Your Time, Your Way

The podcast discusses the importance of execution and completing tasks rather than solely focusing on planning and organizing. It emphasizes using the 20 minute rule to focus on major tasks and overcoming procrastination by simply starting a project. The importance of doing the actual work and improving productivity through repetition and muscle memory is also highlighted.

The podcast discusses the problems with adding tasks to a calendar and why it should be avoided. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the difference between tasks and appointments. It also provides insights on how to effectively manage tasks and appointments using a time blocking system.

Discover strategies to make time for one-off projects amidst your core work and routines. Tips for prioritizing critical work and dedicating specific time slots to projects. Importance of planning and structuring your day to ensure completion of big projects. Personal experience of redecorating a room and the importance of time management in project planning.

This podcast discusses strategies for maximizing time and prioritizing activities for efficiency and productivity. It explores ways to save time through efficient day planning and minimizing distractions. Additionally, it suggests avoiding group chats and eating the same thing every day to maximize productivity. The podcast also provides unique methods to save time, such as meal repetition for quicker cooking and decision-making. It emphasizes the benefits of scheduling services for managing meetings and allocating time for side hobbies to unwind and grow personally.

Exploring the shift from projects to processes, the podcast discusses turning work with clients into processes, building processes for success and efficiency, and highlights the benefits of processes in eliminating wasted time and providing clarity on task management.

This podcast explores the overwhelming amount of information on time management and productivity. It emphasizes the importance of understanding focus and distractions, using tools effectively, and building productive habits. The podcast also discusses strategies for effective time management and work-life balance, featuring examples of successful individuals.

Do you feel overwhelmed by all the things you have to do? Well, this week’s podcast is just for you. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter 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 286 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 286 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. The number one reason someone comes to me for help is because they feel stressed out and overwhelmed by everything they have to do. They have thousands of emails sitting in their inbox, hundreds of Slack or Teams messages asking for things and a long list of to-dos that never seems to shrink. It’s enough to make anyone scream out of sheer desperation.  The good news is it’s not impossible to regain some control. The bad news is you will need to stop and step back a little. And often it’s that stopping and stepping back that people find most difficult.  When you face an impossible situation, the temptation is to keep digging. The problem is what got into the situation you are trying to dig your way out of is precisely what you are continuing to do. Digging.  You need to stop digging so you can look up and see what you are trying to accomplish and restart with a clearer direction.  This week, I’m going to give you a roadmap you can follow to get yourself out of this hole so you are working towards a less overwhelming and clearer place.  And that means, it’s time for me now to h and you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Enrique. (엔리캐), Enrique asks, hi Carl, I really need your help. I feel so overwhelmed and stressed because my list of tasks keep getting longer and longer and I never seem to be making it smaller. It feels for every five tasks I do, fifteen new ones get added. My boss is always sending me messages and asking for updates so I never have time to do any focused work. How can I stop all this from happening?  Hi Enrique, thank you for your question. Firstly, fear not, there is a solution to this for you but you will need to do something a little uncomfortable. I need you to stop for a day or two.  When anyone gets into a situation where far more is coming in than going out, continuing to do what you are currently doing is not going to solve the problem. The only way you will solve a problem like this is to stop and draw a line under it all, while you fix the underlying problem. If you don’t stop, you have no chance to break the vicious circle that has grown. You have to break the circle and to do that you need to press pause.  Now, once you have stopped, you need to first look at the foundations of your system. Tasks and emails are different things so let’s look at your tasks first.  How are you collecting, organising and doing your work—the principles of COD.  Collecting everything is important, but it does not necessarily mean everything you collect needs to be done immediately or at all. A lot of what you collect can be done later. Quite a few of the tasks you collect may even be deleted because on reflection you realise you either do not have the time or resources to complete them or they do not need doing at all. Do not be afraid to delete these. If they are important, they will come back.  The delete key is your friend.  Organising is how you organise all the things you have decided do need to be done. There are only two questions here: what exactly needs to be done and when are you going to do it?  When you do it will depend on a two factors. Deadlines and available time. Now, here you will come up again the time V Activity conundrum, where the time side of the equation is fixed and there is nothing you can do to change that—that’s the natural laws of time and physics. But, you do have complete control over the activity side. The activities you do in the time you have available.  