sleep you want to get. Remember, this is your “perfect week”, so what would be the “perfect” amount of sleep for you. Why would you start with sleep? Well, ask yourself, how do you feel when you don’t get enough sleep? How effective are you through the day? On day’s when you have not got enough sleep, how productive were you?  If you want to be at your most effective each day, you need the right amount of sleep. That could be six, seven or eight hours. Whatever number of hours you need block your sleep time out on your “perfect week” calendar.  The reason for beginning with your sleep is once you have your sleep schedule in your calendar, you now know how much time you have available for everything else.  Next, what would you like time for in your personal life? Why start with your personal life? Well, this is the area of our lives we often neglect at the expense of our work. Yet, if you want to live an active, balanced life, we need to proactively create that life for ourselves. Nobody else will do it for us.  So, if you want time to go to the gym three time a week, then schedule that on your calendar. This is reminiscent of when I was a teenager and doing track and field. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening was training nights, and I would never let anything get in the way of that. The only way to ensure that happened was to block out those days.  What about your hobbies? How much time would you like to spend on your pastimes and, more importantly, when would you like to do it? Again, schedule out time each week for these activities.  Then there are your family responsibilities. Things like taking your kids to and from school and walking your dog. Our dog, for example, likes an hour’s walk each day. This should be blocked out too.  Only when you have everything you would like time for each week on your calendar on a personal level, do you switch your attention to your work.  For your work calendar, the place to start is with your fixed appointments. I know a lot of companies have weekly team meetings. If these are fixed, get them in your calendar. I would also suggest, if you get a break for lunch, you get that on your calendar too.  What we are looking for is to see where the gaps are once all the fixed work commitments are in your calendar. It is these gaps that will inform you where you have time to do your important, core work—the work you are employed to do.  Let’s imagine one of your core work responsibilities is to produce a sales report for your CEO each week. This report’s deadline is every Friday at 12pm. If your CEO requires the sales figures for Thursday, this leaves you will two options. You will either do it after business hours on a Thursday evening—probably not the best option as you will be preparing the report after you finish work. Or Friday morning.  If you know you need forty-five minutes to collate the data and get it into the correct format, then you would block an hour for this work on a Friday morning. Ideally, you would fix this in your calendar, so there was no risk someone else can come along and “steal” that time away from you.  This exercise is about designing your “perfect” week. A week where you have time for everything you would like to do. It will be unlikely you will be able to immediately start living this perfect week, although some of you may be lucky enough to be able to do that, for most of us, it will become an aspiration.  If when you have finished and you look at the calendar and feel, yes, this is the kind of week that would leave me feeling accomplished and fulfilled, the next step is to begin the process of merging your real calendar with this “perfect week” calendar.  Because you have already set this up as a separate calendar, you can periodically turn it on and off and compare it with your real calendar.  A tip I can share with you here, Rob, is pick one part of your perfect week calendar and focus on bringing your real life into alignment with that. For example, if, on your perfect week, you have your going to bed time at 11pm and wake up time at 6:30am, yet at the moment, you are going to bed after midnight and struggling to get out of bed at 7:00am, this would be a good place to start.  In my experience, readjusting your sleep schedule takes around two weeks. So, you can begin by committing to going to bed at 11pm every night for the next fourteen days.  I have also found you can build a work item into your real week as well. If you have a block of time on your perfect week calendar for focused work each Tuesday and Wednesday morning, try aligning that with your real week. Again, make sure you block it out on your calendar and see how you go.  Much of this will be a trial and error. However, if you work at it, over time you will find you are beginning to adjust things in your life so you have the time do the things you want to do. A lot of the stress associated with work comes from a feeling we don’t have enough time to do all the things other people are demanding of us. It’s not just our work commitments, but commitments to our family, friends and partners. It can also be voluntary commitments we have made in the past that perhaps are not bringing us the sense of accomplishment we thought they would.  It maybe you will need to make some difficult decisions and have awkward conversations about the demands others are making on your time. While these will be uncomfortable in the moment, the sense of release you will get when you do it will be huge and the benefits to you, your mental wellbeing and ultimately your accomplishments in life will make those brief moments of discomfort worth it.  To finish, here are some quick fire tips to help you with your calendar management. Try at all possible to have one master calendar where both your personal and work commitments can be seen together. If you work in a company that restricts access to your work calendar, you can copy your appointments over, although you won’t need to copy over your focus time blocks.  When planning your week, begin with your calendar. That will show you how committed you are before you start deciding what tasks you will do. This way, you will be able to better see where you can add more or less tasks. If you have a day of meetings, you can reduce the number of tasks you do, when you have days with fewer meetings you decide to add more tasks.  Don’t allow yourself feel wedded to your calendar commitments. If you feel tired, sick or just want to have an easy day, move your commitments around if you can. Your calendar is there to serve you, not the other way round. The only thing I would advise against is ignoring your calendar completely. Your calendar is there to guide you, but if you start to ignore it, its usefulness will disappear.  So there you go, Rob. I hope that has helped and given you some motivation to begin using your calendar.  Thank you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s episode is all about getting on top of your calendar so you remain in control of your most valuable asset. You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 274 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 274 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. Of all the productivity tools you have, your calendar is the one tool that will bring you the biggest benefits. It does this by only telling you the truth.  While your task manager and notes are likely to be feature rich and new innovative ways to manipulate your tasks and notes are being launched every week, the humble calendar has remained much the same for hundreds of years. Today, we may be using digital calendars, but the layout and functionality of these digital calendars work the same way as a paper-based calendar.  And your calendar is a true leveller. No matter who you are, where you live, your educational background or job title, you still get the same number of hours as everyone else.  Theoretically, each day gives you a blank canvas to choose how you will paint it, and your calendar acts very much like your sketchbook. It’s a place where you can design your day, experiment and plan.  Your calendar can take care of the basics by reminding you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries. It can also be used to remind you of bill payment dates, concerts you may wish to go to and your kids’ school terms and holidays. But those are the basics. What else can your calendar do for you? Well, that is the topic of this week’s episode.  So, with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Rob. Rob asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk about the calendar being the most important part of a time management system, but I’ve always struggled to organise my calendar well. Do you have any tips or tricks to help me get more out of my calendar?  Hi Rob, thank you for your question.  Your calendar should be the foundation of your whole time management and productivity system. It is only your calendar, yet, of all the potential tools you may use, it is the only one that shows you how much time you have.  You can fill up a task manager with hundreds of tasks and if you date them for the same day, your task manager will assume that on that day you want to complete hundreds of tasks. It’s not going to warn you that you don’t have enough time or there are important meetings to attend. It just shows you what you tell it to show you. It has no way to inform you that you are being over-ambitious about what you want to get done on any given day.  Your notes is where you store information you may want or need later. It does not have any time management functionality within your system.  The only tool you have that will indicate how much time you have is your calendar. It never lies to you. You get twenty-four hours each day and you get to choose where you spend those hours.  And that’s the power and beauty of the calendar. Because it gives you a blank canvas, you can use it to design your day. Which means, if you delegate responsibility for your calendar management to other people, you are giving away responsibility of your most valuable asset. Time.  So, with that said, how do we take control of our calendar and use it to design our day and week?  When I am working with an individual who has no productivity system in place, the first area I encourage them to work on is their calendar. What we aim to do is to get the basics in first.  Now, I recommend that you first do an exercise and create a new calendar with your calendar app. I like to call this my “Perfect Day” or Perfect Week” calendar. It is here where you can create a week that covers everything you want time for. Try to do this on a larger screen than your phone—your computer or tablet—because you want to be able t clearly see the whole week in one view. Now, begin with how much sleep you would you like to get? This is not about how much sleep you are currently getting, rather, ho much sleep you want to get. Remember, this is your “perfect week”, so what would be the “perfect” amount of sleep for you. Why would you start with sleep? Well, ask yourself, how do you feel when you don’t get enough sleep? How effective are you through the day? On day’s when you have not got enough sleep, how productive were you?  If you want to be at your most effective each day, you need the right amount of sleep. That could be six, seven or eight hours. Whatever number of hours you need block your sleep time out on your “perfect week” calendar.  The reason for beginning with your sleep is once you have your sleep schedule in your calendar, you now know how much time you have available for everything else.  Next, what would you like time for in your personal life? Why start with your personal life? Well, this is the area of our lives we often neglect at the expense of our work. Yet, if you want to live an active, balanced life, we need to proactively create that life for ourselves. Nobody else will do it for us.  So, if you want time to go to the gym three time a week, then schedule that on your calendar. This is reminiscent of when I was a teenager and doing track and field. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening was training nights, and I would never let anything get in the way of that. The only way to ensure that happened was to block out those days.  What about your hobbies? How much time would you like to spend on your pastimes and, more importantly, when would you like to do it? Again, schedule out time each week for these activities.  Then there are your family responsibilities. Things like taking your kids to and from school and walking your dog. Our dog, for example, likes an hour’s walk each day. This should be blocked out too.  Only when you have everything you would like time for each week on your calendar on a personal level, do you switch your attention to your work.  For your work calendar, the place to start is with your fixed appointments. I know a lot of companies have weekly team meetings. If these are fixed, get them in your calendar. I would also suggest, if you get a break for lunch, you get that on your calendar too.  What we are looking for is to see where the gaps are once all the fixed work commitments are in your calendar. It is these gaps that will inform you where you have time to do your important, core work—the work you are employed to do.  Let’s imagine one of your core work responsibilities is to produce a sales report for your CEO each week. This report’s deadline is every Friday at 12pm. If your CEO requires the sales figures for Thursday, this leaves you will two options. You will either do it after business hours on a Thursday evening—probably not the best option as you will be preparing the report after you finish work. Or Friday morning.  If you know you need forty-five minutes to collate the data and get it into the correct format, then you would block an hour for this work on a Friday morning. Ideally, you would fix this in your calendar, so there was no risk someone else can come along and “steal” that time away from you.  This exercise is about designing your “perfect” week. A week where you have time for everything you would like to do. It will be unlikely you will be able to immediately start living this perfect week, although some of you may be lucky enough to be able to do that, for most of us, it will become an aspiration.  If when you have finished and you look at the calendar and feel, yes, this is the kind of week that would leave me feeling accomplished and fulfilled, the next step is to begin the process of merging your real calendar with this “perfect week” calendar.  Because you have already set this up as a separate calendar, you can periodically turn it on and off and compare it with your real calendar.  A tip I can share with you here, Rob, is pick one part of your perfect week calendar and focus on bringing your real life into alignment with that. For example, if, on your perfect week, you have your going to bed time at 11pm and wake up time at 6:30am, yet at the moment, you are going to bed after midnight and struggling to get out of bed at 7:00am, this would be a good place to start.  In my experience, readjusting your sleep schedule takes around two weeks. So, you can begin by committing to going to bed at 11pm every night for the next fourteen days.  I have also found you can build a work item into your real week as well. If you have a block of time on your perfect week calendar for focused work each Tuesday and Wednesday morning, try aligning that with your real week. Again, make sure you block it out on your calendar and see how you go.  Much of this will be a trial and error. However, if you work at it, over time you will find you are beginning to adjust things in your life so you have the time do the things you want to do. A lot of the stress associated with work comes from a feeling we don’t have enough time to do all the things other people are demanding of us. It’s not just our work commitments, but commitments to our family, friends and partners. It can also be voluntary commitments we have made in the past that perhaps are not bringing us the sense of accomplishment we thought they would.  It maybe you will need to make some difficult decisions and have awkward conversations about the demands others are making on your time. While these will be uncomfortable in the moment, the sense of release you will get when you do it will be huge and the benefits to you, your mental wellbeing and ultimately your accomplishments in life will make those brief moments of discomfort worth it.  To finish, here are some quick fire tips to help you with your calendar management. Try at all possible to have one master calendar where both your personal and work commitments can be seen together. If you work in a company that restricts access to your work calendar, you can copy your appointments over, although you won’t need to copy over your focus time blocks.  When planning your week, begin with your calendar. That will show you how committed you are before you start deciding what tasks you will do. This way, you will be able to better see where you can add more or less tasks. If you have a day of meetings, you can reduce the number of tasks you do, when you have days with fewer meetings you decide to add more tasks.  Don’t allow yourself feel wedded to your calendar commitments. If you feel tired, sick or just want to have an easy day, move your commitments around if you can. Your calendar is there to serve you, not the other way round. The only thing I would advise against is ignoring your calendar completely. Your calendar is there to guide you, but if you start to ignore it, its usefulness will disappear.  So there you go, Rob. I hope that has helped and given you some motivation to begin using your calendar.  Thank you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Calendar.

This week’s question is all about managing your communications and ensuring you have enough time to deal with it every day.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 273 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 273 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, I talked about how by turning everything into a project was a sure fire way to become overwhelmed and overstretched. Instead, I suggested you look for the processes for doing your work.  If you write articles, create marketing campaigns, deal with clients on a frequent basis, then these are not projects. They are just a part of a process for doing your work.  However, there are some parts of our work that are difficult to develop processes for and one of those is handling all the communications you get each day.  Prior to 2000—before the current digital age, most communications largely came from mail, telephone or fax. That meant things were relatively easy to manage—there were only three channels of communication and each one gave us a logical timeline for a response. A letter could be responded to within a week or two, a telephone call was instant—if we were near a phone—and a fax could be sat on for a couple of days. There was not sense we had to respond immediately. Today, thing are quite different. Almost all the messages we receive today could be responded to immediately.  I remember reading the book: The Man With The Golden Typewriter, a book of letters written by Ian Fleming, and awed by the number of letters beginning with the words: “Please accept my apologies for the delay in my reply. I have just returned from an eight week sabbatical in Jamaica”.  That’s two months to reply and nobody would have been angry. It was just the way life was back then. Not necessarily slower, just there were conventions in place and acceptable reasons for not responding in a timely manner.  Back to today, how do we manage our communications so they do not become overwhelming and out of control. Well, before we get to that answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks: Hi Carl, I was hoping you have some advice for organising all the messages and emails I get each day. My company uses Microsoft Teams and it’s always alerting me to new messages. And Emails are a joke. It takes me all afternoon just to stay on top of these. Do you have any ideas for handling these? Hi Annie, thank you for sending in your question.  It’s a timely question too as I covered communications last week in my productivity workshop and there were a lot of questions about getting on top of these.  Let’s deal with email first as this is the easiest to manage. With email we can create a simple process that if followed each day, will get you on top of it and keep you on top of it.  There are two parts to managing email: processing and doing. The key is not to mix the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as you can. This means when you open your inbox, the goal is to get to zero. This means you do not want to be stopping to reply to those emails you think will take two minutes or less (they rarely take two minutes—more like five or six minutes)  Any actionable email get sent to an Action This Day folder and everything else is either deleted or archived. Now that’s a quick summary, but the essence is get that inbox cleared.  The second part of the email management process is to “do email”. This means as late in the day as you feel comfortable with, you go into your actionable email and begin with the oldest one and work your way through the list. Now, you may not be able to clear them all each day, but as long as you begin with the oldest one, you will not have emails hanging around.  The key to this method or process is to decide how much time you need on average to clear your action this day folder.  To give you a benchmark, I need around forty to forty-five minutes each day to stay on top of my actionable email. What I do is schedule an hour each day for dealing with my communications. I have this scheduled and blocked off in my calendar for between 4:30 and 5:30pm each day.  If you want to learn more about this process, I have a free download available on my website under the downloads section where you can get the workflow in its entirety. If you want to go deeper with this, I also have a comprehensive course called “Email Mastery” which will show you how to set everything up and turn you into a master of email.  The key this is consistency. If you do this sporadically, it will not work.  The way I look at it is if I skip a day, that means I now need two hours the next day to get on top of email. I don’t have two hours spare in the middle of the week to deal with email—there’s a lot more important things to do.  So, that one hour a day is non-negotiable. It gets done.  Last week in my Productivity workshop, one of the participants asked me how to handle email when it takes more than two hours just to reply to a single email? Here’s a unique problem—most email does not take more than two hours to respond. However, if you do get an email that requires two hours or more work, that becomes a task in your task manager.  The question is: where will you find the two hours to work on that email response? If you leave an email like that in your Action This Day folder, it will list there for a long time and no work will get done on it. It needs pulling out and putting into your task manager and you can then decide when you will work on it.  Now, what about all those messages?  Here’s the thing about messages. You don’t have to respond immediately. Let me repeat that: You do not need to respond immediately.  Now let that sink in for a minute.  Let’s look at this logically, if you were working on something important that required all your concentration, why would you allow a message to interrupt your chain of thought?  A doctor performing open heart surgery is not going to stop in the middle of the operation to read and respond to a text message. A pilot in the process of taking off or landing their plane is not going to look at her messages. And a lawyer defending you in court is not going to allow themselves to be distracted by messages coming in. How would you feel if they were always pausing their arguments to read and reply to their messages? I’m sure you’d be wanting to fire your lawyer.  So why do you allow it to happen to you?  To me, this is about professional standards. But then I get annoyed when I stand in line at the bank for ten minutes only to get to the counter and the bank clerk answers his phone while I am talking to him. Ooh that really annoys me. The most annoying thing is that phone call likely came from his boss. Why is his boss more important than a customer?  For the less urgent messages, you can deal with these as part of your communication hour, however, if they are urgent don’t feel obligated to respond immediately. Finish what you are doing before replying.  There’s a reason for this. You want to be slowing down the response time. You see, if you set an expectation with your boss, clients or customers and colleagues that you respond immediately, then you’ve just caused yourself a lot of problems later down the line.  The goal is to slow things down. A good tip here is to add your response times to your email signature. For example: Email: 24 hours Messages: within 6 hours Telephone call: within 2 hours.  This way you are telling people that you know the importance of your work. And constantly being distracted by messages is going to destroy your effectiveness at doing the work you are employed to do.  Look at it this way, nobody gets promoted because they answer their messages immediately. They get promoted for the quality of their work. People remember you for the work you produce. Always remember that.  Now, I understand this can be a bit scary when you first begin to do it—particularly if you have a boss that expects instant responses—but you can do this gradually. Perhaps for one week, leave each message for fifteen minutes before responding. Then the following week, extend that to thirty minutes.  Keep doing that until you get someone complaining. This way you will find the balance.  You phone and computer have a do not disturb function. You can turn this on when you need to focus. There’s a reason why so many productivity and time management specialists harp on about this. It works. And you do not need to turn this on all day. You turn it on when you need some distraction free time to do your work—the work you are employed to do.  I find, I can respond to instant messages in between sessions of work. As I am writing this script, I will likely have received four or five emails and a few messages. I don’t know exactly because I haven’t looked.  However, it takes me around ninety minutes to write this script, so nobody will be waiting long for my response. When I finish the script, I will stand up and use my phone to check messages and email. I can do that while walking around and then make a decision about which ones I will respond to.  Finally, reduce your communication channels. If you have every social media messaging service, Teams and Slack as well as several email accounts, is it any wonder you are inundated with messages? Reduce these channels. The great thing about reducing your communications channels is you reduce the number of time wasters. You force people to communicate with you on your terms. For instance, my wife and mother know the best way to get in touch with me is through iMessage. I only give that out to family and very close friends.  Everyone else I advise to contact me though email because I have a process for handling email and it means I can work on my timeline.  There have been occasions where I was asked to use WhatsApp or Telegram for a particular event I was speaking at. I will install the app for the duration of the event, and as soon as it’s over, I delete the app.  If someone really wants to get in touch with you, they will. They will find a way.  So there you go, Annie. 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. 

