Do you feel you never have enough time to do everything on your to-do list? Well, you’re not alone.

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Script | 331

Hello, and welcome to episode 331 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.

How often do you begin the day with a to-do list that you know will be impossible to complete? What does that do to your motivation? If you are like most people, your motivation will sink, and the day becomes another stressful horror show. 

Why is that? Why do we find ourselves with a to-do list longer than any reasonable person could complete in a single day? Is it because we are over-ambitious and over-optimistic about our abilities or because we have too much to do? 

Well, this week, we will examine some of the causes of this problem and discuss potential solutions. While not necessarily easy to implement, these solutions will give you the necessary breathing room to create realistic, doable days and leave you with enough energy to enjoy your evenings doing what you want. 

Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, may I ask a favour? If you have been kind enough to buy a copy of my book Your Time, Your Way, could you leave a review? Reviews help other people discover the book, learn better ways to manage their time and their lives and reduce stress, which will ultimately help all of us.

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

This week’s question comes from Heather. Heather asks, Hi Carl, I have tried for years to use a to-do list, yet after a few days, the list becomes enormous, and I stop looking at it (which makes the list even longer). I’ve tried all sorts of digital to-do lists and even pen and paper, but nothing works. 

How does anyone keep their to-do list manageable so it doesn’t become useless?

Hi Heather, thank you for sending in your question. 

To get to the bottom of this, we need to go back to some basics. That is to understand the relationship between time and activity. 

To start, can we all agree that doing anything requires time? Whether taking your dog for a walk, cooking dinner, or meeting up with friends, all activities require some time. 

Can we also agree that each day has twenty-four hours? 

As long as we accept these two facts—that anything we do requires time and that there are twenty-four hours in a day—we have a solid anchor on which to build a reliable time management system. 

When I accepted these two facts, everything changed for the better. It didn’t matter how much was on my to-do list if I didn’t have the time to complete the tasks. 

I remember the days before I accepted this. I used to commute to the university I was teaching at—ninety minutes each way—and then teach for six hours. I had a to-do list with over thirty tasks on it, and I needed to stay two or three hours after my classes to talk with my students. 

In effect, my day was doomed the moment I woke up. There was no way I could drive for three hours, teach for six, do two hours of tutorials, and complete thirty tasks. Yet that was what my day looked like each day.

That had nothing to do with time management or productivity. It had everything to do with me being unrealistic about what could be done in a single twenty-four-hour period. 

And that is where most of our problems start—being unrealistic about what can be done in a single day. 

If you are familiar with my Time Sector System—a way to manage your work and time more realistically—you will know about something I call your “core work”.

Your core work is the work you are employed to do. It does not include work you have “volunteered” to do—those little favours you do for a colleague or looking something up for your boss. It’s just the work you were employed to do.

As a university lecturer, I was employed to teach. My core work involved preparing for and delivering my lectures. There was some additional work, such as setting and grading exam papers, but for the most part, my core work was teaching my students. 

Sending attendance records and dealing with class time conflicts for my students was not a part of my core work. I did do those tasks, but they were never at the expense of doing my core work. 

Establishing what your core work is gives you some advantages. The first is you know what to prioritise each day. As your core work is what you are employed to do, it naturally follows that it will be your top priority for the day. 

The second is you learn how long it takes to do your core work. This helps you see what is possible and not possible regarding the work you set for yourself each day. 

Let me give you an example. Today, I run a coaching programme. After each coaching call with a client, I write feedback summarising what we discussed and include a little homework for them to do before our next call. 

Writing one piece of feedback takes me, on average, twenty minutes. This means I can write around three pieces of feedback per hour. I didn’t know this when I first started writing feedback; I only learned this by repeating the same task over and over. 

This is an average. Sometimes, it may take me thirty minutes to write one; other times, it may take ten minutes. I am human, and so are you—I hope—which means the time it takes you to do something will vary depending on how much sleep you’ve had, whether you are stressed or anxious about something. You could be distracted by a colleague, family member, or anything else from a long list of potential factors. 