Now as an aside here, how long does a task take? For quite a few tasks it’ll be likely you will not know before you begin the task. And therein lies the answer… “before you begin the task”. Let’s say your boss asks you to prepare a report on a recent sales campaign you delivered. If you write in your task manager “Write report on recent sales campaign”, it will stress you. Unless you regularly write sales campaign reports you won’t know how it will take you and your brain will tell you “It’s going to take a long time”. That now means every time you see that task in your task list, you will convince yourself you have no time to write it today, so it gets rescheduled for tomorrow.  You will not know how long this task will take until you start it. So, rather than writing the task as “write sales campaign report” you add an extra word: “start writing sales campaign report”.  What you have now done is taken the emphasis away from completing the task, to just starting the task. How long does it take to start a task like this? A few minutes at most. You may only set up a Word document, give it a title and write the introduction, but it’s a start. Now, when you have finished, all you need do is change the task from “start writing sales campaign report” to “continue writing sales campaign report and schedule it for another day.  The benefit of writing tasks like this is as you start and continue to write the report, you will quickly be able to anticipate how long the whole task will take and that will take a lot of the pressure off. If you were to spend thirty-minutes each day for five days on the task, you will have spent two-and-a-half hours on it. That’s a lot better than doing nothing because you kept rescheduling it.  Let get back to the principles of COD.  The doing part is where your calendar comes in to play. Based on what you have decided needs to be done today, where do you have the time to do it?  It’s no good starting the day with thirty tasks you have convinced yourself need to be done today, yet have six hours of meetings. Your day’s destroyed before it starts. You need to be more strategic than that. In this situation you have two choices (and ONLY two choices). Either you cancel some of those meetings or you reschedule some of those tasks. I suppose you could do both as a third choice.  This is where things can become uncomfortable because sometimes we have to let people down and that’s hard to do. However, people are a lot more accommodating that we imagine. If we have promised someone to get a piece of work to them by the end of the week, yet, by Wednesday we know that’s not going to happen, it’s far better to reach out and renegotiate the deadline. In 90% of cases, people are perfectly happy with the renegotiated deadline.  What’s the worst that can happen if you do reach out? They could say no, I MUST have the work by Friday. Okay, now you have a hard deadline and you can renegotiate some of your other work instead. You may have to work an extra few hours that week to meet the deadline. As long as you are not working extra hours every day, that should not be a big issue.  Now, that brings me on to your email, and messages.  How much time do you need each day to stay on top of your email? When I ask people this question the reply is usually “it depends”. Yet, if you were to analyse it, you would find an average. For me, I need around forty-five minutes a day to respond to my actionable email. Some days, I only need twenty-five minutes, others I need an hour.  With that information, I can now block that time out on my calendar. I have one hour each day set aside for communications. I rarely need to full hour, but it’s there if I do need it.  Now with email, there’s a process for this. This process has worked for hundreds of years because it was devised when we received a lot of regular mail, and it’s only two steps.  The first is to process what you received. This is, in effect filtering out the actionable from the non-actionable. You can do this by asking two questions: What is it? Is it actionable?  If it’s actionable—ie you need to do something with it—it goes to an Action This Day folder. If it’s not actionable you only have two choices; delete or archive it and that will depend whether you may want to reference it later or not.  Now, with your actionable email, you reverse the way the folder shows you the mail. You want it to show the oldest at the top. This means when you sit down to deal with your email, you begin at the top—it’s the oldest email there so in theory it is the most urgent—and work your way down the list.  Because they are ordered oldest to newest, if you are unable to get to the bottom of your list for the day, it won’t be a problem because the ones you did not get to will be at the top of your list tomorrow.  When you become consistent with this, you will find email is no longer a problem.  In your case Enrique, one of the things you must do is to clear your inbox and that may take a morning or afternoon to do—it may even take you a whole day, but the only way you will ever get on top of it, is to stop, and clear that inbox.  This may involve declaring email bankruptcy. With that you have a choice you can choose to do a hard bankruptcy—that involves deleting all mail older than ten days. The other choice is to do a soft email bankruptcy, which involves taking all mail older than ten days and moving them into a folder called “Old Inbox”. You can then process that over time. (Although, I find most people end up deleting that folder after a few months) If you want to earn more about managing email, you can join my Email Mastery course. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for you.  Now there are other things you can do Enrique, you do need to know what your core work and areas of focus are so you can ensure you are working on these. But if you want to get back in control of everything the place to start is to stop. Step back and put in place COD and some better email management practices.  