This week’s question is all about managing your communications and ensuring you have enough time to deal with it every day.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 273 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 273 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, I talked about how by turning everything into a project was a sure fire way to become overwhelmed and overstretched. Instead, I suggested you look for the processes for doing your work.  If you write articles, create marketing campaigns, deal with clients on a frequent basis, then these are not projects. They are just a part of a process for doing your work.  However, there are some parts of our work that are difficult to develop processes for and one of those is handling all the communications you get each day.  Prior to 2000—before the current digital age, most communications largely came from mail, telephone or fax. That meant things were relatively easy to manage—there were only three channels of communication and each one gave us a logical timeline for a response. A letter could be responded to within a week or two, a telephone call was instant—if we were near a phone—and a fax could be sat on for a couple of days. There was not sense we had to respond immediately. Today, thing are quite different. Almost all the messages we receive today could be responded to immediately.  I remember reading the book: The Man With The Golden Typewriter, a book of letters written by Ian Fleming, and awed by the number of letters beginning with the words: “Please accept my apologies for the delay in my reply. I have just returned from an eight week sabbatical in Jamaica”.  That’s two months to reply and nobody would have been angry. It was just the way life was back then. Not necessarily slower, just there were conventions in place and acceptable reasons for not responding in a timely manner.  Back to today, how do we manage our communications so they do not become overwhelming and out of control. Well, before we get to that answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks: Hi Carl, I was hoping you have some advice for organising all the messages and emails I get each day. My company uses Microsoft Teams and it’s always alerting me to new messages. And Emails are a joke. It takes me all afternoon just to stay on top of these. Do you have any ideas for handling these? Hi Annie, thank you for sending in your question.  It’s a timely question too as I covered communications last week in my productivity workshop and there were a lot of questions about getting on top of these.  Let’s deal with email first as this is the easiest to manage. With email we can create a simple process that if followed each day, will get you on top of it and keep you on top of it.  There are two parts to managing email: processing and doing. The key is not to mix the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as you can. This means when you open your inbox, the goal is to get to zero. This means you do not want to be stopping to reply to those emails you think will take two minutes or less (they rarely take two minutes—more like five or six minutes)  Any actionable email get sent to an Action This Day folder and everything else is either deleted or archived. Now that’s a quick summary, but the essence is get that inbox cleared.  The second part of the email management process is to “do email”. This means as late in the day as you feel comfortable with, you go into your actionable email and begin with the oldest one and work your way through the list. Now, you may not be able to clear them all each day, but as long as you begin with the oldest one, you will not have emails hanging around.  The key to this method or process is to decide how much time you need on average to clear your action this day folder.  To give you a benchmark, I need around forty to forty-five minutes each day to stay on top of my actionable email. What I do is schedule an hour each day for dealing with my communications. I have this scheduled and blocked off in my calendar for between 4:30 and 5:30pm each day.  If you want to learn more about this process, I have a free download available on my website under the downloads section where you can get the workflow in its entirety. If you want to go deeper with this, I also have a comprehensive course called “Email Mastery” which will show you how to set everything up and turn you into a master of email.  The key this is consistency. If you do this sporadically, it will not work.  The way I look at it is if I skip a day, that means I now need two hours the next day to get on top of email. I don’t have two hours spare in the middle of the week to deal with email—there’s a lot more important things to do.  So, that one hour a day is non-negotiable. It gets done.  Last week in my Productivity workshop, one of the participants asked me how to handle email when it takes more than two hours just to reply to a single email? Here’s a unique problem—most email does not take more than two hours to respond. However, if you do get an email that requires two hours or more work, that becomes a task in your task manager.  The question is: where will you find the two hours to work on that email response? If you leave an email like that in your Action This Day folder, it will list there for a long time and no work will get done on it. It needs pulling out and putting into your task manager and you can then decide when you will work on it.  Now, what about all those messages?  Here’s the thing about messages. You don’t have to respond immediately. Let me repeat that: You do not need to respond immediately.  Now let that sink in for a minute.  Let’s look at this logically, if you were working on something important that required all your concentration, why would you allow a message to interrupt your chain of thought?  A doctor performing open heart surgery is not going to stop in the middle of the operation to read and respond to a text message. A pilot in the process of taking off or landing their plane is not going to look at her messages. And a lawyer defending you in court is not going to allow themselves to be distracted by messages coming in. How would you feel if they were always pausing their arguments to read and reply to their messages? I’m sure you’d be wanting to fire your lawyer.  So why do you allow it to happen to you?  To me, this is about professional standards. But then I get annoyed when I stand in line at the bank for ten minutes only to get to the counter and the bank clerk answers his phone while I am talking to him. Ooh that really annoys me. The most annoying thing is that phone call likely came from his boss. Why is his boss more important than a customer?  For the less urgent messages, you can deal with these as part of your communication hour, however, if they are urgent don’t feel obligated to respond immediately. Finish what you are doing before replying.  There’s a reason for this. You want to be slowing down the response time. You see, if you set an expectation with your boss, clients or customers and colleagues that you respond immediately, then you’ve just caused yourself a lot of problems later down the line.  The goal is to slow things down. A good tip here is to add your response times to your email signature. For example: Email: 24 hours Messages: within 6 hours Telephone call: within 2 hours.  This way you are telling people that you know the importance of your work. And constantly being distracted by messages is going to destroy your effectiveness at doing the work you are employed to do.  Look at it this way, nobody gets promoted because they answer their messages immediately. They get promoted for the quality of their work. People remember you for the work you produce. Always remember that.  Now, I understand this can be a bit scary when you first begin to do it—particularly if you have a boss that expects instant responses—but you can do this gradually. Perhaps for one week, leave each message for fifteen minutes before responding. Then the following week, extend that to thirty minutes.  Keep doing that until you get someone complaining. This way you will find the balance.  You phone and computer have a do not disturb function. You can turn this on when you need to focus. There’s a reason why so many productivity and time management specialists harp on about this. It works. And you do not need to turn this on all day. You turn it on when you need some distraction free time to do your work—the work you are employed to do.  I find, I can respond to instant messages in between sessions of work. As I am writing this script, I will likely have received four or five emails and a few messages. I don’t know exactly because I haven’t looked.  However, it takes me around ninety minutes to write this script, so nobody will be waiting long for my response. When I finish the script, I will stand up and use my phone to check messages and email. I can do that while walking around and then make a decision about which ones I will respond to.  Finally, reduce your communication channels. If you have every social media messaging service, Teams and Slack as well as several email accounts, is it any wonder you are inundated with messages? Reduce these channels. The great thing about reducing your communications channels is you reduce the number of time wasters. You force people to communicate with you on your terms. For instance, my wife and mother know the best way to get in touch with me is through iMessage. I only give that out to family and very close friends.  Everyone else I advise to contact me though email because I have a process for handling email and it means I can work on my timeline.  There have been occasions where I was asked to use WhatsApp or Telegram for a particular event I was speaking at. I will install the app for the duration of the event, and as soon as it’s over, I delete the app.  If someone really wants to get in touch with you, they will. They will find a way.  So there you go, Annie. 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.

Managing Email and All The Other Forms of Communication.

This week we’re exploring the need for projects and why the way a project has been defined is causing most of your task management problems.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 272 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 272 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 many projects do you have? 50? 75? More than a hundred? Well, if you are defining a project as “anything you want to do that requires more than one action step”, as many people do, you are going to have a lot of projects. And all those projects need looking at to decide what needs to happen next.  When I was researching the reasons why so many people resist doing a weekly planning session, one thing I kept coming up against was the large number of “projects” people told me they had to review, which made doing a weekly review or planning session too long.  I began to realise that if our resistance was down to the sheer number of projects we had to review each week, that was something fixable because we have control over the number of projects we have. More interestingly, we also have control over how we define what a project is.  If we change the way we define a project to something that fits better with the work we do, we can reduce the number of projects we have and that in turn will reduce the time it takes to complete a planning session.  So, before we dive a little deeper into this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Christian. Christian asks: Hi Carl, I’ve always struggled with managing my projects. When I look at my task Manager, I have over 80 projects. These take a very long time to go through each week and I hate doing it. (Which is why I don’t do a weekly planning session) My question is; is it normal to have so many projects? Hi Christian, thank you for your question. I’ve found those who have read and tried to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done, do tend to have a lot of projects. This is a consequence of how David Allen defines a project. That being anything that requires two or more steps.  This means, in theory, making an appointment to see your dentist, take your car in for a service or arranging your annual medical check up will all be projects. Yet, if you stop and think about this, if you dedicated thirty minutes on a given day, you could easily make all these arrangements. They certainly don’t need to be projects.  Over my working life, I’ve worked in a number of different industries. From hotel management, to car sales, law and teaching. When I look back over these jobs, I cannot remember treating everything as a project. I came into work, and got on with the work.  For instance, when I was working in a law office, we had around 150 cases ongoing at any one time. We never treated these cases as projects. They were our work. And our work had a process. When a new case came in, we needed to collect information and there was a checklist on the inside of the case file that we checked off as the information came in. The first step, once the new case was entered into the firms computer system was to request the information we needed.  Each day, we were receiving information for many of these cases and we simply printed off the file or, if it came in my regular mail, check the information, put the documents in the case file and checked off the information that had come on the checklist.  It was a part of my core work to ensure that the cases due to be completed that month, were monitored and any reasons why a case might not complete on time, were communicated to the client. To manage this, we had a spreadsheet, which either myself or my colleague updated every Friday afternoon and sent it to our client.  I remember when I worked for a famous marketing company here in Korea, the copy writers and designers never considered individual campaigns as a project. It was just a part of their daily work. They would come into work, make coffee and then get on with the work they were currently working on. It was almost like a conveyor belt. Once the current piece of work was completed, it was handed on to the next person in the chain and they did their bit.  It seems to me, that perhaps what we are doing is confusing our core work with project work.  So, what is a project? For me a project is something unique that has a clearly defined deadline that is going to take a reasonably long time to complete. For example, moving house, would be a project. There are a lot of interconnected things here. Putting your current house on the market, finding a new home and arranging for furniture to be moved.  Moving house is not going to to happen over a weekend and will only happen if you have a plan to make it happen.  Theoretically, producing this podcast would be a project. There are multiple steps from deciding which question to answer, to writing the script, organising the Mystery Podcast voice to record the question and recording and editing the audio track. But it’s not a project. It just a part of my core work. I produce a podcast every week so I have a process for doing it. I also consider producing this podcast as part of my core work, which means I have a process for doing it.  Each week, I write the script on Tuesday, I send the question to the Mystery Podcast Voice on Thursday and record the podcast on Friday during my audio visual time block on a Friday morning.  I don’t need project folders, I don’t have anything to review. It’s just a part of my work that I do every week. The only thing I have is a list in my notes app of all the questions I have collected and on a Tuesday morning I will pick a question to answer.  So, Christian, what I would suggest is first look at the work you do and identify your core work—the work you are employed to do. What are you responsible for? What results does the company you work for expect of you? That will give you a clear set of activities to perform each week and month. Once you know what these are, you can distribute those activities throughout the week to ensure they get done.  For example, if I take working for the law firm as an example. Each morning we would receive around five to ten new cases. The first job with any new case was to get the case into the firm’s system. So, I would have a daily recurring task on my task list that says “Input new cases into the case management system”.  Every Friday, I would have a task that says: “Update case spreadsheet and send to client”. That task may mean I need two hours to collect the information, which likely means I need to block two hours out on my calendar every Friday to do the work.  If I were to treat each new case as a project, it would be overwhelming trying to keep everything up to date. But my core work was not to micromanage individual cases, it was to ensure that all cases were up to date and in the system and to report updates to the client each week. That’s not a project, that’s a process.  For many of you listening, your company will have some form of work management system. That could be a CRM system if you work in a sales related job, or it could be a central file folder where the work you do on a daily basis can be shared with your colleagues—as there was for the designers and copywriters in the marketing company.  One of my clients is a screenwriter and while he will have two to four scripts to work on at any one time, and theoretically each script could be considered a project, each day, his focus is on writing. When he does his weekly planning, he will identify the most important scripts and decide which ones to work on the following week. This will be determined by script deadlines. Then, on Monday morning, he will open his script writing software, sit down and write. His core work is to write scripts, deal with any re-writes the producer requests and meet his deadlines. The only way that will happen is if, when he begins his day he focuses his attention on writing scripts.  I’ve never heard my client talk about projects. He knows his core work. He knows what his responsibilities as a script writer are and he’s developed a process for getting his work done. All he needs to do is follow that process.  Another way to look at this would be if Toyota decided to create a new car. If, to build this new car, they have to build a factory then building a factory is a project. It’s a one off unique task with a deadline. Making the cars, that’s a process. If Toyota treated each new car as a project, it would be the most inefficient way to make a car. Instead, they follow a process. That way they can monitor productivity, costs and resources.  Last week, I answered a question about analogue v digital systems. I was lucky, I began my working life when the world of work was transitioning from a paper based one to a digital one. One of the advantages of the paper-based world was we could put the work we need to do into a physical in-tray. We would then begin at the top and work our way through the in-tray. As we completed work, we move it to an out-tray. At the end of the day we would then transfer what was in our out-tray to the filing cabinet and close out our day.  Being able to see our work in a physical form meant we could instantly see how much work we had to do. The digital world hides our work, we have emails with documents attached to them hidden inside Outlook. Presentations, spreadsheets and reports are hidden inside folders deep within our computers. We cannot see the work we need to do.  However, if you build processes for doing you work rather than creating projects, you are going to find life a lot easier. Following processes ensure you get your important work done. The work you are responsible for. Hiding everything inside self-contained projects not only risks things being missed, it also wastes time when have to go looking for things you think you may have missed.  So, Christian, rather than turning every multi-step task into a project, look for the processes. And if there are no processes for doing your work, create some. It’s how surgeons and pilots do their work every day. They follow processes. It’s how Formula 1 racing teams can move a whole team and two cars from one country to another week after week. It’s not projects, it’s about following a tried and tested process.  I hope that helps, Christian. Thank you for your question. And thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week we’re exploring the need for projects and why the way a project has been defined is causing most of your task management problems.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 272 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 272 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 many projects do you have? 50? 75? More than a hundred? Well, if you are defining a project as “anything you want to do that requires more than one action step”, as many people do, you are going to have a lot of projects. And all those projects need looking at to decide what needs to happen next.  When I was researching the reasons why so many people resist doing a weekly planning session, one thing I kept coming up against was the large number of “projects” people told me they had to review, which made doing a weekly review or planning session too long.  I began to realise that if our resistance was down to the sheer number of projects we had to review each week, that was something fixable because we have control over the number of projects we have. More interestingly, we also have control over how we define what a project is.  If we change the way we define a project to something that fits better with the work we do, we can reduce the number of projects we have and that in turn will reduce the time it takes to complete a planning session.  So, before we dive a little deeper into this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Christian. Christian asks: Hi Carl, I’ve always struggled with managing my projects. When I look at my task Manager, I have over 80 projects. These take a very long time to go through each week and I hate doing it. (Which is why I don’t do a weekly planning session) My question is; is it normal to have so many projects? Hi Christian, thank you for your question. I’ve found those who have read and tried to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done, do tend to have a lot of projects. This is a consequence of how David Allen defines a project. That being anything that requires two or more steps.  This means, in theory, making an appointment to see your dentist, take your car in for a service or arranging your annual medical check up will all be projects. Yet, if you stop and think about this, if you dedicated thirty minutes on a given day, you could easily make all these arrangements. They certainly don’t need to be projects.  Over my working life, I’ve worked in a number of different industries. From hotel management, to car sales, law and teaching. When I look back over these jobs, I cannot remember treating everything as a project. I came into work, and got on with the work.  For instance, when I was working in a law office, we had around 150 cases ongoing at any one time. We never treated these cases as projects. They were our work. And our work had a process. When a new case came in, we needed to collect information and there was a checklist on the inside of the case file that we checked off as the information came in. The first step, once the new case was entered into the firms computer system was to request the information we needed.  Each day, we were receiving information for many of these cases and we simply printed off the file or, if it came in my regular mail, check the information, put the documents in the case file and checked off the information that had come on the checklist.  It was a part of my core work to ensure that the cases due to be completed that month, were monitored and any reasons why a case might not complete on time, were communicated to the client. To manage this, we had a spreadsheet, which either myself or my colleague updated every Friday afternoon and sent it to our client.  I remember when I worked for a famous marketing company here in Korea, the copy writers and designers never considered individual campaigns as a project. It was just a part of their daily work. They would come into work, make coffee and then get on with the work they were currently working on. It was almost like a conveyor belt. Once the current piece of work was completed, it was handed on to the next person in the chain and they did their bit.  It seems to me, that perhaps what we are doing is confusing our core work with project work.  So, what is a project? For me a project is something unique that has a clearly defined deadline that is going to take a reasonably long time to complete. For example, moving house, would be a project. There are a lot of interconnected things here. Putting your current house on the market, finding a new home and arranging for furniture to be moved.  Moving house is not going to to happen over a weekend and will only happen if you have a plan to make it happen.  Theoretically, producing this podcast would be a project. There are multiple steps from deciding which question to answer, to writing the script, organising the Mystery Podcast voice to record the question and recording and editing the audio track. But it’s not a project. It just a part of my core work. I produce a podcast every week so I have a process for doing it. I also consider producing this podcast as part of my core work, which means I have a process for doing it.  Each week, I write the script on Tuesday, I send the question to the Mystery Podcast Voice on Thursday and record the podcast on Friday during my audio visual time block on a Friday morning.  I don’t need project folders, I don’t have anything to review. It’s just a part of my work that I do every week. The only thing I have is a list in my notes app of all the questions I have collected and on a Tuesday morning I will pick a question to answer.  So, Christian, what I would suggest is first look at the work you do and identify your core work—the work you are employed to do. What are you responsible for? What results does the company you work for expect of you? That will give you a clear set of activities to perform each week and month. Once you know what these are, you can distribute those activities throughout the week to ensure they get done.  For example, if I take working for the law firm as an example. Each morning we would receive around five to ten new cases. The first job with any new case was to get the case into the firm’s system. So, I would have a daily recurring task on my task list that says “Input new cases into the case management system”.  Every Friday, I would have a task that says: “Update case spreadsheet and send to client”. That task may mean I need two hours to collect the information, which likely means I need to block two hours out on my calendar every Friday to do the work.  If I were to treat each new case as a project, it would be overwhelming trying to keep everything up to date. But my core work was not to micromanage individual cases, it was to ensure that all cases were up to date and in the system and to report updates to the client each week. That’s not a project, that’s a process.  For many of you listening, your company will have some form of work management system. That could be a CRM system if you work in a sales related job, or it could be a central file folder where the work you do on a daily basis can be shared with your colleagues—as there was for the designers and copywriters in the marketing company.  One of my clients is a screenwriter and while he will have two to four scripts to work on at any one time, and theoretically each script could be considered a project, each day, his focus is on writing. When he does his weekly planning, he will identify the most important scripts and decide which ones to work on the following week. This will be determined by script deadlines. Then, on Monday morning, he will open his script writing software, sit down and write. His core work is to write scripts, deal with any re-writes the producer requests and meet his deadlines. The only way that will happen is if, when he begins his day he focuses his attention on writing scripts.  I’ve never heard my client talk about projects. He knows his core work. He knows what his responsibilities as a script writer are and he’s developed a process for getting his work done. All he needs to do is follow that process.  Another way to look at this would be if Toyota decided to create a new car. If, to build this new car, they have to build a factory then building a factory is a project. It’s a one off unique task with a deadline. Making the cars, that’s a process. If Toyota treated each new car as a project, it would be the most inefficient way to make a car. Instead, they follow a process. That way they can monitor productivity, costs and resources.  Last week, I answered a question about analogue v digital systems. I was lucky, I began my working life when the world of work was transitioning from a paper based one to a digital one. One of the advantages of the paper-based world was we could put the work we need to do into a physical in-tray. We would then begin at the top and work our way through the in-tray. As we completed work, we move it to an out-tray. At the end of the day we would then transfer what was in our out-tray to the filing cabinet and close out our day.  Being able to see our work in a physical form meant we could instantly see how much work we had to do. The digital world hides our work, we have emails with documents attached to them hidden inside Outlook. Presentations, spreadsheets and reports are hidden inside folders deep within our computers. We cannot see the work we need to do.  However, if you build processes for doing you work rather than creating projects, you are going to find life a lot easier. Following processes ensure you get your important work done. The work you are responsible for. Hiding everything inside self-contained projects not only risks things being missed, it also wastes time when have to go looking for things you think you may have missed.  So, Christian, rather than turning every multi-step task into a project, look for the processes. And if there are no processes for doing your work, create some. It’s how surgeons and pilots do their work every day. They follow processes. It’s how Formula 1 racing teams can move a whole team and two cars from one country to another week after week. It’s not projects, it’s about following a tried and tested process.  I hope that helps, Christian. Thank you for your question. And thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Do You Really Need All Those Projects?

