Beyond the Chaos: Building a Low-Maintenance Productivity System

Where would you start if you were to completely redesign your productivity and time management system? That’s what I’m looking at this week.

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Script | 367

Hello, and welcome to episode 367 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 of the things that can hold you back from creating a solid time management and productivity system is the legacy of your old habits and systems. 

It could be you have always done things a particular way, which may have worked well in the past, but no longer does. Yet, the hold of the familiar keeps you wedded to that old habit. 

Or, your company may have adopted a new system or piece of software that has a number of possibilities that you haven’t explored yet. And, of course, the elephant in the room where you have so many tools it’s paralysing you when it comes to deciding what to use. 

So, how would you go about doing an overhaul on your system so it’s simple, easy and does not require a lot of maintenance to keep working?

That’s the topic of this week’s question and so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Lindsay. Lindsay asks, hi Carl, I recently took your new Time Sector System course and I love it. The trouble I am having is I have so much stuff all over the place, I don’t know where to start to rebuild my system. Do you have any tips that may help?

Hi Lindsay, thank you for your question. 

There’s a great YouTube video, where David Allen, author of Getting Things Done spends a day with Linda Geerdink, a Dutch journalist showing her how to get her life organised. (I’ll put the video in the show notes)

It’s quite emotional at times as Linda has never had any kind of system in the past and has lived her professional and personal life by the seat of her pants. 

David Allen comes across as being a little cruel at times, yet, I can understand where he is coming from. Sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind in order to help someone get to where they want to be. 

What fascinated me about this video is the utter chaos the start of the process of building a system can be. When you gather everything you may or may not need to do into one central place, it can seem daunting. 

And when that involves papers, documents and digital stuff, it can feel like you are drowning in an ocean of stuff that must be done. 

But, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

So, where would I start if I was to rebuild my system?

I would suggest watching that David Allen video. It starts in Dutch, but when David is introduced to the video, it continues in English. 

What David gets Linda to do is exactly right. Gather everything you have into a central place. Today, that’s going to be largely digital stuff.

If you have notes in several notes apps, pick one and go through the process of bringing everything together into one. Which notes app you choose doesn’t really matter too much, although I would choose one that is simple to use. The more complex a notes app is, the more time you will need to maintain it in the future. (Which is not a very productive way to go about it) 

The good thing about notes is they are rarely urgent. Notes are support materials for meetings, projects and ideas. Most notes apps will allow you to get a URL link so you can link the important notes to tasks in your task manager. 

Now with you task manager, again, if you have a few of these laying around, again, pick one—a simple one, and move any tasks from the apps you discard into the one you’ve chosen’s inbox. 

Then process your inbox. Use the three questions:

What is it?

What do I need to do?

When will I do it?

And then move the task to the appropriate folder. 

Now, I know all this may take a long time. Often it can take a few days. The best way to do this is to take a day or two off and dedicate those days to getting your system sorted out. It can be fun, no really, it can be.

Just be careful when you do this. We can become quite nostalgic when doing this and keep stopping to read through old notes. Now’s not the time to do this. If you do find yourself doing this create a folder called “nostalgia” and drop them in there. You can then go back to that folder when you’re finished. 

One tip here is to think elimination not accumulation. In other words focus on deleting as much as you can. Notes can be archived, sometimes your old ideas can spark fresh ideas. With your task manager, though, be ruthless and delete as much as you can. 

Your notes can hold as much as you like. You task manager needs to be clean and tight. The less in there the more effective it will be. 

I’ve stressed the importance of keeping things simple and this is something you want to be thinking about as you process what you have in your inboxes. 

Complexity is the enemy of productivity. It slows you down by adding what I call an administrative cost. That’s the cost in time it takes to maintain your system. 

This is why the Time Sector System is powerful. It narrows down you options to when you will do something. After all, it doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have the time to do it, does it? 