It will take time, but developing the processes and habits will soon have you in control and no longer feeling overwhelmed with everything you have to do. I hope that has helped and than you for sending in you question. Thank you also to you too for listening. It just remains for now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 285 This week, it’s all about what should and should not go on your To-Do list. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  The Working With… Weekly Newsletter 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 285 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 285 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. Do you have too many tasks in your task manager? It’s one thing committing to using one, it’s an entirely different thing ensuring the right kind of tasks are on your list. Get this part wrong and you are going to soon find yourself overwhelmed.  I regularly see a common type of task on a to-do list that really should not be there, and I see quite a lot of tasks on a calendar that should be on a to-do list.  I know, it sounds confusing, but once you learn this strategy, you will soon find your task list reduces and you feel a lot less anxious and overwhelmed.  Now, before we get to the question and answer, let me just inform you that on Friday (that’s the 4th August for those of you in the US) My next Ultimate Productivity Workshop begins. That’s a 90 minute live workshop via Zoom where over the four Fridays of August, we cover how to get the most out of your calendar and task manager as well how to better manage your email and messages and finally in the fourth week, we cover planning.  As part of this workshop you have access to my Mini-Course set—that’s four of my most popular mini-courses—AND you get to download the workshop itself so you can keep it for later reference (and also if you are unable to attend one or more sessions)  Places are limited now, but there are a few still available. If you want to take your own time management and productivity to the next level, then get yourself signed up now and I’ll see you on Friday. More details on the workshop plus how to register are in the show notes.  Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Grace. Grace asks, Hi Carl, I began using Microsoft’s ToDo app last March and at first it really helped. But now, I find it’s become so overwhelming. I hate going in there because it reminds me how much I still have to do. Do you have any tips on making my ToDo better? Hi Grace, thank you for your question. This is something that happens to so many people. There’s the initial excitement of being able to put all the things we feel we have to do into a simple app, and to add dates to when we will do these tasks. And because at first we rarely put too much in there, our daily lists are not too bad. They are doable and if we do reschedule something, it doesn’t feel too bad because we got at least 80% of what was on the list done.  It’s a great feeling, yes? However, over time, we add more and more stuff. We start to add things we don’t want to forget about such as an upcoming event, anniversary or birthday. We then start to fiddle with the projects area and start adding more and more and more.  And eventually, we find ourself with an endless list of projects with a lot of unclear tasks telling to do something we cannot remember why we needed to do them in the first place.  We also begin adding random dates to tasks in a vain attempt to prevent us from forgetting something. Of course, when those task appear on our today list we just reschedule them again because we’re now trying to keep our heads above the water and as these tasks are not urgent or they don’t have a clear deadline, they can be sacrificed today. And that, just kicks the problem down the road.  Eventually, what most people do is blame the tool because that’s much easier than blaming the real culprit, and they go back to YouTube and watch their favourite YouTubers and see what they are reviewing now. And lo and behold, these people are talking about the latest new app that promises to make you more productive, more relaxed and do the work for you.  So, it’s switch time and the the cycle is complete and ready to be repeated.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.  In my podcast from a couple of weeks ago, I talked about what David Allen taught me over a lunch we had back in 2016. That was the forget the tools and focus on developing your system.  You see the problem is never the tools. You could very easily create your own digital task manager using Google Sheets, Excel of Apple Numbers. Sure, there’d be a bit of setting up work and some fine tuning, but it’s certainly doable and I know a lot of people who have done this perfectly fine.  The problem is with your system and more specifically what you are collecting into your task manager.  Let’s look at the different types of tasks commonly found in a task manager. There are the obvious ones like; “send document to Jenny” or “buy bracelet for Claire’s birthday”. These are clear and very specific. Then you will likely have your routines in there such as take the garbage out, do the laundry or complete my expense report.  Hopefully, you will also have your areas of focus tasks in there. Tasks such as schedule this week’s exercise programme, send money to savings account and call parents.  Now, the other types of tasks are often where the problems begin. These are tasks that involving decisions or thought. If you see a task such as “think about where to go for our summer holiday”, you’re in trouble.  You see a task like this is not actionable. It’s not something you can actually do. It’s something you need to be away from your desk and in a place where you are better able to think. It’s also something that needs a bit of time to do.  For a task like this, you would be better off creating a task such as “create list of possible places to go for our summer holiday” and move over to your note app to create the list.  