In this engaging discussion, Carl Pullein, an expert in time management and productivity strategies, shares valuable insights on mastering productivity. He delves into the Ivy Lee method and his unique 'Two Plus Eight' system for prioritizing tasks effectively. Carl emphasizes reframing procrastination as a learning opportunity and talks about balancing professional and personal commitments. His strategies aim to help busy professionals manage their time intentionally, ensuring a sustainable and fulfilling lifestyle.

Carl Pullein, an expert in productivity and habit creation, dives into the distinction between mere busyness and true accomplishment. He emphasizes transforming to-do lists to reflect personal aspirations that drive growth. By pinpointing what truly matters, Pullein suggests prioritizing impactful actions that align with long-term goals. He warns against the trap of ticking off tasks without real progress, urging listeners to focus on meaningful activities that foster personal and professional development.

In this episode, Carl Pullein, a productivity expert, shares the impact a calendar can have on productivity. He emphasizes confident decision-making, prioritizing areas of focus and core work, and planning and prioritizing as crucial aspects of productivity.

Podcast 263. This week, we are looking at the humble task manager and at how to get the most out of it by getting back to basics.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 263 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 263 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. Since even before the Ivy Lee Method was first used in 1918, listing out your tasks for the day has been a common way to manage all the things you have to do. Externalising what needs to be done, is a tried and tested method for managing what we do each day. When you combine a well managed task manager with a calendar, you have a very powerful way to get your work done and to have time for rest each day. Now, as usual we humans are incredibly destructive. For some weird reason we seem to hate simplicity and love to over complicate things until they are destroyed.  A classic apocryphal story that illustrates this is during the space race, both NASA and the Russians were having difficulty finding a writing implement that worked in a zero gravity environment. The traditional pen needs gravity to work and when you take gravity out, the pen will no longer work.  NASA spent millions of dollars researching this. Yet the Russians spent nothing and solved the problem. The Russian space agency gave their astronauts pencils. Pencils don’t need gravity.  This week’s question touches on this problem of over-complexity and I will give you some ways to get things back to a more simple footing so you can focus more on doing your work and spend less time organising your work. So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Thomas. Thomas asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently been watching a lot of YouTube videos on using task managers. I like the idea of keeping all my tasks in one place, but it’s so confusing. There’s so many different ways to use a to-do list I just cannot figure out which is the best one. Do you have any recommendations?  Hi Thomas, thank you for your question and yes, you are right; it is very confusing.  The problem here is everyone will have a different way to manage their work. This is in part because we are all different (which is a good thing), and we all do different types of work. While you might have a generic job title such as a doctor or dentist within those generic titles there are a multitude of different disciplines.  Another problem is we now have many more options than using a piece of paper and a pen to write out what needs to be done today. Now the task manager has been digitalised, developers can add features to differentiate themselves from other developers building task managers.  It a combination of these two factor that has inevitably led to things becoming overly complicated.  But let’s just push back the complexity and look at what a task manager needs to do. A task manager needs three areas: An area to collect things, an area to store things and an area that tells you what needs to be done today.  Anything else that adds to that is just adding complexity. Now task manager developers can easily create something with those three areas that works well. Unfortunately, for us, that would be boring and so we now have flags, tags and filters (and a whole lot more in many cases) Now these can be useful, but they are definitely not essential.  So, how can you make a task manager work effectively? Well, understanding the three areas would be a good start. Let’s look at these individually.  First you need to be collecting all your commitments, tasks and anything else you need to do in your inbox. It’s no good collecting some and leaving others in your head. This is not something you can do half-heartedly. Either you go all in or don’t bother at all.  Your head is the worst place to remember what needs to be done. It’s not designed to store information. It’s designed to recognise patterns. We use all our senses to do that. Sight, taste, smell, touch and sound are our primary pattern recognition senses and the ones used every day. We would immediately think something is wrong if we go outside when there’s a blue sky and the sun is shining, but when we do step outside we get wet. There’s an interrupt in the pattern and our brain alerts us to something not being right and our fight or flight reaction will engage.  