Customizing Productivity: Finding Your Unique Approach

This week, why you should not be copying other people’s systems. 

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Script | 347

Hello, and welcome to episode 347 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

There is a lot of advice on managing your to-dos, organising your notes and controlling your calendar. And it can be tempting to copy whatever you have seen, believing if it worked for someone else, it must work for you. 

Well, not so fast. 

One thing I’ve learned from coaching hundreds of people is that no individual is the same. We think differently, have different jobs, and have different family lives and interests. 

One example is Tiago Forte’s PARA method. It’s a great way to organise your notes, and many people swear by it. However, it never worked for me. I’m a goal-orientated person. Goals motivate me. I also define Areas of Focus differently from how Tiago defines an area. 

This is why I settled on GAPRA (Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive.)

This does not mean that PARA does not work. It works, for some people. Similarly, I have coaching clients who find GAPRA works better. It all depends on how you think, like to organise things and do your work. 

So, what can you do with so much conflicting advice? How can you find the methods for you? Well, before I get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, hi Carl. I’ve been a life-long follower of productivity systems and have struggled to find a system that works for me. How would you advise someone to find a way that works for them?

Hi Frank, thank you for your question. 

Around 20 years ago, I began my career as an English teacher in Korea. 

I had come from working a typical 9 til 5 office job and suddenly I was on the other side of the world, working from 6:30 am to 12:00 pm and 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. It was tough. 

I’m not a natural morning person—never have been—so waking up at 5:00 am was a shock to my system. 

It wasn’t long before I began taking naps. I would get home at 12:30, and go straight back to bed for two hours. 

For the next ten years, that’s what I continued to do. 

I had learned about the power of taking naps from none other than Winston Churchill. He believed that if you took a solid 90 minute nap every afternoon you would be able to get at least a day and half’s worth of work done in a day. 

He wasn’t wrong. By taking an afternoon nap I found I was full of energy when teaching in the evening and was able to spend an hour preparing for my next day’s classes when I got home in the evening. 

Yet, I knew Churchill took his naps between 3:30 pm and 5:00 pm. That didn’t work for me. So I adapted it to work better for me. 

Likewise, back in 2016 or so, I read Robin Sharma’s brilliant 5 AM Club book. I was sold. I thought, okay, let’s give this a try. 

For those of you not familiar with the 5 AM Club, this is where you wake up at 5:00 AM and do twenty minutes of exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of learning. It’s solid way to begin your day. 

Yet, I had a problem. I’ve never been comfortable exercising in the morning. So, I adapted it. I did twenty minutes journal writing, then ten minutes planning the day and finally studied Korean for thirty minutes. 

And it worked. I was consistent for around eighteen months and I loved it. 

But then I hit a problem. My coaching business began taking off and I was doing coaching calls late at night—sometimes not finishing until midnight. This meant I was trying to survive on four or five hours of sleep. Not a good thing if you want to be productive.

It then occurred to me, the “secret” to the 5 am club is not waking up at 5 am. It’s what you do immediately on waking up that matters. 

Today, I wake up around 8:00 am, and start my day with a solid set of morning routines that include journal writing, some stretches and learning my email inbox. It works perfect for me. It sets me up for mostly productive days. 

And that’s the key point. Whatever you learn about productivity, time management and living life doesn’t have to be followed exactly as described. We all live different lives and it can be modified to better work for you. 

However, there are a few caveats here.

The first is you will not be able to break basic principles. 

For instance, if you want a solid way to manage your life, you will need to collect stuff into a trusted place and not rely on your head to remember things. You will then need to spend a little time organising what you collected and finally, you need to do the work. 

Yet, how you collect things and where you collect them is entirely up to you. You could use a pencil and notebook, or a sophisticated task management system. Both work. 

Another principle I see people trying to break is scheduling far more than the number of hours in the day will allow. 

You get 24 hours a day. That’s not going to change. The only variable you have is what you do in the time you have. 

This is not as simple as you may think. Sure, it’s easy to schedule seven hours of sleep, an hour for a gym session, four hours for deep work, another three hours for spending with your family and an hour for dealing with your communications and further hour for learning. 