Similarly with your “decide” type tasks. Again, this is not really actionable. It’s something you need to contemplate and weigh the pros and cons of your options. Again, this should be in your notes app.  Now, I know why these kind of activities are in task managers. It’s because people are afraid they will forget about them. And that’s a valid fear. However, there are two options you have here. The first is to create a recurring task in your task manager to remind you to review you thinking or decision list. The second is to use the all day event space in your calendar and add them there.  In both cases you will not forget them. They will always be visible every time you open your notes or calendar.  Now, what about time specific tasks. Tasks such as pick up Tommy from swimming class? These are not tasks, they are events and should be in your calendar. Watch out for these. We often add them to our task managers because it’s easier than adding them to our calendar. Sure, use your inbox to collect the item, but when you process your inbox, move it over to your calendar. Another way you can overwhelm your task manager is adding individual communication items in there. I frequently see people having ten to twenty tasks a day that begin reply to this email, or email that person. This is guaranteed way to overwhelm your system.  Email replies should not need to be in a task manager. You already have a great tool for managing emails, and messages for that matter. Whether you use Gmail, Outlook or Apple mail, there’s a built in inbox, the same goes for Slack, Teams and Twist. Transfer items from those inboxes to another inbox, is simply duplicating and adding additional steps you do not need.  Instead you can simply have a single task in your task manager reminding you to clear your email and messages. That will then trigger you to move over to your mail or message app and you can focus your attention there.  Now if you take all or some of these tips, Grace, you are going to reduce the number of tasks in your task list immediately.  However, there is one more tip. This tip will remove overwhelm and any anxiety you may have about the number of tasks you need to do each day. Sadly, 95% of you will not do it. Instead you will find an excuse.  This tip is, give yourself five to ten minutes at the end of the day to review you tasks for tomorrow and make sure it is not overwhelming. Now you need to be realistic. You should check your calendar to make sure you have the time to complete what you have on your list and if not, trim down the list to a more realistic one.  Like I said, most people will not do this, and so they begin the day overwhelmed and no idea where to start. When you do allow those five to ten minutes, when you start the day you know exactly what you will start with, you have a manageable list and you there’s no procrastination.  It’s brilliantly simple, works every time, yet, sadly, not sexy. So, few people ever do it. Instead, it’s far easier to blame the tool, or your boss for giving you too much work. That might be true in some cases, but you will be a lot more focused and productive if you can add those five to ten minutes.  So, Grace, I would recommend you go through your tasks in ToDo and look for tasks that require you to think or decide and move them to your notes app. I would also look for anything that is not clear. Tasks that say something like “call George”, that’s not an a task, it’s a statement that gives you no information. Call George about what? Make it clear.  Unclear tasks require you to think and try and remember what it is you need to do. Remove that thought process and make it clear. Call George about next month’s offsite meeting” will prevent any hesitation and give you a much clearer idea how long it will take.  And, remove all tasks that no longer need doing. It’s surprising how quickly these can accumulate. Clear them. Don’t worry about them because if they are important, they will come back and you can add them again.  I hope that helps, Grace. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Is what you want to get accomplished this week realistic, or are you setting yourself up for disappointment? That’s what we are looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter 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 284 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 284 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. What do you want to get accomplished this week? What are the “big rocks” you want to deal with so you end the week knowing you have got what needed to be done, done? If you don’t know, your week is already destroyed. It’s destroyed because if you don’t know what you want to get completed that week, then someone else will tell you what to do. And that means you are working on other people’s agenda and benevolently helping them to achieve their goals.  But where does that leave you? When it comes to promotion opportunities who’s going to get the promotion? You who are running around dealing with everyone else’s issues and work and as a consequence not getting much done. Or the person who is getting their tasks completed on time and consistently moving things forward each week? Ultimately, all this comes down to making a decision. Will you spend thirty minutes or so at the end of the week looking ahead and establishing some objectives for the following week or not? Only you can make that decision or find an excuse. Either way, on this issue, only you can make that choice. And so, this naturally leads to me handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I know weekly planning is important, and I try to do it, but when I get to the end of the week, I am just so relieved the week is over and the last thing I want to do is think about the next week. I know this is impacting my career prospects and was wondering if there is something I can do that will motivate me to do something about planning the week.  Hi Julie, thank you for your question.  