This week’s question is about how to balance your work life with your professional life.   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 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 218 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 218 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’m sure you heard of Work/Life Balance and how this is the goal for living a balanced life. Well, is it? Does trying to balance your personal and work life really give you a balanced life?  You see, if you place hard barriers between your personal and professional life you create an unnatural barrier to living life on your terms. If you are up against a tight deadline and you have a very important meeting the next day, what will you be thinking about as you sit on the sofa with your family in the evening? You won’t be thinking about your family. Your mind is going to be on that important meeting that begins in ten hours time.  But because you have a hard rule that states after 6 PM you do not do work, you are now causing yourself a lot of unnecessary stress. The better thing for you to do is to excuse yourself for the evening, go to a quiet room and prepare for your meeting. You’ll feel a lot better, be much more in tune with your needs and you can make it up to your family the next day by taking them out for dinner somewhere nice.  A lot of our time management and productivity problems come from trying to box ourselves in when if you give yourself greater freedom, you’d be a lot happier, less stressed and considerably less overwhelmed.  Now before we get to this week’s question, if you would like to receive all my weekly content, including this podcast as well as my blog posts and YouTube videos in one place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It’s completely free and each week you get a productivity tip plus get to see what I am reading and watching.  This newsletter is a great productivity and time management resource for your weekend reading. The link to join the newsletter is in the show notes. Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks: hi Carl, what do you think of work/life balance? I’m really struggling with this. I have two teenage boys and a full-time job. I worry that I am not able to spend enough time with my boys. Do you have any tips on having a better work/life balance?  Hi Anna, thank you for your question.  There is a lot written about work/life balance and it certainly used to be possible. Back in the day when we worked shifts in a factory where the only action we needed to take was to put widgets on devices, it was easy to leave work behind when we clocked out for the day. We were not coming up with solutions to problems that came up throughout the day.  But for most of us, we do not work that way anymore. That kind of work has been farmed out to machines and robots. We’ve moved into an age where our physical labours are less in demand and our mental abilities have become the in-demand skill.  The great thing about using our physical skills and labour is we can turn off at the end of the day. The only thing we need to worry about is where do we need to be tomorrow. Being employed for our mental skills makes it a lot harder to turn off at the end of the day. You can still be working on a client’s problems while driving home from the office. It’s much harder to turn off at the end of the day.  We also live in a very connected world. I have clients who live in California and manage teams in Asia and Europe. There’s a seventeen hour time difference between Seoul and San Francisco. How do you do one on one team meetings with that time difference and maintain a work/life balance?  The solution is in something called work/life integration. Rather than seeing our work and personal life are two entirely different things, we combine the two.  Now, anyone who runs their own business will likely already be living a work/life integrated life. It’s a necessary part of building a business. As a business owner, you can’t simply turn off at the end of the workday. You will be constantly coming up with ideas, dealing with customers at all times of the day and having to do admin and other such tasks late into the evening.  So how does work/life integration work?  Well, the first step is to see your day as a whole rather split into work and home. This means if one of your boys is playing in a school rugby match on a Wednesday afternoon and he wants you to come and watch him, you schedule the match in your calendar like you would schedule a business meeting.  Now, because you spent three hours watching your son play rugby, you can catch up with your work later that evening say between seven and ten. To your son, it was far more important to him that you were there at his rugby match, rather than skipping the rugby match and sitting down in the evening watching TV with him.  It’s being there in the moment when it matters that counts, not going through the motions believing that you are doing the right thing every evening.  Now, I accept not everyone can take a Wednesday afternoon off to watch their kid play sport, but the way we work is shifting towards this more flexible way of working. Knowledge work doesn’t naturally conform to strict timelines anyway.  If we take the team leader in California, she is going to have to do meetings in the early morning or late at night if she wants to communicate with her whole team anyway.  So, let’s say our team leader wants a weekly team get together to review current and future projects. She might schedule a meeting at 11 pm for her. That would be 4 pm for her team in Asia and 8 am for her European team. This is one hour per week, where she gets the chance to communicate with her team as a whole.  She could schedule a later start to her day the next day or another day to compensate for the late time for the meeting. There are endless possibilities to reclaim the time back. An alternative approach is to split your days. Now, this has worked for me, but it is not for the faint-hearted. I live in the Far East. My clients are either in Europe or North America. My clients are active late at night and early mornings in my time zone. So, all my coaching calls are scheduled for either morning or evening.  My afternoons are quiet. I rarely get emails and I have no coaching calls. So, I do my errands and exercise in the afternoons. I can take our dog for a walk with my wife and do any shopping that needs doing.  Now, for most of my working life, I have worked split shifts. I began in the hotel industry and I regularly did the morning and evening shift getting the afternoons off as a break. Then when I came to Korea I taught English for fifteen years where my classes were both early morning and evening classes. So, taking a break in the afternoon somehow feels natural to me.  The key to work/life integration is to do what needs doing in the moment. If you have a young child that needs your help with his homework in the afternoon, then you stop working and help them with their homework.  When your children are on half-term break, with a work/life integration approach, you will free up your calendar as much as possible to spend time with them. When they return to school you can make up time on your work projects or do any time-sensitive work in the evenings when your kids are in bed (or playing video games)  I follow a lot of successful entrepreneurs and read many biographies on tremendously successful people. People like Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Dell will always be at home for their family dinner in the evenings so they can spend quality time with their families. After dinner and when their kids are in bed, they will do some more work.  I remember seeing a video on how Casey Neistat manages his day. Now, Casey Neistat is a very successful YouTuber and creator. He’s an incredible storyteller. He’s also a bit of a workaholic. He’s a runner too and running every day is a non-negotiable part of his life. So, he wakes up early, does his run, returns home for breakfast with his family, then goes to the office and spends most of his day there. He will return in the evening to spend time with his wife and child and then at 11 pm he will work on editing his videos until 1 am.  Now while Casey works a lot, he still gets five to six hours a day of quality time with his family. He is totally present when he is with them. Knowing he has another two-hour block later in the evening allows him the freedom to forget work for the five hours or so he’s with his family.  People trying a work/life balance approach might be there in person, but they are mentally worrying about all the work that’s piling up because they will not allow themselves a couple of hours to get on top of it.  There will be times when your work is busy and you need to spend more time on your work life than your personal life. I work weekends and so I try and take Wednesdays off. It doesn’t always happen. If I am putting together a new course or preparing for a seminar, I will use that day for recording or preparation. But on those days I do take off, I will make sure my wife and I do something special.  This week, we are going to Seoul—about a three-hour drive away—to have dinner with my parents in law and get our dog’s haircut. (My wife only trusts a specific dog hairdresser in Seoul) This means we have six hours of driving time for conversation and I get a few hours for doing errands in the big city. It’s pure family time.  We will get home around 10 pm and I will go to my office and spend an hour or two doing a little admin, responding to my emails and planning the next day. I’ve still had well over ten hours of quality family time and got my most important work done for that day.  So, Anna, don’t try and live a work/life balance. You won’t be able to do it and will cause you unnecessary stress. Instead, live a work/life integrated life. This way you will always be there for your boys when they need you and when they don’t, you can return and do some work. The sense of freedom you have when you do this will bring you a lot more happiness.  Thank you, Anna, for the question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week’s episode is a question that came about because of my recently updated Time Sector System course. 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 Time Sector System 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 217 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 217 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. So, many of you already know that my productivity system is called The Time Sector System. This system is based on managing my work by when I want to do it rather than by project.  Around three or four years ago, I discovered that when I managed my tasks by project, I was spending too much time organising and reviewing and not enough time doing the work. It was leaving me with a lot of work that needed rescheduling at the end of the day. Not a good place to be when you want to feel you are becoming better at managing your time. Too much rescheduling and you lose confidence in your system.  That’s when it dawned on me that, really, the most important part of any system is having the time to do the work, not how you organise your files and projects. That was my light-bulb moment.  