How to Stay Productive When Everything Changes

Let me take some pressure off. Your problem is not discipline. Your problem is not organization. Your problem is not that you have yet to stumble upon the perfect schedule. And your problem is not that the folks at home demand too much of your time. The problem is this: there’s not enough time to get everything done that you’re convinced—or others have convinced you—needs to get done.

That’s a quote by Andy Stanley, an author and church leader and perfectly captures the topic of this week’s episode. Enjoy. 

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Script | 384

Hello, and welcome to episode 384 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. 

It’s easy to create a productivity system on paper, working with theories and concepts. The challenging part comes when that system is confronted with real-life events. 

The upset customer who demands immediate action, a colleague off work sick and a boss who thinks you can drop everything and work on their latest wheeze. 

It’s not that these productivity systems don’t work, they do, it’s that a system is only as good as the person adopting it is willing to slow down and consider how important the demand in front of them really is. 

It’s also understanding what you have control of and what you don’t. 

You don’t have control over whether your daughter’s after-school class is cancelled at short notice or not. You do have control over putting in place a contingency in case it happens. 

In the real world, things change fast. An urgent email you received at 9:15 a.m. Is resolved on its own by 9:28 a.m. A meeting you spent all weekend preparing for get’s cancelled two hours before it’s due to begin. The list is endless. 

Yet, having some kind of system still helps you. 

And that’s what this week’s question is about. How to use a productivity system in a fast moving, chaotic world. 

And so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks, hi Carl, how would you advise someone that is struggling to set up a system because their work is always changing. My customers expect me to be available all the time and my boss keeps calling meetings without any notice. I never have any time to do my work. 

Hi Alan. Thank you for your question. 

I think it was Jim Rohn that taught me to understand that there are a lot of things in life that we cannot control. Obvious ones would be the weather, or a train breaking down that prevents you from getting into work on time. 

Yet, there are also things like phone calls and urgent messages that can significantly change your plans for the day. 

This is what I suppose we call life. Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of our plans. 

However, it’s always been like that. Life has always been unpredictable and yet many people have managed to deal with it. 

There are a number of things you can do that will help you to stay on track, yet have the space and time to deal with the unexpected when they occur. 

The first one is when planning the week, don’t focus on tasks, focus on objectives. 

What I mean by this is when you focus on scheduling tasks for the week, it’s likely 60% or more will not get done. Either you don’t have the time or things change and they no longer need to be done. 

Too much can change over seven days. 

I’ve seen people carefully schedule out an exercise plan for the week, only to pick up a calf strain on Tuesday that prevents them from doing any more running for the rest of the week. 

Yet, had they set the objective to exercise four times that week, the calf strain would be a minor inconvenience and perhaps to fulfil their exercise objective they could go swimming or to the gym and do non-leg exercises instead. 

Similarly in the work environment, if you were to plan out a project’s tasks for the week, and you keep getting pulled into a last minute “urgent” meetings, the chances are by the end of the week you will have done practically none of the tasks you scheduled for yourself. 

If you had instead set the objective of doing some work on the project, you would give yourself more flexibility to choose what to do given the changing circumstances of your week. 

This way, although you may have only done three things on the project you still completed your objective. That’s a win. 

Had you set yourself up to complete ten tasks on the project and only done three, you would consider that a failure and feel planning the week is a waste of time. 

It’s as if all you are doing in a weekly planning session is scheduling tasks you won’t do. Which then makes it feel like a waste of time. But It’s not a waste of time if you are setting yourself realistic objectives based on what your calendar says you have time for. 

Tasks are assigned at a daily level. 

When you assign your tasks at a daily level you can take into account the changing nature of the week. 

I’ve had clients have their complete week destroyed because of a crisis with a client in another country. They go into work with one expectation and by 11:00 am they are driving to the airport to catch a flight to the other side of the world to resolve a crisis. 

This is why weekly and daily planning go hand in hand. 

Another tip I would recommend is to avoid scheduling anything for the first thirty minutes of your work day. 

Use that time to get a heads up on the day. 

Go through your messages and emails to see what is happening. 

I don’t subscribe to the idea that you should not check your email or messages in the morning. That to me is a ridiculous idea. When you stop yourself from processing your messages, you start to worry that there might be something in there that is important. 