Are the old ways still the best ways? That’s what I explore in this week’s podcast.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 271 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 271 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. Have you ever wondered how people managed their work before we had computers on every desk and a smartphone in every pocket? I mean, how was it possible to manage our email when the only place we could read and respond to email was at our desks in our place of work? How did we know when we had a meeting when the only way to add a meeting to our calendar was to pull out our diaries and handwrite the meeting into it? Well, it may come as a surprise to many of you, but people did manage. In fact, I would go as far as to say people managed a lot better than they do today. Not using a digital system meant that it was far easier to compartmentalise our work. For instance, responding to letters—the things we used to communicate before email—meant we needed to be in the office. If we were not in the office, we could not respond to the letter.  This meant if an important, so called urgent, letter arrived on a Saturday morning, it would not be read until Monday morning and a response would not be going out until, at the earliest, Monday evening. So, in theory, if an urgent letter was sent on Friday afternoon, you would not be getting your reply until Tuesday morning, at the earliest. And, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.  Yet, things got done. Deadlines were met and there was just as much stress around as there is today.  I was lucky, I began my working life just as the workplace was transitioning to the digital systems we use today. This meant I had the opportunity to see both sides. The analogue, the midway (where it was half analogue, half digital) and digital.  What I’ve learned is that there are advantages in both types of system and when you combine the best of the analogue systems with the best of the digital systems you can build yourself a robust, reliable time management and productivity system.  So, before we continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from David. Hi Carl, When I was working in the mid-1990s, we did not have computers or smartphones but we did have a system for managing our appointments and tasks. Do you think technology today has helped us or made managing our time harder?  Hi David, thank you for your question. You are right in observing that people managed just fine before computers, smartphones and iPads came onto the scene. In fact, while people still became overwhelmed, there was a better sense of time than there is today. Because we had to manually write out the things we had to do, rather than enter them into an app, we were much more conscious about what we were committing ourselves to.  Today, your task manager will take thousands, if not millions of tasks, and while that may sound fantastic, it does create a problem. The problem being: when will do do all these tasks?  The reality is, we cannot and never will be able to do everything. There is just too much we would like to do and a limited amount of time to do it in. When I was teaching English, I enjoyed the session where we looked at the words time and money. The two nouns share the exact same verbs. For instance, spend time on something, spend money on something. Or we can save money or save time.  But not only do these two words share the same verbs, they can also be thought of as the same thing. If we choose to spend money on a new iPad, that means we have less money to spend on other things. So, if you have $3,000 in your bank account and you choose to spend $1,000 on an iPad Pro with a keyboard and Apple Pencil, then you are going to have $2,000 left to spend on other things.  Let’s say your rent to mortgage is $1,000 and household expenses come to $800.00, then you only have $200 to spend on other things.  With time, we all get 166 hours a week. We are usually committed to spending 40 hours at work, perhaps we need to spend 2 hours a day commuting to and from work (that’s ten hours) and there’s sleeping, eating and keeping ourselves clean.  If you decide to pay less rent or mortgage pretty soon you will have a debt that needs to be paid and if you don’t pay it, you’ll lose your home. If you choose to skip your sleep for a few days, you’ll make yourself sick and won’t be able to do your work and you’ll likely lose your job.  Just like with bank account, there is a finite amount you can use and you get to choose how you spend your money or time on your commitments Technology has not changed that. Just because we can manage our to-do list digitally, doesn’t mean we automatically become more productive. And just because we can schedule repeating events on our calendar, doesn’t mean we have more time.  Most companies and individuals go bankrupt because they have over-committed themselves with debt. Likewise, you will burn yourself out if you over-commit yourself with time.  Now, one of the downsides of the digital systems is, the ease with which we can commit ourselves. We can throw an unlimited amount of tasks into our task managers without necessarily seeing what we have committed ourselves to. The more you throw in there, the less time you have for other things.  Conversely, with an analogue system—one written out on paper, you can see exactly what you are committing yourself to. Either you are writing your tasks out on a piece of paper or you are adding them into the notes section of a diary.  The act of writing them out, triggers your brain to resist adding too much. You become very aware of what you are committing to and how little time you have.  Recently, I was talking with a tech loving friend of mine who is always trying out the latest productivity apps—he understands it’s a bad habit of his. However, he did confess to me recently that whenever he feels overwhelmed he pulls out an old fashioned notebook and writes out all the things that he thinks he needs to do.  Once he’s done this “brain dump”, he will cross out all the tasks he either doesn’t want to do or knows deep down he’s never going to get round to doing.  This act of pruning his list leaves him feeling better and a lot less overwhelmed.  And that is where good old fashioned pen and paper still holds an advantage over the digital tools we now have access to. The awareness of what you are committing yourself to is far greater than when you use digital tools.  I love my Apple Calendar, it allows me to add recurring events, subscribe to my rugby team’s calendar so I can see when they are playing and I can share a calendar with my wife so I know when our family commitments are. The downsides to modern digital calendars is you can allow other people to schedule events for you. For me, that’s not good. That’s like giving people access to your bank account and letting them withdraw money without asking you. You’re never likely to do that are you? So why are we allowing people to do that with our time.  With a digital calendar, I would recommend you make sure you have, at the very least, the option to “accept”, “decline” or “maybe” a meeting request. I would also suggest if you need time to work on a piece of work, to block that time out. You do not need to worry, the other person cannot see what you have blocked out. All they see is that you are unavailable at that time. This will safeguard you against time thieves filling up your calendar with their priorities.  One area where I feel digital tools are better than analogue tools is the notes app. Traditionally the issue people had keeping all their notes in a notebook is finding their notes later. There was also the issue of scribbling down an idea on a scrap of paper only to lose that scrap paper.  With digital notes, you don’t lose them and finding notes you wrote years ago is as simple as doing a keyword or date search within your notes app.  There is a danger if you in the habit of switching your digital notes app every few months that you will lose something. But if you stick with one notes app, over the years you are going to build, as Tiago Forte called it a “second Brain”.  I’ve been using Evernote for nearly 13 years and when I do a keyword search for something I am often pleasantly surprised when I get a note I wrote sever years ago. It’s a great way to reminisce and also can trigger me to build on the ideas I had back then. That isn’t as easy with paper-based notes unless you spend a lot of time carefully indexing and organising your notebooks—which can look incredibly impressive in a bookcase, but does take up an enormous amount of time just keeping organised.  Digital notes apps do a lot of that hard work for you.  So, David, to answer your question, I have found that when it comes to my calendar and notes, digital tools have made life much easier. There are dangers with your calendar, but if you are vigilant, your digital calendar can serve you better than having to carry around a diary everywhere you go.  And with your notes, you now have access to a library of ideas and thoughts on your phone—a digital device you carry with you everywhere you go. That again, is far better than carrying around a notebook—or series of notebooks so you have access to everything.  The only digital tool I feel is better in an analogue system is the to-do list. A paper based to-do list worked for centuries. The digital to-do list, or as we call it now task manager, can cause a lot of overwhelm and stress. It doesn’t help you to prioritise what’s important unless you keep it well organised and curated—which I find most people don’t do—and a lot of things we add to our task managers disappear, never to be seen again until it’s too late.  Thank you, David for you question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Are the old ways still the best ways? That’s what I explore in this week’s podcast.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 271 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 271 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. Have you ever wondered how people managed their work before we had computers on every desk and a smartphone in every pocket? I mean, how was it possible to manage our email when the only place we could read and respond to email was at our desks in our place of work? How did we know when we had a meeting when the only way to add a meeting to our calendar was to pull out our diaries and handwrite the meeting into it? Well, it may come as a surprise to many of you, but people did manage. In fact, I would go as far as to say people managed a lot better than they do today. Not using a digital system meant that it was far easier to compartmentalise our work. For instance, responding to letters—the things we used to communicate before email—meant we needed to be in the office. If we were not in the office, we could not respond to the letter.  This meant if an important, so called urgent, letter arrived on a Saturday morning, it would not be read until Monday morning and a response would not be going out until, at the earliest, Monday evening. So, in theory, if an urgent letter was sent on Friday afternoon, you would not be getting your reply until Tuesday morning, at the earliest. And, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.  Yet, things got done. Deadlines were met and there was just as much stress around as there is today.  I was lucky, I began my working life just as the workplace was transitioning to the digital systems we use today. This meant I had the opportunity to see both sides. The analogue, the midway (where it was half analogue, half digital) and digital.  What I’ve learned is that there are advantages in both types of system and when you combine the best of the analogue systems with the best of the digital systems you can build yourself a robust, reliable time management and productivity system.  So, before we continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from David. Hi Carl, When I was working in the mid-1990s, we did not have computers or smartphones but we did have a system for managing our appointments and tasks. Do you think technology today has helped us or made managing our time harder?  Hi David, thank you for your question. You are right in observing that people managed just fine before computers, smartphones and iPads came onto the scene. In fact, while people still became overwhelmed, there was a better sense of time than there is today. Because we had to manually write out the things we had to do, rather than enter them into an app, we were much more conscious about what we were committing ourselves to.  Today, your task manager will take thousands, if not millions of tasks, and while that may sound fantastic, it does create a problem. The problem being: when will do do all these tasks?  The reality is, we cannot and never will be able to do everything. There is just too much we would like to do and a limited amount of time to do it in. When I was teaching English, I enjoyed the session where we looked at the words time and money. The two nouns share the exact same verbs. For instance, spend time on something, spend money on something. Or we can save money or save time.  But not only do these two words share the same verbs, they can also be thought of as the same thing. If we choose to spend money on a new iPad, that means we have less money to spend on other things. So, if you have $3,000 in your bank account and you choose to spend $1,000 on an iPad Pro with a keyboard and Apple Pencil, then you are going to have $2,000 left to spend on other things.  Let’s say your rent to mortgage is $1,000 and household expenses come to $800.00, then you only have $200 to spend on other things.  With time, we all get 166 hours a week. We are usually committed to spending 40 hours at work, perhaps we need to spend 2 hours a day commuting to and from work (that’s ten hours) and there’s sleeping, eating and keeping ourselves clean.  If you decide to pay less rent or mortgage pretty soon you will have a debt that needs to be paid and if you don’t pay it, you’ll lose your home. If you choose to skip your sleep for a few days, you’ll make yourself sick and won’t be able to do your work and you’ll likely lose your job.  Just like with bank account, there is a finite amount you can use and you get to choose how you spend your money or time on your commitments Technology has not changed that. Just because we can manage our to-do list digitally, doesn’t mean we automatically become more productive. And just because we can schedule repeating events on our calendar, doesn’t mean we have more time.  Most companies and individuals go bankrupt because they have over-committed themselves with debt. Likewise, you will burn yourself out if you over-commit yourself with time.  Now, one of the downsides of the digital systems is, the ease with which we can commit ourselves. We can throw an unlimited amount of tasks into our task managers without necessarily seeing what we have committed ourselves to. The more you throw in there, the less time you have for other things.  Conversely, with an analogue system—one written out on paper, you can see exactly what you are committing yourself to. Either you are writing your tasks out on a piece of paper or you are adding them into the notes section of a diary.  The act of writing them out, triggers your brain to resist adding too much. You become very aware of what you are committing to and how little time you have.  Recently, I was talking with a tech loving friend of mine who is always trying out the latest productivity apps—he understands it’s a bad habit of his. However, he did confess to me recently that whenever he feels overwhelmed he pulls out an old fashioned notebook and writes out all the things that he thinks he needs to do.  Once he’s done this “brain dump”, he will cross out all the tasks he either doesn’t want to do or knows deep down he’s never going to get round to doing.  This act of pruning his list leaves him feeling better and a lot less overwhelmed.  And that is where good old fashioned pen and paper still holds an advantage over the digital tools we now have access to. The awareness of what you are committing yourself to is far greater than when you use digital tools.  I love my Apple Calendar, it allows me to add recurring events, subscribe to my rugby team’s calendar so I can see when they are playing and I can share a calendar with my wife so I know when our family commitments are. The downsides to modern digital calendars is you can allow other people to schedule events for you. For me, that’s not good. That’s like giving people access to your bank account and letting them withdraw money without asking you. You’re never likely to do that are you? So why are we allowing people to do that with our time.  With a digital calendar, I would recommend you make sure you have, at the very least, the option to “accept”, “decline” or “maybe” a meeting request. I would also suggest if you need time to work on a piece of work, to block that time out. You do not need to worry, the other person cannot see what you have blocked out. All they see is that you are unavailable at that time. This will safeguard you against time thieves filling up your calendar with their priorities.  One area where I feel digital tools are better than analogue tools is the notes app. Traditionally the issue people had keeping all their notes in a notebook is finding their notes later. There was also the issue of scribbling down an idea on a scrap of paper only to lose that scrap paper.  With digital notes, you don’t lose them and finding notes you wrote years ago is as simple as doing a keyword or date search within your notes app.  There is a danger if you in the habit of switching your digital notes app every few months that you will lose something. But if you stick with one notes app, over the years you are going to build, as Tiago Forte called it a “second Brain”.  I’ve been using Evernote for nearly 13 years and when I do a keyword search for something I am often pleasantly surprised when I get a note I wrote sever years ago. It’s a great way to reminisce and also can trigger me to build on the ideas I had back then. That isn’t as easy with paper-based notes unless you spend a lot of time carefully indexing and organising your notebooks—which can look incredibly impressive in a bookcase, but does take up an enormous amount of time just keeping organised.  Digital notes apps do a lot of that hard work for you.  So, David, to answer your question, I have found that when it comes to my calendar and notes, digital tools have made life much easier. There are dangers with your calendar, but if you are vigilant, your digital calendar can serve you better than having to carry around a diary everywhere you go.  And with your notes, you now have access to a library of ideas and thoughts on your phone—a digital device you carry with you everywhere you go. That again, is far better than carrying around a notebook—or series of notebooks so you have access to everything.  The only digital tool I feel is better in an analogue system is the to-do list. A paper based to-do list worked for centuries. The digital to-do list, or as we call it now task manager, can cause a lot of overwhelm and stress. It doesn’t help you to prioritise what’s important unless you keep it well organised and curated—which I find most people don’t do—and a lot of things we add to our task managers disappear, never to be seen again until it’s too late.  Thank you, David for you question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Is Pen And Paper Better Than Digital?

Podcast 270 Do you feel you have balance in your day? If not, this episode is for you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 270 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 270 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. So, if you’re listening to this podcast, the chances are you have an interest in managing your time and being more productive. And that’s a great interest to have, but the real question is why? Why do you want to better manage your time? Is it because you feel you have too much to do or it seems all you ever do is work work work?  The real reason why anyone would want to better manage their time is because they want more balance in their lives. After all, we have a lot of lives to manage. At a basic level, we have our professional and personal lives, but inside those, we may have different roles. We could be a mother, a daughter, a sister. We may have interests such as painting or sketching.  At a professional level, we could be a manager of people, an accountant, a salesperson or a project manager—it’s likely you are all of these. You need to manage your team, allocate your department’s budget and make sure your projects are moving forward.  The realities of life today is that there will always be something you have to do. It can be difficult to bring any kind of balance into our lives. Yet, it may be difficult, but it’s certainly not impossible if you focus on what’s important to you.  That, nicely leads me to this week's question, which means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week’s question comes from Mary-Anne. Mary Anne asks: Hi Carl, I know you and many other people in the time management world talk a lot about planning the day and week, but I find it’s impossible. I have two teenage daughters, a full-time career, and I have to take care of my father, who needs full-time care. I find it impossible to get any balance. There are just too many demands on me. What would you say to someone who is really struggling to find some kind of balance in their day?  Hi Mary Anne, thank you for your question. That’s a great question, and I know it can be very hard to organise everything when other people are involved. The good news is, somehow you are managing everything. It might feel like you are juggling a lot of balls each day, but it does appear from your question that you are not dropping any.  Now, we must return to the fact that time is fixed. You only have 24 hours a day. What that means is the only control you have is what you do in those twenty-four hours.  Before we can move on, though, we need to look at out areas of focus. The eight areas that are important to all us. These range from our family and relationships to our career and self development. Now these eight areas will change in importance as we go through life.  When we are in our twenties, it’s likely our education (self development) and career are near the top of our list. As we settle down into adulthood, finances and lifestyle become more important. As we age, family and friends become more and more of a priority and our career drops down the list. Your areas of focus are dynamic. As we go through the different stages of life they change in importance.  Now, looking at what you wrote, Mary-Anne, it seems your family and relationships and career are at the top of your list. Knowing that, means when you sit down to plan your week, you begin with these two areas. If you need to attend to your father two or three times a day, then that’s what you need to do. It becomes a non-negotiable part of your day.  Your teenage daughters may be able to help you here, or maybe not, either way, as teenagers, they will likely have some independence—may even demand some independence. Encouraging them to take on more responsibility for their lives, will not only help you it will also help them.  With you career, you need to establish what your core work is. The work you are employed to do. This does not mean the results; for example, if you have to make $20,000 in sales each week, that’s the outcome, the result you want. Your core work is the activity that will produce that result. That could be you need to make ten calls to prospective customers and have three appointments on your calendar each day. Making those calls and setting up those appointments are your core work activities.  These need to be your priority each day you are at work. You do not want to confuse results with activity. To get the results you want, you need to identify the activities that will give you those results. You can also bring this to your family. What are the results you want, and then determine what the activities are that will bring those results. Those activities are your priorities each day.  So, to give the care you want to give to your father, what do you need to do? That needs to be your priority.  Now, once you know what activities you need to perform each day to bring the results you want, you can make sure they are embedded in your day.  To give you a simple example. Louis, my dog, needs to go for a walk every day and I like to spend an hour exercising. In total two hours, that means two hours of my day have already been taken up before each day begins. The only question I need answer is when? When will I do these activities? For me, I like to break up my day. So, I take Louis out for his walk around 2pm, then when we get back home, I will exercise. My calendar is blocked from 2pm until 4pm each.  I don’t work a typical nine til five job. I work mornings and evenings and do my personal activities in the afternoon. That works for me.  You will likely have work commitments through the day leaving you with the early morning and evening for your family activities.  Now, what about you, Mary-Anne? What do you want to do for yourself?  Balance is all about balancing our commitments to others with the commitments to ourselves. If we spend all our time on the commitments to others, we will feel out of balance and lost. Our lives will be directed by other people and that is never going to be good for you.  You may want some time to yourself for reading, pursuing a hobby or exercise. We all need some “alone time”. It’s what recharges us and help keep us mentally balanced.  Too often we feel guilty about spending time on ourselves, but you should not. It’s healthy and vital if you want the energy to take care of others—which is something we naturally want to do. The problem is you cannot do that if you are exhausted from giving too much of yourself to others.  Time for yourself does not need to be a lot. We’re talking an evening or two a week or an afternoon on a weekend where you can step away and do your own thing.  Whatever time you do set aside for yourself you want to put that on your calendar. It gives you something to look forward to and every time you look at your calendar you’re going to see it. And, once it’s on your calendar, it becomes non-negotiable. You do not sacrifice that time for anyone or anything. Tell everyone that this time is for you. You need to protect it.  I do this with my Saturday nights. Saturday night is the only night each week I have to myself. It begins with a family dinner and once finished, the rest of the evening is my time. To do with whatever I want. I usually settle down to some TV and just wallow in doing absolutely nothing at all.  The key, Mary-Anne, is to step back a little. Prioritise what is important to you and make sure that whatever time you want for the important things in your life are scheduled on your calendar.  While I was away on my quarterly “Strategy week” last week, I undertook to watch all episodes of the early 70s action comedy, The Persuaders! Starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The show was set in the early 70s (perhaps late 60s) and well before the mobile phone or home computer. What I noticed was how less stressed people were. The beauty of paper is it slows everything down. If you needed to send a document you only had one way to do it—the mail (and not email). So there was always around 48 hours to wait before things got completed.  But because everything was slower, we had time for ourselves. Mornings were never rushed, we ate a proper breakfast—bacon and eggs (all natural ingredients) and as there was fewer cars on the road, there were no traffic jams.  I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a better time—but it was a lot slower. Many of the words we use today were not used—burnt out, stressed out and overwhelmed—nobody used those words. There were fewer distractions and finding out the news meant you either watched the 9 O’clock news or sat and read the newspaper.  What we can do is learn from that. Slow down and have fixed times when you do things. What do you do after dinner? Could you not find an hour for yourself and either go read a book or out for walk? Where are the pockets of time that you can use to do the things you want to do to add balance to your own life—rather than serving others?  Ultimately, Mary-Anne, it’s about taking control of your calendar and making sure you have the things you need to do and want to do on there. Task managers and notes apps don’t help here. All these do is tell you what you still have to do. Not helpful if you want to take control of your day and have a more balanced life.  Where possible try to make your activities routine. Routines require a lot less energy because you can do them without thinking. You’re not wasting time thinking about what to do next. You know and you automatically do it. For instance, I go downstairs to cook dinner at 6pm every evening. It’s automatic.  This also means I have some markers in my day. As I mentioned before, I break between 2 and 4pm, then come back to some work until 6pm when I go down to make dinner. These markers mean I can balance my work between these natural breaks in my day.  I should also mention that if you are struggling with doing a weekly plan, then I just launched a new mini course that covers just that. If you hurry, you can get that course for the early-bird discount of $25.00. This course will help you to create plan for the week which will not take you two or three hours to do—forty minutes tops. I’ve put the details of this course in the show notes for you. I hope that has helped, Mary-Anne. 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. 