Now, I do get a lot of questions about this system. It goes against the grain of many of the more popular systems out there and naturally I get a lot of questions about it. So, I have selected one of those questions to answer this week.  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 Eric. Eric asks, Carl, You used to write and talk a lot about GTD but I notice you no longer use it. Why is that and what do you use instead?  Thank you Eric for your question.  Let’s start by dealing with the elephant in the room. Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen. This is the standard text by which all productivity and time management systems are judged today. There’s nothing wrong with GTD, as it is called. It’s a solid workable system.  However, there are two issues with GTD that caused me problems. The first is this is a book that was first published in 2001 and its concepts are based on what David Allen taught in companies as a productivity and time management trainer in the 1980s and 1990s.  Now, I remember working in the early 1990s and in those distant days it did matter where you were and what tools you had with you. If you wanted to respond to your mail, you needed to be in a place where your mail was because, for most people, there was no such thing as email. And even in the late 1990s, when email became more prevalent, you needed to be at a computer set up for your email.  If you were lucky enough to have a personal email account, you needed to be at home with your “personal computer” in order to reply. For your work email, you needed to be at your office and sitting in front of your work desktop computer.  So, for a simple task such as responding to your mail, you had to be in a specific physical location (home or office) and be in front of your computer (the tool). The second issue I was struggling with was how the digital task managers were created. For some reason, task managers were set up by project, not context as it should be in a GTD system.  For those not familiar with GTD, in GTD your task lists are organised by context. This means you create lists based on a tool, such as a computer, a phone or car. Place, such as your office or home or person, such as your boss, spouse or colleague.  The idea is you choose what to do based on where you are, with which tool or person.  Now, when I went digital, I fell into the trap of believing the most effective way to manage my tasks was to organise everything by project and to use tags or labels for my contexts. Big mistake.  In GTD, a project is defined as anything requiring two or more steps. This meant, theoretically, arranging for my car to go in for a service was a project or even arranging to have my haircut (I did once have hair that needed cutting). So you can imagine how many projects you end up having on your list.  David Allen mentions that an average person is going to have between seventy and a hundred and fifty open projects.  That’s a lot of projects for an individual like you and me to manage.  Now the glue that makes GTD work is the weekly review. This is where you sit down at the end of the week to go through all your projects to make sure everything is up-to-date and current.  Well, for me, by the time I switched to using the Time Sector System my weekly review was taking almost two hours to complete each week. Yes! Two hours.  No, I don’t know about you, but giving up two hours of my weekend to review all my projects and get current is not really the best use of my time on a weekend.  However, let’s not be too hard on GTD. It’s a great system and it does help you get very organised. All your projects are kept in project folders—originally, paper-based project folders you kept in or near your desk, now digital folders you keep on your computer. It is easy to find what you need when you need it—if you are willing to maintain your system and keep it up to date.  And that’s really the problem with GTD today. Maintaining the system takes a lot of time. Time that could better be served to do the work you are creating lists for.  If you look at the very basics a productivity system needs; it’s a way to collect all your inputs such as calendar events, tasks and notes. You then need to organise those inputs in a way you can find them when you need them and you need to be maximising time to do the work.  GTD crosses the first two boxes. It teaches you to build a collection system. When the GTD book was first launched that meant purchasing a physical inbox that you had on or around your desk. And it organises your documents and relevant materials into projects or reference materials that are easy to find. However, because of the time, it takes to manage those first two parts, you are taking away a lot of time for doing. And if you want to be more productive, you need to maximise your doing time and minimise your organising time.  That’s why I eventually got to the point where I realised GTD was not working for me. I wanted to free up my organising time so I could focus on doing.  That led me to analyse what was really important about getting my work done. That was when I realised that the only thing that really mattered about a task was when I was going to do it. After all, it does not matter how important or urgent something is, if there are no hours left in the day it is not going to get done that day. Period. And, I’m sure you are aware now, contexts have become a lot less important. You can design presentations, do work on a spreadsheet, email and make phone calls from a handheld device you carry with you everywhere you go. You no longer need specific tools to do a lot of the work you need to do.  I have been told that contexts are a personal choice. You can create contexts around energy levels. For example, if you feel energetic, you can do some of the more difficult work. If you feel tired you can do some of the less strenuous tasks. That true. But I cannot predict when I will feel energetic or when I feel lethargic. I cannot control how I will sleep tonight. For energy level contexts, there are far too many variables outside my control for those to be effective.  In the end, I realised that all I wanted to know was what tasks were important this week. Which ones did I want to do and which tasks could I do that would move a project or goal forward.  So, I created a folder structure in my task manager that focused on when I would do something. That means I have: this week, next week, this month and next month folders for tasks I am reasonably certain I want to get done in the next eight weeks or so. And I have a long-term and on hold folder for tasks that I’d like to do sometime, but I am not sure yet when I will do them.  What this means is when I do my weekly planning, all I need to focus on is when I will do something and more importantly what will I do that week.  Using this method means instead of spending two hours or so doing a weekly review, my weekly planning sessions last around twenty to thirty minutes. They are a little longer at the end of the month because I am looking at more folders.  It also makes processing what I collected in my inbox much simpler. I have far fewer decisions to make. Really all I am doing is deciding what something is and when will I do it. I don’t have to worry about what context to add and which project to put it in.  Now, all my projects notes and resources are kept in my notes app. Tasks that relate to these projects are hyperlinked to the relevant task so all it takes is one click and I am in my project notes. This makes it so much quicker to get down to work. I can quickly see what’s been done and what needs to be done. I also have access to relevant emails, meeting notes and files all in one place—which is not something you can do if you are managing your projects from a task list manager. The most important thing for me though, is how I spend very little time managing my projects and reference materials and I am spending far more time doing the work that matters. And this has given me much more free time to do things outside of work. The more time I have available for doing the work the more free time I get at the end of the day.  And, I no longer skip my weekly reviews as it did when I was doing GTD. I’d probably do a proper weekly review once a month. Now, as I know a planning session won’t take longer than thirty minutes, I love doing them. It’s got me a lot more focused on what’s important and I no longer lose anything. But the most important thing for you to remember is, the best productivity system is the one you design for yourself. I strongly believe that you need to take parts of the many different systems out there and build them into your system. I have elements of Tony Robbins’ RPM (Rapid Planning Method) system, Ivy Lee’s method and the Eisenhower matrix in my system.  Tony Robbin’ RPM is how I plan out my projects and goals. The Ivy Lee Method is how I prioritise my day when I do my daily planning and the Eisenhower Matrix ensures I am working on the things that reduce the urgent work.  It’s taken me a long time to develop a system that works seamlessly. It began with the Franklin Planner in the early 90s, through GTD in the naughties and eventually to my own system I call the Time Sector System.  Always remember, you are a unique individual and what works for one person will not necessarily work for you. Take elements from one and merge them with something else. You will find a system that works best for you and that one will be the one for you.  Thank you, Eric, for the 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 about deciding what to work on and prioritising   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 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 216 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 216 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. We’ve covered prioritising before in this podcast and it is an important part of being more productive and ensuring that what you are working on is meaningful and moves the right things forward.  However, for those of you who have created a good solid system, you are likely struggling with deciding what to work on. If you are collecting a lot of inputs—tasks, events and ideas—at some point you will have to make a decision about what to do about those collected inputs and, more importantly, when you will do something about them.  And those decisions can be very difficult. So, that is what we will be exploring in this week’s podcast. Don’t forget, if you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Not only do you get a summary and link to my weekly blog post, YouTube videos and this podcast, you also get a free productivity or goal-setting lesson each week.  And best of all… This newsletter is completely free. All you need do is click the link in the show notes enter your details and you’re in. Doesn’t get any simpler than that.  Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question: This week’s question comes from Shelly. Shelly asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the work you produce each week, I have a question about choosing which tasks to work on. I usually begin the day with around thirty tasks in my to-do list and I never complete them all. I feel guilty about rescheduling a lot of tasks. How do you choose which tasks to work on each day? Hi Shelly, thank you for your question.  