How to Set Rules for Your Life

In this week’s podcast, I answer a question about setting some rules of engagement for yourself.

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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.