Firstly Julie, this is an area I know so many people struggle with. I think everyone knows the advantages and importance of having some kind of plan for the week, yet it can be hard to motivate ourselves to spend a little time looking ahead and deciding what needs to get done the following week.  However, before we can get to the planning stage there is something very important that needs addressing. That is asking yourself what can you realistically get done the following week. I suspect most people don’t do, or stop doing a weekly plan, because they very rarely, if ever, accomplish anything they plan anyway.  If you spent an hour or two (and yes, some people do waste that much time planning the week) and then never get close to completing that plan, what’s the point? Why bother in the first place?  This is why you do not want to be spending hours and hours on a weekly plan. It’s a waste of time. You see, there are far too many unknowns. You have no idea how many emails you will get on Tuesday morning, let alone what your boss with ask you to do via WhatsApp or Slack on Monday afternoon.  In a way, this is the missing piece of planning a week that almost everyone overlooks. All the unknowns that will be thrown at you throughout the week. It’s these that have an enormous impact on what you can and cannot get done in a week. I recently learned that author Jeffrey Archer disappears to Marbella from 27th December to around the first week of February to completely focus on his writing. During those five to six weeks he does nothing else but write. He effectively removes himself from the possibility of distractions in order to get his work done. It’s this that allows him the confidence to know that he will complete his first draft in those few weeks. It’s unlikely you have the luxury to be able to disappear and remove all possibility of distraction to focus on your work, which means you also lose the confidence to know with almost complete certainty what you will be able to accomplish in a given week.  But that’s okay because you don’t need to know with absolute confidence what you can accomplish in a week. All you need to know is what you want to get accomplished in a week.  Now, this begins with knowing what your core work is—that is the work you are employed to do—the absolute basics.  For me, that means writing a blog post, two newsletters. The script for this podcast and recording two YouTube videos.  I also have between fifteen and twenty hours of meetings each week and I need around an hour a day to deal with my communications. In total, I need around thirty three hours each week to complete my non-negotiable work.  Now, let’s say I want to work on some projects too, if I were to work a forty-hour week I still have seven hours to play with. That’s an hour a day on average for project work and to deal with the unexpected. I’ve found that’s more than enough to keep things moving forward.  Sure, from time I need more time to deal with an emergency or to unstick a project. But that doesn’t happen every week, so on average when I begin each week, I know as long as I have a plan to cover my core work and get that done, I have enough time.  However, if you do not have a plan, you introduce the biggest problem. Uncertainty.  How much time are you losing each day trying to decide what to do? Should you do this or should you do that? Perhaps you should make a start on that thing, but then you had better finish this thing off first. No wait! You’d better check your email—there might be something important in there! How many times a day do you have that conversation with yourself?  It’s conversations like that that demonstrates clearly the disadvantages of not knowing what you want to get done that week.  When you know that Project A needs to be moved forward this week, that conversation does not happen. You know you need to move it forward, so you open up your project notes and get started. If you’ve done a plan for the week you know what you want to do. It could be you want to get the design proofs off to your boss for approval, or it might be to send out a tender to five contractors. If you’ve done a plan for the week you know precisely what you want to get done and there’s no uncertainty or hesitation. The only decision you need to make is when will you sit down and do the work. And making decision is considerably easier than trying to decide what to do in the first place.  Deicing what to do in the moment is hard. It’s what I would describe as a pressure decision. With no plan you are rushed into making a decision based on very limited information. It’s like trying to make a decision about which direction to go in the bottom of foggy valley. When you do a weekly plan, that’s your chance to clamber up the highest peak of the valley and look ahead with clear blue skies. You can see all around you, where the dangers are, which direction to go and where you currently are. It’s a much clearer view than what you get at the bottom of the valley where the fog is settled.  The resistance to planning the week can be attributed to many things. The idea you don’t want to think about work at the end of the week, or the thought it’s going to take you two or three hours to do it properly. And that understandable. After all, if you’ve read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done or read an article about the weekly review, it’s likely you think two or three hours is normal.  But it’s not. Sure the first time you do plan the week it could take you two or three hours (or more), but that’s just the first time you do it. You’re unsure, you’re don’t where to start to where to look. And of course, you will be slow.  Let’s be honest, when you took your first steps in from of your parents, I bet you didn’t walk across the room particularly fast did you? No. You stubbed, fell down and walked very steadily. It’s the same with weekly planning the first and second ones will be slow. But by the time you do your third one you will have cut the time down significantly and the more times you complete one, the faster you will get.  