This is a great question because it touches on a hidden aspect of productivity and time management.  All productivity and time management systems focus on collecting and organising stuff. Writing everything down and then organising it in a way that means something to us. What often gets forgotten is finding the time to complete these tasks we collect. And, more importantly, deciding which is important and which is not. How do you do that?  Well, time sensitivity is one way. Due dates and deadlines are great motivators for getting things done. If you have a deadline for something, you are going to be more likely to complete it. This becomes even more important if the deadline was given to your by your boss or someone in authority over you.  Your life would be easier if you spent a little time each week doing your taxes—organising your receipts and income and expenditure—rather than leaving a year's worth until a few weeks (or days) before the tax assessment deadline. But, hey, when I don’t have to submit my tax information for ten months, why would I spend an hour every weekend pulling together everything I spent and earned this week? There’s no imminent deadline, so there’s no urgency and therefore it’s not a priority.  So we leave it until a week or two before it’s due and now it’s not an hour, we are talking days if not a whole week doing work on submitting taxes.  If you want to stop the tyranny of tax assessment time, then do a little each week (or month) to keep it organised. It’s not about making it a priority, it’s about making it something you do regularly.  A bigger problem you will be facing each day Shelly, is a phenomenon called “over-choice”. Basically, what this means is when we are faced with a lot of options to choose from, we find it very difficult to decide. We become overwhelmed and anxious about whether we are making the right decision or not.  If you were to wake up tomorrow morning and have one item to do. You would do it. No matter how big or difficult the task was. You would do it. First of all you would be focused and secondly, there’s no decision to make. You are doing that one thing. So you get on and do it.  But we don’t do that do we? We see how easy it is to add things to our task managers and then, so we don’t forget something, we add a random date to a task that roughly equates to when we think it needs doing.  Unfortunately, this strategy leads to tasks coming up on our daily lists that don’t actually need to be done that day but clutter up your today’s task list. When you look at that list in the morning, you have far too many decisions to make.  We try and rationalise that by looking for the urgent tasks—but you often find even that filtering approach leads to too many tasks to complete in one day. We think everything is urgent and the problem there is if everything is urgent which one do you work on first?  What we end up with is a list that gives us too much choice and then we face the paradox of choice—as Barry Schwartz wrote about in his book by the same name.  You make have heard of the studies into choice. When we have a limited number of choices of a particular product we are much more likely to buy one than if we are faced with too many choices. I believe the statistics were when faced with a limited choice 80% bought. When faced with a lot of choices, only 3% chose something.  This is the same for your daily task list. Too many items on that list and you will waste so much time trying to pick something. More often than not you won’t and will stop looking at your to-do list and instead do whatever someone else tells you to do. It’s easier and you delegate choosing to someone else.  It’s why we procrastinate. We have far too much choice.  So, if you want your to-do list to become more effective; you must reduce your list of tasks for the day.  How do you do that? Well, first look at how you are writing your tasks. Make sure it is very clear what you need to do. I see people writing things like “Paul 353 2458 3579” and expect to know instantly what that task means. It looks like the name Paul and a telephone number. So you may deduce you need to call Paul. But why do you need to call him? You’d be far better-writing something like: “Call Paul about expected shipment date for Yorkshire Tea”. As soon as you read that you instantly know what you need to do.  The key to writing your tasks is to make sure there is an action verb in the sentence. If you make it very clear what needs to be done with a task you reduce the number of decisions you need to make. And that is really the secret here.  Reduce the decisions you need to make.  And this can be done in another way. Let’s take email. We all get it, some more than others. If you are not staying on top of your email daily, it builds up to a point where you become swamped and overwhelmed.  There are two parts to managing email. Processing; where you decide what, if anything, needs to be done with an email. And doing email—where you respond or act on the email you have decided needs action from you.  Now if you are randomly looking at your email throughout the day, you lose focus on what you were working on. You get dragged away from what you decided to do that day and can quite easily spend a lot of time just responding to email. If you set aside some time each day for processing—say thirty minutes before lunch or first thing in the morning and then a set amount of time each for responding to your actionable email, you reduce the decisions you need to make.  If, for example, you set 4pm to 4;45pm for responding to your actionable email each day, you now no longer have to decide when you will respond. You know you have time for that later in the afternoon. All you need to decide, when an email comes in, is whether or not you need to action it. You’ve simplified your decision making.  With this method, you no longer need to be sending emails to your task manager. All you need now is a single time block in your calendar that tells you when it’s time to clear your actionable email.  What about all those follow-ups and calls you need to make? I find these are often the cause of a lot of clutter in a task manager and are likely to be the tasks that get put off again and again.  Rather than randomly adding these to a task manager, you could group them together as subtasks in a recurring task that tells you to do your calls. Or, if you are in sales and need to follow up with clients regularly to see if they need something, you could put them on a spreadsheet. That way you can record information like when you last called them and any information that would be useful when you do call them.  All you need do then is have a single task telling you to review your calls list.  This is the reason why I stress the importance of knowing what your core work is. This is the work you are paid to do, not the voluntary work you have committed yourself to by using the word “yes” too often.  Once you know what your core work is, you can make sure you block time out on your calendar for doing that core work. Again, once you have done this there’s no decision to make. You look at your calendar and you see what you must do. The decision is already made.  I write a blog post each week. It’s part of my core work. I have set aside Monday morning, once my early morning calls are complete for writing. It’s non-negotiable. It’s what I do. So now, I don’t have to try and decide when I will write the blog post. I know I will be writing the blog post on Monday morning. The only decision I need to make now is what will I write about? I’ve reduced my decisions by 50%. The key to building more manageable to-do lists, Shelly, is in reducing your choices. The less you have to choose from, the easier that choice will be to make.  This can be achieved by making sure you are very clear about what you want to get accomplished each day and the best time to do this is the evening before.  When you give yourself ten to fifteen minutes before you end the day to make decisions about what you will work on the next day, you no longer have to waste time picking a task. You wake up with a clear set of objectives for the day and you can get started.  The strange thing is once you start to see that most of our productivity problems are caused by the decisions we have to make each day you start to find ways of reducing those decisions. I am a bit extreme here. A couple of years ago I decided I hated having to think about what to wear on my videos each time. So I decided I would wear a navy blue t-shirt. Since I made that decision I have accumulated about twelve navy blue T-shirts. I have six long-sleeve for the winter and six short-sleeved ones for when the temperature gets warmer.  I’ve also been eating the same thing for breakfast and dinner each day for around eight years. This means I don’t have to worry about calories because I eat roughly the same amount of calories each day and I don’t have to decide what to eat. I already know that when I have breakfast today I will have Greek yoghurt with blueberries and mixed nuts. For dinner, I will have chicken salad and a bowl of fruit to finish.  Now, I don’t expect people to follow my lead here. I am not a foodie. So eating the same thing eat day doesn’t worry me. I don’t get bored. And I do have a free day every Saturday where I can eat anything I want. And as for my clothes, I rarely meet people in person these days—certainly not since the pandemic began—so wearing the same kind of clothes each day isn’t an issue for me.  Finally, I would recommend you build as much structure into your day as possible. Doing the same kind of things at set times each day and week isn’t boring. It prevents procrastination. It reduced the number of decisions you need to make and it keeps your task manager clean and tight. You will find you no longer have to reschedule as many tasks are you are doing now and with consistency, life will become so much easier and less overwhelming.  I hope that has helped, Shelly. 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 about finding new goals when you have achieved many of your life’s gals already.   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 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 215 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 215 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. Now, we often hear about how to achieve goals, what habits to develop and change our lives. But what do you do when you have achieved many of your long-term goals and what remains no longer inspire you?  Not much is written or spoken about that. It’s as if the assumption is people struggle to achieve goals. Well, that’s not entirely true. It is hard to achieve goals, that as it should be. But it doesn’t mean we don’t achieve them. We do.  So. I’m going to tackle that question this week. Now before we get to the question, if you would like to receive all my weekly published content in one single place, then subscribe to my newsletter. Not only will you get links to my content, you also get a FREE productivity tip plus notice of any special offers before anyone else.  It’s free and if you want to grow your skills in productivity, time management and goal setting (and achievement) then go ahead and subscribe today. 