Podcast 270 Do you feel you have balance in your day? If not, this episode is for you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 270 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 270 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. So, if you’re listening to this podcast, the chances are you have an interest in managing your time and being more productive. And that’s a great interest to have, but the real question is why? Why do you want to better manage your time? Is it because you feel you have too much to do or it seems all you ever do is work work work?  The real reason why anyone would want to better manage their time is because they want more balance in their lives. After all, we have a lot of lives to manage. At a basic level, we have our professional and personal lives, but inside those, we may have different roles. We could be a mother, a daughter, a sister. We may have interests such as painting or sketching.  At a professional level, we could be a manager of people, an accountant, a salesperson or a project manager—it’s likely you are all of these. You need to manage your team, allocate your department’s budget and make sure your projects are moving forward.  The realities of life today is that there will always be something you have to do. It can be difficult to bring any kind of balance into our lives. Yet, it may be difficult, but it’s certainly not impossible if you focus on what’s important to you.  That, nicely leads me to this week's question, which means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week’s question comes from Mary-Anne. Mary Anne asks: Hi Carl, I know you and many other people in the time management world talk a lot about planning the day and week, but I find it’s impossible. I have two teenage daughters, a full-time career, and I have to take care of my father, who needs full-time care. I find it impossible to get any balance. There are just too many demands on me. What would you say to someone who is really struggling to find some kind of balance in their day?  Hi Mary Anne, thank you for your question. That’s a great question, and I know it can be very hard to organise everything when other people are involved. The good news is, somehow you are managing everything. It might feel like you are juggling a lot of balls each day, but it does appear from your question that you are not dropping any.  Now, we must return to the fact that time is fixed. You only have 24 hours a day. What that means is the only control you have is what you do in those twenty-four hours.  Before we can move on, though, we need to look at out areas of focus. The eight areas that are important to all us. These range from our family and relationships to our career and self development. Now these eight areas will change in importance as we go through life.  When we are in our twenties, it’s likely our education (self development) and career are near the top of our list. As we settle down into adulthood, finances and lifestyle become more important. As we age, family and friends become more and more of a priority and our career drops down the list. Your areas of focus are dynamic. As we go through the different stages of life they change in importance.  Now, looking at what you wrote, Mary-Anne, it seems your family and relationships and career are at the top of your list. Knowing that, means when you sit down to plan your week, you begin with these two areas. If you need to attend to your father two or three times a day, then that’s what you need to do. It becomes a non-negotiable part of your day.  Your teenage daughters may be able to help you here, or maybe not, either way, as teenagers, they will likely have some independence—may even demand some independence. Encouraging them to take on more responsibility for their lives, will not only help you it will also help them.  With you career, you need to establish what your core work is. The work you are employed to do. This does not mean the results; for example, if you have to make $20,000 in sales each week, that’s the outcome, the result you want. Your core work is the activity that will produce that result. That could be you need to make ten calls to prospective customers and have three appointments on your calendar each day. Making those calls and setting up those appointments are your core work activities.  These need to be your priority each day you are at work. You do not want to confuse results with activity. To get the results you want, you need to identify the activities that will give you those results. You can also bring this to your family. What are the results you want, and then determine what the activities are that will bring those results. Those activities are your priorities each day.  So, to give the care you want to give to your father, what do you need to do? That needs to be your priority.  Now, once you know what activities you need to perform each day to bring the results you want, you can make sure they are embedded in your day.  To give you a simple example. Louis, my dog, needs to go for a walk every day and I like to spend an hour exercising. In total two hours, that means two hours of my day have already been taken up before each day begins. The only question I need answer is when? When will I do these activities? For me, I like to break up my day. So, I take Louis out for his walk around 2pm, then when we get back home, I will exercise. My calendar is blocked from 2pm until 4pm each.  I don’t work a typical nine til five job. I work mornings and evenings and do my personal activities in the afternoon. That works for me.  You will likely have work commitments through the day leaving you with the early morning and evening for your family activities.  Now, what about you, Mary-Anne? What do you want to do for yourself?  Balance is all about balancing our commitments to others with the commitments to ourselves. If we spend all our time on the commitments to others, we will feel out of balance and lost. Our lives will be directed by other people and that is never going to be good for you.  You may want some time to yourself for reading, pursuing a hobby or exercise. We all need some “alone time”. It’s what recharges us and help keep us mentally balanced.  Too often we feel guilty about spending time on ourselves, but you should not. It’s healthy and vital if you want the energy to take care of others—which is something we naturally want to do. The problem is you cannot do that if you are exhausted from giving too much of yourself to others.  Time for yourself does not need to be a lot. We’re talking an evening or two a week or an afternoon on a weekend where you can step away and do your own thing.  Whatever time you do set aside for yourself you want to put that on your calendar. It gives you something to look forward to and every time you look at your calendar you’re going to see it. And, once it’s on your calendar, it becomes non-negotiable. You do not sacrifice that time for anyone or anything. Tell everyone that this time is for you. You need to protect it.  I do this with my Saturday nights. Saturday night is the only night each week I have to myself. It begins with a family dinner and once finished, the rest of the evening is my time. To do with whatever I want. I usually settle down to some TV and just wallow in doing absolutely nothing at all.  The key, Mary-Anne, is to step back a little. Prioritise what is important to you and make sure that whatever time you want for the important things in your life are scheduled on your calendar.  While I was away on my quarterly “Strategy week” last week, I undertook to watch all episodes of the early 70s action comedy, The Persuaders! Starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The show was set in the early 70s (perhaps late 60s) and well before the mobile phone or home computer. What I noticed was how less stressed people were. The beauty of paper is it slows everything down. If you needed to send a document you only had one way to do it—the mail (and not email). So there was always around 48 hours to wait before things got completed.  But because everything was slower, we had time for ourselves. Mornings were never rushed, we ate a proper breakfast—bacon and eggs (all natural ingredients) and as there was fewer cars on the road, there were no traffic jams.  I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a better time—but it was a lot slower. Many of the words we use today were not used—burnt out, stressed out and overwhelmed—nobody used those words. There were fewer distractions and finding out the news meant you either watched the 9 O’clock news or sat and read the newspaper.  What we can do is learn from that. Slow down and have fixed times when you do things. What do you do after dinner? Could you not find an hour for yourself and either go read a book or out for walk? Where are the pockets of time that you can use to do the things you want to do to add balance to your own life—rather than serving others?  Ultimately, Mary-Anne, it’s about taking control of your calendar and making sure you have the things you need to do and want to do on there. Task managers and notes apps don’t help here. All these do is tell you what you still have to do. Not helpful if you want to take control of your day and have a more balanced life.  Where possible try to make your activities routine. Routines require a lot less energy because you can do them without thinking. You’re not wasting time thinking about what to do next. You know and you automatically do it. For instance, I go downstairs to cook dinner at 6pm every evening. It’s automatic.  This also means I have some markers in my day. As I mentioned before, I break between 2 and 4pm, then come back to some work until 6pm when I go down to make dinner. These markers mean I can balance my work between these natural breaks in my day.  I should also mention that if you are struggling with doing a weekly plan, then I just launched a new mini course that covers just that. If you hurry, you can get that course for the early-bird discount of $25.00. This course will help you to create plan for the week which will not take you two or three hours to do—forty minutes tops. I’ve put the details of this course in the show notes for you. I hope that has helped, Mary-Anne. 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.

Balancing Your Life’s Responsibilities.

Why bother with a weekly plan when a single crisis can destroy the whole week? That’s what I’ll be answering this week.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 269 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 269 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’m sure you’ve heard the saying “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” There are numerous variations to this quote, one of my favourites is allegedly by Mike Tyson; “Everyone Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth”.  Now, it would be easy to take these quotes at face value and decide that there’s no point in planning the week when the chances are some crisis or another will come up on Monday morning rendering any plan you may have useless. Well, that’s not strictly true.  A plan’s purpose is to guide you through the week. It’s designed to keep you focused on what’s important and prevent you from being pulled off track by these crises that will inevitably crop up. There’s always something unexpected. That could be your colleague calling in sick, an important meeting being cancelled or postponed or a catastrophic problem with one of your customers.  However, having a plan means no matter what is thrown at you, you still have a road map that will guide you through the week. There’s still an objective and it’s that that ensures that while you may not be able to get everything done that you set out to accomplish, you at least get some of it done.  So, today I will outline why, despite the chances of you being pulled away from your plan, it’s still important to have a plan. And 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 Matthew, Matthew asks; Hi Carl, I know you always stress how important it is to do the weekly planning, but I find every time I do one, by Tuesday afternoon that plan is useless because so many issues and problems come up and I have to deal with them and forget my plan. Do you have any insights why and how planning can stop this from happening?  Hi Matthew, thank you for your question.  Sometimes when we talk about doing a weekly plan or weekly review many people miss its main purpose. A plan for the week is not to give you a step by step micromanaged plan for the week. It’s to give you a set of objectives to achieve that will take you from what you are today to where you want to be at the end of the week.  Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say I need to get a 5,000 word report written next week. Now, logically, I would divide that work up into writing 1,000 words each day next week. That’s a plan. It’s a project broken down into smaller a steps.  But what happens if something comes up on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm that requires all my time and attention. I may even have to go off site and visit an important customer on Wednesday to fix the problem. Now, my carefully laid plan of writing 1,000 words each day has been destroyed. I’m not going to be able to write anything on Wednesday and Tuesday, because of the crisis, I was only able to write 500 words.  Now, the week is only half way done and I’m 1,500 words behind. Now, here’s the thing, the objective was not to write 1,000 words per day. The objective was to complete the 5,000 word report by the end of the week. The plan was to write 1,000 words, that’s now gone, but the objective still remains the same.  All I need do now, when I get back on Wednesday after resolving the issue, is to readjust my plan. Okay, I cannot finish it by writing 1,000 words on Thursday and Friday, but I can if I write 1,750 words per day.  I will still accomplish my objective and all I needed to do was to adjust my plan.  Now, it’s likely you will need to also adjust your timings. Perhaps you allocated an hour each day to writing the report, you now need to increase that time to ninety minutes per day, but finding an extra thirty minutes each day for two days is not a huge dilemma.  Making adjustments to your plan is far better than giving up altogether and getting stressed out. That’s not going to solve anything. Work the problem in front of you, don’t make things worse by worrying about things you cannot do anything about right now.  This why we need to build two things into our days. The first is some buffer time. For me, I like to give myself at least thirty minutes between sessions of work where possible. Sometimes, that’s not always going to be possible, say when I have back to back meetings, but for the most part I will have at least two thirty minute buffer slots in my day—even on the busiest of days.  Secondly, doing a daily planning session. Now, your daily planning session is not about creating a new plan. Its purpose is to make sure you are still on track with your weekly plan. It’s here where you have an opportunity to make adjustments to your weekly plan that will help you to reach your objectives for the week, or if necessary, adjusting your weekly objective.  I like to think of my weekly plan as like a flight plan for a commercial flight. Let’s say I am flying between Seoul and Paris. This is a flight that leaves Seoul at around 11:30am (Seoul time) and arrives in Paris around 4:00pm (Paris Time). It’s a fifteen hour flight.  The flight is scheduled every day, yet each day the pilots will have a briefing meeting to review the weather, the flying time, the anticipated weight and calculate how much fuel they will need. They will also confirm their flight plan based on conditions in countries they are flying over both in terms of weather and geopolitical developments.  For example, This flight previously took around eleven hours. Yet, in February 2022, it was no longer possible to fly over Russia and Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not known to Air France before the day they entered Ukraine. Yet, the pilots will have adjusted their flight plan to fly around Russia and Ukraine thus avoiding any potential danger to the flight.  The objective of the pilots was not to fight between Seoul and Paris in eleven hours. The objective was to get the passengers, crew and plane to Paris safely. On that day in February last year, the pilots achieved their objective. Nobody complained that the flight arrived four hours late.  So, Matthew, the purpose of planning the week is to give you a set of objectives and a framework in which to achieve those objectives.  The purpose of planning the day is to confirm you are on track and to make any adjustments if necessary.  When I begin a typical week, I will have twenty coaching calls booked in. That’s twenty hours of calls and a further seven hours of writing feedback on those calls. However, each week, I will likely have two or three calls cancel and reschedule for another day. That means I will have a few extra hours in which to catch up or work on something else.  I know most of you may begin the week with a set number of meetings planned, but some of those will cancel or reschedule for another week, so while it’s likely additional work will come in as the week progresses—work you did not anticipate having to do, you are also going to pick up some extra time too with work that either no longer needs doing or cancelled meetings.  Over the course of a week, things generally balance out. Throwing your plan out because Monday or Tuesday didn’t go to plan is not a good strategy. Work the problem in front of you and get back to your plan. Then at the end of the day, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to make any adjustments to your weekly plan based on your objectives for the week. Now how to stop problems and issues arising in the first place. That comes down to anticipating future problems. This will generally only come from experience. But, doing the weekly planning also gives you an opportunity to plan ahead and to anticipate what could go wrong.  One the biggest benefits of getting yourself organised and being consistent with your weekly and daily planning is you are moving from being reactive—reacting to events, to being proactive—being prepared for events. It’s not something you even need to learn. It’s a natural coincidence of having some time at the end of the week and looking forward and seeing the bigger picture of what you are trying to accomplish.  Now, something else that works well is to what I call “front load” the week. What this means is you try to get as much of your fixed work done early in the week. If you have a number of tasks that require a lot of focus or time, try to schedule these for early in the week. This will help you later in the week because either they are done, or if they need finishing, the biggest part of the task has been completed—you only then need to find a small amount of time to fin ish them.  I do this with my writing. I try to get as much of my writing done on Monday and Tuesday. If you have an important meeting to prepare for later in the week, do the hard work on Monday and Tuesday. It takes the pressure off you and leaves you free to fine tune things.  However, the most powerful thing you can do is to make sure you are doing the daily planning session. Think of this as a debriefing meeting with yourself to review your plan and consider new tasks that have come in and to revise your plan if necessary.  Becoming better with your time management and being more productive is not going to stop additional work from coming in. However, what it does do is train you to quickly decide what is important. You become better at making decisions, and it’s that speed with your decision making that improves your overall productivity.  If something needs to be done, then it meeds to be done. All you need do is decide when you will do it.  Thank you, Matthew for your question. I hope this has helped.  And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Why bother with a weekly plan when a single crisis can destroy the whole week? That’s what I’ll be answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 269 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 269 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’m sure you’ve heard the saying “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” There are numerous variations to this quote, one of my favourites is allegedly by Mike Tyson; “Everyone Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth”.  Now, it would be easy to take these quotes at face value and decide that there’s no point in planning the week when the chances are some crisis or another will come up on Monday morning rendering any plan you may have useless. Well, that’s not strictly true.  A plan’s purpose is to guide you through the week. It’s designed to keep you focused on what’s important and prevent you from being pulled off track by these crises that will inevitably crop up. There’s always something unexpected. That could be your colleague calling in sick, an important meeting being cancelled or postponed or a catastrophic problem with one of your customers.  However, having a plan means no matter what is thrown at you, you still have a road map that will guide you through the week. There’s still an objective and it’s that that ensures that while you may not be able to get everything done that you set out to accomplish, you at least get some of it done.  So, today I will outline why, despite the chances of you being pulled away from your plan, it’s still important to have a plan. And 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 Matthew, Matthew asks; Hi Carl, I know you always stress how important it is to do the weekly planning, but I find every time I do one, by Tuesday afternoon that plan is useless because so many issues and problems come up and I have to deal with them and forget my plan. Do you have any insights why and how planning can stop this from happening?  Hi Matthew, thank you for your question.  Sometimes when we talk about doing a weekly plan or weekly review many people miss its main purpose. A plan for the week is not to give you a step by step micromanaged plan for the week. It’s to give you a set of objectives to achieve that will take you from what you are today to where you want to be at the end of the week.  Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say I need to get a 5,000 word report written next week. Now, logically, I would divide that work up into writing 1,000 words each day next week. That’s a plan. It’s a project broken down into smaller a steps.  But what happens if something comes up on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm that requires all my time and attention. I may even have to go off site and visit an important customer on Wednesday to fix the problem. Now, my carefully laid plan of writing 1,000 words each day has been destroyed. I’m not going to be able to write anything on Wednesday and Tuesday, because of the crisis, I was only able to write 500 words.  Now, the week is only half way done and I’m 1,500 words behind. Now, here’s the thing, the objective was not to write 1,000 words per day. The objective was to complete the 5,000 word report by the end of the week. The plan was to write 1,000 words, that’s now gone, but the objective still remains the same.  All I need do now, when I get back on Wednesday after resolving the issue, is to readjust my plan. Okay, I cannot finish it by writing 1,000 words on Thursday and Friday, but I can if I write 1,750 words per day.  I will still accomplish my objective and all I needed to do was to adjust my plan.  Now, it’s likely you will need to also adjust your timings. Perhaps you allocated an hour each day to writing the report, you now need to increase that time to ninety minutes per day, but finding an extra thirty minutes each day for two days is not a huge dilemma.  Making adjustments to your plan is far better than giving up altogether and getting stressed out. That’s not going to solve anything. Work the problem in front of you, don’t make things worse by worrying about things you cannot do anything about right now.  This why we need to build two things into our days. The first is some buffer time. For me, I like to give myself at least thirty minutes between sessions of work where possible. Sometimes, that’s not always going to be possible, say when I have back to back meetings, but for the most part I will have at least two thirty minute buffer slots in my day—even on the busiest of days.  Secondly, doing a daily planning session. Now, your daily planning session is not about creating a new plan. Its purpose is to make sure you are still on track with your weekly plan. It’s here where you have an opportunity to make adjustments to your weekly plan that will help you to reach your objectives for the week, or if necessary, adjusting your weekly objective.  I like to think of my weekly plan as like a flight plan for a commercial flight. Let’s say I am flying between Seoul and Paris. This is a flight that leaves Seoul at around 11:30am (Seoul time) and arrives in Paris around 4:00pm (Paris Time). It’s a fifteen hour flight.  The flight is scheduled every day, yet each day the pilots will have a briefing meeting to review the weather, the flying time, the anticipated weight and calculate how much fuel they will need. They will also confirm their flight plan based on conditions in countries they are flying over both in terms of weather and geopolitical developments.  For example, This flight previously took around eleven hours. Yet, in February 2022, it was no longer possible to fly over Russia and Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not known to Air France before the day they entered Ukraine. Yet, the pilots will have adjusted their flight plan to fly around Russia and Ukraine thus avoiding any potential danger to the flight.  The objective of the pilots was not to fight between Seoul and Paris in eleven hours. The objective was to get the passengers, crew and plane to Paris safely. On that day in February last year, the pilots achieved their objective. Nobody complained that the flight arrived four hours late.  So, Matthew, the purpose of planning the week is to give you a set of objectives and a framework in which to achieve those objectives.  The purpose of planning the day is to confirm you are on track and to make any adjustments if necessary.  When I begin a typical week, I will have twenty coaching calls booked in. That’s twenty hours of calls and a further seven hours of writing feedback on those calls. However, each week, I will likely have two or three calls cancel and reschedule for another day. That means I will have a few extra hours in which to catch up or work on something else.  I know most of you may begin the week with a set number of meetings planned, but some of those will cancel or reschedule for another week, so while it’s likely additional work will come in as the week progresses—work you did not anticipate having to do, you are also going to pick up some extra time too with work that either no longer needs doing or cancelled meetings.  Over the course of a week, things generally balance out. Throwing your plan out because Monday or Tuesday didn’t go to plan is not a good strategy. Work the problem in front of you and get back to your plan. Then at the end of the day, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to make any adjustments to your weekly plan based on your objectives for the week. Now how to stop problems and issues arising in the first place. That comes down to anticipating future problems. This will generally only come from experience. But, doing the weekly planning also gives you an opportunity to plan ahead and to anticipate what could go wrong.  One the biggest benefits of getting yourself organised and being consistent with your weekly and daily planning is you are moving from being reactive—reacting to events, to being proactive—being prepared for events. It’s not something you even need to learn. It’s a natural coincidence of having some time at the end of the week and looking forward and seeing the bigger picture of what you are trying to accomplish.  Now, something else that works well is to what I call “front load” the week. What this means is you try to get as much of your fixed work done early in the week. If you have a number of tasks that require a lot of focus or time, try to schedule these for early in the week. This will help you later in the week because either they are done, or if they need finishing, the biggest part of the task has been completed—you only then need to find a small amount of time to fin ish them.  I do this with my writing. I try to get as much of my writing done on Monday and Tuesday. If you have an important meeting to prepare for later in the week, do the hard work on Monday and Tuesday. It takes the pressure off you and leaves you free to fine tune things.  However, the most powerful thing you can do is to make sure you are doing the daily planning session. Think of this as a debriefing meeting with yourself to review your plan and consider new tasks that have come in and to revise your plan if necessary.  Becoming better with your time management and being more productive is not going to stop additional work from coming in. However, what it does do is train you to quickly decide what is important. You become better at making decisions, and it’s that speed with your decision making that improves your overall productivity.  If something needs to be done, then it meeds to be done. All you need do is decide when you will do it.  Thank you, Matthew for your question. I hope this has helped.  And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