That’s where our brains work incredibly well.  If someone gives us a random series of numbers that do not fit a pattern (such as giving us a telephone number) we will struggle to remember them. Give us a series of numbers such as 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and we will remember—we recognise the pattern.  So the first thing to do if you want a task manager to work is to collect everything and not trust your brain to remember to do the task.  The second area of a task manager is the storage area. I like to think of this as a holding pen for tasks I have not yet decided when I will do them or are not due today.  If we were not organising tasks into holding pens, our inbox—the place you collect your tasks—would soon be swamped. Once that happens you stop looking at it and it becomes a waste of time.  This means every 24 hours or so, you want to be clearing out your inbox, making decisions about when you will do a task and storing them in appropriate holding pens.  Now, there’s a lot of variability in how you organise your tasks. For instance, I organise my collected tasks into time sectors—ie when I am going to do the task. For me, all I want know is whether I will do the task this week, next week, this month, next month or sometime in the distant future.  Other ways to organise your tasks would be by context. This is more commonly known as the GTD method (Getting Things Done) Here you would organise tasks by what you need to do the task—such as a computer, or where you would do the task—in your office or at home, or person, such as your boss, partner or colleague.  The truth is you can organise your tasks in whatever way you want. The important thing is; the way you organise your holding pens needs to work for you.  The thing about these holding pens is you do not work directly from them. They are simply storage areas. They are for planning purposes only.  In my coaching programme, I can quickly tell if a client does any planning by where they choose their next task. If they are in and out of their holding pens looking for tasks to do, that’s a clear indicator that no planning is being done. Essentially, you are planning every time you complete a task and move on to the next one.  This means instead of spending thirty minutes or so on at the end of the week doing a weekly plan, you are doing micro planning between tasks and that adds up to a lot more time than thirty minutes over the course of a week. It’s a very inefficient way of managing your tasks.  It’s a little like working in a shop. If you do your planning, the stock you need is right there in the shop on a shelf where the customer can pick it up, bring it to the counter and pay for it. It’s a seamless, efficient way to conduct your business.  If you don’t do your stock planning, a customer would come in, ask you for a particular product and you would need to walk into the warehouse, find the box the product is in and bring it to the counter. It’s incredibly inefficient and will leave you exhausted. And yet, according to statistics, 93% of people are doing no weekly planning. No wonder there are so many exhausted people. The final part of your task manager is your today list. It’s this list that needs to be kept clean and tight. It must show you only the tasks that need to be completed today and not anything you might like to do. This is what I like to refer to as the business end of your task manager. If you do have extra time at the end of of your list, by all means go into your holding pens and look for a few tasks you can clear before the next day—or better still, take some well deserved rest.  If you are collecting everything and doing your weekly and daily planning, when you start your day and open your today list, you can be confident that the tasks on this list are the only ones that need concern you today.  When you have your task manager working in this manner, where you collect everything, process what you collected into their appropriate holding pens, (or delete the things that are no longer relevant) and you work primarily from your today list, you will find getting through the day Is easy.  You won’t feel as mentally exhausted because you are not doing mini-planning sessions between tasks,—which is a real drain on your mental resources—and you find you flow from one task to another.  There are other strategies for managing your today list. For example, group similar tasks together so you are not switching your focus. This means if you have five or six calls to make, block an hour or so out and sit down and do them all together. Respond to your actionable emails all at once—as late in the day as you can as that prevents email ping-pong. Now the problem we all face today is in the competitive world of productivity apps the only way for developers to distinguish themselves from their competition is to keep adding features. We now have flags, which to be honest is quite useful, tags and labels, filters and multiple different views.  While all these extra features may seem nice, none of them actually help you to do your work. We cannot do multiple tasks at the same time. I cannot make two phone calls at the same time nor can I write three articles. I can only do one task at a time. This means for me to be at my most focused, all I need to know is what to work on now, and then get on and do it without being distracted by what I need t todo next. If I have a lot of random tasks on my list, I’ve just slowed myself down because now I have to decide what to do. And human nature being what it is, I’m likely to pick the easiest task—just to complete a task and get the dopamine hit.  