The Best Productivity System Is the One You Design for Yourself

This week’s episode is a question that came about because of my recently updated Time Sector System course.

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Episode 217 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 217 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, many of you already know that my productivity system is called The Time Sector System. This system is based on managing my work by when I want to do it rather than by project. 

Around three or four years ago, I discovered that when I managed my tasks by project, I was spending too much time organising and reviewing and not enough time doing the work. It was leaving me with a lot of work that needed rescheduling at the end of the day. Not a good place to be when you want to feel you are becoming better at managing your time. Too much rescheduling and you lose confidence in your system. 

That’s when it dawned on me that, really, the most important part of any system is having the time to do the work, not how you organise your files and projects. That was my light-bulb moment. 

Now, I do get a lot of questions about this system. It goes against the grain of many of the more popular systems out there and naturally I get a lot of questions about it. So, I have selected one of those questions to answer this week. 

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 Eric. Eric asks, Carl, You used to write and talk a lot about GTD but I notice you no longer use it. Why is that and what do you use instead? 

Thank you Eric for your question. 

Let’s start by dealing with the elephant in the room. Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen. This is the standard text by which all productivity and time management systems are judged today. There’s nothing wrong with GTD, as it is called. It’s a solid workable system. 

However, there are two issues with GTD that caused me problems. The first is this is a book that was first published in 2001 and its concepts are based on what David Allen taught in companies as a productivity and time management trainer in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Now, I remember working in the early 1990s and in those distant days it did matter where you were and what tools you had with you. If you wanted to respond to your mail, you needed to be in a place where your mail was because, for most people, there was no such thing as email. And even in the late 1990s, when email became more prevalent, you needed to be at a computer set up for your email. 

If you were lucky enough to have a personal email account, you needed to be at home with your “personal computer” in order to reply. For your work email, you needed to be at your office and sitting in front of your work desktop computer. 

So, for a simple task such as responding to your mail, you had to be in a specific physical location (home or office) and be in front of your computer (the tool).

The second issue I was struggling with was how the digital task managers were created. For some reason, task managers were set up by project, not context as it should be in a GTD system. 

For those not familiar with GTD, in GTD your task lists are organised by context. This means you create lists based on a tool, such as a computer, a phone or car. Place, such as your office or home or person, such as your boss, spouse or colleague. 

The idea is you choose what to do based on where you are, with which tool or person. 

Now, when I went digital, I fell into the trap of believing the most effective way to manage my tasks was to organise everything by project and to use tags or labels for my contexts. Big mistake. 

In GTD, a project is defined as anything requiring two or more steps. This meant, theoretically, arranging for my car to go in for a service was a project or even arranging to have my haircut (I did once have hair that needed cutting). So you can imagine how many projects you end up having on your list. 

David Allen mentions that an average person is going to have between seventy and a hundred and fifty open projects. 

That’s a lot of projects for an individual like you and me to manage. 

Now the glue that makes GTD work is the weekly review. This is where you sit down at the end of the week to go through all your projects to make sure everything is up-to-date and current. 

Well, for me, by the time I switched to using the Time Sector System my weekly review was taking almost two hours to complete each week. Yes! Two hours. 

No, I don’t know about you, but giving up two hours of my weekend to review all my projects and get current is not really the best use of my time on a weekend. 

However, let’s not be too hard on GTD. It’s a great system and it does help you get very organised. All your projects are kept in project folders—originally, paper-based project folders you kept in or near your desk, now digital folders you keep on your computer. It is easy to find what you need when you need it—if you are willing to maintain your system and keep it up to date. 

And that’s really the problem with GTD today. Maintaining the system takes a lot of time. Time that could better be served to do the work you are creating lists for. 

If you look at the very basics a productivity system needs; it’s a way to collect all your inputs such as calendar events, tasks and notes. You then need to organise those inputs in a way you can find them when you need them and you need to be maximising time to do the work. 