Moving forward, you want to be quite strict about what you schedule to do this week. It’s quite easy, when planning your week, to think that’s it. But it isn’t. Once the week begins, new stuff will be coming in daily, and some of that will need to be done this week. You do need to keep some space—white space as I’ve heard it called—for these tasks and appointments. 

Now, what about the future? How can you prevent chaos from returning in the future and to put yourself in a position where you are in control and know what you are doing and when?

First accept your human limitations. 

You and I have two limitations. We can only work on one thing at a time and the number of hours we have each day. 

These are human limitations and there nothing we can do to change them. 

Then there is the need to sleep—although you may be able to pull an all nighter occasionally if you must, which I hope you don’t need to do, ever—and eat. Both of which take time. 

This means, the place to start would be your calendar. How much time do you need for your personal needs. That would be family and social time, sleep, exercise and anything else you want time for. 

You don’t want to be worrying about work at this point. 

Your work has a fixed time—usually Monday to Friday, so you can deal with that later. 

The benefit to starting with your personal life is it will help you to establish some boundaries between your personal and professional life. 

Once you have your calendar of personal activities set up, and I would set these to recur in your calendar. You can always move things around when you do your weekly planning. By setting them up as recurring events, you’re much more likely to stick to them. 

Now look at your work. 

First where are your fixed meetings? Get them on your calendar. 

After that, how much time do you need, on average, to do your core work. That’s the work you’re employed to do. 

When I was a teacher, my teaching schedule was fixed. Yet, I also needed to schedule time for class preparation and my admin duties. 

When I worked as a lawyer, I required more time to work on the cases, so I made sure I had five hours a day for just working on the cases—that involved preparing court documents, requesting documents from the Land Registry and responding to letters from other lawyers. 

That meant I had only three hours available for appointments. 

There was no point in me believing I could fit in five hours of meetings and spend five hours on my cases—which I genuinely needed to do in order to keep my head above water—I wasn’t being paid enough to work ten hours a day and sacrifice my social life and my exercise time. 

Now, I did allow a little more flexibility at the end of a month, but on the whole I strictly controlled my calendar to ensure I was not trying to do the impossible. 

And, for those of you who believe you cannot get control of your calendar, when I worked in a law firm, I never got fired and received my annual bonus for exemplary work each year, and I was the most junior or juniors in my time in the law office. You can do this—control your time. You’re evaluated on your work, not how many meetings you attend. 

This is why I always recommend you start with getting control of your calendar. It’s your calendar that controls one of your limitations—available time.

Now, the other limitation, only being able to work on one thing at a time, means you can group similar tasks together and focus your efforts on clearing that list. For example, if you allocate an hour a day for dealing with your communications, you’re not worrying about how many emails you have to respond to, you don’t need to. 

All you need to do is begin with the oldest message and do as many as you can until your hour is up. If you consistently follow that process, you’ll rarely have any communication backlogs. 

It’s not about the number of emails and messages you have to respond to, it’s about how much time you have available to respond to them. Do them all at the same time and that way you won’t be jumping around inside multiple different apps trying to find what to do.

It’s the same with your admin and project tasks. It’s never about how many you have to do at anyone time. It’s about how much time you have available to do them. 

If you’re work is largely project based, make sure you have sufficient time scheduled on your calendar for working on your project tasks each week. If you’re role is mainly admin tasks—for example you’re in customer support, then how much time, on average, do you need to do your work without the build up of backlogs each week? 

If you’re focused on how much you have to do, you will always feel overwhelmed. If you focus on how much time you have available for working on different types of work, you’ll be a lot less overwhelmed and you will be getting your work done. 

This also eliminates the impossible challenge of trying to estimate how long a task will take. Nobody can do that with any degree of accuracy. This comes back to you being a human being. Some days you’ll be on fire and churn through a lot of work. Other days you’ll be feeling exhausted and find everything you do is like trying to run through treacle. 

I hope that has helped, Lindsay. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.