This is a terrible way to do your work. You are at your best in the morning and that is the time to tackle the hardest tasks, leaving your easiest tasks to later in the day when you are not going to be at your best.  So, Thomas, if you want to remove all the complexity, focus on the three areas of your task manager and make sure you get those parts working well for you. Ignore al the extra features—they may become useful later, but if you are starting out, focus your attention on collecting everything—make that a habit. Don’t overthink how you structure your lists, folders etc. These are holding pens for when you do your planning, and make sure you spend enough time dong the work to clear your tasks each day.  I hope that has helped, Thomas. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listen. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 212 This week’s question is all about getting your task manager clean and tight and ultimately more functional.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Download the Annual Planning Template Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template More about the Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 212 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 212 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. One of the problems many people face with their task manager is the volume of tasks that appear on their today lists. And even if you are vigilant about when you add a date to a task, there often is still far too many tasks on the daily list.  So, this week, I want to address that and share with you a few ways you can eliminate rather than accumulate tasks.  Now before we get to the question, this will be the final episode for a couple weeks. Don’t worry, we will be returning on the 10th January. And, if you don’t want to miss out of all the productivity and time management content I produce each week, sign up for my weekly newsletter where every Friday you will receive all the content, PLUS a short essay with a tip on improving your overall productivity, time management and goal setting.  The link to sign up is in the show notes.  Okay, it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Gary. Gary asks, Hi Carl, I saw your recent video on how you have Todoist set up. I noticed you have very few tasks on your today list. Is that for real or was that just for show?  Hi Gary, thank you for your question and yes, that was for real.  Twice a year I show how I have evolved how I use Todoist, and in this videos I share my real Todoist account. Normally, I use a demo account.  So, how I achieve that is by focusing on elimination and being very very strict about what gets into my system.  Now, I should be careful here because I still collect a lot of stuff into my inbox. However, I am very strict on what goes from my inbox into my time sectors. This is where I practice the art of elimination. Let me explain. Firstly, I am obsessed with avoiding duplication. I hate it if there is a piece of work or a task in one app and I copy it over to my task manager. That act of copying it over to my task manager creates a duplicated task.  For example. Like most people a lot of my tasks come from email and in the past I would forward these to Todoist’s inbox. That would easily generate fifteen to twenty tasks per day in my inbox. This meant I had the original email in my email system and a task for that email in my task manager which created duplication. Then when it came to processing my Todoist inbox, I had all the other tasks plus those emails to process. This meant those email tasks had now been processed twice and I still had done nothing about acting on them—which is crazy.  I realised, if I created a folder in my email called “Action This Day” and any email that required me to do something was put in there, I only needed a single task in Todoist that recurred every day to remind me to clear that folder. This meant I no longer needed to go from Todoist to email, back to Todoist and then email again. It was a lot of unnecessary extra steps just to reply to a single email.  Moving email within the email app itself is a lot easier and faster and I eliminate a complete step. It also means now all I need do is allocate a block of time later in the day to clear my action this day folder and all my email commitments are dealt with for another twenty-four hours.  Another area where accumulation and duplication appears is throwing all your project tasks into your task manager. A lot of what needs doing on a project is obvious. If you’re preparing for a big important presentation, adding tasks such as: decide theme, get figures from accounts team, find images etc are superfluous. None of these really get the presentation done.  Opening up PowerPoint or Keynote and laying out the outline of your slides and and, once the file is complete, rehearsing it are the only really important tasks.  So for me, I have tasks such as: Continue working on presentation file and practice for tomorrows presentation.  My thoughts, ideas and sample slide layouts will be in a project note and that is also where the deadlines, milestones and instructions from the event organiser and anything else relevant to the project will be. You really don’t need to duplicate all that in your task manager. Again, all you have done is wasted a lot of time moving things around but done nothing to actually move the project forward.  