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 is from Tim. Tim asks: Hi Carl, I have been fortunate in that I have achieved many of my life's goals. Those that I haven't achieved . . . well, they're just not attractive to me anymore. The problem is I now feel lost without having some goals. How do I find new goals? Hi Tim, thank you for the question.  One thing humans need is to be continually growing. That does not necessarily mean physically grow, but grow mentally. When we stop growing, we can feel depressed and down and lost. What keeps us moving forward is something to achieve. That could be a certain lifestyle, a new knowledge or even a business.  No matter what it is, our minds (and bodies) need exercising and that exercise is how we grow.  When we are young, fresh from school, it’s likely we will have a lot of ideas and ambitions. We are a little naive then, and we think we are immortal and can achieve anything. Then life punches us in the face and we realise that all the things we’ve dreamed about accomplishing is not as easy to achieve as we first thought.  Apparently, statically, 97% of people will stop at this point and just accept life as it is and give up their dreams and ambitions. It’s easier to blame life and our circumstances than to stand out and be different and go after our dreams—the things that other people around us say are crazy or impossible to do.  The three percent who do go after their dreams and goals and accepts that their life is 100% their responsibility, are the ones who are goal driven, focused and never stop growing their skills and abilities. But there comes a natural point where most of those goals and dreams have been achieved. Then what? What do you do then?  I remember, the first time I completed a marathon. It was amazing. The sense of accomplishment was incredible. There was this smile on my face. I felt I could achieve anything. Those feelings lasted all of about an hour. After that I began thinking now what?  You see, achieving your goals will not give you a lifetime of fulfilment. That sense of pride and fulfilment doesn’t last.  A goal, as Damon Cart talked about in this podcast a few weeks ago, is just a stepping stone to something much bigger. And I mean much much bigger.  The real question to ask yourself is what do I want out of life? Who, or what do I need to become to accomplish that?  Now, one place you are likely to find the answers to these questions is in your areas of focus. These are the eight areas of life that are important to us. Some are obvious such as health, family and friends and finances. But the other five are just as important. Your career or business, your spirituality, your self development, lifestyle and life’s purpose will all come into the mix at some point.  I’ve recently finished reading a new biography of Ian Fleming, my writing hero. For those who don’t know, Ian Fleming was the creator and writer of the James Bond novels.  Throughout the 1950s, Ian Fleming achieved everything he desired. He attained all his goals. At the start of the decade he built his dream home in Jamaica, he married the woman he loved and he published “a spy novel to end all spy novels” when he published Casino Royale in 1953.  Throughout the 1950s, Ian Fleming achieved all the goals he set out to achieve. The success of the James Bond novels made him a multi-millionaire, it allowed him to become an independent writer and live the lifestyle he had always dreamed of.  At the end of the decade, was he happy? No. His marriage was breaking down, his health was failing him and he became embroiled in a legal battle involving his book, Thunderball.  Towards the end of his life, Ian Fleming had one remaining goal. That was to become the club captain at the Royal St George’s Golf Club in Kent, England. He finally achieved that goal when he was announced as the club captain on the 12 August 1964—the day he died of a heart attack.  Despite all the success the James Bond novels brought Ian Fleming. The fame, the fortune and lifestyle, the one thing he valued most was his golfing friends. Golf was a big part of his life, but it wasn’t until towards the end of his life he came to realise that the friendships he developed on the golf course and in the club house and writing—whether that was books or articles for The Sunday Times newspaper—were the most important things in his life.  If you look at the eight areas of focus, friendships and career / business were important parts of Ian Fleming’s life. Career or business because his career was spent largely in journalism and writing.  Two years before his death, Ian Fleming, wrote a book called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was a children’s book about a flying car. It was going to be the start of a new career—writing children books. He decided he wanted to become famous not just for writing spy fiction, but also to be a children’s book author.  Often even though you may have retired from your professional life, the skills and abilities you learned during your career, hold a part of you that you love doing.  My father is a great example of this. My father’s a farmer. He has been all his life. He retired in 1999, sold the family farm in the UK and promptly bought a small farm in Ireland. There’s little pressure for him to make money, now it’s a labour of love.  He still wakes up reasonably early to go out and feed the animals. He’s an avid poultry shower—he raises hens to show in events around the country each year and that is where most of his goals come from each year. Winning the all Ireland Championship.  So, Tim, Where are you interests now? That’s where I would start. What interests you?  If you have most of your areas of focus covered, are there any areas you feel need attention? Often you will find new goals and ways to grow in there.  But that’s not all you can do. I would suggest trying new things. Go to a mountain retreat in a far off country, learn to surfboard, take a rally driving course, learn to horse ride or do archery (or both!)  You could set a goal to try ten new things over the next ten years. Commit to learning something new for twelve months. I have a friend who did this in her mid-thirties. She decided she would learn ten new skills over the decade. The first one was to learn English fluently—she did that, the second was to learn to swim. One of the goals was also to write a book.  When she embarked on this ten year journey, the energy and excitement in her eyes was there for everyone to see. To her, failure was not an option.  And yes, she did learn ten new things between 2005 and 2015. The funny thing was by the end of 2015, she’d already written a list of ten new things to go after in the next ten years. Can you imagine the life she’s living?  But the most important thing about my friend’s ten year goal, was the amazing positive change in her. Once she’s achieved her first goal, her confidence was sky high. I remember the celebration we all had when she finished learning English. Not only was she pretty much fluent, but she was now surrounded by people from all over the world. Twelve months previously the only friends she had were from Korea. Now she had international friends as well .  Goals do not have to be high and lofty. They can be small little things you could do on a weekend. I have a former client who after retiring decided to restore an old car. The car he bought was around $700. I cannot remember the name of the car, but I do remember the excitement in his voice when he told me he’d picked up the car and put it in his garage.  The car didn’t run, it was over forty years old—I remember it was a car he’d always wanted when he was in his early twenties. He had to learn how to rebuild an engine, repair rust damage and so much more.  That’s like me finding an old Ford Escort RS Cosworth and restoring it. WOW! Just thinking about that excites me. The fact that the Escort Cosworth was never sold in Korea, doesn’t deter me. I’d find a way to get one.  So there you go Tim. I hope these examples have given you some ideas. There’s a lot you could do. A lot you could try. Perhaps start with a country retreat somewhere special. Take a notebook with you and write out all the things you could do over the next ten years that would excite you.  Thank you for your question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, it’s all about how to stop overthinking and just get on with the work.   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 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 214 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 214 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 occasionally find yourself paralysed by decisions? Having too many choices and not knowing where to begin? I think a lot of us find ourselves in this situation and it can have negative effects on our overall productivity.  One of the things I have conditioned myself to be able to do is to quickly decide what needs to be done and where something should go. This takes quite a lot of practice but can be speeded up with a few simple questions.  Now before we get to the question, I want to give you a heads up about my weekly newsletter. If you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. This newsletter goes out every Friday and contains my YouTube videos, blog posts and podcast all in one convenient email.  In addition to my content, I share with you a couple of articles of interest from other people as well as some of the videos I have been watching that week. AND, I also share with you a short essay on a productivity or time management tip that I am sure will help you to develop your out systems. The link to my weekly newsletter is in the show notes. Okay let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks: Hi Carl, I follow the Time Sector System and it has really helped me to process my inbox much faster. However, I do still find myself not being able to decide where to put a task. How do you process your inbox so fast?  Thank you Alan for the question.  One of the reasons I developed the Time Sector System was because I found myself wasting so much time trying to decide where a task went. When I managed my tasks by project I would have twenty to thirty open projects in my projects list and while tasks related to specific projects were quite easy to process, there were a lot of tasks that didn’t neatly fit into a project.  Then I had to decide whether a new task was a project or not—based on the principle that anything requiring two or more steps was a project—if it did require two or more steps, I created another project to add to my already overwhelming project list.  It was crazy! I found myself spending so much time deciding what something was and precious little time doing whatever that something was. And don’t get me started on the time it took to review so many projects each week.  That’s how the Time Sector System was born. It came about because of frustration and when I analysed what was important about a task, I realised the only important factor was when I was going to do it, not what project it was associated with.  Basically, I removed a step—a step that was taking up a lot of time each day and week. Now the only decision I need make when I get a new task is when am I going to do it. There are no more grey areas because I’m not thinking about how many steps are required. All I am deciding is when I am going to do it.  