Have you ever wondered what one thing you could change that would have a significant impact on your productivity and time management? In this episode, I’m going to share with you that one thing.

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Hello, and welcome to episode 296 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.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading, watching and studying time management and productivity strategies and practices. And while a lot of what I’ve read rarely works in the real world, there are many that do and most of these are time tested and have been around for a long time.

For example, use a calendar. People have carried around calendars for decades—well before the digital age. It’s logical when you think about it. Have a single source that tells you where you need to be and when and make sure you carry that with you everywhere you go.

Of course, being humans and having a natural instinct to over-complicate things, digital calendars are now trying to do everything for us and as a result they have become less helpful. Cramming your day full of appointments and tasks you don’t really need to do, has made the calendar a place few people enjoy going to anymore. What’s worse is delegating responsibility for your time to other people by allowing them to schedule appointments for you. Gee why did it go so wrong?

There is one time management and productivity practice that technology has so far been unable to influence. It’s the one skill that the most productive people have mastered above everything else and if you are not skilled and confident enough to do it, you will never be productive and worse, ever be successful in your work.

However, before we get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, Hi Carl, I’ve always wanted to ask you what you consider to be the critical skill needed to be good at managing time and being productive?

Hi Greg, thank you for your question.

That’s something I’ve spent years trying to figure out, and there is one skill I have noticed in all incredibly productive people that very few people seem to possess.

That’s the ability to make decisions quickly.

You see, if you want to be more productive and less overwhelmed by what you have to do, quickly (and confidently) deciding what to work on right now is the only thing you can do.

Naturally, executing on that decision is the next important thing, but you first need to make a decision about what you will do right now. Writing this script at this moment was a decision I made twenty minutes ago, and writing it was the execution of that decision.

There are a multiple other things I could be doing right now—walking my dog, going to the gym, taking a nap, responding to my email etc. But I made the decision to sit down and write this script. It’s got to be done sometime, right? Why not now? (Although asking for an excuse why you should not be doing something is probably the wrong question to ask)

The time it took me to make that decision and begin writing was perhaps three seconds. And that is how productive people become productive. They make a decision and execute immediately.

What will hold you back and prevent you from being productive is being unable to make a decision about what to do now.

So, if you asked what skill you could develop that would radically improve your time management and productivity skills, I would say become better at making decisions.

But it is a bit more than that. You see, making decisions is something you will already be able to do. Even the most indecisive people make decisions. What time you rolled out of bed this morning was a decision, what you ate for breakfast was a decision. We are making decisions all the time.

However, the skill you need to develop is the skill of confidently making decisions. Writing this script was a confident decision. I have around twenty actionable emails sitting in my Action This Day folder, I have four unread messages in my messaging app and fifteen tasks to do in my task manager. But I am writing this right now. That’s because I am confident that writing this is the best use of my time, currently.

Everything else I have to do today can wait. Most of it will get done, some of it won’t and I am comfortable with that.

That’s the state you want to be training yourself to be in. And I use the work “training” intentionally.

Your brain has a natural tendency to overthink things. It has no sense of past, present or future. So as far as your brain is concerned, everything must be done right now. That’s why it’s important to get everything on your mind out of your mind and into an external place. A task manager or notes app or a piece of paper. It’s there where you can make the right choices about what to work on next.

But how do you make the right choices?

That begins with your Areas of Focus and core work. Knowing what these mean to you is a brilliant way to pre-decide what to work on next.

Your areas of focus shows you your priorities based on the eight areas of life we all have in common. Things like your finances, family and relationships, career and purpose. When you know what these areas mean to you, decisions based on what to do next become obvious.

For instance, if a client wants to have a dinner meeting with you on Wednesday and that’s your wedding anniversary and you’ve promised to take your partner out for dinner what do you do? If you prioritise your career above your family and relationships, then you will have dinner with your client. You may not want to admit that, but if you make that choice, that’s effectively what has happened. Your career is more important than your family and relationships.

However, if your family and relationships are more important than your career, you ask your client if you can have dinner on an alternative night, or if they are only in town for one day, perhaps you can have lunch or a coffee in the afternoon.

Knowing your core work works in the same way. Your core work is the work you are employed to do. That does not mean extra meetings, chatting with your colleague about next week’s off site event or reorganising your documents and emails.

Core work requires time and that’s why it’s important that before the week begins you have the time blocked out for doing your core work. No excuses. get that time protected. Once it’s protected, you now have less decisions to make. If you should be finishing off a client proposal and you are asked to join meeting about next quarter’s targets, you don’t go to the meeting, you write the client proposal. The proposal writing is your core work, the meeting is not. You can always ask a colleague to give you a copy of their notes.

If you observe the most productive people, you will notice they know what is important and are obsessively focused on getting the important stuff done. They don’t become distracted by trivialities such as email and Teams or Slack messages when they are working on their important tasks for that day.

Those decisions are made before the day begins. Which is why planning the day becomes a critical part of your end of day routine. Plan the day before you finish the previous day and you will sleep better (always good for being productive) will be a lot less stressed and much more focused.

So, the way to become better at managing your time and being more productive is to know what is important and what is not. What can wait and what needs dealing with immediately. And the easiest way to determine that is to know what your areas of focus and core work are.

That means you do need to allow some time to work on your areas of focus and core work. This is what I call the backend work. Spend a couple of weekends determining these areas of your life and the time investment you make will reward you massively later.

The issue I find is the people who most need to do this, are the ones who make the excuse they are too busy to do it. It seems like a luxury they cannot afford to do because they have too much to do already.

But why do you have too much to do? That’s because you don’t know what is important and what is not which means everything’s important. and when everything’s important, nothing is. And now you’re stuck in a vicious cycle that can only be broken if you stop, step back and work on your areas of focus and core work.

Now, the good news is that we have entered the annual planning season. The three months before the start of a new year. If you want to go into 2024 with a focus, a lot less stress and a determination to move your goals and projects forward, use the remaining days of 2023 to build out your areas of focus and core work.

Work out what tasks you need to do to keep these areas in balance, get them into your task manager and set them to repeat as often as they need to be repeated. This will give you consistency and when you get consistent with something you can refine and develop processes for getting this work done without much effort at all.

Ultimately, it will come down to how effective your processes are. With a process you can improve and refine them so you become faster at doing them. I have a process for doing my daily admin. Six years ago when I began doing my daily admin, it took me around an hour and half to do the tasks. Today, I can do the same tasks in the same order in less than twenty minutes. That has only happened because I have consistently done the work and refined the process for doing the work.

So there you go, Greg. Those are the critical skills. The most important one of all, though is making decisions quickly and confidently and anyone can learn to do that. All it takes is a little bit of practice.

I hope that has helped. 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.

David Wood on the Singularity Principles