To give you a reference point. My weekly planning takes on average thirty minutes. I know were to look, I know what to look for and I know how to add dates to the things that need to be done the following week.  And now, when should you do the weekly planning.  Okay, so I did a lot of research into this a couple of years ago. I’ve also experimented on myself. What I’ve found is the best time to do your weekly planning is Saturday morning.  Now for those of you who have strict rules about work and personal life and have just spat out a mouthful of your coffee, hear me out. Why Saturday morning? Well, the first thing is you’re not not going to be tired. That excuse is squashed. You can sleep an extra hour wake up slowly and gently—well, you can if you don’t have a young family.  More importantly, though, you get it done early so you can then enjoy the weekend without sudden anxiety attacks about what you think you must get done next week. You prevent that from happening because you will already have cleared your mind and can then relax and actually enjoy the weekend without worrying about what you may or may not need to get done the following week.  Saturday morning is also a time when the week just gone by is still fresh in your mind and you are not going to be disturbed.  Now, all you are asking for is thirty minutes. That’s a small sacrifice for a weekend free of anxiety and worry isn’t it?  This is why I don’t recommend doing your planning on a Sunday evening. That leaves you at the mercy of worrying thoughts about the week ahead all weekend. That’s not going to give you a pleasant weekend and it’s very difficult to pick yourself up off the sofa and go power up your computer and start planning the week after a lovely, relaxing weekend.  No, get it done early so you can relax and enjoy the weekend free from thoughts about work and horrors that may reveal themselves to you at 8:30am on Monday morning.  So there you go, Julie. I hope that helps and gives you a little motivation for doing a weekly planning session. Enjoy it, put on some of your favourite music, make yourself a lovely cup of tea and smile. You know you are doing the right thing.  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.   

This week’s question is all about what is important in your time management and productivity system.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course 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 283 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 283 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. With the constant influx of new productivity tools it can be difficult to settle on a set of tools because you are worried that you might be missing the boat or there could be something out there that is better than what you are using now and could, in theory, make you even better at managing your time and being more productive.  But wait, do all these new tools really offer you the opportunity to improve your time management or productivity? Have you considered the time cost penalty of switching and then learning the new way to find what you need and organise everything?  The truth is not what you may think and it’s something I learned several years ago. Once I did, my productivity shot through the roof. I was better organised and I quickly discovered I had more time to do the things I loved doing. Which was a bit of a shock.  So that brings me to this week’s question, it’s also a question I frequently get on YouTube comments, and I thought it would be a good idea to share my discoveries with you so you can make your own decision.  So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question come from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I’ve always wondered why you don’t use apps like Notion and Obsidian. I notice a lot productivity YouTubers use these apps, but you seem to stick with the same apps. Is there a reason you don’t check these apps out?  Hi Kevin, thank you for your question.  To answer your question directly, the reason I don’t switch my apps is because David Allen told me not to.  Now, for those of your who don’t know, David Allen wrote the “bible” of time management and productivity: Getting Things Done and he is considered the Godfather of today’s productivity systems.  Back in 2016, David visited Korea and I reached out to him and I got to meet him. We had lunch together, and we inevitably talked productivity. The conversation soon got onto tools and I asked him if he really does still use eProductivity—an app that was an offshoot of the old Lotus Notes. He confirmed he did. Now at that time, I was still on my productivity tools journey. I don’t think I stuck with a task manager for longer than three of four months before I was searching around for a new one to “play with”.  I was curious, and asked him if he’d ever considered using something else—something that was available on his iPhone or iPad as as well as his computer. (eProductivity was only available on a computer) and he said: Why?  I was a bit stuck there, but he added why would he change something that works? Something that he’d learned to use inside out and could pretty much use with his eyes closed. He also pointed out that eProductivity was reliable, it didn’t rely on syncing (which back in 2016 was not particularly reliable for anything) and he couldn’t remember the last time it crashed.  As our conversation continued, David elaborated on his system. He carried with him a leather wallet that contained a little note pad and pen. If he thought of something he’d write it down on the notepad and when he got back to his office (or hotel room) he would tear out the notes and add them to his inbox (or traveling inbox if he was on a business trip).  Later when he had time he would transfer those notes to eProductivity. This gave him an opportunity to filter out the stuff that didn’t need any action and decide whether something was a note or a task.  