My thoughts and ideas about a project are kept in my notes app. If I want to add information, ideas or a checklist of things to do on a project, I can jot them down in the project note and not worry about dates, labels or anything else you need to think about when you manage projects from a to-do list.  Many of the old style task management systems require you to make a lot of decisions, and as we now know, our ability to make decisions each day is limited. As the day goes on, our capacity to make good quality decisions diminishes. And, as most people are processing inboxes at the end of the day, it’s at that time when our ability to make decisions is at its lowest. This is why we struggle in this area. We get caught up in overthinking a simple decision: What to do next. So what about those decisions I alluded to earlier? Well when you are processing your inbox—whether that is your task manager’s or email inbox, the first question to ask yourself is:  What is it?  If you are processing your email, there are many different types of email. There’s spam that got through your spam filter—of course you delete these immediately. Then there are those emails you were CC’d on, but you have no action to take personally and there are emails that do require you to take some action.  I’ve found this one question can eliminate as much as 50% of the email in my inbox because knowing what something is, tells me what to do with it. If it’s spam or has no interest to me, delete it. If it’s something I need to know, but not take action, I archive it and if it’s something I need to reply to, it goes to my action this day folder for replying to later in the day.  I apply the same question to my task manager’s inbox. Here is a little different because anything going into this inbox has been put there by me. There’s a reason it’s there. However, again, I am looking to eliminate and as I process my inbox, I am thinking: do I really need to act on this? Often, as time has passed my enthusiasm for doing something has gone and I can delete it. That a positive result for me.  However, after deciding what something is, and that I will do something about it, the only question I need ask then is when will I do it? And with that a lot of the time the decision is already made. If I’ve been asked to send an invoice or receipt to a customer, I’ll do that within the next twenty-four hours. If I’ve added an idea for a future project, I will transfer that idea to my ideas list in my notes app or, if it relates to a current project, to the existing project note.  Deciding which projects to work on and what to do with those projects will likely form a major part of your daily decision making and certainly when it comes to managing projects, you will be making those decisions when you do your weekly planning.  The best criteria for deciding which projects to work on is time sensitivity. When is the project due? When’s the deadline? If the deadline is imminent, then that project needs to be worked on this week. If the project is a few months away, I can add it to my Next month folder. No need to be thinking about that project just yet.  However, the secret sauce in being able to process inboxes quickly is practice. The more you do it, the faster you become. When I am processing any of my inboxes it’s automatic. The questions about what it is and what needs to happen, can be answered very quickly.  But it wasn’t always like that. It was slow at first and it will be slow for you when you begin doing something new. Don’t expect to be fast immediately. You will be asking yourself what something is and when will you do it consciously at first. But over time, those decisions about a task or email will be almost automatic. You begin to see patterns in the different types of tasks and then you will be making decisions very fast indeed.  Now that should take care of basic decision making process for you. The next decisions you will need to make are what do I want to accomplish this week and what will I do today?  Now a quick tip here. Deciding what you want to accomplish next week, is best done Saturday morning before you do anything else. Remember our capacity to make good decisions diminishes throughout the day, so if you leave doing your weekly planning session to late Friday or Sunday, you will certainly not be in the right mood to plan next week and you won’t be making good decisions. The best time to do a weekly planning session is Saturday morning. Get, make yourself a cup of coffee or tea (or whatever you favourite morning beverage is) turn on some of your favourite music and sit down for thirty minutes or so with your calendar and task manager open.  Then go through and decide what you want to accomplish based on how busy your week is going to be. You may need to refer to your project notes to see where projects are, but all in all you only need to move tasks from your Next Week folder to This Week, give them a date based on when you are going to do them and make sure you inboxes are clear.  Do that Saturday morning and you are going to get a lot more enjoyment from the weekend. Your week is planned, you do not need to think about your work and you can really settle in and enjoy the weekend.  But the most important thing about doing the weekly planning session is it makes the daily planning sessions so much easier. Because you did the hard work on Saturday morning, when you do the daily planning sessions, all you are doing is confirming what you planned is still the right things to be working on and adding in anything new that you picked up during the day. Now how do you stop overthinking tasks?  Here, you need to ask yourself what is the result you want to accomplish from this task. Focus less on how you are going to do it, first ask what result you want.  More often than not, once you are clear on the outcome, the ‘how will I do it?’ Will take care of itself.  For instance, if you want to employ a new staff member, what’s the outcome you want? To get a fantastic new team member for the department. Okay, how will you do that? Now in this case if you work for a large organisation you may be lucky and have an HR department who can do a lot of the leg work for you. So the first step is to request assistance from your HR department.  If you are not so fortunate, and you have to do all the work yourself, then the next step would be to draft out a job description and what the ideal candidate will be.  From there, the next steps will take care of themselves.  You see the idea here is to only focus on the very next step. You don’t climb mountains in one step. You climb one step at a time. That’s also the way to complete your projects and goals; one step at a time.  I think of it this way, never leave a project without first deciding what the very next step is. You can then move that task to your task manager or leave it in your project note.  So there you go, Alan. I hope that has helped. Try to make your processing and planning as automatic as possible: what is it and when do I need to do it?  When it comes to individual projects, don’t focus too much on the process. Decide what the result is you want and then make sure you know what the very next step is.  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.   

Podcast 213 This week’s question is about habits and more specifically the best habits to have for greater productivity and time management.   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 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 213 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 213 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. Over the years I have been obsessed with time management and productivity, I have tried and tested multiple ways of better managing my time and my productivity. And from all that testing, I have learned that there are some hard and fast rules that, if followed, guarantees improvements in these areas.  I’ve spoken before about things like developing workflows, about making sure you plan the day the day before and keeping your task manager and calendar clean and tight. But of all the best methods, there is is one that stands out more than the others and that is the development of the right habits.  And that is what this week’s question is all about. What set of habits should you adopt so that better time management and productivity becomes a habit, rather than something you need to think about. Now, before we get to this week’s question, if you would like to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Every Friday, I send out a newsletter that gives you all the links to things like my Youtube videos, my blog post and of course this podcast. Plus, I include one or two articles written by others that I have enjoyed reading as well as a couple of videos I have watched that have helped me develop my systems. PLUS… I also write a short essay each week that is exclusive to my newsletter that will give you tips and tricks to optimise your own productivity set up. And of course, it’s all FREE. All you need do is sign up, which you can do from the link in the show notes. Okay, on with the show 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 Julia. Julia ask, Hi Carl, I read Atomic Habits by James Clear over the Christmas break and that got be thinking about the best habits to help me become better at managing my time and getting more of my work finished. Do you have any thoughts on this?  Hi Julia, great question! Thank you for sending it in. Firstly, may I just say, Atomic Habits is one of the best books you can read if you want to transform your life as a whole, not just your productivity. I remember a few years ago I was struggling to fix my morning routine and make doing it consistent. After reading Atomic Habits I discovered the piece I was missing—something called “habit stacking” which was the missing piece to making it consistent.  Essentially habit stacking requires a trigger—in my case turning on the kettle in the morning to make my coffee, and then a sequence of little actions steps. So in the case of my morning routines, the turning on of my kettle leads to me doing my shoulder stretches while the kettle boils, which then triggers me drinking a glass of lemon water while my coffee brews, and once I have my coffee, I sit down either at my desk or on the sofa and write my journal for ten minutes.  I’ve got to say it really does work. Now, let’s look at some habits you can develop that will massively improve your productivity.  Let’ start with a simple habit. The habit of consciously closing out your day.  What do I mean by “closing out your day”? This means that at a specific time each day you stop and close down the day. It’s where to put a hard border between your work life and your personal life.  While technology has done a lot to make our lives eminently more convenient and comfortable, it has also blurred the lines between our work life and personal life. This is not good for our mental and emotional wellbeing. There needs to be a time for work and a time for our personal activities. That could be doing some exercise or meeting up with friends. It’s often these essential parts of our lives that get sacrificed on the alter of career development and business growth.  