It’s obvious what needs doing next once you open the document or the project note.  This is also why I am not a big fan of waiting for labels or tags. If you are waiting for something you have an incomplete task. For instance. If I create a task such as “Get last month’s sales data from Jeff” and I send Jeff a message asking him for the info, all I have done is ask Jeff for the information. I still do not have the information, so the task is not complete.  As the task is not complete and Jeff tells me he will send it tomorrow, then I reschedule the task for tomorrow.  If I decide to buy a new video camera for Zoom or Teams calls and I order it from Amazon, the act of ordering the camera is not completing the task. The task is I want a new video camera. So I order it on Amazon and the confirmation email is added to a waiting for folder in my email. I then have a single task in Todoist that comes up every Saturday to remind me to check that waiting for folder. If you are buying three or four things on Amazon every week, adding three or four tasks to follow up on something seems superfluous and you can easily replace those with a single task reminding you to check you waiting for folder in email. I should say, though, if you’re ordering things and you need a reminder about everything you’ve ordered, you’re probably ordering far too many things.  Another area I look for is what I call natural triggers. Natural triggers are objects or events that will naturally remind you that something needs doing. Simple examples of this would be you know when to take out the trash because your trash bin is full. Likewise you know when your car needs refuelling because the fuel warning light will come on, or if you leave it long enough you run out of fuel—probably the best reminder to do something. I’ve also set up a shopping list in Apple reminders so I can use the convenience of my Home Pod Mini and tell Siri to add something to my shopping list while I am showering or cooking. I only need look at this list on days I go to the supermarket, which is usually Tuesday and Friday. I don’t need to be reminded to go the supermarket. It is just something my wife and I do.  Another reason why I am able to keep my today list clean and tight is because I know what my core work is. I know what needs doing each day. For instance, today, I have a task telling me to record this podcast. I also have a task that tells me to edit my YouTube videos and write my coaching clients’ feedback. These three tasks are my important tasks for the day and they are at the top of my list.  Anything else that comes up will not take priority over my core work unless it is a genuine emergency—and genuine emergencies are rare. I’ve only had one in the last five years.  Underneath these tasks are my routines for the day including clearing my email action this day folder and daily admin. Clearing my action this day folder takes around forty minutes and my daily admin around thirty minutes. These tasks are performed every day, and although I probably don’t need them on a list for the day, it does act as a reminder on those days when it has been chaotic or I have been away from my office.  In total, if you include my routines, when I begin each day I will have between fifteen and twenty tasks for the day and the important tasks are at the top. If I see I have more than twenty tasks during my daily planning session, I will eliminate the less important ones. And again, I am very strict about this.  If you do not know what your core work is—the work you are paid to do, or in you run your own business, the work you do that generates your income, then everything will be a priority and you will feel compelled to add everything to your task manager.  I’ve seen things like iron shirts, take dog for a walk and take medicine on a task manager. Seriously? Ironing shirts should be a part of a home cleaning routine—it doesn’t need to be in a task manager. And as a dog owner myself, you should never need reminding to take your dog out for a walk. That is a part of the commitment you take on when you decide to have a dog—and dogs have a way of telling you it’s walkie time.  For medicines, use your phone’s reminder system if you must. Setting a recurring alarm reminding to take your medication will work far most effectively than using a task manager.  Ultimately, if you are putting everything on your task manager it means you don’t trust yourself and you need to start trusting yourself. Daily and weekly planning sessions are a key part to this because it ensures you do not miss anything. Skipping these prevents you from trusting that your system will work for you.  When you do a daily and weekly planning session you gain the confidence that you have everything under control. You know nothing has been missed and if it has it’s unlikely to be important. Not doing these is like trying to push a wheelbarrow with a square wheel up a steep hill.  So there you go, Gary. The trick is to have the mindset of elimination not accumulation. Remove the unnecessary and what’s left will naturally be the necessary. You can then focus all your attention on getting those done and not worry about everything else—you don’t need to because they inevitably will not be important.  Have a wonderful week, a fantastic Christmas and I’ll talk to you all again the New Year.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

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