How a Surgeon, CEO, and Financial Advisor Mastered Their Time

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

That’s a famous quote from Groucho Marx and encapsulates perfectly what this episode is about

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Script | 390

Hello, and welcome to episode 390 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. 

I’ve been coaching people one-on-one for seven years, and in that time, I picked up some ideas that, when adopted by clients, almost always guarantee they will transform their time management and productivity. 

None of these ideas is revolutionary, which isn’t surprising since people have long struggled with time management and productivity issues. 

Our attitude to time and the expectations of others has changed, but the amount of time we have hasn’t. 

Technology, rather than helping us to do more in less time, has elevated the amount we are expected to do. 

Fifty years ago, we might have received thirty letters; today, technology has elevated the number of digital letters and messages we receive into the hundreds. And while we may be quicker at responding, we’re not realistically able to respond to hundreds of emails and messages each day and still produce work. 

(Even though I know a number of you are trying)

It goes back to what I wrote and spoke about two or three years ago, fashions may change, but the principles don’t. 

AI and ChatGPT are all the rage today. If you’ve gone down that rabbit hole, you will have been blown away by what it can do. It’s incredible. 

Yet what is it doing? It is making some parts of our work faster. Yet, most people still don’t have enough time to do all their work. What’s happening? 

Well, telling everyone that you can now produce a sales review presentation in less than twenty minutes with the help of ChatGPT means you are now expected to create more presentations. 

That sales review presentation may have taken you two days before, but now, if you can do it in twenty minutes, boom! Your boss can give you more work to do! 

So what are the traits, best practices and ideas that do work that the people who have seen a massive increase in their time management and productivity follow? 

Well, that’s the subject of this week’s question. And that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Lauren. Lauren asks, “Hi Carl, I know you have been coaching people for a long time, and I am curious to know what the most productive people you meet do that is different from those less successful at it.” 

Hi Lauren, thank you for your question. 

As I eluded to, the most productive people I’ve coached follow principles, not fashions, and are ruthless with their time allocation. 

Those principles are to collect everything, process what you gathered, eliminate unnecessary things, and allocate time for doing what’s left. 

But it goes a little deeper than that. 

First, you need to know what is important to you. That relates to your Areas of Focus. Those are the eight areas of life we all share but will define and prioritise differently. 

Things like, your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness and self-development. 

Knowing what these mean to you and what priority they are in your life goes a long way to helping you to build productive days. 

Almost every client of mine that has significantly improved their time management have gone through the Areas of Focus exercise and defined each one. 

The second part to this is to be clear about what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do. 

What I found interesting is that my YouTube Short video with the fewest views is the one asking the question: What are you employed to do?” 

That doesn’t surprise me.

Going through and defining your Areas of Focus and core work is not sexy. Quick fixes, new tools and apps are the sexy things, yet none of those will ever help you regain control of your time. 

Sure, they are fun, exciting and interesting to explore. But they are distractions that will never help you be better at managing your time. 

(I learned that one the hard way. I used to waste so much time each week playing with new apps, programmes and tools) 

Speaking of tools, I have noticed that the most productive people use simple tools. Often it’s Microsoft ToDo or Apple’s Reminders. Quite a few use Todoist, but I suspect that’s because I have done nearly four hundred videos on Todoist and many of my clients found me through YouTube. 

People who struggle the most are using project management tools like ClickUp or Monday.com.

Those types of tools require far too much maintenance to keep them up-to-date and that takes time away from you doing the work you are organising. 

It’s as the old saying goes, you’re trying to crack a nut by using a sledge hammer. 

But, the stand out change that people make that has the biggest impact on their time management and overall productivity is they get ruthless with their time allocation. 

And I mean ruthless. 

For example, one long term client, now a senior executive in his company, will not allow any meetings on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon. Those times are blocked on his calendar. 

He uses that time for doing his most important work for that week. 

Three hours Monday morning and three hours Friday afternoon. That’s six hours he knows will not be interrupted and so he can confidently allocate work to those times.

I remember when we first started. He was all over the place. He had meetings lined up Monday through Friday and couldn’t even find a hour to quietly get on with his work. 

His default answer to any request was “yes” and it was destroying him. 

Now, not only does he have greater respect for his own time, his colleagues also do. Nobody even bothers to ask for a meeting on a Monday morning or Friday afternoon because they know he will say no. 