If you try to strictly limit yourself to a precise timeline, you will become stressed out. It’s not possible. With your activities, you can only work with averages. Time and the number of tasks you have may be fixed and easily identifiable; however, how long it takes you to do the tasks is not. There are too many variables involved to be able to do that.

But averages are fine. Over a week, those things do average out, and you will find that your critical core work is consistently getting done. 

However, this goes a step further. Because I know I need one hour a day to write feedback, I can only allow up to three coaching calls a day. If I were to allow four or five calls a day, I would require more time to write the feedback. 

Requiring more time to write my feedback would mean I would need to reduce something else. Perhaps I could stop writing my blog posts or newsletters or reduce the number of episodes of this podcast. 

Remember, time is fixed—that part of the equation cannot be changed. The only thing that can be changed is the number of tasks you do—i.e. your activity. 

Another factor here is that repeating the same task over and over leads to better efficiency, which reduces the time it takes to complete the tasks. If I were to take three of you listeners to a Formula 1 pit lane and we attempted to change the tires on an F1 car as they came in it would take us a long time. 

While the tools would be given would be state of the art, and each tyre only has one bolt to undo, our unfamiliarity with the task would slow us down. The pit crews tasked with changing the tyres can do so in less than two seconds. That comes about because they practice. They’ve done it over a thousand times before. 

What you can do is look at your core work and calculate how long it takes you to do that work each week. You may need to monitor this for a week or two, but the exercise will give you some valuable data. Data you can use to plan out your week. 

For instance, I discovered that if I dedicated an hour a day to dealing with my actionable emails and messages, I would never have a situation where anyone was waiting longer than 24 hours for a response. There are some days where I cannot reply to all of them, but on the whole, I can stay on top of it all (and that’s based on 150 emails on average per day, although not all of them will be actionable).

Responding to my actionable email for an hour daily means I have developed the most efficient method possible. I group all my actionable emails in a single folder. When I process my inbox, I can quickly identify anything that needs action and move it to my actionable folder in seconds. I’ve been following this process for over ten years, and now I can clear around 350 emails from my inbox in less than thirty minutes. 

Ten years ago, that would have taken me more than two hours. Repetition is not just the mother of mastery; it’s also the secret to getting faster at doing anything.

Last week, in one of my newsletters, I wrote that hope is a terrible time management strategy. Hoping you will find time to do your work is never going to work. The only thing that works is to get realistic about what you have to do and how much time you have available. 

I’ve seen so many people tie themselves in knots, trying to perform impossible mental gymnastics to circumvent this fact. 

It’s only when you stop trying to do the impossible and get real about what you can and cannot do in a day that you start to get control over your time. 

So far, I’ve talked about the constants—your core work—which is known to you. But what about all the unknowns? The agitated client who needs your help urgently or your boss who forgot an important presentation she is due to deliver this afternoon and needs your help to prepare. 

One thing you likely will have discovered is that these unknowns are going to happen. Perhaps not every day, but more often than you would like. How do you manage these?

This comes back to controlling your calendar. Filling your calendar with appointments and time to do your tasks leaves you vulnerable to all these inevitable unknowns. You will need to create space for these. 

Again, this is about being realistic. How many meetings do you have scheduled today? When are they? How much time do you have between them? 

Perhaps an additional question is: Do you really have to attend all these meetings? Are there some you could excuse yourself from? Maybe not, but it’s worth asking. 

I love to ask people if they could guarantee two hours a day where they are undisturbed so they can get on and do their most important work for the day. Would they become more productive? Of course, the answer would be yes. 

Why not try that? When you plan the week, find two hours a day for undisturbed, focused work. If you were to look at your calendar next month, could you pre-block those two hours out now? I suspect most of you listening to this could do that. Why not do it now? At least try and see what happens. 

There will be days when you cannot do that, and that’s fine. If you could do three days out of five where you could, though, you’ll soon find yourself becoming more productive. 

And that’s what it’s all about, Heather. Understanding your relationship with time. Time is fixed; you cannot change that. You only have control over what you say yes to and the number of tasks you complete each day. Focus your attention on that part of the equation. Learn what you can realistically complete each day and then get more efficient at doing that work. 

I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Heather. Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.