So, closing out your day is about drawing a line underneath your work and projects for the day so you can move to giving yourself some time.  A good closing down habit is to stop working on whatever it is you are working on. Then clearing your task manager’s inbox. Then spending a few minutes planning out what needs to be done the next day. That involves looking at the tasks you have scheduled for the next day and your calendar for your appointments. You can prioritise your tasks and make sure you have sufficient time to accomplish everything you have planned for the day at this point.  Now, the benefit of this habit is you avoid worrying about what you have missed and what you have to do tomorrow. Just a few minutes at the end of the day going through what you collected in your inbox and looking at what you have scheduled for tomorrow calms your mind and allows you to properly shut down the work side of your life for the day.  What I notice about not closing out the day and planning the next, is your brain will randomly throw up thoughts about your work long into the evening and if you are particularly busy, it can have a negative affect on your sleep. You try to sleep but you are worrying about what you may or may not need to do the next day.  It’s far better to get that sorted out before you finish the work day.  So habit number one - get into the habit of closing down the work day. That one habit alone will massively improve your productivity AND your focus.  The next habit I would recommend is to start the habit of journaling. A lot has been written about the benefits of journaling, but the biggest benefit for me is the focus and clarity I get from writing out what’s on my mind.  If you include ten minutes of journaling in your morning routine you will get several benefits. The morning is when you are likely to be at your most creative—even if you are a night person—because as you begin to write you create a connection between your subconscious mind and the page. I cannot count the number of great ideas I’ve had from those ten minutes I write.  Now, I must confess, great ideas do not come every day—perhaps once or twice a month—but when they do, I often find myself switching from my journaling app to my notes and collecting the idea there.  But, perhaps the greatest benefit is the way journaling focuses you on the day. If you use a dedicated journaling app such as Day One, you can create a daily template. For me, my daily template includes a place where I can put my two objective tasks for the day—these are the tasks that I must complete that day, it also gives me a place to track my morning routines. For that I have a checklist to confirm I have completed my morning routines.  The benefit of this is I have record of what I have done, AND not done, so if I ever feel out of balance, I can go through my journal and see where the imbalance may have occurred. It’s usually because I am not doing something important to me.  My journal is also my accountability buddy.  Last year was a torrid time for my exercise consistency. I really struggled to get back into my exercise routine after a Christmas break. Things did not start well. I strained my calf while out on my annual New Year’s Day run which stopped me from running for two weeks. And we had moved house and the new environment caused me to drop out the habit of doing exercise in the afternoons.  I found I was berating myself almost every day and promising I would get back into my exercise routines the next day. This constant reminder eventually pushed me to solve this problem and by April I was getting back into the habit. By July I was back to where I wanted to be.  So habit number two; start journaling. It can be a little strange at first, but if you stick to it, eventually you will find you always have something to write about. Don’t worry if in the early days you only write out the weather forecast or some news item. We all start there. Once you start doing this consistently, you will soon start writing out your thoughts.  Habit three is to write everything down. This has saved me so many time from missing something important. How many times have you agreed to a meeting and not written it down believing you will remember and at the appointed meeting time you get a call asking where you are? It’s so easy to forget these things if we are not writing them down.  But it’s more than that. If we don’t have a trusted method of dealing with information our brains will try and do the job for you. The problem is our brains were never designed to store factual information in this way. Our 200,000 year old brain evolved to recognise patterns—it’s what kept us alive on the open savannahs thousands of years ago. We recognised the pattern of some predatory creature stalking us for lunch. The crack of a twig or the russell of long dried grass.  If you think about all the information coming at us every second of the day through sounds, smells, sight and touch. It’s impossible to be consciously aware of every information input. Pattern recognition is a far more effective way to alert us to danger or opportunity. Our brain automates the process and if a number of informational inputs come together at the same time that corresponds to a known danger or opportunity, you brain will make you consciously aware of it.  One the best things our ancestors have left us are their journals and notebooks. From Leonardo D’ Vinci to Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. People who changed the world captured every little idea and hypothesis into notebooks. We can go and see these notebooks and see how amazing ideas and inventions developed over time.  Now whether you collect everything in a paper notebook or a digital notes app doesn’t matter. Choose something that works for you. Just make sure that you develop the habit of collecting everything. You can discard things later when you close down your day and clear out your inboxes.  I think of all the productivity tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years. Developing the habit of capturing everything has been the one that has had the biggest impact on my overall productivity. I would say I probably delete around thirty or forty percent of what I collect, but it very rare I miss something. If I do miss anything it was because I didn’t write it down.  I’ve set up my phone and Apple Watch to be little collection tools. I use an application called Drafts which is a very powerful collecting tool available on all Apple devices (I’ve even done a series of videos on using Drafts for collecting)  Anything from my shopping list to tasks and notes are collected using Drafts or Siri in the case of my shopping list.  So the third habit I would suggest you develop is collect everything. Once it’s written down and in a place your brain trusts you will look at later it will relax. Once you are in this habit, I can promise you you will find your stress levels reduce and you feel a lot more relaxed.  So there you go, Julia, three habits worth developing as we begin this New Year. Create a habit of closing down the day, begin journaling and collect everything in place you trust you will see later.  Those three little habits will give your productivity, mental well being and overall sense of accomplishment such aa positive boost.  Thank you, Julia for the great question and thank you to you too for listening. 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.   

This week, we are cleaning up our productivity systems and getting ready for the new year. 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 211 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 211 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. Something I’ve been doing for a long time is cleaning up my productivity system during the end of year Christmas break. I’ve found it’s the best time of the year to do this as there are very few new inputs coming in. Most of my work comes to a screeching halt because, while not everyone celebrates Christmas, most companies and people do have an end of year holiday.  So while it’s quiet over the final two weeks of the year, you can take advantage and clean up your system so it’s ready and waiting for you when your new year starts.  So where do you start?  The best place to begin is with your task manager. Over the year you will have added tasks that have disappeared into the deep dark depths and there are likely to be tasks you have completed but have not checked off. Go through all your folders or projects and make sure all the tasks in there are still relevant. If not, delete them or check them off. Next up, is to review your routines and recurring areas of focus. By the very nature of these folders, you don’t spend much time in there because they are set up to recur. However, through the year it’s likely some of these will have become irrelevant while others may have become a little boring. Now’s a good time to remove the irrelevant ones. Now, these irrelevant ones are the ones that you have turned into a habit. For instance, I used to have a recurring task in my areas of focus to do my exercise. This was added at a time I was being inconsistent with exercise and I needed the prompt to make sure I was at the very least reminded to do my exercise.  Once I got the consistency back, I just added a single task as part of my weekly planning session to schedule my exercise for the week on my calendar. I no longer needed the daily prompt.  Now for the boring ones, what I mean by these are you have seen the tasks every day for a year and you’ve become a little numb to them. Find ways to change the verb. To give you an example here, I used to have a task in my routines that said “Empty my Action this Day Folder”—this is the folder I have in email for all my actionable mail. The goal is to empty that folder each day.  Earlier this year, I changed the verb from “empty” to “clear”. It’s a very small change, but it keeps things fresh. You can change this to things like: “reply to all actionable email” or something similar. It is a small change, but it helps to prevent things from becoming boring.  Now before you finish with your routines folder, ask if there are any other things you really should add in here. Do you need any reminders to clean different parts of your home or car? Do you need a reminder to renew any subscriptions—or consider renewing subscriptions. Setting up tasks to remind you about upcoming renewals can help to keep you on top of your commitments. The thing with these is don’t set them up on the day of renewal. Set them for a few days before so you have time to make sure there’s sufficient money in your account. The final action to take on your task manager is to make sure you are happy with its structure. Over the course of a year, you are likely to have experienced folder creep. You may also have tested new apps but found you don’t really use them. Clear these off your computer and mobile devices. They only take up digital space and can be a distraction.  Hopefully, you are using the Time Sector System and with this, you should really only have six folders—your inbox, This Week, Next Week, This Month, Next Month and Long-Term and On Hold folders. If you’ve added temporary project folders or anything else, now’s the time to consider their value to your overall system.  