Efficiency in managing tasks and the role of a calendar

How much time do you spend organising and reorganising your work each day? A key question to ask if you are seeking better productivity and time management.

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Script | 309

Hello, and welcome to episode 309 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.

Deciding to get organised and better at managing your time is a good goal to have. After all, when you know where everything is and what needs to be done, you will see an exponential increase in your productivity, and that means, if managed well, your time management will also improve. 

However, there is a fine line between spending too much time managing your stuff and not enough time doing your stuff. When you get caught up in that trap, you are lulled into feeling you are being productive when, in fact, you are not getting anything important done. 

There are many reasons why this happens, the most common of which is becoming obsessed with tools—the apps and technology that promise to make organising and doing your work easier. No, this does not happen. Sure, a solid set of tools can help, but these tools will never do the work for you. Some of the worst tools will cause you to waste a lot of time organising and maintaining them instead of helping you to do your work more effectively. 

Now, before we get to the question, I’d just like to give you a heads-up about this year’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop. This will be held on Friday the 9th and 16th February. Starting at 7:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (A little under two weeks away), This workshop will cover your calendar and task management in week one. In week two, we will look at how to manage email and other communications, as well as the all-important daily and weekly planning. By the end of these two sessions, you will have the know-how to build your very own “perfect” productivity system.

But what’s more special about this workshop is when you register, you get access to four of my mini-courses for FREE, as well as a workbook for all sessons. PLUS, you get a chance to ask me anything about time management and productivity. 

Now, places are going fast, so if you don’t want to be disappointed, get yourself signed up now. Full details for the workshop are in the show notes below. 

So, what do you need to do to ensure you are spending the appropriate amount of time doing your work and managing the work coming in? Well, before we get to answering that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Kris. Kris asks, Hi Carl, is there a right balance between keeping my tasks and notes up to date and organised and doing the work? I find that keeping everything up to date takes me at least an hour a day and sometimes longer. It’s very frustrating. 

Hi Kris, thank you for your question. 

I am always very careful with these types of questions because it is a good thing to use a few tools to help you with your organisation. For instance, a well-maintained notes app will do a lot for your overall productivity because note apps today have incredible search functionality. This is far better than when we were trying to keep all our notes up to date in paper notebooks and file folders. 

However, because of this search functionality, we no longer need to spend a lot of time organising notes into folders (or notebooks, as some note apps call them) and tagging. All we need to do today is make sure we are making the title of the note easily searchable. That involves ensuring you have a keyword you would naturally search for and perhaps the date in the title. 

After that, all you would need to have in your notes app is a simple folder structure, so you have at least the remnants of a system. A simple work and personal folder system would work today because search is so powerful. 

The more complex you make your folder structure in notes, the longer it will take you to keep things organised. 

One other tip on notes. It’s likely that anything you put in your notes is not going to be urgent. Urgent things are normally things we have to do, and we would put those into our task manager or calendar. This means when it comes to cleaning up what you collected, you can do this once a week. I do this on a weekend when I do my weekly planning. 

Another issue I come across is prioritising the task manager above the calendar. If you stop and think for a moment, this does not make a great deal of sense. A task is something that can be done at any time. It may need to be done on a given day, but when on that day you do it is not important. For example, you may need to call a client, but no time has been specified. This means you could call them at 9 am or at 2:30 pm. All that matters is you call them that day. 

But if you were meeting a client for lunch, that would be a different matter. You would need to be in a specific place on a given day and time. That would be in your calendar. 

In those two scenarios, the lunch meeting would naturally take priority over the phone call. 

This means your calendar is at the top of your productivity tools hierarchy. 

If I were to choose one tool that was kept up to date at all times, it would be my calendar, and to do that will likely only take two or three minutes a day. 

But let’s step back a little here and look at the process for managing your tasks. If you’re listening to this, you will probably be aware of the COD system. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do. We need to be collecting the stuff we need to do, then allocate a little time for organising that stuff and finally, we need to do the work. The ideal split between organising and doing is 95% of your time doing and 5% organising. That works out at around twenty minutes a day organising your stuff and the rest of the time doing. 

You are collecting all the time, and your process for collecting needs to be quick and with a minimum of friction. Here, technology helps you because you will likely be carrying your phone with you everywhere you go. This means your phone becomes your UCT—Ubiquitous Collection Tool. 

To ensure that your phone is optimised for this role, you want to make sure collecting tasks, notes and events is as easy as you can make it. 

However, once you have all this stuff collected, when will you process it? I do my processing in the evening. It’s quieter, and I can process all the stuff I have collected without distractions. 

Now, processing is not about moving all your stuff from your inbox to your folders. The emphasis needs to be on eliminating, not accumulating. Your thinking should be around asking yourself, “Do I really need to do this task?” not where can I put it? 

There will always be more stuff to do than time available to do it, so eliminating as much as you can at this processing stage will save you a lot of anxiety and overwhelm—lists have a habit of growing uncontrollably if not checked. 

The great thing about focusing on eliminating rather than accumulating is it reduces the need to spend time organising. The delete key is a lot easier to operate than adding additional information and ensuring the tasks are written in a way you will understand what they mean next week. 

The thing is, if you get your processing right the first time and you are not arbitrarily adding dates so you don’t forget a task (as opposed to adding a date because the task genuinely needs doing on that date), you will not have too much reorganising to do. 

I see a lot of people having to spend a lot of time rescheduling tasks every day because they were being a bit over-ambitious about what they could accomplish in a day. On a given day, that may not seem like a lot of time, but it adds up, and by the end of the week, you will have spent thirty to sixty minutes just rescheduling. 

There’s an old carpenter’s saying, “Measure twice, cut once.” Well, in productivity terms, this would equate to thinking twice before dating a task and doing the task once. Every time you reschedule a task, you will mentally picture yourself doing the task and deciding you don’t have time for it right now, so it gets rescheduled. Not a very effective way to manage your time. 

Think of organising tasks as collect fast, process slow. This way, you will find yourself less likely to waste time reorganising and rescheduling stuff. There’s a better chance you will get it right the first time. An extra few minutes when you process will save you a lot of reorganising later. 

And now the elephant in the room—the tools you are trying to use to organise all your stuff. Be careful here. The more complex and pretty an app is, does not necessarily mean it will be better for your productivity. In fact, I find the more complex an app is, the slower you will be. All those bells and whistles mean more buttons to push. 

When I compare my coaching clients’ speed at being able to find things, Apple Notes seems to be the fastest, and that is the simplest. Notion, Evernote and Obsidian may have a lot more features, but all those extra features mean it’s harder to remember where something is stored. And if you become adept at using search, you will find the complexity of getting something into your system slows you down. Avoid these attractive yet complex apps. They are procrastination traps, and it will take a superhuman effort to avoid playing and fiddling with them when you are tired or not in a very productive state. 

I hope that has helped, Kris. If you get your collecting, organising and doing right, you will only need around twenty minutes a day to organise your stuff. The rest of the time, you can spend getting your work done. 

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.