Why You Need To Do Your Weekly Planning

How confident are you setting up a project and delivering it on time every time? If you struggle in this areas, then this podcast is for you.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 268 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 268 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. Completing our personal projects is something we all frequently find difficult. This is largely because there’s usually nobody holding us accountable and we don’r have access to the same resources our companies will have. However, it does not have to be difficult if we follow a simple formula.  I’ve spent many years studying how NASA went from a seemingly impossible challenge to successfully landing Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969.  When that project was first floated by President Kennedy in May 1961, NASA lacked the knowledge of whether humans could survive in space, they were struggling to get a rocket off the ground, and the nobody had left the confines of Earth’s orbit. Yet, eight years later, Neil Armstrong spoke those infamous words: “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind”. Now it’s true that NASA did not have to worry about resources, Congress gave them the money to make this happen. But it was not all about the money. Sure, that helped, but the technology still needed to be invented, scientists had to work out how to get a spaceship out of Earths orbit and into the Moon’s orbit and they needed to know if humans could survive in space and if so, how.  I’ve always been a believer in finding the success stories and then breaking them down to their component parts to understand how the success happened. It’s why I know there is no such things as an overnight success, there’s much more to completing a project than being in the right place at the right time.  And with the Moon landings, everything is there to show you the roadmap towards completing a project—or a goal for that matter—all we need to do is break it down. And that is what we will do in this episode. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jonathan. Jonathan asks, Hi Carl, one thing I really struggle with is working on my personal projects. I have some home improvement projects that I’ve had on my list for years and I just never seem to get around to doing them. Do you have any tips on getting these projects done?  Hi Jonathan, thank you for your question. Firstly I must start by saying this is something very common and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this, Jonathan. The good news this is an opportunity to develop skills.  Now, let’s begin with what I talked about a moment ago with the clarifying sentence. I used to talk about this as the clarifying statement, but somehow the word “statement” invited people to write line after line of words defining what the project was. No. That’s not what you are trying to achieve here. What you are looking for is a simple sentence that gives clarity on what you want to accomplish with the project.  Going back to the John F Kennedy sentence setting the parameters of the Moon landing project when he stood before Congress and announced that the US; "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."  Twenty-six words that set NASA on a course that captivated the world. Those words were clear, contained a deadline and left no-one in doubt about what was to be achieved. Now, Kennedy was no scientist. He was a student of government and international affairs. Certainly nothing that gave him a deep knowledge of the science and engineering feats required to land and walk on the moon.  But that didn’t matter, Kennedy was the leader, not the implementer. There was a reservoir of talented, motivated scientists and engineers ready to take up the “challenge” and turn Kennedy’s project outcome into a reality.  Now, depending on the size of the project you are attempting to do, Jonathan, you may need to reach out for the skills you do not process. For instance, one of your home improvement projects could be to build a conservatory onto the side of your house. Now, unless you are a builder, you are not going to have the know-how or skills to build the conservatory—you are going to need to hire outside help. A builder and an electrician are likely to be your first requirements.  Plus, you may need to hire an architect to draw up the plans for you.  So, this means you will need to “secure the funding” for the project. Now, Kennedy assigned this part of the project to his Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, who pushed Congress for the necessary funding.  Now, if I were to undertake building an extension to the side of our house, I would need to “Secure” the funding somehow. That could come from my savings or I may need to talk to the bank for a loan. Either way, because I would need to hire experts to do the work, I would need funds, so before anything started on the project I would need to get some estimates on how much the project would likely cost.  One area where I find people waste time with project planning is to sit down and plan out the whole project step by step. In my experience, I find there’s always time to plan the next steps, but planning can and often does become the source of procrastination. There’s too many unknowns and if you really want to get the project off the ground take the first logical step.  To write a book, start writing the first draft. Don’t worry about publishers, writing applications, chapter headings or book cover designs. Until you have a first draft you are not going to have anything to work with anyway.  Similarly with your home improvement projects, you will need a budget, so get the quotes and estimates together. That will give you the right information to proceed to the next step.  With the Moon landings, NASA broke the project down into three parts. There was Mercury, where they wanted to learn what was required in order to get humans into space. Then came Gemini, where they learned all about rendezvousing with other spacecraft and doing space walks, and finally Apollo, which was the part of the project that took humans to the Moon.  Each part of the lunar landing project had its own set of objectives. Whatever project you are working on, will be the same. The first part could be to secure the funding. The second part may involve hiring the right people to do the work, and finally the construction part. Each part will have its own outcome, but ultimately, the overall project sentence will guide you.  For example, if you want to have the conservatory built by the summer, and you have three months until the summer begins, each part of your project will need to be broken down to meet that deadline. If, when you get the estimates, you are told the builders will require eight weeks to complete the work, then that leaves you with four weeks for the other parts of the project.  When we moved to the East Coast of Korea, my wife and I first sat down to decide how we were would do it. Our initial plan was to spend three months living in a guest house in the area we wanted to move to. These three months confirmed we definitely wanted to proceed with the project and we extended our stay in the guest house until the end of the year.  During that time, we began looking at properties and working on our budget. We decided on our new home in October and as it was still being built, we were given a moving in date on the 20th December. That gave us almost three months to put into action the second phase of our project—which was the interior design and furniture. And then the final part of the project was to move in.  Looking back at my original notes for that project, very little went according to that initial plan. But one thing did not change. The deadline (by the end of the year) and the move itself. The initial action was to move to the area we wanted to live in for three months and we did that within two weeks of making the decision to proceed. After that plans changed, but the outcome did not.  There’s always going to be delays, issues to resolve and changing plans. That’s to be expected. However, if you have been clear with your project sentence, and you stick to your overall deadline for the project, you will push yourself to get things moving.  And problems and issues will always arise. That’s part of life. With the moon landing project, tragedy struck on the 27th January 1967 when during a test on the new Apollo programme (the third phase) a fire broke out in the astronauts cockpit instantly killing the three astronauts. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffy were killed in the tragic accident and all manned flights were stopped, just three years before the project deadline while a full investigation took place.  NASA, continued developing the programme, as information from the tragedy came through, changes were implemented and by the time the final investigation report came through, almost all its recommendations had been implemented.  Hopefully, nothing as tragic will happen with your projects, but problems and issues will inevitably arise. While you are dealing with those issues, what could you be doing to make sure they the issue does not delay you from your final deadline?  For instance, there could be a materials shortage and there may be a two week delay to receiving some of the materials needed to build your conservatory. What could you do so that when the material is available and delivered you minimise any further delays?  And finally, you need a competitor or villain. For NASA and the United States, the villain and competitor was the Soviet Union. When NASA began the project to land on the Moon, The Soviet Union had already been the first to put a man in space and had launched the first satellite, Sputnik. NASA was still struggling to get a rocket to lift off without exploding.  The introduction of a villain or competitor brings energy to the project. Now, of course, with our personal projects it’s unlikely you will have a competitor. However, the reality is you do. The competitor is you.  The reason most of us fail with our personal projects is because of us. We are our own worst enemies. If you want to go deeper, it’s comfort that stops you from completing your projects. We naturally don’t like change and we always default to our comfort zone. But if you really want to complete these personal projects, whether they are home improvements or buying a new house, you will have to get uncomfortable.  The way I deal with this is, it to turn whatever comfort I am defaulting to into the enemy. At its simplest level that comfort could be the sofa. I never let the sofa beat me. No matter how inviting and seductive the sofa tries to be, I will still go out for a run when it’s raining. The sofa will never beat me. That’s my mindset. And it’s an easy mindset to develop. First identify the comfort, then look at it and tell it that it will never beat you. You will always win. If you find yourself procrastinating, externalise it by writing Procrastination in big words on a piece of paper and stare at it as if it was your worst enemy and tell it it will never ever beat you.  Steve Jobs invoked this strategy. First it was Microsoft and IBM, then it was Intel. With Steve, there was always an enemy to galvanise his employees. Today, Tim Cook does it with Samsung and Android.  Interestingly, because there was a clear competitor and enemy for NASA in the 1960s, their staff were highly motivated and focused on winning. They were making history and that was enough for them to succeed. NASA never needed table football tables (Fuzzball), nap pods, massage rooms or any of the other crazy benefits for their employees. Having a clear outcome, a strategy and a defined enemy was all that was needed to keep their employees focused, happy and engaged.  So there you go, Jonathan. I hope that has helped. I strongly recommend the documentary film Unsung Heroes, The Story Of Mission Control and Tom Hanks film Apollo 13. Both of these films will inspire you and give you everything you need to finally complete all those projects that you are stalling on. Thank you for your question and thank you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

How confident are you setting up a project and delivering it on time every time? If you struggle in this areas, then this podcast is for you.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: <a href="https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jxw6r-920795" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Podbean</a> | <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/the-working-with-podcast/id1308104501?l=en&amp;mt=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-working-with-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6Y97mtYZoJdwQAjTSkUcFc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Working-With-Podcast-p1353577/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TUNEIN</a> Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlpullein/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linkedin</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-time-blocking-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time Blocking Course</a> <a href="http://eepurl.com/cOAmvz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Weekly Newsletter</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Learning Centre</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Episode 268 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 268 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. Completing our personal projects is something we all frequently find difficult. This is largely because there’s usually nobody holding us accountable and we don’r have access to the same resources our companies will have. However, it does not have to be difficult if we follow a simple formula.  I’ve spent many years studying how NASA went from a seemingly impossible challenge to successfully landing Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969.  When that project was first floated by President Kennedy in May 1961, NASA lacked the knowledge of whether humans could survive in space, they were struggling to get a rocket off the ground, and the nobody had left the confines of Earth’s orbit. Yet, eight years later, Neil Armstrong spoke those infamous words: “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind”. Now it’s true that NASA did not have to worry about resources, Congress gave them the money to make this happen. But it was not all about the money. Sure, that helped, but the technology still needed to be invented, scientists had to work out how to get a spaceship out of Earths orbit and into the Moon’s orbit and they needed to know if humans could survive in space and if so, how.  I’ve always been a believer in finding the success stories and then breaking them down to their component parts to understand how the success happened. It’s why I know there is no such things as an overnight success, there’s much more to completing a project than being in the right place at the right time.  And with the Moon landings, everything is there to show you the roadmap towards completing a project—or a goal for that matter—all we need to do is break it down. And that is what we will do in this episode. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jonathan. Jonathan asks, Hi Carl, one thing I really struggle with is working on my personal projects. I have some home improvement projects that I’ve had on my list for years and I just never seem to get around to doing them. Do you have any tips on getting these projects done?  Hi Jonathan, thank you for your question. Firstly I must start by saying this is something very common and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this, Jonathan. The good news this is an opportunity to develop skills.  Now, let’s begin with what I talked about a moment ago with the clarifying sentence. I used to talk about this as the clarifying statement, but somehow the word “statement” invited people to write line after line of words defining what the project was. No. That’s not what you are trying to achieve here. What you are looking for is a simple sentence that gives clarity on what you want to accomplish with the project.  Going back to the John F Kennedy sentence setting the parameters of the Moon landing project when he stood before Congress and announced that the US; "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."  Twenty-six words that set NASA on a course that captivated the world. Those words were clear, contained a deadline and left no-one in doubt about what was to be achieved. Now, Kennedy was no scientist. He was a student of government and international affairs. Certainly nothing that gave him a deep knowledge of the science and engineering feats required to land and walk on the moon.  But that didn’t matter, Kennedy was the leader, not the implementer. There was a reservoir of talented, motivated scientists and engineers ready to take up the “challenge” and turn Kennedy’s project outcome into a reality.  Now, depending on the size of the project you are attempting to do, Jonathan, you may need to reach out for the skills you do not process. For instance, one of your home improvement projects could be to build a conservatory onto the side of your house. Now, unless you are a builder, you are not going to have the know-how or skills to build the conservatory—you are going to need to hire outside help. A builder and an electrician are likely to be your first requirements.  Plus, you may need to hire an architect to draw up the plans for you.  So, this means you will need to “secure the funding” for the project. Now, Kennedy assigned this part of the project to his Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, who pushed Congress for the necessary funding.  Now, if I were to undertake building an extension to the side of our house, I would need to “Secure” the funding somehow. That could come from my savings or I may need to talk to the bank for a loan. Either way, because I would need to hire experts to do the work, I would need funds, so before anything started on the project I would need to get some estimates on how much the project would likely cost.  One area where I find people waste time with project planning is to sit down and plan out the whole project step by step. In my experience, I find there’s always time to plan the next steps, but planning can and often does become the source of procrastination. There’s too many unknowns and if you really want to get the project off the ground take the first logical step.  To write a book, start writing the first draft. Don’t worry about publishers, writing applications, chapter headings or book cover designs. Until you have a first draft you are not going to have anything to work with anyway.  Similarly with your home improvement projects, you will need a budget, so get the quotes and estimates together. That will give you the right information to proceed to the next step.  With the Moon landings, NASA broke the project down into three parts. There was Mercury, where they wanted to learn what was required in order to get humans into space. Then came Gemini, where they learned all about rendezvousing with other spacecraft and doing space walks, and finally Apollo, which was the part of the project that took humans to the Moon.  Each part of the lunar landing project had its own set of objectives. Whatever project you are working on, will be the same. The first part could be to secure the funding. The second part may involve hiring the right people to do the work, and finally the construction part. Each part will have its own outcome, but ultimately, the overall project sentence will guide you.  For example, if you want to have the conservatory built by the summer, and you have three months until the summer begins, each part of your project will need to be broken down to meet that deadline. If, when you get the estimates, you are told the builders will require eight weeks to complete the work, then that leaves you with four weeks for the other parts of the project.  When we moved to the East Coast of Korea, my wife and I first sat down to decide how we were would do it. Our initial plan was to spend three months living in a guest house in the area we wanted to move to. These three months confirmed we definitely wanted to proceed with the project and we extended our stay in the guest house until the end of the year.  During that time, we began looking at properties and working on our budget. We decided on our new home in October and as it was still being built, we were given a moving in date on the 20th December. That gave us almost three months to put into action the second phase of our project—which was the interior design and furniture. And then the final part of the project was to move in.  Looking back at my original notes for that project, very little went according to that initial plan. But one thing did not change. The deadline (by the end of the year) and the move itself. The initial action was to move to the area we wanted to live in for three months and we did that within two weeks of making the decision to proceed. After that plans changed, but the outcome did not.  There’s always going to be delays, issues to resolve and changing plans. That’s to be expected. However, if you have been clear with your project sentence, and you stick to your overall deadline for the project, you will push yourself to get things moving.  And problems and issues will always arise. That’s part of life. With the moon landing project, tragedy struck on the 27th January 1967 when during a test on the new Apollo programme (the third phase) a fire broke out in the astronauts cockpit instantly killing the three astronauts. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffy were killed in the tragic accident and all manned flights were stopped, just three years before the project deadline while a full investigation took place.  NASA, continued developing the programme, as information from the tragedy came through, changes were implemented and by the time the final investigation report came through, almost all its recommendations had been implemented.  Hopefully, nothing as tragic will happen with your projects, but problems and issues will inevitably arise. While you are dealing with those issues, what could you be doing to make sure they the issue does not delay you from your final deadline?  For instance, there could be a materials shortage and there may be a two week delay to receiving some of the materials needed to build your conservatory. What could you do so that when the material is available and delivered you minimise any further delays?  And finally, you need a competitor or villain. For NASA and the United States, the villain and competitor was the Soviet Union. When NASA began the project to land on the Moon, The Soviet Union had already been the first to put a man in space and had launched the first satellite, Sputnik. NASA was still struggling to get a rocket to lift off without exploding.  The introduction of a villain or competitor brings energy to the project. Now, of course, with our personal projects it’s unlikely you will have a competitor. However, the reality is you do. The competitor is you.  The reason most of us fail with our personal projects is because of us. We are our own worst enemies. If you want to go deeper, it’s comfort that stops you from completing your projects. We naturally don’t like change and we always default to our comfort zone. But if you really want to complete these personal projects, whether they are home improvements or buying a new house, you will have to get uncomfortable.  The way I deal with this is, it to turn whatever comfort I am defaulting to into the enemy. At its simplest level that comfort could be the sofa. I never let the sofa beat me. No matter how inviting and seductive the sofa tries to be, I will still go out for a run when it’s raining. The sofa will never beat me. That’s my mindset. And it’s an easy mindset to develop. First identify the comfort, then look at it and tell it that it will never beat you. You will always win. If you find yourself procrastinating, externalise it by writing Procrastination in big words on a piece of paper and stare at it as if it was your worst enemy and tell it it will never ever beat you.  Steve Jobs invoked this strategy. First it was Microsoft and IBM, then it was Intel. With Steve, there was always an enemy to galvanise his employees. Today, Tim Cook does it with Samsung and Android.  Interestingly, because there was a clear competitor and enemy for NASA in the 1960s, their staff were highly motivated and focused on winning. They were making history and that was enough for them to succeed. NASA never needed table football tables (Fuzzball), nap pods, massage rooms or any of the other crazy benefits for their employees. Having a clear outcome, a strategy and a defined enemy was all that was needed to keep their employees focused, happy and engaged.  So there you go, Jonathan. I hope that has helped. I strongly recommend the documentary film Unsung Heroes, The Story Of Mission Control and Tom Hanks film Apollo 13. Both of these films will inspire you and give you everything you need to finally complete all those projects that you are stalling on. Thank you for your question and thank you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

How To Complete Your Personal Projects.

Carl doesn’t get bogged down in frivolous information. I enjoy the show.

Practical productivity

If you want to improve your productivity, this is the Podcast for you. Carl Does a great job of explaining how to be more productive and get more out of your day!

Great Podcast!

The Working With... Podcast

Do you need to reset? That’s the question being answered on this week’s podcast.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link Life &amp; Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019 The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Ultimate Goal Planning Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script Episode 106 Hello and welcome to episode 106 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week it’s all about stepping back and regaining control over your time and what you are working on. It’s very easy to find ourselves being caught up in day to day work that has no real impact on our overall goals or plans. To have a built-up backlog that is causing us to feel stressed out and overwhelmed. And to feel we cannot take any time out to regain control and perspective. In this week’s podcast, I share a few strategies that can help you to take that time out and to regain some control and perspective.  Now before we do that, I just want to give you a heads up that my October special offers are about to come to an end.  As we are now just about eight weeks away from the end of the year, we do not have a lot of time left to plan out what we would like to accomplish in 2020. To help you with that process I have a very special offer on my Ultimate Goal Planning course. This is a course that will focus you on what is important to you. It will help you formulate your ideas and then create a clear, easy to follow strategy to make those ideas, goals and plans come to life.  Normally this course is $59.99, but for now, until the end of this month (31st October) you can pick up this course for just $49.99. That’s an incredible investment in yourself. $50 for creating a plan that could give you many thousands of dollars in return.  And for those of you who feel you need a little extra help, my three-month coaching programme is now just $295.00. That’s a saving of 15% on the usual price. My coaching programmes give you a plan and guidance, unlimited calls, written feedback after each call with clear action steps and someone to hold you accountable to your goals, plans and intentions. $295 is incredible value for a life plan that can elevate you to areas you have only ever dreamed of going.  So get yourself signed up now before these incredible offers come down.  Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Ethan. Ethan asks: Hi Carl, I hope you can help me. I am feeling completely stressed out and overworked. I just do not feel I can get on top of my work. I have tried everything, read all the books, listened to all the podcasts and while I do get inspired sometimes, I just cannot get in control of my time or my work. Is there anything I can do that will help me to get in control and start over without taking time off work?  Thank you for your question, Ethan.  So let’s define exactly what we mean by a reset. A reset is where you stop doing what you are currently doing, step back, look at the larger landscape of what is going on in your life. Reassess your priorities and start over. It means no adding anything else to your to-do list. It means saying no to any new commitments and renegotiating existing ones.  It’s quite dramatic and is a way to interrupt a soul-destroying pattern of stress, overwhelm and a feeling you cannot keep up with the demands being thrown at you.  Because of the severity of what you are doing in a reset, a lot of people fear doing it. There’s a sense that you will be letting everyone down—your coworkers, friends and family. Of course, this is part of the problem. You’ve stopped putting yourself first and the demands of others have taken over your life. That’s one of the reasons you feel you need to stop and reset now.  It’s a horrible cycle to be stuck in and one you really do need to interrupt.  So how do you interrupt this pattern? You interrupt it by stopping. You need to get away from the daily cycle you are in and step back. You need to take a few days off and you need to get away from your daily routines. Now, for most, this is the hardest part of a reset. They believe they cannot stop and step back. They, rather selfishly, think that the world, the company they work for, their friends and family cannot exist without them. This is utter utter nonsense.  The world, your company, family and friends can survive without you and quite possibly right now they would be better off without you.  You are not going to be making your best decisions at the moment anyway. Your brain is overloaded. Stepping back and taking a few days to reevaluate your priorities, objectives and systems would be a much more effective thing to do.  You see, when you are stressed out and overwhelmed, your decision-making skills reduce. When you are not making your best decisions, you become a burden on your team. That’s not helping your team.  Stepping back, regaining control of your work, your priorities and your system is helping your team because it means when you do step back in, you step back with a clear mind, a fresh perspective and a lot more energy.  So how do you do a reset?  First stop. Stop everything and take some time away. That means you talk to your boss, colleagues, customers and clients and step away. You have to move away from the cause of the overwhelm and that means you have to step away from your work.  This is where it is often best to go find yourself a quiet coffee shop or cafe and sit down with a piece of paper. And yes, I said a piece of paper. Technology is likely to be the cause of some of the stress and overwhelm and you want to remove all these sources. It also means you have no excuse for having your messages and emails and other electronic communication means open. For now, you have a block on new inputs. So turn off all those electronic devices and just sit down with a pen and piece of paper and begin writing down everything on your mind.  Do not worry about categorising anything at this stage. You just need to get everything off your mind. Project work, commitments that are bothering you, problems and issues. Anything. Just write them all down as they come to mind.  This process can take a couple of hours, it often takes longer. Just keep going until you feel you have squeezed out everything that has been bothering you for the last few months or weeks.  Once you have done that. Fold the paper away and go for a walk in nature. Get a bus or drive to a park or the countryside and just go out and enjoy nature. Get away from concrete, screens, commuter noise and just get into nature. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, we have the amazing beauty of autumn and those incredible colours. Enjoy them. For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, you have fantastic spring and the warming temperatures. Just get outside and enjoy your surroundings.  Take in some deep breathes and enjoy the freedom.  Take as long as you want. One or two days is a good length of time for this.  When you feel ready, when you feel relaxed then you can open up the piece of paper again and start to go through it deciding what is important and what is not.  What you will find is a lot of the stuff on that list is not really all that important. Most of it can be delegated to other people, some of it would only require a two to three-minute phone call and others could be dropped completely.  The remaining stuff on your list then needs to be categorised into what needs dealing with first and so on. You cannot do it all at once—trying to do that is what put you into a stressed out, overwhelmed situation in the first place. Use your calendar to assign days to the work you want to do (keyword there… “want’ to do) and make sure you build in enough flexibility to handle new stuff coming in. Now for the biggest challenge. Email. If you follow this advice, you will have accumulated quite an email backlog. The best advice I can give you here is do a soft email bankruptcy. That means you select all the email in your inbox and move it to a new folder called “Old Inbox”. You want to start back with a clear inbox and no backlog.  Now the thing with doing a soft email bankruptcy is that 95% of the email in your inbox will not be all that important. If it is important, the sender will send it again or will chase you for a response. So, stop worrying. There will be a trigger.  The final part of this exercise is to consider why you found yourself in this situation in the first place. What was the cause? Now, I know it is easy to say that it was the amount of work being thrown at you. You have to understand that many people have a lot of work to do but manage to stay on top of things. Usually, we find ourselves stressed out because we don’t prioritise well or we say yes too easily. These are the underlying problems. Not the amount of work we have to do. Look for the underlying problems and take action to eliminate them.  Okay, I know it is hard to take some time out and stop. It’s particularly hard if you are a business owner, a leader, a parent or responsible for sales. But you also have to understand if you are not performing well within your role or roles then you may as well not be there at all. You have become part of the problem and not helping things. Step back, reassess, and come back refreshed and energised. Deal with the backlog and return to a clean slate. That is when you will start making better decisions and your performance in all areas will improve.  I hope that has helped, Ethan and good luck. Take some time out my friend.  Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week. 