If you are not using the Time Sector System, and have a more traditional setup with projects, clean these up. This is one area where folder creep can become overwhelming and you are likely to find you have a lot of projects that either have been completed or are unlikely to complete for whatever reason.  Now, before you finish with your task manager, ask yourself if it is working for you. Does it show you what you need to see when you need to see it? If not, make any necessary changes to make sure it does. For me, I want to make sure that what comes up on my today list are tasks I will do or must do. I don’t want tasks coming up that I know deep down I am going to push off to another day.  And, if you are taking a holiday at the end of the year, go into your routines and recurring areas of focus and forward date tasks you know you will not be doing over the holidays. I will be setting a lot of my routines and recurring areas of focus to stop coming up until the 3rd of January when I return to my full working schedule.  Now, what about your notes app? This is likely the place where you have a lot of stuff you no longer need. After all, it’s your notes app that you open quickly to capture those little ideas that come in a flash and when you look at them later you wonder what you were thinking at that time.  Now it does depend on how much time you are willing to spend here and how many notes you have. I have around ten to twelve thousand notes in Evernote and to go through all of those would take days if not weeks.  So, I do a search for all notes created in the last twelve months and start there. Then I change the order of the notes collected to the oldest first and that way I can begin in January and work my way through. I usually make sure the note is held in the right place and is appropriately tagged as I go through them.  I find doing this I will delete around 20% of what I collected and it only takes an hour or so.  If I want to go further, I just filter notes to any note created in the last five years and repeat the process. Fortunately, I’ve been doing this every year for around six or seven years, so this deeper clean up is very quick. Anything older than a year will already be tagged correctly so all I am doing is making sure the note is still relevant.  A final exercise with your notes is to review your structure. Is the way you are structuring your notes still serving you. These days it’s rare I would change the way I structure my notes, but in the past, I’ve played with multiple ways and found a lot of them didn’t really serve me. Now’s a good time to do any restructuring.  Okay, so that’s taken care of your productivity apps. What about the folders in your cloud storage system and your computer. Well, hopefully, you are not using your computer to store files. Aside from the risk of losing everything if your computer died (and they do still die) flies stored on your computer’s hard drive are not available on your other devices.  It’s really up to you. I keep files and folders for up to two years. So, anything I created this year will be stored in a parent folder called 2021. Then anything new will be created as and when required. I do have some folders that stay around for instance my company’s certificate and VAT documents which I need quite frequently.  I also go into Pages, Keynote and Numbers and clear out anything I no longer need. If you use Google Docs or Microsoft Office online, then take a. Look and clean up anything you no longer need. Okay, that’s a good annual clean up of your productivity tools. Now for the final step: dealing with app creep. Let’s be honest, we are all sucked into trying new apps and forgetting they are still on our phones and computers. The end of the year is a good time to purge these and to also look at what you are using and make sure the apps you use are still doing the job you want them to do.  It’s funny, if I am being honest, over the last two years Evernote has been on my “at-risk” list, but as I was never able to find a worthy replacement, I stuck with it. This year, Evernote is off the “at-risk” list. It’s vastly improved over the last eighteen months and while this year they have brought out a lot of features I don’t need or would use, it still does the job I want it to do reliably and with speed.  But I did look at Obsidian this year and was underwhelmed by all the fuss. It’s gone—I’ve already deleted that one, and that was the only one I was tempted to look at this year. However, in years gone by, I have looked at a lot of apps and forgot they were taking up space. So I purge.  One final area to clean out is your to-read list. Let’s honest here, if you have a list that’s well over a hundred articles to read, you’re not going to read them all. Purge that list, my friends. Clean it out so you start the year with a list of things to read you are going to read.  And that’s it. If you spread this out over the end of year break, you will begin the year with a refreshed set of productivity tools ready to see you through another year.  Have a fantastic week and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, why your system or process is more important than the apps you use.   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 210 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 210 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. This week, we’re talking about the system versus app and why with the right system it doesn’t matter what apps or tools you use, you’ll always be productive. I remember when I first read David Allen’s Getting Things Done book many years ago, I salivated at the chance to learn what apps would be recommended and where I could buy them from (there were no app stores in those days). I was disappointed after reading the book to learn that David Allen didn’t recommend anything other than a label printing device for all the folders I would be creating for my projects.  Then in 2015, the revised updated version of Getting Things Done came out and I rushed to buy my copy believing this time, as we were well and truly in the new digital world of apps and app stores, David would be recommending some new apps I hadn’t tried. Again I was disappointed, The same label printing device was recommended, but no apps or tools. And yet, David Allen was teaching me a lesson. Being productive has nothing to do with the apps or tools you use. They are just cosmetic and do nothing to make you more productive. Everything that makes you more productive comes from the system and daily process you use. And that is what this week’s question is all about. So, with that in mind, 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 Philip. Philip asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently come across your content on YouTube and this podcast and hoped you could help me. I’ve been searching for the best apps for managing my daily to-dos and notes. I feel I’ve tried them all but I still feel like I am burning out trying to get everything done. Do you have any app recommendations?  Hi Philip, thank you for your question.  I think a lot of people struggle with this one largely because there are a lot of applications and tools now that promise to make you more productive and organise your life for you. The truth is no application or tool will ever do that. No matter what application you are using, you are still going to have to put the work in. You still need to input your information, your tasks, and collect all your files together and organise them in a way you can find them later.  I’ve seen some apps try and do some of this hard work using machine learning or AI, but technologically we are not there yet. For that to work, a machine or app will need to know how your mind works and for most of us, we don’t even know how our minds work, so there’s little chance an app or piece of complex software is going to be able to do that.  At best, these apps guess based on algorithms and, as we know from US congressional hearings into Facebook and Google algorithms, these are not exactly perfect by a long way.  And that is really where you need to start. Understand that whatever tools you choose, you will still need to input your data.  Now, When I created my system I began with the question: what do I want to see each day?  What this question is does is elicit the information I need on hand for me to complete my work to a satisfactory level each day. It also implies that there is quite a lot of information I do not need to see. For instance, I do not need to see tasks or appointments I have next week. I might need to know I have a workshop to prepare or if I have a holiday coming up, but I only need to see that when I am planning the week.  For instance, if I have a workshop to deliver on Monday, I will need to know that this week, because I will need to prepare for it. But that is just a single task that says “prepare for next Monday’s workshop”. Once that is is on my list for this week, I don’t need to know anything else. From that, I can open the Keynote file or the Pages document for the workbook and get on and do the work. I may have a few notes related to the workshop in my notes app, and that note will be linked to my task.  So, let’s say on Wednesday, I see I have a task that says “prepare for Monday’s workshop” that task will be linked to the project note in my notes app and all I need do is click the link, and I’ll be taken to the project note and I can do a quick read through to see where I am and decide what needs doing next.  So, within five seconds I am ready to begin work.  However, to get to that point, I first need to make a number of decisions. First, when am I going to work on the workshop—I decided Wednesday—and what work will I do that will ensure I have the workshop prepared for.  This means I need to input the data at some point. I will need to input the task, and collect my notes and ideas and create a presentation file.  None of these things requires expensive, complicated applications. In practice, all of this could quite easily be done using a pen and piece of paper. The Keynote file and workbook will need software, but the process of knowing what to work on and when does not need anything elaborate.  Over the last ten years or so, I’ve played around with a lot of different tools. From Evernote to OmniFocus and in recent months Notion, ClickUp and Obsidian. And yet, while many of these apps may be pleasing to the eye very few of them actually help to get my work done any better or faster. In fact, I found Notion and ClickUp actually stopped me from maximising the work I got done each day because I wasted too much time trying to get the app to look nice.  So a question to ask yourself is what do you need your productivity apps to do for you?  Well, the answer to that question is you want them to tell you what needs working on and why and then to get out of the way except when you need to collect something into your system.  This means, the best productivity apps—the ones that will help you become more effective and allow you to focus on your work—are the most boring apps. Boring because you will not be tempted to keep rearranging things: changing fonts, colours and layouts. All these are distractions. They stop you from doing your work.  