That worry causes distraction and it becomes difficult to focus on anything else. 

The chances that there is a crisis that needs your urgent attention is slim and if there is a crisis that needs your attention better to know about it early so you have time to slow down and consider the best steps to resolve it. 

But more importantly, those first thirty minutes gives you a chance to get a feel for the day, confirm your plan and decide when best to do whatever work you had decided to do that day. 

To give you an example. I woke early this morning for a meeting at 8:00 am. I did my morning routines, and as I was preparing for the meeting, I got a text message informing me that the meeting had been cancelled. 

That gave me back an hour I had not planned for. 

So, I looked at my plan for the day and decided that the best use of that hour would be to begin writing this podcast script. Doing that would take the pressure off the rest of the day and give me a chance to bring forward other work. 

All this does not mean having a system is pointless. Having a system means you can switch focus quickly and you know where to look to make better decisions on what to work on next. 

For example, having a quick and simple way to collect stuff is a no-brainer. A paper notebook open on your desk with a pencil ready to go allows you to quickly jot something down when on a call or in the middle of doing something else. 

Making sure that your phone and computers are set up for quick capture is also important. Ideas and requests can happen at any time. Being able to collect those ideas with the minimum of fuss is important.

Then, allowing yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day for processing what you collected so you can delete the unnecessary and ensure that what is left is either scheduled or dealt with. 

This is why I urge everyone to take the free COD course. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and it’s the foundations of every solid productivity system. 

I’ll put a link in the show notes for you if you haven’t taken the course yet. 

Another thing you can do, which is linked to the first thirty minutes of your day is to mentally map out when you will do something. This is where you use the power of “implementation Intentions”. 

This is where you used an “if this, then that formula” 

If it’s 2:00 pm then I will spend an hour clearing my actionable email.

If it’s 5:30 pm, I will stop and plan tomorrow for ten minutes. 

I like to use the first thirty minutes of the day to review my calendar and then visualise the different times in the day what I will be doing at that time. 

It really helps to get you focused and prevents you from getting involved in things you do not need to be involved in. 

Don’t be too strict with yourself. If you planned to respond to your actionable emails at 2:00 pm and it’s now 2:20 pm, it doesn’t matter. Just start going through your actionable emails. Whether you spend an hour or forty minutes on this activity isn’t the issue. What matters in you spent some time doing it. 

Being consistent and allowing yourself to get back on track is what really matters. When it comes to things like emails and messages and daily admin, it’s never going to be about clearing everything in one day. It’s always about spending some time doing it daily. 

If you’re just starting out on an exercise programme, it’s not really about the quality of your workout initially, It’s about spending time doing exercise. Getting fit and healthy doesn’t happen with one workout. It’s an accumulation of many workouts done consistently over a period of time that results in your increased physical fitness. 

A final point is if you work in a dynamic environment. This is work that involves multiple interruptions each day and rapid changes in focus. 

Here we have to be careful. Many people believe their jobs are dynamic, but often the chaos is not the job, but the way they are structuring their day. 

I remember once being contacted by someone who worked in customer support. They worked in an office and they were customer facing. There was no place to go and do other work without the risk of someone coming in and interrupting them. 

In this instance asking what is their core work gave then the answer they were looking for. They were employed to deal with customer issues, face to face. 

The priority here was to be available for customers coming in to their office. If there was a lull, then they could make calls or follow up people they were waiting to hear back from. If there wasn’t a lull, then as long as they were in front of the customer, they were doing the job they were employed to do.

The solution in this instance was to arrange with their team leader to allow the customer support team to have thirty minutes each day away from talking with customers face to face to deal with any follow up issues. 

As it happened in that case the team leaders realised that this was a good idea and allowed all customer support people to have two thirty minutes periods each day. Those times were fixed where possible so the team could better plan their days. 

The key here is to protect periods of time in the day for doing the non-dynamic work. You can do this weekly or daily. If you do it daily, the daily planning will become more important as you will be fixing in these protected times when you do your daily planning.

And remember, thirty minutes is always going to be better than zero minutes. 

I hope that has helped, Alan. Thank you 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.