Where are you spending most of your time? Are you planning or doing? That’s what we are looking at this week.
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Script | 358
Hello, and welcome to episode 358 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.
Podcaster Chris Williamson has recently caused a bit of a stir in the productivity world with the phrase “the productivity rain dance”. Cal Newport picked this up and it’s something I’ve written and spoken about for many years.
If you are obsessing about productivity tools—apps, techniques and systems—you’re not doing the work. You’re doing the productivity rain dance. It’s organising, planning and searching for new tools in the hope that somehow the work will get done.
It won’t. And while you are wasting all that time planning, and playing, the work continues to pile up.
This week’s question is linked to this in that it’s about tools and organising work and I hope, my answer will help you find the balance between collecting, organising and doing.
Before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question, I’d like to mention that the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025 is coming.
On Fridays 14th and 21st March I invite you to spend two hours with me learning how to create a time management and productivity system that’s focused on doing the work so you have time for the things you want time for.
In the workshop, we will cover getting control of your calendar and task manager . Then in week two, I will show you some simple techniques to get control of, and more importantly, stay in control of your communications—email, Slack/Teams messages AND the all important daily and weekly planning sessions.
Places are limited so, if you would like to develop a personal productivity system that is focused on doing rather than organising and planning, get yourself registered today. The link to register is in the show notes.
Okay, back to this episode. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alastair. Alastair asks, hi Carl. I recently came across your work and wonder how you avoid getting caught up in the wonderful world of productivity apps. I never seem to able to stick to anything and I know I am wasting time.
Hi Alastair, thank you for sending in your question.
I’m not sure you are necessarily wasting time looking for the right tools. If you are at the start of your productivity journey, finding the right tools is inevitable and yes, it can be confusing. There are so many.
However, there comes a point when you need to stop and settle down with a set of tools.
Those tools are: A calendar, a notes app and a task manager.
The good news is the built in tools that comes with your computer will do. You don’t need expensive subscriptions to so called AI enabled tools or collaborative project management tools.
What are you trying to do when you decide it’s time to get organised and be “productive”?
It’s not about getting more work done. That’s a bit of a misnomer about productivity. It’s about getting the important stuff done and eliminating the less important.
Getting your kids up, dressed, fed and ready for school each morning is important at 7:30 am. Checking email and messages is not. There’s a time and place for those messages, but 7:30 am is not the time.
The world we live in today has made communication incredible fast and easy. Forty years ago, the only forms of communication were letters and telephone calls. (Although some offices had fax machines too).
If you were not next to a telephone, no one could contact you. And if you were not in the office, you didn’t know what surprises were contained in the correspondence waiting for you.
It was therefore easier to compartmentalise your days. Today, it’s much more difficult because you can be alerted to problems instantly, and those problems can derail your day very quickly.
The challenge therefore is to be able to quickly sift through all the stuff coming at us and to decide what is important and what is not.
When things are coming at us all day, they appear loud and urgent. But urgent is not necessarily important.
If you have a thousand emails backlogged in your email system and your boss is demanding you send in your employee evaluations by the end of the week, your employee evaluations are the more important task. The backlog will have to wait.
And let’s be honest, if someone’s been waiting three months for you to reply to their email they’re not going to be bothered if they have to wait a further week.
If you consider that scenario for a moment, your productivity tools are not going to help you.
The only thing you need to know is that writing your employee evaluations must be done. Shuffling that task around your productivity tools won’t do that for you. You are, in effect, procrastinating.
I like the analogy to the rain dance here. A rain dance is performed to persuade God or the gods to bring rain to water the crops. Yet, the dance doesn’t produce the rain. You can dance as much as you like, you can wear elaborate costumes and involve other people. None of that will give you what you want—water to feed the crops.
You can download as many productivity tools as you like. You can organise your notes in such a way that finding stuff is quick and easy and you can spend hours curating your notes and tasks so they look pretty. Yet, none of that gets the work done.
Doing the work is the only way the work will get done.
So, all you need each day is a list of things you have decided are important and you get done and do them.
For that, you don’t need expensive apps. A single sheet of paper would do that.
I’ve always found it interesting how productive people get their work done. The common thread is they do the work, not organise it.
If you Google Albert Einstein’s desk you will see a mess. Papers and books strewn all over the place. If you search for Jeff Bezos’ desk from the early days of Amazon, you’ll see something very similar.
These guys got a tremendous amount of work done without the need for clean and tidy systems. They got on with doing the work that mattered and cleaned up when they were finished.
Sadly, unproductive people don’t achieve very much so we cannot see their workspaces, but I’ll bet they were beautifully neat and tidy with bookshelves of neatly organised books and papers lined up perfectly on their desks.
A few years ago I got into watching YouTube videos of minimalist desk set ups. (Weirdly, these videos are still popular!). I remember at the time wondering how they ever got any work done. It must have taken hours to keep their workspace so clean.
The key to all of this is knowing what is important and what is not. This is why I recommend doing two exercises before you begin developing any kind of system.
The first is to establish what your areas of focus are. These eight areas around your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness, lifestyle and personal development are important because they define what is important to you as an individual.
The next is to get clear what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do and directly effects your promotional prospects and ultimately your income.
Being quick to answer your phone, respond to a message or email or being on time to every meeting is not your core work. Well, not unless you work in customer support.
Once you know what your areas of focus are and your core work is, you have a pre-defined set of priorities on which to base your decisions about what you should be doing each day.
For example, one of my areas of focus related to my work (career) is to help as many people as I can become more productive and less stressed. To do that, I produce several pieces of content each week.
Creating and publishing that content is always a priority for me.
I don’t need a lot of tools to to do that.
A calendar protects time each week for creating that content—I have twelve hours a week protected for this.
I have a very disorganised list of content ideas in a single note in Evernote—a notes app I’ve been using for almost 16 years now.
And, of course, I have an app for writing and producing that content.
Are there better calendars, notes apps and writing tools out there? Possibly, but how much faster would I be able to create content with those new tools? Probably no faster because using them would be unfamiliar to me.
The tools I use I’ve used for over ten years. I know them inside out and they are boring. And that’s good because I’m not tempted to organise them, or even look for new apps. They do the job I need them to do and I can focus on creating the content.
If you want to become more productive and get the important things done on time every time, the only way you will do that is to do the work. There are no shortcuts and no productivity tool will do it for you. Only you can do that.
- If you need to write a report, open up Microsoft Work or Google Docs and write the first paragraph.
- If you need to prepare a presentation, open up PowerPoint or Keynote and create the first slide.
- If you need to wash your car, go to the car wash centre and wash your car.
- If you need to do your taxes, download the documents and write in your name and national insurance number.
Funny how none of those things requires you to add a task into a task manager. You just need to decide when you will do them and do them.
So there you go, Alastair. Focus less on the tools and more on what you need to do to get the job done. You really don’t need elaborate apps, complex organisational structures or a minimalist desk.
You just need time protected to get the work done.
Thank you, Alastair for your question and thank you for listening. Don’t forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop where will cover many of these concepts (and much more).
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