All that looks great on a calendar. But what if you didn’t sleep well, you woke up with the start of a heavy cold and had a fight with your teenage daughter? 

Yep, that’s real life hitting you in the face. 

Now, hopefully that’s not going to happen to you every day, but events will always get in the way of your perfectly planned day. 

It’s rare to see any kind of time management or productivity system building in buffer time. Yet, buffer time—time you keep free for the unexpected—is critical if you are to avoid becoming overwhelmed. 

One way you can approach the day is to treat it as a puzzle:

Here are the twenty-four hours you have. That’s your constraint. Here’s a list of things you need to do or attend in those twenty-fours hours, now how are you going to fit everything in? 

Now, it could be that I am weird, but I love solving this puzzle every day. I love it so much I do it the day before. 

First, I look at my confirmed appointments—these are the fixed stakes in the ground. They help to give my day a little structure.

Then, I look at my tasks for that day. Where can I fit these in? 

It’s important to know your own natural biorhythms here. When are most likely to be focused? Perhaps you find focusing on deep work in the morning easier than trying to do in the afternoon. If that’s the case, then try to protect two hours in the morning for dedicated focused work. 

I should say at this point, every productive person I’ve come across does this. They protect time each day for their most important work. Authors, CEOs, top salespeople, the most successful lawyers and Olympic athletes. 

The difference is no matter where they are in the command chain, they are ruthless about protecting time each day for their critical work. 

Unproductive, stressed out and exhausted people don’t do this. They don’t protect time. Instead, they have a false belief that they have to be available all the time for their customers and bosses. Well, good luck with that approach. It doesn’t work, never has, and never will. 

I remember a sales training session I was on, and the trainer was a former top salesperson—I believe he was formerly the number one car salesperson in the country. 

He told us, we could call him at any time if we needed help. But, not before 11 am. He would not answer his phone before 11 am. 

When asked why, he explained he needed those two hours in the morning to do his follow ups, and contact his customers who were due to change their car in the next three months and make sure he had appointments scheduled for the rest of the day. 

I suspect this was why he was the number one salesperson. He understood how to solve the daily puzzle. 

Another area that can disrupt you overall productivity is the tools you use. 

There are a lot of fantastic time management and productivity tools available to us today. Many promise the impossible, but ultimately, it will always come down to how you solve the daily puzzle. In that respect, no tool will help you beyond a calendar and a list of tasks that need to be done. 

I get questions every day from people asking me if it’s possible to do this or that thing. What they are really asking me is “how do I complicate things?” 

Let’s be clear, all you need to know each day is what appointments you have and when and what your critical must do tasks for the day are. 

Once you know this and you know you have sufficient time to complete everything, you’re good to go. 

The more organising you do, the more lists you create and the more tools you use, the less time you have to get on and do the work. 

I mentioned Tiago Forte’s PARA method earlier, and I remember the popularity of this when Tiago launched his book on the subject. There was a frenzy and YouTube lit u with people doing videos on how to set up this notes app or that one with the PARA method. 

I could see immediately why it was so popular. It was another way to reorganise things. It gave people something to play with. In other words it gave people an excuse not to do their work. 

PARA is great, but it’s not going to make you more productive or better at managing time. I use Evernote and it’s a complete mess. When I need something, I use Evernote’s powerful search. 

Whether I’m looking for a client note, a reference to an idea I had several years ago or my book notes from a book I’ve read on Kindle, all I need do is type a keyword, a date range or person’s name and in less than a second I have the information in front of me. 

I could spend hours each week keeping my notes up to date, summarised and organised, or I can rely on search and give me those hours to get my work done. I know what I choose. 

Over the last three or four months, Todoist has introduced a calendar and start and due dates. I use neither. They don’t help me get my work done and both of those features just add more complexity to what should be a simple list. 

You don’t need to use all the features an app has. Use the ones that help you to focus on your work and leave alone the ones that add more organising work. 

I hope that has helped, Frank. 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.