How to Reset Your Task Manager

This week, how to reset your whole productivity system during your summer holiday. 

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Episode 189 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 189 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.

From many of the emails I am receiving these days, it appears many of you have decided to do a productivity system summer reset. Now, I know how easy it is for our systems to become bloated and not run as efficiently as it perhaps should. SO, this week, the question I am answering is on how to do a complete reset when you have a few free days t focus on doing it.

Before we get to the question, I just want to give you a heads up to say that my Ultimate Productivity Bundle of courses is possibly the best value bundle I have ever done. In that bundle, you get four of my top courses including the newly updated Time And Life Mastery. It also includes Your Digital Life 3.0 which on its own includes my updated Email Mastery course as well as The Ultimate Goal Planning course. 

In total, you get six courses for less than $200!. If you were to buy all six courses individually, it would cost you $420. You’re saving yourself $219! 

So if you are planning on doing a productivity and time management reset over the summer break, then this bundle is THE bundle to buy. It’s going to give you everything you need to create the best productivity system for you. 

Full details on how to purchase this bundle are in the show notes.

Okay, on with the show and that means it time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Evan. Evan asks, hi Carl, I’m going on vacation in the last two weeks of July and I plan to take a few days to rebuild my whole system. I feel my current system is not working for me as well as it could. Do you have any tips on how to go about doing this? 

Hi Evan, great question. Thank you for sending it in.

Now, if you do have a few days to review and rebuild your whole system then my first tip is to start with the end in mind. What I mean by that is start from where you want to be in ten to twenty years' time. 

You see, all great productivity and time management systems begin with where you want to end up, NOT where you are today. The stuff you do today won’t matter very much in ten years' time—it won’t matter very much next week. 

When I see most people's task managers it is filled up with trivial little tasks that serve other people and do nothing to serve your own interests and goals. This is why so many people feel stressed out and overwhelmed. It’s because they spend ninety percent of their days running around doing stuff for others. 

Now that doesn’t mean you need to become selfish. What it means is all those little tasks for your boss, your colleagues and customers and clients may well have to be done, but most of those tasks have come about because you said the worst thing you could say. You said “yes” without thinking about other, more important things. Things such as spending time with your family, your kids, and your elderly parents. Working on your health and fitness and preparing for those bigger projects that have much higher importance, but may not necessarily be as urgent. 

Now the thing is, if you don’t know what it is that you want, then it’s much easier to say “yes” to requests from others. It keeps you busy and it makes you feel important. But that is the wrong way to build any productivity system. You need to turn that on its head and begin with what you want out of life. Begin with your longer-term goals and the things that are important to you.

If you haven’t downloaded my FREE areas of focus workbook yet, then I recommend you do so. You can get that from my downloads page on my website. That workbook will take you through the eight important areas of life we all have in common. Family and relationships, finances, career and business, health and fitness, spirituality, personal development, lifestyle and life experiences, and finally your purpose in life. 

Once you know what these are, what each means to you individually and you have pulled out a few action steps to keep this in balance you are well on your way to building an effective, purpose-driven productivity system.

These action steps are often very simple, yet we neglect them because we are exhausted from all the other, less important to us, tasks we commit ourselves to each day. The only thing you are fit to do when you get home at night is collapse on the sofa and complain about how exhausted you feel. In that state how are you ever going to have the energy to play with your kids, go out for a run, or to the gym? 

Now it’s easy to blame your boss or your company or your clients. But remember you said yes to doing these things. You did not draw a line in the sand and say “no, after 6pm my time is for my family and myself.”

So, establish what is important to you and get the time required to work on those things blocked off in your calendar now. Make sure any tasks you need to complete that are related to your areas of focus and longer-term goals are in your task manager and set to recur whenever they need to recur. 

From now on this time—the time you’ve blocked out on your calendar for these important things for you—is non-negotiable. 

How do you think people like Dwayne Johnson, Terry Crews, Tina Turner, Sylvester Stallone, Frank Grillo, and Jennifer Aniston, despite their age, are in such fantastic shape? Because they have prioritised their exercise time and it is non-negotiable. They are not super-human or have any special genetics. They are human beings just like you and me. The difference is they know what they want and they make sure that every single day they do the work required to make what they want become a reality. It’s fixed on their calendars and it just what they do. 

Next up, when doing a reset is to go through your task manager and clean out any task you know you are not going to do. Now, What I mean by this is tasks such as “send Peter a thank you note for taking us out to dinner”, when that task has been sitting in your task manager for six months. It’s too late. You didn’t do it, so stop keeping these types of tasks around. Delete them. 

There’s also likely to be a lot of old project tasks hanging around that disappeared deep into your system that either you did and didn’t check them off at the time, or were not necessary and the project was completed a long time ago. Clear these out too. 

I would also suggest you look at your recurring areas of focus—for those of you using the Time Sector System—and refresh the wording of your tasks. As time goes by, we become numb to a lot of tasks and they don’t inspire or excite us anymore. All you need to do is change the wording. Tasks like: “call mum and dad” can be changed to “catch up with mum and dad” and “do exercise” can be changed to “get out and exercise”. Doing this every three to four months, by the way, is a good habit to get into. It keeps your recurring tasks fresh and it can be fun thinking of inspiring ways to write these tasks.

Now, take a look at your apps. Do you really need three notes apps and four cloud storage services? Probably not. Which of all these different apps could you get rid of? A lot of the issues I get in my coaching calls is where a person has inadvertently found themselves with multiple apps doing pretty much the same thing. For instance, do you really need to have Todoist AND Microsoft ToDo? Wouldn’t it be easier to just bring everything into one app? There’s less of a chance you would miss something if everything was in a single place. 

How about your notes apps? I mean do you really need Dropbox Paper, Evernote, and Obsidian? Why not consolidate them all into one app? It’ll make your life a lot simpler having everything in one place. 

Now, I know a lot of people will say well I need to use Dropbox paper (or OneNote) for work and Obsidian for my personal life. And in theory, that sounds okay. But you may already have found that life is not so black and white. There’s a lot of grey there too and you will find yourself wasting time trying to figure out where something should go. 

Just use one app for each purpose. One calendar, One task manager, and one notes app. Seriously, you’ll find life a lot simpler that way. 

And that’s really all you need do, Ethan. Begin with what you want, get that fixed into your system first so that those tasks and events become a priority over everything else. Once you have those in place, you will find your life is much better balanced and you will be a lot less stressed out and overwhelmed. 

Clean out old, not longer required tasks, notes, and other digital stuff and consolidate as many apps as you can. The fewer apps you use the faster your whole system will become.

Thank you for the question and thank you for listening too. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.