Do you need to reset? That’s the question being answered on this week’s podcast.  Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> <a href="https://www.skillshare.com/r/user/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link</a> <a href="https://lifesuccessengineer.mykajabi.com/life-time-mastery-event" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Life &amp; Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/the-ultimate-goal-planning-course" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Ultimate Goal Planning Course</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/getting-started-with-todoist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Script Episode 106 Hello and welcome to episode 106 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week it’s all about stepping back and regaining control over your time and what you are working on. It’s very easy to find ourselves being caught up in day to day work that has no real impact on our overall goals or plans. To have a built-up backlog that is causing us to feel stressed out and overwhelmed. And to feel we cannot take any time out to regain control and perspective. In this week’s podcast, I share a few strategies that can help you to take that time out and to regain some control and perspective.  Now before we do that, I just want to give you a heads up that my October special offers are about to come to an end.  As we are now just about eight weeks away from the end of the year, we do not have a lot of time left to plan out what we would like to accomplish in 2020. To help you with that process I have a very special offer on my Ultimate Goal Planning course. This is a course that will focus you on what is important to you. It will help you formulate your ideas and then create a clear, easy to follow strategy to make those ideas, goals and plans come to life.  Normally this course is $59.99, but for now, until the end of this month (31st October) you can pick up this course for just $49.99. That’s an incredible investment in yourself. $50 for creating a plan that could give you many thousands of dollars in return.  And for those of you who feel you need a little extra help, my three-month coaching programme is now just $295.00. That’s a saving of 15% on the usual price. My coaching programmes give you a plan and guidance, unlimited calls, written feedback after each call with clear action steps and someone to hold you accountable to your goals, plans and intentions. $295 is incredible value for a life plan that can elevate you to areas you have only ever dreamed of going.  So get yourself signed up now before these incredible offers come down.  Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Ethan. Ethan asks: Hi Carl, I hope you can help me. I am feeling completely stressed out and overworked. I just do not feel I can get on top of my work. I have tried everything, read all the books, listened to all the podcasts and while I do get inspired sometimes, I just cannot get in control of my time or my work. Is there anything I can do that will help me to get in control and start over without taking time off work?  Thank you for your question, Ethan.  So let’s define exactly what we mean by a reset. A reset is where you stop doing what you are currently doing, step back, look at the larger landscape of what is going on in your life. Reassess your priorities and start over. It means no adding anything else to your to-do list. It means saying no to any new commitments and renegotiating existing ones.  It’s quite dramatic and is a way to interrupt a soul-destroying pattern of stress, overwhelm and a feeling you cannot keep up with the demands being thrown at you.  Because of the severity of what you are doing in a reset, a lot of people fear doing it. There’s a sense that you will be letting everyone down—your coworkers, friends and family. Of course, this is part of the problem. You’ve stopped putting yourself first and the demands of others have taken over your life. That’s one of the reasons you feel you need to stop and reset now.  It’s a horrible cycle to be stuck in and one you really do need to interrupt.  So how do you interrupt this pattern? You interrupt it by stopping. You need to get away from the daily cycle you are in and step back. You need to take a few days off and you need to get away from your daily routines. Now, for most, this is the hardest part of a reset. They believe they cannot stop and step back. They, rather selfishly, think that the world, the company they work for, their friends and family cannot exist without them. This is utter utter nonsense.  The world, your company, family and friends can survive without you and quite possibly right now they would be better off without you.  You are not going to be making your best decisions at the moment anyway. Your brain is overloaded. Stepping back and taking a few days to reevaluate your priorities, objectives and systems would be a much more effective thing to do.  You see, when you are stressed out and overwhelmed, your decision-making skills reduce. When you are not making your best decisions, you become a burden on your team. That’s not helping your team.  Stepping back, regaining control of your work, your priorities and your system is helping your team because it means when you do step back in, you step back with a clear mind, a fresh perspective and a lot more energy.  So how do you do a reset?  First stop. Stop everything and take some time away. That means you talk to your boss, colleagues, customers and clients and step away. You have to move away from the cause of the overwhelm and that means you have to step away from your work.  This is where it is often best to go find yourself a quiet coffee shop or cafe and sit down with a piece of paper. And yes, I said a piece of paper. Technology is likely to be the cause of some of the stress and overwhelm and you want to remove all these sources. It also means you have no excuse for having your messages and emails and other electronic communication means open. For now, you have a block on new inputs. So turn off all those electronic devices and just sit down with a pen and piece of paper and begin writing down everything on your mind.  Do not worry about categorising anything at this stage. You just need to get everything off your mind. Project work, commitments that are bothering you, problems and issues. Anything. Just write them all down as they come to mind.  This process can take a couple of hours, it often takes longer. Just keep going until you feel you have squeezed out everything that has been bothering you for the last few months or weeks.  Once you have done that. Fold the paper away and go for a walk in nature. Get a bus or drive to a park or the countryside and just go out and enjoy nature. Get away from concrete, screens, commuter noise and just get into nature. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, we have the amazing beauty of autumn and those incredible colours. Enjoy them. For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, you have fantastic spring and the warming temperatures. Just get outside and enjoy your surroundings.  Take in some deep breathes and enjoy the freedom.  Take as long as you want. One or two days is a good length of time for this.  When you feel ready, when you feel relaxed then you can open up the piece of paper again and start to go through it deciding what is important and what is not.  What you will find is a lot of the stuff on that list is not really all that important. Most of it can be delegated to other people, some of it would only require a two to three-minute phone call and others could be dropped completely.  The remaining stuff on your list then needs to be categorised into what needs dealing with first and so on. You cannot do it all at once—trying to do that is what put you into a stressed out, overwhelmed situation in the first place. Use your calendar to assign days to the work you want to do (keyword there… “want’ to do) and make sure you build in enough flexibility to handle new stuff coming in. Now for the biggest challenge. Email. If you follow this advice, you will have accumulated quite an email backlog. The best advice I can give you here is do a soft email bankruptcy. That means you select all the email in your inbox and move it to a new folder called “Old Inbox”. You want to start back with a clear inbox and no backlog.  Now the thing with doing a soft email bankruptcy is that 95% of the email in your inbox will not be all that important. If it is important, the sender will send it again or will chase you for a response. So, stop worrying. There will be a trigger.  The final part of this exercise is to consider why you found yourself in this situation in the first place. What was the cause? Now, I know it is easy to say that it was the amount of work being thrown at you. You have to understand that many people have a lot of work to do but manage to stay on top of things. Usually, we find ourselves stressed out because we don’t prioritise well or we say yes too easily. These are the underlying problems. Not the amount of work we have to do. Look for the underlying problems and take action to eliminate them.  Okay, I know it is hard to take some time out and stop. It’s particularly hard if you are a business owner, a leader, a parent or responsible for sales. But you also have to understand if you are not performing well within your role or roles then you may as well not be there at all. You have become part of the problem and not helping things. Step back, reassess, and come back refreshed and energised. Deal with the backlog and return to a clean slate. That is when you will start making better decisions and your performance in all areas will improve.  I hope that has helped, Ethan and good luck. Take some time out my friend.  Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.

How To Do A Complete Reset To Get Back In Control Of Your Time.

This week’s question is all about using your calendar and how and why your calendar is your number one productivity tool   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website Carl’s YouTube Channel Link Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link Life &amp; Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019 The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page ----more---- Script Episode 109 Hello and welcome to episode 109 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Before we get to the question, I’d like to let you know that if you are in the Apple ecosystem, I am currently running a special series of videos on my YouTube channel showing how to get the most out of Apple’s productivity apps as well as iCloud.  And if you want to learn how to build your very own productivity system using only Apple’s suite of apps, then I have updated my Create Your Own Apple Productivity System course which will show you how to build a system designed for you and the unique way in which you work.  Details of all these are in the show notes. Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. This weeks question comes from Tiago. Tiago asks: Hi Carl, I work on customer service and sometimes is difficult to lead with interruptions and emergencies from clients, colleagues and my boss. Do you have some tips for using my calendar appropriately to do my tasks and projects to get more work done? Thank you, Tiago for your question. Now, this is something I believe strongly about - that is your most important productivity tool is not your to-do list, notes app or any other app. It’s the plain simple calendar. That’s because your calendar is the one app that tells you the truth about how much time you have each day. Your to-do list does not do that. Your to-do list is a list of tasks you need to complete.  More often than not, most people overestimate what they are capable of each day and find they have to reschedule tasks every day. The irony is when they do that a lot of people give up with to-do lists believing it’s the to-do lists fault not realising it is they who put tasks into a to-do list and a simple fix for constantly having to reschedule tasks is to not put so many tasks into the list in the first place. Basically get realistic.  Okay, so let's get back to the calendar. Why is it the most powerful productivity tool for you? Well, firstly it shows you only the time you have available each day. Those precious 24 hours. You cannot change that and you cannot change the need for sleep, food and water. Those are the non-negotiables of life. You can try and squeeze time out of your sleep and eating time if you want, but you would only be damaging your health and well-being and it would unlikely lead to any improvement in the amount of quality of work you get done anyway.  Okay, so how do you use your calendar to maximise your productivity? First up begin with the weekly review. This is where you can take a long-view of your calendar and see what time you have available in the week. Let’s say, for example, you have a training day on Wednesday and on Friday you are out of the office on a site visit. This means you have lost two ‘normal’ working days. So those two days are scheduled off and you would be wise not to add anything extra in those days.  This leaves you with three normal office workdays. Now, you may have a number of meetings to attend on some of those days, a conference call or two and various other non-negotiables. These all get put on your calendar first. They are, after all, non-negotiable.  Once you have all your non-negotiables on your calendar you can see how much time you have left. You can see the gaps. That’s what you have to do your regular tasks and project work.  Now if you are like most people you are going to discover you are looking at one to three hours each working day—not much more than that. You’ve probably felt you had eight hours. No, you don't, not when you take into account your daily meetings and other commitments.  This is why using your calendar as your foundational productivity tool makes sense. Your task list is just that—a list of tasks all with different time requirements. Looking at your to-do list is not going to tell you how much time you need for each task. Even if you label tasks with time estimates, they are only estimates. And while you can really only estimate how long something will take on your calendar at least when you do add something to your calendar you are blocking the time out to do that task. If that takes longer than the time you allocated you can allocate additional time later.  Review all your projects and areas of focus so you know what you need to work on next week. Make sure your meetings and commitments are on there first including your travel times (it’s amazing how many forget that part) then schedule out your project work.  Don’t be too specific here. Let’s say you have a ninety-minute block on Tuesday morning. All you need to do is write in “Work on project X”, then when Tuesday morning comes along you see that on your calendar and you can open your to-do list at that project and begin work.  Now, It does depend on what kind of work you do how you do this. If you’re a writer perhaps you could just write in “Writing time” and when you do your daily planning the night before you decide what you will write the next day. The key is to be general and not specific. You want to build flexibility into your calendar where possible. Just because you have control of your calendar does not mean emergencies and crises will not happen.  Once you have your work into your calendar next up take a look at your personal life. What are your plans for the evenings and weekends? Now here’s a very powerful trick if you are struggling to find time for exercise each week. Schedule your exercise time on your calendar. I see a lot of people scheduling exercise on their to-do lists and this does not work.  It doesn’t work because a lot of what we put on our to-do lists are ‘hope to do’ tasks and so at the end of the day, when you’ve been hit with the realities of the world, it’s likely you are not going to feel much like doing exercise. When it’s on a to-do list it’s too easy to ignore it and find excuses like “I don’t have time”. When it’s on your calendar you see it when you plan your day and you are mentally prepared to do it at the time to you have assigned and of course, you cannot use the excuse “I don’t have time”.  Okay, so now you have your calendar organised at a weekly level. This is like the big-picture view of your week. Now you need a daily review. This is where you spend ten to twenty minutes before you finish your day to process the work you have collected through the day - organise it where it needs to go - and look at your calendar to see what the day looks like for tomorrow. Often meetings that were scheduled have been cancelled, or you have new meetings to attend. A lot can change throughout the week that will knock your initial plans off. That’s okay. That’s just life.  This is why the daily review is important. Look at your calendar, decide what you have to do tomorrow and make sure you have a block of time to get your important project work done. Now whether you are in customer service or any other kind of work, you still need to find blocks of time to do your focused work. Thirty minutes, if that’s all you have, is better than nothing.  You will find even at a daily level you will have to move a few tasks around. That’s perfectly fine. You need not worry. As long as you are doing your daily review you will always be on top of what you have to do because you are making daily decisions about what you want to work on.  So, a daily review means you review your calendar for events you have planned for tomorrow. You review your to-do list for the tasks you have assigned for tomorrow and based on the amount of time you have available for tasks tomorrow you can reschedule your tasks or add tasks accordingly.  Remember, you only have twenty-four hours each day. That’s why your calendar is the most important tool it shows you how to fit everything you have to do into those twenty-four hours.  It also stops you from procrastinating. If you see you have thirty minutes between 9 AM and 9:30 AM to do some focused work and you waste that time thinking about what to do, you will know you have just wasted thirty minutes. This is why planning what you want to do the day before is so important. It prevents you from procrastinating and it stops you from wasting valuable time. You start the day knowing exactly how much time you have and what you want to get accomplished in that time. You don’t have time to procrastinate and you will see you don’t have any time to waste.  Finally, I would always suggest you schedule R&amp;R time (rest and relaxation) It’s very easy to get caught up in work, to over schedule work on your calendar. I’ve done this a lot and it is not pleasant. Block time off for rest. You do not need to micro-manage your rest time. All you need is a block that just says “rest” or “R&amp;R”. Then you decide in the moment what you want to do with that time. For me, Friday evenings between 6:00 pm and 10 pm are always blocked for R&amp;R, so is Sunday evenings too… Generally.  And that really all there is to it. Make sure you schedule you big-picture stuff on a weekly level when you do your weekly review and then do a quick daily update when you do your daily review—and that’s only ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day—to make sure you are taking in to account any changes to your priorities that may come in on a daily basis.  I hope that has helped a little, Tiago. Thank you for your question. And thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast just send your question in via email - carl@carlpullein.com - or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s question is all about using your calendar and how and why your calendar is your number one productivity tool Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD?sub_confirmation=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl’s YouTube Channel Link</a> <a href="https://www.skillshare.com/r/user/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link</a> <a href="https://lifesuccessengineer.mykajabi.com/life-time-mastery-event" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Life &amp; Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/create-your-own-apple-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> ----more---- Script Episode 109 Hello and welcome to episode 109 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Before we get to the question, I’d like to let you know that if you are in the Apple ecosystem, I am currently running a special series of videos on my YouTube channel showing how to get the most out of Apple’s productivity apps as well as iCloud.  And if you want to learn how to build your very own productivity system using only Apple’s suite of apps, then I have updated my Create Your Own Apple Productivity System course which will show you how to build a system designed for you and the unique way in which you work.  Details of all these are in the show notes. Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. This weeks question comes from Tiago. Tiago asks: Hi Carl, I work on customer service and sometimes is difficult to lead with interruptions and emergencies from clients, colleagues and my boss. Do you have some tips for using my calendar appropriately to do my tasks and projects to get more work done? Thank you, Tiago for your question. Now, this is something I believe strongly about - that is your most important productivity tool is not your to-do list, notes app or any other app. It’s the plain simple calendar. That’s because your calendar is the one app that tells you the truth about how much time you have each day. Your to-do list does not do that. Your to-do list is a list of tasks you need to complete.  More often than not, most people overestimate what they are capable of each day and find they have to reschedule tasks every day. The irony is when they do that a lot of people give up with to-do lists believing it’s the to-do lists fault not realising it is they who put tasks into a to-do list and a simple fix for constantly having to reschedule tasks is to not put so many tasks into the list in the first place. Basically get realistic.  Okay, so let's get back to the calendar. Why is it the most powerful productivity tool for you? Well, firstly it shows you only the time you have available each day. Those precious 24 hours. You cannot change that and you cannot change the need for sleep, food and water. Those are the non-negotiables of life. You can try and squeeze time out of your sleep and eating time if you want, but you would only be damaging your health and well-being and it would unlikely lead to any improvement in the amount of quality of work you get done anyway.  Okay, so how do you use your calendar to maximise your productivity? First up begin with the weekly review. This is where you can take a long-view of your calendar and see what time you have available in the week. Let’s say, for example, you have a training day on Wednesday and on Friday you are out of the office on a site visit. This means you have lost two ‘normal’ working days. So those two days are scheduled off and you would be wise not to add anything extra in those days.  This leaves you with three normal office workdays. Now, you may have a number of meetings to attend on some of those days, a conference call or two and various other non-negotiables. These all get put on your calendar first. They are, after all, non-negotiable.  Once you have all your non-negotiables on your calendar you can see how much time you have left. You can see the gaps. That’s what you have to do your regular tasks and project work.  Now if you are like most people you are going to discover you are looking at one to three hours each working day—not much more than that. You’ve probably felt you had eight hours. No, you don't, not when you take into account your daily meetings and other commitments.  This is why using your calendar as your foundational productivity tool makes sense. Your task list is just that—a list of tasks all with different time requirements. Looking at your to-do list is not going to tell you how much time you need for each task. Even if you label tasks with time estimates, they are only estimates. And while you can really only estimate how long something will take on your calendar at least when you do add something to your calendar you are blocking the time out to do that task. If that takes longer than the time you allocated you can allocate additional time later.  Review all your projects and areas of focus so you know what you need to work on next week. Make sure your meetings and commitments are on there first including your travel times (it’s amazing how many forget that part) then schedule out your project work.  Don’t be too specific here. Let’s say you have a ninety-minute block on Tuesday morning. All you need to do is write in “Work on project X”, then when Tuesday morning comes along you see that on your calendar and you can open your to-do list at that project and begin work.  Now, It does depend on what kind of work you do how you do this. If you’re a writer perhaps you could just write in “Writing time” and when you do your daily planning the night before you decide what you will write the next day. The key is to be general and not specific. You want to build flexibility into your calendar where possible. Just because you have control of your calendar does not mean emergencies and crises will not happen.  Once you have your work into your calendar next up take a look at your personal life. What are your plans for the evenings and weekends? Now here’s a very powerful trick if you are struggling to find time for exercise each week. Schedule your exercise time on your calendar. I see a lot of people scheduling exercise on their to-do lists and this does not work.  It doesn’t work because a lot of what we put on our to-do lists are ‘hope to do’ tasks and so at the end of the day, when you’ve been hit with the realities of the world, it’s likely you are not going to feel much like doing exercise. When it’s on a to-do list it’s too easy to ignore it and find excuses like “I don’t have time”. When it’s on your calendar you see it when you plan your day and you are mentally prepared to do it at the time to you have assigned and of course, you cannot use the excuse “I don’t have time”.  Okay, so now you have your calendar organised at a weekly level. This is like the big-picture view of your week. Now you need a daily review. This is where you spend ten to twenty minutes before you finish your day to process the work you have collected through the day - organise it where it needs to go - and look at your calendar to see what the day looks like for tomorrow. Often meetings that were scheduled have been cancelled, or you have new meetings to attend. A lot can change throughout the week that will knock your initial plans off. That’s okay. That’s just life.  This is why the daily review is important. Look at your calendar, decide what you have to do tomorrow and make sure you have a block of time to get your important project work done. Now whether you are in customer service or any other kind of work, you still need to find blocks of time to do your focused work. Thirty minutes, if that’s all you have, is better than nothing.  You will find even at a daily level you will have to move a few tasks around. That’s perfectly fine. You need not worry. As long as you are doing your daily review you will always be on top of what you have to do because you are making daily decisions about what you want to work on.  So, a daily review means you review your calendar for events you have planned for tomorrow. You review your to-do list for the tasks you have assigned for tomorrow and based on the amount of time you have available for tasks tomorrow you can reschedule your tasks or add tasks accordingly.  Remember, you only have twenty-four hours each day. That’s why your calendar is the most important tool it shows you how to fit everything you have to do into those twenty-four hours.  It also stops you from procrastinating. If you see you have thirty minutes between 9 AM and 9:30 AM to do some focused work and you waste that time thinking about what to do, you will know you have just wasted thirty minutes. This is why planning what you want to do the day before is so important. It prevents you from procrastinating and it stops you from wasting valuable time. You start the day knowing exactly how much time you have and what you want to get accomplished in that time. You don’t have time to procrastinate and you will see you don’t have any time to waste.  Finally, I would always suggest you schedule R&amp;R time (rest and relaxation) It’s very easy to get caught up in work, to over schedule work on your calendar. I’ve done this a lot and it is not pleasant. Block time off for rest. You do not need to micro-manage your rest time. All you need is a block that just says “rest” or “R&amp;R”. Then you decide in the moment what you want to do with that time. For me, Friday evenings between 6:00 pm and 10 pm are always blocked for R&amp;R, so is Sunday evenings too… Generally.  And that really all there is to it. Make sure you schedule you big-picture stuff on a weekly level when you do your weekly review and then do a quick daily update when you do your daily review—and that’s only ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day—to make sure you are taking in to account any changes to your priorities that may come in on a daily basis.  I hope that has helped a little, Tiago. Thank you for your question. And thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast just send your question in via email - carl@carlpullein.com - or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