The key here is to get control of your calendar. (Another principle). If you’re not in control there, it doesn’t matter what you do elsewhere because you’ve lost control in the one area that determines what you do and when. 

Everyone will be different here. 

I have one client who’s a surgeon and a professor. She has to divide her time between the operating room and the classroom. 

Her surgery hours are fixed. So, she knows she will be in the operating room on a Tuesday and Thursday. Her teaching hours vary according to each semester, but once the academic year begins, her lecture times are fixed. 

These times are locked into her calendar. But she goes further. She knows that she will have to meet with patients and students. So, Wednesdays are dedicated for patients. She will visit the patients she will be operating on the next day and deal with any out-patient clinics on a Wednesday. 

So three days a week are dedicated to her role as a surgeon. 

She will do her academic work on Mondays and Fridays. Most of her lectures are in the mornings, and she will stay in her office in the afternoons so she’s available for students if they need her. 

What she has done is to become ruthless with how she allocates her time each week. Her calendar is sacred territory. 

She does open Saturday mornings during exam times so students can access her if needed, and she can do any outstanding admin work in between. 

What got her back in control was taking back control of her calendar and saying “no” to requests that did not fit in with her priorities. 

And this is where it’s hard for most people. Getting control of their calendar. The easy part is organising and reorganising your task manager. Really all you are doing there is moving things around. 

When it comes to getting control of your calendar you have to interact with other people and that means in some instances you will need to say No. 

And there human nature will challenge us. We’re wired to “please people”. So saying “no, I cannot meet with you” is tough. It’s easier to find an excuse why you are different to everyone else. 

Yet, you don’t have to say no. You can use services such as Calendly, that lets you pick times you will be available for meetings and all you need do is share your unique link with people requesting a meeting with you. They can then choose a time that works for them without all the hassle of trying to find a time. 

Technology has conditioned us to become comfortable with automated systems. There’s little to no pushback these days. In fact I’d go as far as to say that people much prefer to choose their appointment time from an online booking service. 

Another long-time client of mine is a financial advisor. He adopted Calendly for his clients to use to book a call with him. 

He was expecting a lot of pushback from his clients. Instead he got a lot of compliments. They loved it. They could book a time to talk with him from the comfort of their own sofa late at night without having to call or message him during “office hours”.

Now, whenever he gets a message or email requesting a meeting, he sends them the link to his booking service. 

This means he’s in complete control of his time. He can open or close meeting time slots during his weekly planning sessions, and he knows when he will be meeting clients so he can be better prepared for the meeting. 

And speaking of weekly planning. This is possibly the number one idea that brings the most significant improvement. 

Consistently planning the week is really a no-brainer no matter what role you have in your professional and personal life. 

The senior executive, surgeon and financial advisor I previously mentioned wouldn’t dream of beginning a week without a plan. It’s how they can manage conferences, holidays and other extraordinary weeks. 

Without a plan for the week, it’s like setting out on a journey without knowing where you are going. You’ll get somewhere but highly likely it’ll be a place you do not want to be. 

The weekly plan is about deciding what is important to you that week. What projects need attention, where your meetings are, and what you want to accomplish. 

For instance, many of my clients will decide when they will exercise at a weekly level. They’ll decide how many times they want to go to the gym or out for a run and set that as an objective. This gives them the flexibility they need to ensure they are getting the right things done whilst taking care of the personal maintenance we all need of the right amount of sleep, exercise and eating the right food types. 

The final piece is the daily planning. This is where you decide at a task level what needs to be done. 

Because the world we live in today is fast moving, there will likely be things on your weekly plan that need to change. It’s the daily planning where you can make those adjustments. 

For example, if the senior executive came into work one day and walked into a crisis such as what recently happened to Jaguar Land Rover with the cyber attack, his whole week would need to change. It’s at a daily level that those changes can be taken care of. 

Meetings can be cancelled, auto reply can be set up on email services to explain why they cannot respond to emails and messages, etc. 

That might be extreme, but it clearly can happen and things will need to change. 

So there you go, Lauren. The people who get it, who are living productive and well managed lives follow a few simple principles. 

They follow the COD methodology—collect stuff, organise and process that stuff, eliminating the unimportant and then ensure they get on with the work. 

They ruthlessly protect their time on their calendars and never delegate management of their calendar to anyone else. 

They plan the week and day to ensure they are working on the right things at the right time and are clear about what is important to them. 

I hope that has helped and thank you for your question.

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