Mastering Daily Structure for Enhanced Productivity

This week, what does it take to be organised and productive?

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Script | 366

Hello, and welcome to episode 366 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.

One thing you will discover if you begin reading around the subject of time management and productivity is the importance of planning your week and day. 

Every successful person i have come across, or read about, never fails to plan their days and week. Every person who is struggling, and not achieving their goals are not. 

Instead, they find excuses. “I’m too tired”, “I don’t have time”, “I have more important things to do”, etc, etc. 

Yet, there’s more to it than that. It’s not just about having a plan for the day and being clear about what needs to be done. it’s also about protecting time for the important, but not urgent work, and knowing when to say no, when to push and when to pull back and take some rest.

In essence, it’s about understanding yourself and knowing your limits. So with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Tammy. Tammy asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to understand what I need to do to become more organised and productive. I know it’s holding me back, but there’s so much conflicting advice out there that I am confused. Can you help?

Hi Tammy, thank you for your question.

As I just alluded to, the best place to begin is to understand yourself. 

This means knowing when you are at your most focused, when you are prone to distractions and how much sleep you need. 

The chances are, if you stop and step back, you will already know this information. Perhaps you find yourself being able to get quite a lot of work done in the morning, but struggle in the afternoons. Or, you may come alive around 3 pm and can get a lot of work done then. 

This knowledge, allows you to better structure your days. You can avoid meetings, where possible, at the times you are at your most focused, and rely on human connection to keep your energy levels up by holding meetings when you are less focused—there’s something about human interaction that raises our energy levels.

You can also ensure you are getting enough sleep, and that means being consistent when you wake up. As I recently learned, it’s not the time you go to bed that matters, it’s waking up at roughly the same time each day as that starts your 24 hour sleep/wake cycle. 

If you mess around with your sleep/wake cycle, you will feel dreadful, and that destroys your productivity. 

Once you have the basics locked in, you can then move on to structuring your days. 

A couple of years ago, I wrote quite extensively about some famous authors. This was inspired by the book Daily Rituals by Mason Curry. In that book, Mason Curry wrote about incredibly productive people and how they got their work done. 

One person, not featured in the book, I wrote about was author Jeffrey Archer. He writes a book every year, and he has his year structured to allow him to take care of writing the new book, promoting the book he wrote the previous year and dealing with his publishers, book cover designers and much more. 

Archer also loves cricket. So his year is structured so he can reduce his workload in the summer when the cricket season is on. 

This works brilliantly. Jeffrey Archer is consistent. Everyone who works with him knows he will be in Majorca between 27th December and the beginning of March writing his next book. They also know he will be available for meetings, promotions and events between March and June. From July to October, Archer is less available, and from October he’s happy to do book tours, interviews and anything else his publisher needs him to do. 

It’s simple, consistent and makes working with Jeffrey Archer easy.

Now, I know it’s unlikely you are a multi-million selling author. It’s likely you work in a place where there are multiple demands coming at you each day from bosses, customers and colleagues. 

Demands such as wanting to know how you’re getting on with this or that. If you dig a little deeper, though, most of these demands are because people don’t trust that you remember that you committed to doing something for them. 

What’s the most common reason you chase someone up? It’s most likely because you’re worried they’ve forgotten they said they would do something for you. 

Why is that? The most common reason is because most of the people we work with are inconsistent. And, yes, sometimes things fall through the cracks and get forgotten and we need to chase them up. 

So, if you want less interruptions, which equals more time to do your work, be more consistent. 

Consistent with your focus work times. Don’t throw your hands up in the air and say “I cannot do that in my job”. You can. You just have to figure out how to communicate your focus work times. 

As I was taught, if someone else can do it, so can you. If an airline pilot or surgeon can do their focused work without allowing distractions, so can you. Find the way. What do you have to do to resist interruptions? 

So how do you become consistent? You put in place a structure for your day and for your week. 

How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications each day? Most people tell me if they could have an hour daily dedicated to responding to messages and emails they would be on top of it. So schedule it. 

The alternative is not good, is it? If you don’t spend an hour on your messages today, how much time will you need tomorrow? If you skip tomorrow as well, now, how much time will you need? I’m sure you can find one hour a day, but to find three? That’s verging on the impossible. 

If you were responsible for sending out proposals to clients, how much time would you need for proposal writing to prevent a backlog? 

You won’t be accurate with your times; you don’t have to be. You are using averages. If you get five proposals to write each day, and each proposal takes around thirty minutes to write, that means to prevent backlogs from appearing you need about two-and-a-half hours each day. 

The only way you will be able to take care of your responsibility to send out the proposals would be to schedule two-and-a-half hours each day for doing the work. How else will you do it? 

Now look at that from your colleagues’s perspective? If they know you are consistent and are getting the proposals out on time, how likely will they be chasing and interrupting you? 

That’s what consistency does. It builds trust with your colleagues. They know once they send you a proposal to write, it will be done. So, they don’t bother you asking if you’ve done it, yet. 

My favourite all-time rugby player is Ellery Hanley. He was the greatest player of his generation. What made him so special? You could guarantee that if you made a break, he would always be right next to you, backing you up. This is what made him so good. 

Sure he was tough, as all rugby players generally are. He was also fit and strong. But what made him so good was he consistently backed up his players. You knew if you broke your opponent’s line, Ellery Hanley would be right there with you to take the ball and score. 

Let’s say you are that person responsible for writing proposals. You need two-and-a-half hours each day for proposal writing and an hour for your communications. That’s just three-and-a-half hours you need to protect each day for your important work. 

That still leaves you with four to five hours for anything else you may be required for. Is that impossible? 

The final part to this is to plan your week and your day. 

Planning the week is about looking at what you have to do and deciding what you will work on the following week. This will be influenced by your deadlines and what you have promised to others. 

It will also be influenced by your personal life and your commitments there. If you have kids, they will have a big influence on your weekly plans too. 

On a daily level, how many and when are your appointments for the day? what are your must do tasks? Must do tasks are non-negotiable. They must be done. Now, this means you do not want to have too many of these. I generally advise people to have no more than two. 

By not allowing more than two must do tasks for the day, you are forced to prioritise. Prioritising is a learned skill. The more you practice it, the better, and faster, you will get at it. 

I would also advise using a simple set of tools. A calendar, naturally, and a task manager. If you don’t have a task manager now, choose one that’s built into the devices you use. That would mean Apple Reminders if you use Apple tools, or Microsoft ToDo if you use a Windows system. 

Once you have these tools—a calendar and a task manager, learn to use the tools. I see a lot of people regularly switching their tools in an erroneous belief that they will find the “perfect” tool. They won’t the “perfect tool” does not exist. 

The real secret is not the tools. It’s how you run your day. 

Make sure you plan each day, you are consistent doing the work you are employed to do and you get enough sleep. 

Just those simple basic practices will improve your overall productivity. I can promise you it works every time. 

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