How To Use Your Calendar To Maximise Your Productivity

This week’s podcast is an end of year special. So sit back and let me see if I can teach you some productivity and time management wisdom.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website Life &amp; Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019 6 Common Sense Time Management And Productivity Tips Anyone Can Use. The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script Episode 113 Hello and welcome to episode 113 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 is the final episode of this year. The Working With Podcast is taking its annual break and will be back on 6th January.  As a treat for the final episode of 2019 this week it’s all about productivity tips and tricks. All these tips I am going to share with you work. They are tried and tested and if you adapt them for your own way of life and ways of doing things you will see significant gains to your overall time management and productivity. The important thing is you adapt them.  They are simple and logical but are not easy to implement. But I can promise if you do implement them you will improve.... a lot.  Now before we get to this week’s question, don't forget if you are in the UK, you have the opportunity to join Kevin Blackburn and me in Scunthorpe for a day of planning, motivation and massive massive action.  Saturday 28th December. Perfectly positioned between Christmas and the start of the new year. Will you join us? I cannot think of a better way to start the 2020s than making a commitment in front of likeminded people.  Tickets are limited so get yours now. Ticket details are available in the show notes and from my website - Carl Pullein.com  Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question is from many people. They have all asked if you could share some of your favourite tips and tricks to become better organised and more productive. Thank you to Richard, Sophie, Stephan, Alex, Duncan, and many more for asking this question.  Yes, thank you, guys. Now I am going to share with you six tips I shared in a recent blog post called - 6 Common Sense Time Management And Productivity Tips Anyone Can Use. Hopefully, some of these will resonate with you. If you want to read the article, I will put a link in the show notes for you.  The digital revolution has caused the demand on our time to grow incredibly over the last twenty years or so. —where once if we were not in our home or place of work our friends and colleagues could not reach us, now no matter where we are in the world (or universe!) we can be reached with the simple press of a button.  Now, with that 24/7 access and all the wonderful things we can now do for entertainment and education, we find ourselves having difficulty finding time to do the most basic of things. Having breakfast or dinner with our family, spend an hour or so reading a book or go for a Sunday afternoon walk with our partner or friends.  Because we are expected to be more accessible than we have ever been, leaving our mobile phone at home while we go out for a run or take a walk with our loved ones would be uncomfortable. Now, this is the way we lived just twenty to thirty years ago and we had no problems or issues. I would not go as far as to say we were more relaxed back then, I would say we enjoyed more of the time we had with the people we cared about because it was just them and us. There was no mobile phone or other electronic device beeping and buzzing for our attention. So, to help us get some out time back so we can focus on the things we want to focus on, here are six tips and tricks anyone can use that will help you to regain more of your time so you can spend it doing the things you want to with the people you want to be with.  Use your calendar It does surprise me how many people are not using their calendars to manage their time each day. Your calendar shows you how much time you have each day and you see where you have gaps to do the things you love doing. Exercise, spending time with the people you care about, reading a book or taking a walk in the park. All these things can be scheduled on your calendar so when you receive a demand for your time you can make a decision based on whether the new demand for your time will be more important or fulfilling than the original one.  Seriously, use your calendar to schedule your work and play. It will help you to get a better grasp on where you are spending your time and will help you to better allocate your time resource.  Get better at saying no This is hard. It’s the one that most people struggle with because we are wired to please people. Saying “no” to someone feels like we are letting them down and they will think badly of us. The truth is, if you say “yes” to a time demand and then you do not give your full commitment to it, you will let that person down a lot more than if you had said “no” in the first place.  You don’t have to be impolite when saying “no”, you can do it gently. Developing a few strategies though that make it easier for you to say no to demands will ease your time pressures and put you in more control of what you do each day.  My trick is to not commit immediately to a time demand. I always ask for time to review my calendar. Of course, I could check my calendar from my phone, but the truth is I want to see the full week in context before I commit to anything new. Once checked, I can then accept or decline the invitation with honesty.  Spend a few minutes at the end of the day planning the next day This one is huge. All you need is ten minutes at the end of the day to write out a few things you want to get done the next day. My Golden Ten method is designed to put you in control of your work. It’s just ten tasks per day that you want to want to focus on. These ten tasks do not include your regular routines, but they are the ten tasks you really want to complete and doing so would move your projects and goals forward.  Now It does not matter where you do this. You can have an elaborate to-do list manager, you could use your calendar or just a simple piece of paper. All that matters is you make a plan for the things you want to do tomorrow.  What this does is help you to stay focused on what is important to you. It also gives your mind a chance to prepare. When you begin the day with a purpose and a plan, you are more likely to get those things done than if you just turn up at work and allow your email to tell you what needs doing next.  Here’s a bonus tip: Before you start the day, take a look at the list you made the day before and review it. Visualise yourself completing the list. This helps you to stay focused on what you have decided is important for the day. You can make this a part of your morning routine. It’s a fantastic way to get ‘primed’ for the day.  Stop overcommitting yourself Okay, truth time…. You do not have to do everything all at once. One of the reasons so many people feel stressed out and overwhelmed is because they are trying to complete all their projects in one go. Stop this madness.  Firstly, you are never going to be able to do everything all at once anyway so stop trying and secondly, when you take that kind of pressure off yourself you get a lot more work done because you can focus on a few key parts that will move your projects further faster. It’s the old saying… “less is more”. It’s true. Try doing less each day and watch your productivity grow.  Identify the things that will have the biggest impact on your work  Far too often we spend our time doing trivial tasks that do not have a significant impact on our work but make us feel busy. Let me give you an example of this. Checking email is incredibly inefficient. Doing email is more productive. What’s the difference? Checking email is going through your inbox looking for important emails and ignoring the less important emails. Doing email is starting at the top of your inbox and dealing with each email as you go through it.  Checking email leaves you with email still in your inbox that you will have to look at again later anyway. Doing email leaves you with an empty inbox and a list of emails that need action that you will do when you have time later.  With practice, you soon learn to distinguish what tasks have the biggest impact on moving projects forward. While planning is important, spending too much time planning and thinking does not move projects forward. Action does. Making the phone call you have been putting off, sitting down and writing the report or preparing the slides for the presentation you have to do next week. Those tasks get things done. Thinking about them does not. Never confuse thinking about and planning as doing. It is not. Thinking and planning does not move things forward only doing does that.  Of course, there is a time for planning and thinking, but that should never be used as an excuse for not taking action.   And finally, take a break! We are not machines. We cannot work at a consistent level all day. We will go through peaks and troughs. For most people, they can stay focused and creative longer in the morning. After lunch, it becomes harder to focus and pushing yourself through to try and finish a report is wasting time and again rather inefficient.  Instead, learn when you are at your most focused—for most people that will be in the morning, for some, that could be in the evening—then use your calendar to schedule the work that requires the most focus and concentration at the times you are at your best.  Make sure every ninety-minutes or so, take a ten-minute break. Get up, move around. Try to get some fresh air and a different view. Staring at a screen all day will sap your creative juices quicker than anything else. Taking a break and getting outside will rejuvenate you. If like me you work from home, you can schedule dog walking or exercise time in the middle of the day. I find that’s a great way to break up the day and helps me t get a tremendous amount done each day.  So there you go, six common-sense tips and tricks to help you become more productive with your time so you can spend more of your time doing the things you want to do and that have the biggest impact on your work and your wellbeing.  Thank you to all of you for listening this year and a big thank you to all of you who have sent in questions. This podcast is built on your questions so please keep them coming in. If you have a question, just email it to carl@carlpullein.com.  Have a wonderful end of year break and happy new year. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week’s podcast is an end of year special. So sit back and let me see if I can teach you some productivity and time management wisdom.  Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> <a href="https://lifesuccessengineer.mykajabi.com/life-time-mastery-event" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Life &amp; Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019</a> <a href="https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/6-common-sense-time-management-and-productivity-tips-anyone-can-use/27/11/2019" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">6 Common Sense Time Management And Productivity Tips Anyone Can Use.</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/create-your-own-apple-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Script Episode 113 Hello and welcome to episode 113 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 is the final episode of this year. The Working With Podcast is taking its annual break and will be back on 6th January.  As a treat for the final episode of 2019 this week it’s all about productivity tips and tricks. All these tips I am going to share with you work. They are tried and tested and if you adapt them for your own way of life and ways of doing things you will see significant gains to your overall time management and productivity. The important thing is you adapt them.  They are simple and logical but are not easy to implement. But I can promise if you do implement them you will improve.... a lot.  Now before we get to this week’s question, don't forget if you are in the UK, you have the opportunity to join Kevin Blackburn and me in Scunthorpe for a day of planning, motivation and massive massive action.  Saturday 28th December. Perfectly positioned between Christmas and the start of the new year. Will you join us? I cannot think of a better way to start the 2020s than making a commitment in front of likeminded people.  Tickets are limited so get yours now. Ticket details are available in the show notes and from my website - Carl <a href="http://Pullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pullein.com</a> Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question is from many people. They have all asked if you could share some of your favourite tips and tricks to become better organised and more productive. Thank you to Richard, Sophie, Stephan, Alex, Duncan, and many more for asking this question.  Yes, thank you, guys. Now I am going to share with you six tips I shared in a recent blog post called - 6 Common Sense Time Management And Productivity Tips Anyone Can Use. Hopefully, some of these will resonate with you. If you want to read the article, I will put a link in the show notes for you.  The digital revolution has caused the demand on our time to grow incredibly over the last twenty years or so. —where once if we were not in our home or place of work our friends and colleagues could not reach us, now no matter where we are in the world (or universe!) we can be reached with the simple press of a button.  Now, with that 24/7 access and all the wonderful things we can now do for entertainment and education, we find ourselves having difficulty finding time to do the most basic of things. Having breakfast or dinner with our family, spend an hour or so reading a book or go for a Sunday afternoon walk with our partner or friends.  Because we are expected to be more accessible than we have ever been, leaving our mobile phone at home while we go out for a run or take a walk with our loved ones would be uncomfortable. Now, this is the way we lived just twenty to thirty years ago and we had no problems or issues. I would not go as far as to say we were more relaxed back then, I would say we enjoyed more of the time we had with the people we cared about because it was just them and us. There was no mobile phone or other electronic device beeping and buzzing for our attention. So, to help us get some out time back so we can focus on the things we want to focus on, here are six tips and tricks anyone can use that will help you to regain more of your time so you can spend it doing the things you want to with the people you want to be with.  Use your calendar It does surprise me how many people are not using their calendars to manage their time each day. Your calendar shows you how much time you have each day and you see where you have gaps to do the things you love doing. Exercise, spending time with the people you care about, reading a book or taking a walk in the park. All these things can be scheduled on your calendar so when you receive a demand for your time you can make a decision based on whether the new demand for your time will be more important or fulfilling than the original one.  Seriously, use your calendar to schedule your work and play. It will help you to get a better grasp on where you are spending your time and will help you to better allocate your time resource.  Get better at saying no This is hard. It’s the one that most people struggle with because we are wired to please people. Saying “no” to someone feels like we are letting them down and they will think badly of us. The truth is, if you say “yes” to a time demand and then you do not give your full commitment to it, you will let that person down a lot more than if you had said “no” in the first place.  You don’t have to be impolite when saying “no”, you can do it gently. Developing a few strategies though that make it easier for you to say no to demands will ease your time pressures and put you in more control of what you do each day.  My trick is to not commit immediately to a time demand. I always ask for time to review my calendar. Of course, I could check my calendar from my phone, but the truth is I want to see the full week in context before I commit to anything new. Once checked, I can then accept or decline the invitation with honesty.  Spend a few minutes at the end of the day planning the next day This one is huge. <a href="https://youtu.be/StMGsath46M" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">All you need is ten minutes </a>at the end of the day to write out a few things you want to get done the next day. My Golden Ten method is designed to put you in control of your work. It’s just ten tasks per day that you want to want to focus on. These ten tasks do not include your regular routines, but they are the ten tasks you really want to complete and doing so would move your projects and goals forward.  Now It does not matter where you do this. You can have an elaborate to-do list manager, you could use your calendar or just a simple piece of paper. All that matters is you make a plan for the things you want to do tomorrow.  What this does is help you to stay focused on what is important to you. It also gives your mind a chance to prepare. When you begin the day with a purpose and a plan, you are more likely to get those things done than if you just turn up at work and allow your email to tell you what needs doing next.  Here’s a bonus tip: Before you start the day, take a look at the list you made the day before and review it. Visualise yourself completing the list. This helps you to stay focused on what you have decided is important for the day. You can make this a part of your morning routine. It’s a fantastic way to get ‘primed’ for the day.  Stop overcommitting yourself Okay, truth time…. You do not have to do everything all at once. One of the reasons so many people feel stressed out and overwhelmed is because they are trying to complete all their projects in one go. Stop this madness.  Firstly, you are never going to be able to do everything all at once anyway so stop trying and secondly, when you take that kind of pressure off yourself you get a lot more work done because you can focus on a few key parts that will move your projects further faster. It’s the old saying… “less is more”. It’s true. Try doing less each day and watch your productivity grow.  Identify the things that will have the biggest impact on your work  Far too often we spend our time doing trivial tasks that do not have a significant impact on our work but make us feel busy. Let me give you an example of this. Checking email is incredibly inefficient. Doing email is more productive. What’s the difference? Checking email is going through your inbox looking for important emails and ignoring the less important emails. Doing email is starting at the top of your inbox and dealing with each email as you go through it.  Checking email leaves you with email still in your inbox that you will have to look at again later anyway. Doing email leaves you with an empty inbox and a list of emails that need action that you will do when you have time later.  With practice, you soon learn to distinguish what tasks have the biggest impact on moving projects forward. While planning is important, spending too much time planning and thinking does not move projects forward. Action does. Making the phone call you have been putting off, sitting down and writing the report or preparing the slides for the presentation you have to do next week. Those tasks get things done. Thinking about them does not. Never confuse thinking about and planning as doing. It is not. Thinking and planning does not move things forward only doing does that.  Of course, there is a time for planning and thinking, but that should never be used as an excuse for not taking action.   And finally, take a break! We are not machines. We cannot work at a consistent level all day. We will go through peaks and troughs. For most people, they can stay focused and creative longer in the morning. After lunch, it becomes harder to focus and pushing yourself through to try and finish a report is wasting time and again rather inefficient.  Instead, learn when you are at your most focused—for most people that will be in the morning, for some, that could be in the evening—then use your calendar to schedule the work that requires the most focus and concentration at the times you are at your best.  Make sure every ninety-minutes or so, take a ten-minute break. Get up, move around. Try to get some fresh air and a different view. Staring at a screen all day will sap your creative juices quicker than anything else. Taking a break and getting outside will rejuvenate you. If like me you work from home, you can schedule dog walking or exercise time in the middle of the day. I find that’s a great way to break up the day and helps me t get a tremendous amount done each day.  So there you go, six common-sense tips and tricks to help you become more productive with your time so you can spend more of your time doing the things you want to do and that have the biggest impact on your work and your wellbeing.  Thank you to all of you for listening this year and a big thank you to all of you who have sent in questions. This podcast is built on your questions so please keep them coming in. If you have a question, just email it to carl@carlpullein.com.  Have a wonderful end of year break and happy new year. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

My Top 6 Tips For Better Productivity and Time Management

This week I have a fantastic question about the difference between processing and doing and when to apply the two-minute rule. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3 The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script Episode 92 Hello and welcome to episode 92 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week I have a fantastic question about processing items in your inboxes. This question perfectly describes a problem I see many people have when it comes to using GTD—or COD—for that matter and that is the speed you process the items you collect throughout the day. The problem though does not end with the items you have collected that day, it also affects how you process your email and collected notes.  Now before we get to this week’s question, I would like to tell you about my new FREE, beginners guide to Todoist course. This course is a simple, onboarding course to help you get started with Todoist. It covers all the basics and allows you to develop a system that will work for you. The course is ideal for anyone you would like to introduce to Todoist and also if you are new to Todoist, then this will get you set up and running in next to no time at all.  Of course, for all you advanced users out there, I have over 200 videos on Todoist over on my YouTube channel, so if this course does not cover what you are looking for, I am sure you will find it on my YouTube channel.  Oh, and don’t forget my summer sale on my coaching programmes. You can save yourself up to $200 by getting yourself into the programme now. Details of what you will receive from the programme are all in the show notes to this podcast.  Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Justin. Justin asks: Hi Carl, I’ve watched many of your videos and you often talk about processing your inbox as only taking around 10 to 20 minutes. For me, it takes more than 30 minutes - often an hour - is there anything I am doing wrong?  Hi Justin, thank you very much for your question. Let’s start with a recap on what processing is. Processing, or organising, is where you sort out everything you have collected into your inboxes and make decisions on them based on what a collected item is, what needs doing with it and where to put it. In theory, this should be relatively quite a simple task, yet I know it causes people so many problems that in the end they resist doing it and things start to build up in inboxes. When that happens you soon stop collecting and that’s a sign your system has failed and you need to reassess your structure and overall system.  Now, there are two inboxes that will need your attention every day - or at least every forty-eight hours. Your to-do list manager’s inbox and your email inbox. Let's deal with what you collect in your todo list manager’s inbox first.  Here we have some control over what’s in there. When you are collecting notes and to-dos you get to choose where they go—tasks go into your to-do list, ideas and plans to your notes app. Now in the rush to collect something, we may not have defined whether something is a task or a note. That’s okay, but you will need to make that decision at some point. If you have time when you collect the item, make that decision then. That will save you time later.  With email, you have little control over what comes in. That said, I do think you have more control than you probably think. For example, do you really need to subscribe to all those newsletters? Do you really need all your LinkedIn and social media notifications coming to your inbox every day? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. That a choice you can make.  You can also set up rules in most email apps that will filter emails as they come in. You can arrange it so that all newsletters get automatically sent to a specified newsletter folder for example or have emails that have you as a cc’d recipient send to a specific folder—when you are a cc’d recipient it generally means the email is for your reference only. The only thing you will need to with these folders is to make sure you are reading and reviewing them once a week or so. I would set up a recurring task in my to-do list to remind me to do this.  Next up, do not confuse processing with doing. What I see is people going through their inboxes and trying to do the tasks instead of making decisions about them. Now, of course, you may say what about the two-minute rule? I’d say what about it? You see you need to apply the two-minute strategically. If you have an inbox of 100 items and you apply the two-minute rule to just ten of those items, that’s twenty-minutes gone. In those twenty minutes, you could easily have cleared your inbox.  And that the thing here. What are you trying to achieve? Clear the inbox or do the work? The two parts are very different.  The problem I have seen if you combine doing the work and processing you don't do a very good job at either. You don't get as much work done as you would hope and you still have unprocessed items left in your inbox.  It is far better to focus on processing only. Decide what something is and what needs to happen—if anything— next. Once those decisions have been made you can put the item where it needs to go. Using keyboard shortcuts and drag and drop I’ve found to be the fastest way to do this.  Processing is all about speed. The faster you can do it, the sooner you can get down to doing your work. If you spend too much time deciding what something is and what to do about it, then your processing will take far too long. This is why the way you structure your to-do list manager, email and note app is important. If your projects, folders and notebooks are too vague or are very similar in nature you will find you hesitate before making a decision. It will drag down the speed at which you process. When you have clear, well-defined projects and notebooks then you will make your decisions about where something should go much faster.  Of course, if you have plenty of time to do your processing and you do not have many items to process, then you can apply the two-minute rule. I often do this when I process my to-do list inbox at the end of the day. If I have less than ten items in there I will do those tasks that will take less than two minutes. Yesterday, I collected a task to save Fast and Furious 6 to my watch list on Netflix for example. A less than two minute task. I just went over to Netflix, found the film and saved it to my watch list and cleared the task—I’m catching up on the Fast and Furious franchise of films at the moment. However, if there are a lot of items in my inbox, then the focus is on processing those items. I will just process everything first. I will leave tasks that can be done in two minutes or less in the inbox if I intend to do them in that session of work, but if not, they get processed and organised in their rightful folder. Remember organising and doing are two entirely different things.  Now you may find your notes app inbox does not get that many items in it on a day to day basis. I don’t collect items into Evernote every day, so I don’t process that every day. Anything going into Evernote will not be urgent or time-sensitive for me. They are often things I want to read later, ideas that I want to develop at some time in the future or an article I think will be useful for a book or blog post I am writing. As I don’t send too many items there, I only process it once a week. Usually, I have around twenty to thirty items to process, so I can get those processed and organised in less than twenty minutes.  If you use an app like Drafts, you can collect a lot of your stuff, such as items to a checklist or ideas list directly, and bypass the inbox. That’s a real time saver.  Also, with apps like Evernote you get a unique email address you can use to send items directly to your inbox, you can use this email address for subscribing to newsletters. This then brings the newsletter direct to your Evernote inbox and I can process it from there instead of my email. Again it’s really all about saving time and speeding up the processing time. Before we finish this episode let me share with you an area of processing I do every morning. It might help to give you an idea of how long your processing should take.  Because I live over in the Far East, while I am asleep, North and South America and Europe are awake. So, when I wake up in the morning I will often have over a hundred emails in my inbox. Now, before I take a shower I boil my egg and to get the water boiling and the egg cooked to my favourite level, it takes 12 minutes. That gives me twelve minutes to process just over one hundred emails. Often I can actually do that in under ten minutes, but on average, because I only allow my egg boiling time to process those emails, I will get it done.  For me, it’s simply just about making a decision about what something is, whether I want to take action on it or read it later. Because those folders are at the top of my email folder list, I just drag and drop them as I go through my inbox. Once finished, I have an empty inbox, a list of actionable emails I have twenty-four hours to respond to—my personal rule: respond to all emails within twenty-four hours—and I’m ready to step into the shower and really start my day.  And that’s the goal to have, process as fast as you can and then get on do the work that matters most to you.  I hope that’s given you some ideas, Justin. Thank you for your excellent question. And thank you to you too for listening.  Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, just send me an email or DM me on Facebook or Twitter and I will be happy to answer your question if I can. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week I have a fantastic question about the difference between processing and doing and when to apply the two-minute rule. Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/getting-started-with-todoist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/time-and-life-mastery" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Script Episode 92 Hello and welcome to episode 92 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week I have a fantastic question about processing items in your inboxes. This question perfectly describes a problem I see many people have when it comes to using GTD—or COD—for that matter and that is the speed you process the items you collect throughout the day. The problem though does not end with the items you have collected that day, it also affects how you process your email and collected notes. Now before we get to this week’s question, I would like to tell you about my new FREE, beginners guide to Todoist course. This course is a simple, onboarding course to help you get started with Todoist. It covers all the basics and allows you to develop a system that will work for you. The course is ideal for anyone you would like to introduce to Todoist and also if you are new to Todoist, then this will get you set up and running in next to no time at all.  Of course, for all you advanced users out there, I have over 200 videos on Todoist over on my YouTube channel, so if this course does not cover what you are looking for, I am sure you will find it on my YouTube channel.  Oh, and don’t forget my summer sale on my coaching programmes. You can save yourself up to $200 by getting yourself into the programme now. Details of what you will receive from the programme are all in the show notes to this podcast.  Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Justin. Justin asks: Hi Carl, I’ve watched many of your videos and you often talk about processing your inbox as only taking around 10 to 20 minutes. For me, it takes more than 30 minutes - often an hour - is there anything I am doing wrong?  Hi Justin, thank you very much for your question. Let’s start with a recap on what processing is. Processing, or organising, is where you sort out everything you have collected into your inboxes and make decisions on them based on what a collected item is, what needs doing with it and where to put it. In theory, this should be relatively quite a simple task, yet I know it causes people so many problems that in the end they resist doing it and things start to build up in inboxes. When that happens you soon stop collecting and that’s a sign your system has failed and you need to reassess your structure and overall system.  Now, there are two inboxes that will need your attention every day - or at least every forty-eight hours. Your to-do list manager’s inbox and your email inbox. Let's deal with what you collect in your todo list manager’s inbox first.  Here we have some control over what’s in there. When you are collecting notes and to-dos you get to choose where they go—tasks go into your to-do list, ideas and plans to your notes app. Now in the rush to collect something, we may not have defined whether something is a task or a note. That’s okay, but you will need to make that decision at some point. If you have time when you collect the item, make that decision then. That will save you time later.  With email, you have little control over what comes in. That said, I do think you have more control than you probably think. For example, do you really need to subscribe to all those newsletters? Do you really need all your LinkedIn and social media notifications coming to your inbox every day? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. That a choice you can make.  You can also set up rules in most email apps that will filter emails as they come in. You can arrange it so that all newsletters get automatically sent to a specified newsletter folder for example or have emails that have you as a cc’d recipient send to a specific folder—when you are a cc’d recipient it generally means the email is for your reference only. The only thing you will need to with these folders is to make sure you are reading and reviewing them once a week or so. I would set up a recurring task in my to-do list to remind me to do this.  Next up, do not confuse processing with doing. What I see is people going through their inboxes and trying to do the tasks instead of making decisions about them. Now, of course, you may say what about the two-minute rule? I’d say what about it? You see you need to apply the two-minute strategically. If you have an inbox of 100 items and you apply the two-minute rule to just ten of those items, that’s twenty-minutes gone. In those twenty minutes, you could easily have cleared your inbox.  And that the thing here. What are you trying to achieve? Clear the inbox or do the work? The two parts are very different.  The problem I have seen if you combine doing the work and processing you don't do a very good job at either. You don't get as much work done as you would hope and you still have unprocessed items left in your inbox.  It is far better to focus on processing only. Decide what something is and what needs to happen—if anything— next. Once those decisions have been made you can put the item where it needs to go. Using keyboard shortcuts and drag and drop I’ve found to be the fastest way to do this.  Processing is all about speed. The faster you can do it, the sooner you can get down to doing your work. If you spend too much time deciding what something is and what to do about it, then your processing will take far too long. This is why the way you structure your to-do list manager, email and note app is important. If your projects, folders and notebooks are too vague or are very similar in nature you will find you hesitate before making a decision. It will drag down the speed at which you process. When you have clear, well-defined projects and notebooks then you will make your decisions about where something should go much faster.  Of course, if you have plenty of time to do your processing and you do not have many items to process, then you can apply the two-minute rule. I often do this when I process my to-do list inbox at the end of the day. If I have less than ten items in there I will do those tasks that will take less than two minutes. Yesterday, I collected a task to save Fast and Furious 6 to my watch list on Netflix for example. A less than two minute task. I just went over to Netflix, found the film and saved it to my watch list and cleared the task—I’m catching up on the Fast and Furious franchise of films at the moment. However, if there are a lot of items in my inbox, then the focus is on processing those items. I will just process everything first. I will leave tasks that can be done in two minutes or less in the inbox if I intend to do them in that session of work, but if not, they get processed and organised in their rightful folder. Remember organising and doing are two entirely different things.  Now you may find your notes app inbox does not get that many items in it on a day to day basis. I don’t collect items into Evernote every day, so I don’t process that every day. Anything going into Evernote will not be urgent or time-sensitive for me. They are often things I want to read later, ideas that I want to develop at some time in the future or an article I think will be useful for a book or blog post I am writing. As I don’t send too many items there, I only process it once a week. Usually, I have around twenty to thirty items to process, so I can get those processed and organised in less than twenty minutes.  If you use an app like Drafts, you can collect a lot of your stuff, such as items to a checklist or ideas list directly, and bypass the inbox. That’s a real time saver.  Also, with apps like Evernote you get a unique email address you can use to send items directly to your inbox, you can use this email address for subscribing to newsletters. This then brings the newsletter direct to your Evernote inbox and I can process it from there instead of my email. Again it’s really all about saving time and speeding up the processing time. Before we finish this episode let me share with you an area of processing I do every morning. It might help to give you an idea of how long your processing should take.  Because I live over in the Far East, while I am asleep, North and South America and Europe are awake. So, when I wake up in the morning I will often have over a hundred emails in my inbox. Now, before I take a shower I boil my egg and to get the water boiling and the egg cooked to my favourite level, it takes 12 minutes. That gives me twelve minutes to process just over one hundred emails. Often I can actually do that in under ten minutes, but on average, because I only allow my egg boiling time to process those emails, I will get it done.  For me, it’s simply just about making a decision about what something is, whether I want to take action on it or read it later. Because those folders are at the top of my email folder list, I just drag and drop them as I go through my inbox. Once finished, I have an empty inbox, a list of actionable emails I have twenty-four hours to respond to—my personal rule: respond to all emails within twenty-four hours—and I’m ready to step into the shower and really start my day.  And that’s the goal to have, process as fast as you can and then get on do the work that matters most to you.  I hope that’s given you some ideas, Justin. Thank you for your excellent question. And thank you to you too for listening.  Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, just send me an email or DM me on Facebook or Twitter and I will be happy to answer your question if I can. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.