That process wasn’t something he’d developed overnight. It took twenty years or more. Refining and developing the so called muscle memory to automatically add something to the note pad when anything came up isn’t something you will develop over a few weeks or months. It takes years.  But more importantly, the method David Allen had created for himself ensured he was always asking the right questions about something. If you’ve read the Getting things Done book, he writes about these questions. They are:  What is it? Is it actionable? If so, what needs to happen?  It was during our conversation, I told him of my dilemma at that time which was Todoist or OmniFocus? David answered, “pick one and stick with it.”  It was that that revolutionised my productivity. “Pick one and stick with it” has been my mantra since then. This is why I still use Todoist and Evernote to this day.  Everything David told me, happened. My productivity went through the roof. I was no longer searching around looking for something better, I was focused on, forgive the pun, getting things done.  Suddenly, I was able watch a little TV in evenings instead of reading about new productivity tools. I started having longer and better conversations with my wife because I wasn’t distracted playing around with another new toy.  I’m sure it’s no coincidence that from around late 2016 early 2017, I was able to run two businesses, produce two YouTube videos a week and write a blog post as well as start this podcast. None of that would have been possible if I were still searching and looking for new and better tools.  You the see the time cost involved in switching your tools every few months is ridiculous. There’s the searching around and watching countless YouTube videos. Then there’s the switch cost, where you move everything across and organise things how you want it (which ironically is rarely different from the way you organised it before) and finally, the biggest time suck of all, learning to use the new app. That can take weeks, if not months to get up to the speed you were at using your previous app.  Oh, and there’s all that researching trying to figure out how to do something you were able to do in your previous app, which you now discover is not available in your new app.  Do I want to go through all that again? No thank you. Now, that’s not to say there are no reasons for changing your tools. Evernote is a classic example. A few years ago they changed their app considerably when Evernote changed to Evernote 10. The early versions were horrible and everything I’d learned in the previous eight years changed and I was faced with relearning how to use Evernote. I was very tempted to change to Apple Notes at that time. I didn’t because I know the penalties of changing and I’m glad I didn’t. Evernote 10 is now reliable and robust and I’ve had three years to learn how to use Evernote 10.  But, had Evernote not solved those initial problems, I would have changed. I need my tools to work so I can work. I don’t want to spend time in the day trying to figure out how to fix a broken app.  The more I research productive people, the more I see tools are not important. Recently, I researched author Jeffrey Archer. He began writing his books in the 1970s and wrote them by hand. He still does today. In interviews, he talks about having a system that works, so why change it.  John Grisham writes his books in Word—there are loads of new writing apps that are possibly better than Word, yet he knows Word, it works, so why change it? For him, Word is a part of his writing process, and over 50 books later, why change that system?  For me, Todoist and Evernote are all a part of my process. Todoist tells me what I need to work on, Evernote contains my notes on whatever I am working on, whether that is a YouTube video, this podcast, a blog post or a course. It’s seamless, it works and can all be done in less than two seconds. Why would I want to change that?  A client of mine is a screenwriter and he’s been using Final Draft for over twenty years. Can you imagine how quick he is getting down to writing his scripts?  I worked with a copywriter who had used Apple’s built in Text Edit app for fifteen years and would not contemplate using anything else to do her work because as a simple text file her work was transferable to any computer system or app. The brilliance was in the simplicity of her system.  I’ve worked with photographers who can do incredible magic with Adobe’s Lightroom at lighten speed because they’ve used it every day for over ten years.  It all comes down to what you want. Is it the thrill of playing with something new? There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need need to be honest about it. You do not want to be fooling yourself in to believing that the next new app will make you more productive. It won’t.  What will make you more productive is the system you put in place. Going back to Jeffrey Archer, his writing system is simple. He disappears on the 27th December to his house in Mallorca, where for the next five weeks he will follow the same process each day, By the 2nd or 3rd February, he has a completed first draft of his next book. All handwritten on a large bundle of paper.  That’s how you become more productive. Focus on your process for doing your work. Whether you are a salesperson, an interior designer, a doctor or a software developer. Pick tools that will work for you for many years to come and focus on doing your work not the tools. The simpler your system, the better and faster you will be.  All you need is a calendar, a task manager and notes app for your productivity tools. These days, I would advise these are all available on each of the devices you have, so you have everything you need with you at all times. Pick tools that work for you and stick with them. By sticking with them, your system will develop, grow and adjust and that pushes you towards focusing on your work—which is the secret to becoming more productive and better with managing your time.  Thank you Kevin for your question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.