GTD crosses the first two boxes. It teaches you to build a collection system. When the GTD book was first launched that meant purchasing a physical inbox that you had on or around your desk. And it organises your documents and relevant materials into projects or reference materials that are easy to find.

However, because of the time, it takes to manage those first two parts, you are taking away a lot of time for doing. And if you want to be more productive, you need to maximise your doing time and minimise your organising time. 

That’s why I eventually got to the point where I realised GTD was not working for me. I wanted to free up my organising time so I could focus on doing. 

That led me to analyse what was really important about getting my work done. That was when I realised that the only thing that really mattered about a task was when I was going to do it. After all, it does not matter how important or urgent something is, if there are no hours left in the day it is not going to get done that day. Period.

And, I’m sure you are aware now, contexts have become a lot less important. You can design presentations, do work on a spreadsheet, email and make phone calls from a handheld device you carry with you everywhere you go. You no longer need specific tools to do a lot of the work you need to do. 

I have been told that contexts are a personal choice. You can create contexts around energy levels. For example, if you feel energetic, you can do some of the more difficult work. If you feel tired you can do some of the less strenuous tasks. That true. But I cannot predict when I will feel energetic or when I feel lethargic. I cannot control how I will sleep tonight. For energy level contexts, there are far too many variables outside my control for those to be effective. 

In the end, I realised that all I wanted to know was what tasks were important this week. Which ones did I want to do and which tasks could I do that would move a project or goal forward. 

So, I created a folder structure in my task manager that focused on when I would do something. That means I have: this week, next week, this month and next month folders for tasks I am reasonably certain I want to get done in the next eight weeks or so. And I have a long-term and on hold folder for tasks that I’d like to do sometime, but I am not sure yet when I will do them. 

What this means is when I do my weekly planning, all I need to focus on is when I will do something and more importantly what will I do that week. 

Using this method means instead of spending two hours or so doing a weekly review, my weekly planning sessions last around twenty to thirty minutes. They are a little longer at the end of the month because I am looking at more folders. 

It also makes processing what I collected in my inbox much simpler. I have far fewer decisions to make. Really all I am doing is deciding what something is and when will I do it. I don’t have to worry about what context to add and which project to put it in. 

Now, all my projects notes and resources are kept in my notes app. Tasks that relate to these projects are hyperlinked to the relevant task so all it takes is one click and I am in my project notes. This makes it so much quicker to get down to work. I can quickly see what’s been done and what needs to be done. I also have access to relevant emails, meeting notes and files all in one place—which is not something you can do if you are managing your projects from a task list manager.

The most important thing for me though, is how I spend very little time managing my projects and reference materials and I am spending far more time doing the work that matters. And this has given me much more free time to do things outside of work. The more time I have available for doing the work the more free time I get at the end of the day. 

And, I no longer skip my weekly reviews as it did when I was doing GTD. I’d probably do a proper weekly review once a month. Now, as I know a planning session won’t take longer than thirty minutes, I love doing them. It’s got me a lot more focused on what’s important and I no longer lose anything.

But the most important thing for you to remember is, the best productivity system is the one you design for yourself. I strongly believe that you need to take parts of the many different systems out there and build them into your system. I have elements of Tony Robbins’ RPM (Rapid Planning Method) system, Ivy Lee’s method and the Eisenhower matrix in my system. 

Tony Robbin’ RPM is how I plan out my projects and goals. The Ivy Lee Method is how I prioritise my day when I do my daily planning and the Eisenhower Matrix ensures I am working on the things that reduce the urgent work. 

It’s taken me a long time to develop a system that works seamlessly. It began with the Franklin Planner in the early 90s, through GTD in the naughties and eventually to my own system I call the Time Sector System. 

Always remember, you are a unique individual and what works for one person will not necessarily work for you. Take elements from one and merge them with something else. You will find a system that works best for you and that one will be the one for you. 

Thank you, Eric, for the question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.