How To Process Your Inboxes Effectively

“I don’t have time”, “There aren’t enough hours in the day”, “I’m busy”. Do you use these phrases regularly? If so, then this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast is for you. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website Life &amp; Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019 The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script Episode 98 Hello and welcome to episode 98 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week we are returning to the question of time, and how to manage your time on a daily basis. I know so many people really struggle with this, yet there are a few things you can do to reduce your feelings of stress, overwhelm and that feeling of busyness.  But before we get to this week’s question, for those of you in the UK—or anywhere really—the Life and Time Mastery workshop is returning to Scunthorpe on the 28th December.  This workshop is going to be very special. We are calling it “Life and Time Mastery - the 2020 Edition - Start Fast. Start Strong” and its single purpose is to help you to set yourself up for the best decade you have ever had.  So if you are in the UK and want the opportunity to visit the wonderful Lincolnshire town of Scunthorpe, spend a day with some incredibly energised, positive and amazing people plus Kevin Blackburn—a regular guest on this podcast—and myself, get yourself registered soon. Places are limited and they are selling out very fast.  It would be fantastic to meet you in Scunthorpe in December. AND… There might even be a possibility to meet this show’s mystery podcast voice. Now there’s a fantastic reason to join us.  Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it’s now time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Jake. Jake asks: Carl, I know you talk a lot about the 2+8 Prioritisation system and I do understand it, but I have so much to do each day, I really can’t cope. There’s no time for me to block time off for focused work and even thinking about working on my goals is a joke. Is here anything you can suggest that will help?  Thank you for your question, Jake.  Okay, let’s start with time. Everybody gets the same amount of time each day. Twenty-four hours. Some people can get an amazing amount done in that time, while others struggle and seem to be always telling everyone who will listen how busy they are.  So if we start with the premise that we all have the same amount of time, the only variable is what we are doing in those twenty-four hours.  Let me tell you a little secret. The way to get the most out of the time you have available is to get realistic about what you can achieve.  If you have a complex 100 plus slide presentation to create, you are never going to do that in one day. Not if you accept that throughout the day you will get interrupted and distracted. It just isn't going to happen. Take a typical Apple keynote presentation, for example, we know, from the books that came out following the death of Steve Jobs, that one of those presentations took around six months to prepare. And in the two weeks leading up to the keynote, a team of people were spending all the time they had available putting the finishing touches to it.  So, if you have a project as big as an important two-hour presentation, you are going to need more than a week to prepare it. If you are the kind of person who leaves those kinds of tasks until the last minute then sure you are going to feel busy and overwhelmed, yet those feelings are entirely of your own making.  What you have to understand is that a lot of the work you have to do, if you want to do the work properly, will need more than a day to do so you need to spread out your work. Short sprints over a longer period of time will result in better performance and a lot less stress. Here’s a trick I do. At the end of every day, I look at my calendar not just at tomorrow but for the rest of the week. I am looking for days that have filled up with appointments and comparing that with my task list for the rest of the week. I spend around ten minutes each day, just getting a big picture view of my week and making sure no day is overloaded with too many appointments and tasks.  If I do find I have a day with too many appointments and tasks, I will re-schedule some of those tasks to quieter days. Or remove the non-urgent tasks altogether from that week. I’ve even been known to re-schedule less important appointments. If I have a couple of quiet days and three busy days, I will do as much as I can of my bigger project work on those quieter days. Just getting those big tasks started is often all that is needed to keep the overwhelm and stress at bay. In a way, you need to develop the mindset of protecting your time.  Let me ask you a question... do you have the courage to schedule rest time? I ask that because I’ve seen people try and work through an enormous amount of work and meetings only to find their effectiveness becomes so bad they end up having to redo a lot of the work they did when they were exhausted because of all the mistakes in there.  When I ask them about rest periods, they tell me their client, customer or boss “needs” it tomorrow morning. When pushed, they usually confess that they could ask their client, boss or whoever if they could send it later that day and almost always they would be allowed to. The reason they don’t is that they are afraid that they may be told no. Part of getting in control of your available time is asking for and setting realistic deadlines. If you don’t have the courage to ask, then you only have yourself to blame. If you think you can do a week’s worth of twenty-hours a day and get yourself on top of your work you are deluding yourself. You won't. You would get far more work done if you just did five or six hours of concentrated focused work each day.  Never be afraid to schedule some rest time. An extra hour of sleep will do far more for your effectiveness than trying to work an eighteen hour day.  So, what else can you do?  One of the most powerful ways of getting in control of your time is to begin the day knowing what it is you want to get accomplished. And when I say knowing what you want to get accomplished I mean in a realistic sense.  One of the most common reasons for feeling overwhelmed and stressed is setting unrealistic expectations. When you fill your day with appointments and tasks something will break, usually, that will be you. Your discipline will fail, you’ll look at your list of things to do and no matter how determined you are to get everything done, either you will run out of time or your resolve will break at some point in the day.  The truth is there is a limited amount you can effectively do each day. We are living human beings. We are not machines. You will get tired as the day goes by and your ability to focus will reduce. This is something you really need to understand if you want to become more effective and productive. And no matter how super-human you think you are, you are still a human being and you are not as super-human as you think you are. One thing we can all do is to find where our optimum is. What I mean by this is where the point at which our effectiveness begins to reduce.  In my case, I know I am good for around 2,000 written words each day or roughly four hours of concentrated work. If I try and do more than that, while I can do it, my effectiveness diminishes and I end up having to rewrite those extra words the next day or redo a lot of the work I did. Not very efficient.  A recent similar example of this occurred with my exercise schedule. Over the last six months, I have been exercising very intensely. Each week I have pushed myself harder. Last weekend I ran 5 miles - no big deal, except I haven't done much running over the last few months. Instead, I have focused more on circuit training—that’s the old fashioned name for CrossFit—so naturally, as I was unwisely pushing myself through the last mile, I felt a pain in my Achilles' tendon. Then the following day as I was pushing myself towards the end of a bench press session, I felt a sharp pain in my neck. The following two or three days I was walking around with a limp and a stiff neck. Why? I pushed myself too hard and did not take enough rest. I was not able to exercise at all for three days. How effective was my exercise? Had I reduced the intensity a little, got enough rest, I would have been able to exercise those three days instead of feeling frustrated. Remember you are human. There’s a limit you can do each day and when you go beyond that limit something will break and that is more likely to be you. You are not indestructible.  Your most effective tool at managing your workload is your calendar. Your calendar does not lie. It has those twenty-four hours on it each day. You can add your meetings and appointments and you can schedule blocks of time to get your work done. If you adopt a policy of ‘what goes on my calendar, gets done’ then this will work incredibly effectively. If you start to ignore what's on your calendar then you will soon find yourself stressed, over-worked and overwhelmed.  Here’s a trick I use with my calendar. If someone asks for a meeting I always reply “I’ll check my calendar and let you know later.” I could very easily look at my calendar on my phone right there and then and give an answer, but I want to see the big picture of my work before I commit to a meeting. I want to see where I am before and after the suggested meeting time and I want to know how much work I have on at that time. I cannot do that if I am forced to make a decision there and then.  Don’t be so quick to confirm an appointment. Be more deliberate with your scheduling and you’ll find you will soon become much less stressed and overwhelmed.  SO there you go, Jake, I hope some of these tips have helped you. Remember, you are a human being and there is a limit on what you can do each day. Be deliberate with the work you choose to do, make sure it has the biggest impact on your projects and try to schedule enough time each day for rest. You will get far more done if you are rested and not fatigued.  Thank you for your question and again, I thank you all for listening. If you have a burning question you would like answering on this show, then please email it to me at carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer it for you. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

“I don’t have time”, “There aren’t enough hours in the day”, “I’m busy”. Do you use these phrases regularly? If so, then this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast is for you. Links: <a href="mailto:carl@carlpullein.com">Email Me</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/carl_pullein" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Website</a> <a href="https://lifesuccessengineer.mykajabi.com/life-time-mastery-event" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Life &amp; Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/beginners-guide-to-building-your-own-productivity-system" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/coaching/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes</a> <a href="https://carl-pullein.thinkific.com/courses/getting-started-with-todoist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist</a> <a href="http://www.carlpullein.com/podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page</a> Script Episode 98 Hello and welcome to episode 98 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week we are returning to the question of time, and how to manage your time on a daily basis. I know so many people really struggle with this, yet there are a few things you can do to reduce your feelings of stress, overwhelm and that feeling of busyness.  But before we get to this week’s question, for those of you in the UK—or anywhere really—the Life and Time Mastery workshop is returning to Scunthorpe on the 28th December.  This workshop is going to be very special. We are calling it “Life and Time Mastery - the 2020 Edition - Start Fast. Start Strong” and its single purpose is to help you to set yourself up for the best decade you have ever had.  So if you are in the UK and want the opportunity to visit the wonderful Lincolnshire town of Scunthorpe, spend a day with some incredibly energised, positive and amazing people plus Kevin Blackburn—a regular guest on this podcast—and myself, get yourself registered soon. Places are limited and they are selling out very fast.  It would be fantastic to meet you in Scunthorpe in December. AND… There might even be a possibility to meet this show’s mystery podcast voice. Now there’s a fantastic reason to join us.  Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it’s now time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Jake. Jake asks: Carl, I know you talk a lot about the 2+8 Prioritisation system and I do understand it, but I have so much to do each day, I really can’t cope. There’s no time for me to block time off for focused work and even thinking about working on my goals is a joke. Is here anything you can suggest that will help?  Thank you for your question, Jake.  Okay, let’s start with time. Everybody gets the same amount of time each day. Twenty-four hours. Some people can get an amazing amount done in that time, while others struggle and seem to be always telling everyone who will listen how busy they are.  So if we start with the premise that we all have the same amount of time, the only variable is what we are doing in those twenty-four hours.  Let me tell you a little secret. The way to get the most out of the time you have available is to get realistic about what you can achieve.  If you have a complex 100 plus slide presentation to create, you are never going to do that in one day. Not if you accept that throughout the day you will get interrupted and distracted. It just isn't going to happen. Take a typical Apple keynote presentation, for example, we know, from the books that came out following the death of Steve Jobs, that one of those presentations took around six months to prepare. And in the two weeks leading up to the keynote, a team of people were spending all the time they had available putting the finishing touches to it.  So, if you have a project as big as an important two-hour presentation, you are going to need more than a week to prepare it. If you are the kind of person who leaves those kinds of tasks until the last minute then sure you are going to feel busy and overwhelmed, yet those feelings are entirely of your own making.  What you have to understand is that a lot of the work you have to do, if you want to do the work properly, will need more than a day to do so you need to spread out your work. Short sprints over a longer period of time will result in better performance and a lot less stress. Here’s a trick I do. At the end of every day, I look at my calendar not just at tomorrow but for the rest of the week. I am looking for days that have filled up with appointments and comparing that with my task list for the rest of the week. I spend around ten minutes each day, just getting a big picture view of my week and making sure no day is overloaded with too many appointments and tasks.  If I do find I have a day with too many appointments and tasks, I will re-schedule some of those tasks to quieter days. Or remove the non-urgent tasks altogether from that week. I’ve even been known to re-schedule less important appointments. If I have a couple of quiet days and three busy days, I will do as much as I can of my bigger project work on those quieter days. Just getting those big tasks started is often all that is needed to keep the overwhelm and stress at bay. In a way, you need to develop the mindset of protecting your time.  Let me ask you a question... do you have the courage to schedule rest time? I ask that because I’ve seen people try and work through an enormous amount of work and meetings only to find their effectiveness becomes so bad they end up having to redo a lot of the work they did when they were exhausted because of all the mistakes in there.  When I ask them about rest periods, they tell me their client, customer or boss “needs” it tomorrow morning. When pushed, they usually confess that they could ask their client, boss or whoever if they could send it later that day and almost always they would be allowed to. The reason they don’t is that they are afraid that they may be told no. Part of getting in control of your available time is asking for and setting realistic deadlines. If you don’t have the courage to ask, then you only have yourself to blame. If you think you can do a week’s worth of twenty-hours a day and get yourself on top of your work you are deluding yourself. You won't. You would get far more work done if you just did five or six hours of concentrated focused work each day.  Never be afraid to schedule some rest time. An extra hour of sleep will do far more for your effectiveness than trying to work an eighteen hour day.  So, what else can you do?  One of the most powerful ways of getting in control of your time is to begin the day knowing what it is you want to get accomplished. And when I say knowing what you want to get accomplished I mean in a realistic sense.  One of the most common reasons for feeling overwhelmed and stressed is setting unrealistic expectations. When you fill your day with appointments and tasks something will break, usually, that will be you. Your discipline will fail, you’ll look at your list of things to do and no matter how determined you are to get everything done, either you will run out of time or your resolve will break at some point in the day.  The truth is there is a limited amount you can effectively do each day. We are living human beings. We are not machines. You will get tired as the day goes by and your ability to focus will reduce. This is something you really need to understand if you want to become more effective and productive. And no matter how super-human you think you are, you are still a human being and you are not as super-human as you think you are. One thing we can all do is to find where our optimum is. What I mean by this is where the point at which our effectiveness begins to reduce.  In my case, I know I am good for around 2,000 written words each day or roughly four hours of concentrated work. If I try and do more than that, while I can do it, my effectiveness diminishes and I end up having to rewrite those extra words the next day or redo a lot of the work I did. Not very efficient.  A recent similar example of this occurred with my exercise schedule. Over the last six months, I have been exercising very intensely. Each week I have pushed myself harder. Last weekend I ran 5 miles - no big deal, except I haven't done much running over the last few months. Instead, I have focused more on circuit training—that’s the old fashioned name for CrossFit—so naturally, as I was unwisely pushing myself through the last mile, I felt a pain in my Achilles' tendon. Then the following day as I was pushing myself towards the end of a bench press session, I felt a sharp pain in my neck. The following two or three days I was walking around with a limp and a stiff neck. Why? I pushed myself too hard and did not take enough rest. I was not able to exercise at all for three days. How effective was my exercise? Had I reduced the intensity a little, got enough rest, I would have been able to exercise those three days instead of feeling frustrated. Remember you are human. There’s a limit you can do each day and when you go beyond that limit something will break and that is more likely to be you. You are not indestructible.  Your most effective tool at managing your workload is your calendar. Your calendar does not lie. It has those twenty-four hours on it each day. You can add your meetings and appointments and you can schedule blocks of time to get your work done. If you adopt a policy of ‘what goes on my calendar, gets done’ then this will work incredibly effectively. If you start to ignore what's on your calendar then you will soon find yourself stressed, over-worked and overwhelmed.  Here’s a trick I use with my calendar. If someone asks for a meeting I always reply “I’ll check my calendar and let you know later.” I could very easily look at my calendar on my phone right there and then and give an answer, but I want to see the big picture of my work before I commit to a meeting. I want to see where I am before and after the suggested meeting time and I want to know how much work I have on at that time. I cannot do that if I am forced to make a decision there and then.  Don’t be so quick to confirm an appointment. Be more deliberate with your scheduling and you’ll find you will soon become much less stressed and overwhelmed.  SO there you go, Jake, I hope some of these tips have helped you. Remember, you are a human being and there is a limit on what you can do each day. Be deliberate with the work you choose to do, make sure it has the biggest impact on your projects and try to schedule enough time each day for rest. You will get far more done if you are rested and not fatigued.  Thank you for your question and again, I thank you all for listening. If you have a burning question you would like answering on this show, then please email it to me at carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer it for you. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

How To Finally Get Control Of Your Time

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