In many ways, Apple Notes is possibly the best notes app today. I know it’s only available for those who work in the Apple Ecosystem, but when you look at it, it has everything you need and nothing else. It has folders to organise your notes into categories and it allows you to collect notes very easily whether that is by using Siri or using the new Quick Notes feature. Its search is phenomenal and you can tag notes for fine-tuning your organisation.  When it comes to customising things. Nope. Not a chance. While it is possible to change text colours and fonts on macOS, you cannot do that on an iPhone or iPad. Apple Notes does what a notes app is designed to do. Manage your notes and nothing else.  The way to look at this is, the less time you spend inside your productivity apps and the more time you spend doing the work that needs doing, the more productive you will be.  This means you want to be optimising your system and not looking for another app.  To optimise your system look at how easy it is to get your tasks and appointments into your task manager and calendar. Make sure the task manager you use has some form of quick entry and for your calendar you should be able to type something like “meeting with George on Monday at 9:30 am” and your calendar will know to add that to the right place whether it is typed or spoken via Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri.  Once you have your to-dos into your task manager, you want to be able to quickly decide what needs doing and when and then to be able to add dates (if necessary) and move the task to its appropriate folder. If you cannot drag and drop a task on a desktop from your inbox to the right folder, your task manager is not fit for purpose.  This rule applies to your notes app too. Whatever app you choose, make sure there is some form of quick entry on all your devices. You should also be able to add relevant emails to notes and collect websites, PDFs, images and such like. I found when I tested plain text notes apps, they fell down when it came to that part of the process. While some could do it, it was fiddly and time-consuming and that defeated the purpose. Quick entry is vital.  The final part of any good system is down to planning. If you are not planning the week and your day, you will always feel overworked and busy. Not planning your day leaves you at the mercy of other people’s demands.  If you are not making a commitment to work on specific projects each day, you will find yourself saying yes to anything that comes your way. When you know when you start the day what you want to get accomplished, if anyone asks you to do something else, you are much more likely to say no.  For instance, today, preparing this podcast was one of my objectives. However, this morning, I got an email asking if I could jump on a quick call to discuss a “great new proposal”, and it was easy for me to say no. I had already decided that the most important use of my time today was to prepare this podcast, do my exercise and get all my writing done. Talking about how I could help someone else with their ideas was not a priority for me today. I have times available for that, and today was not one of those times.  Not having a plan for today, I would likely have said yes because I would then feel I was doing something.  When you begin the day with a clear plan, any new commitment requests can be assessed based on what you have planned. When you begin the day with no plan, you have nothing to assess, so you’re likely to say yes to the new commitment request and then find yourself overwhelmed with everything you didn’t do.  So, Philip, forget the tools and apps. Pick something you like and stick with it. Focus on making sure you collect everything quickly. Organise what you collected at the end of each day and make sure you have a plan for the day. When you do that, you will soon find yourself being more productive and a lot less stressed.  Thank you for your question, Philip and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, as we begin the final month of the year, it’s time to lay down your plans for 2022 and to set yourself up for a very successful year.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   My 2021 Holiday Season Sale 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 209 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 209 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. If you have followed along with this podcast as well as my YouTube channel, back in October, I recommended you begin a two-month brainstorming session where you gave some thought to what you would like to accomplish next year. Well, that two-month session is almost over and it’s time to turn your attention to what you WILL do next year. Now, before we get to the meat of this week’s podcast, just wanted to give you a heads up to let you know that my 2021 holiday sale is currently on. This year, you can save 20% on all my coaching programmes as well as up to 25% off selected courses. Full details of the savings are in the show notes or can be found on my website: carlpullein.com. Okay, let’s get back to turning ideas into reality. Now, a lot of what you will have written out during the brainstorming session will not be possible next year. And that’s okay. The purpose of the exercise was to open up your thoughts to possibilities. For instance, one of the questions to think about is what would you like to change about yourself? Now, most people tend to think about their weight, or their relationships, but you may have gone deeper and felt you would like to change your attitude to events outside of your control.  I remember, back in 2016, when Donald Trump was running for the Republican nomination for president, the media seemed to turn very negative and tribal. It felt the media sucked any remaining positivity out of the news and focused only on denigrating, lambasting and doom-mongering. Reading the news every day, as I had done since I was in middle school, no longer felt like an education. Instead, it felt like media organisations were trying to trigger me into a negative mood.  I decided that from 2017, I would no longer read the news and instead subscribe to my favourite blogs on topics I was interested in and to get a news summary email every morning from the BBC to let me know what was going on in the world.  This was a small change, but one that left me feeling a lot more positive about the world and people.  Another example, at the end of 2017, I decided that I could become more productive if I could reduce the number of private classes I was teaching face to face and instead focus more on digital classes. This was before the pandemic, but through 2017, I wanted to move towards a more working from home arrangement and learned how to use Skype and FaceTime. Now, of course, most of us are using Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but that change in the way I did my work, enabled me to produce more content and still continue to teach.  So the purpose of brainstorming ideas through October and November isn’t to develop a list of things you feel you must do next year, it’s about developing ideas about how you want to live your life and then choosing a few of those ideas and looking for ways to make small changes to your daily life.  And that’s the point I really want to share with you this week. It’s not about making big changes as the more traditional New Years resolutions would have you do, it’s about looking for those small tweaks to your habits and way of going about your day that will, over the course of a year build into significant changes in your life.  I remember in the days when I was teaching English here in Korea I often would have a student telling me they wanted to lose weight in the new year. I would ask them how they were going to do that and the answers typically involved joining a gym and some elaborate new diet fad.  Now, in Korea, it is common for people to each a bowl of rice for breakfast lunch and dinner every day. I suggested that instead of eating a full bowl of rice, they could reduce that to half a bowl each time and move a bit more. Take the stairs at work instead of the lift. Go for a twenty-minute walk after lunch instead of gossiping in a coffee shop etc.  Making these small changes would bring some dramatic results after only a few months, yet they would not be asking too much of themselves. You could still do the things you like to do, you can still eat with your colleagues and all you would be asking of yourself is to commit to a twenty-minute walk every day.  And that’s the thing. When you give yourself enough time to consider what you want to change and improve, you have the time to come up with some action steps that will not be such a drastic shift in the way you have always lived your life. It’s when you try to change things too much that you fail.  Humans are change-averse. We like routine. This is why we generally wake up at the same time each day. It’s why we eat at the same time and why we come home and do the same things each evening. We feel safe with a familiar structure to our day. When we try and change that too dramatically, our whole psychology will fight to return to the familiar.  Often, if you really want to make big changes, the best time to do it is when you move house or change your job. It’s then that a new environment will help you to make other big changes.  But for most of us, we do not have the luxury of being able to move house or change our jobs every year. Instead, if you want to succeed at making changes and successfully achieving your goals, making small changes to the way you run your day are the best way to stick to your goal and to come through successfully.  One of the best things you can do to become better organised and more productive is to give yourself thirty minutes before you close out the day and clean up your desktop. Delete old screenshots, move files to their rightful folders and then allow yourself ten minutes to look at your tasks for tomorrow and your calendar to sketch out a plan.  It’s just thirty minutes a day, but those thirty minutes will do so many things for you. First, you will begin the day knowing exactly what you want to get accomplished and secondly when you do start the day, you begin it with a clean desktop, and a distraction-free work environment. You get all that from twenty to thirty minutes. It’s really a no-brainer.  What about your bucket list? Are there any things on there you could do next year? Now, I know for many of us there is still the uncertainty of the pandemic, but that will end soon. What could you do next year from your bucket list?  Now usually, the things we have on our bucket lists are things that excite us, are a little far outside our comfort zone, and yet, if we picked something, thought about how to make it happen and then took the first step, you would find it happens. Let’s take one of my bucket list items. I want to take my wife to Goldeneye, a resort in Jamaica where all the James Bond books were written.  Now, Goldeneye is an expensive resort, and we would need to save a lot of money to make it happen. But what I can do is go to the bank in the new year, open a new bank account and call that my Goldeneye account. Then each month, send any spare money over to the account. I could set a monthly target, let’s say $1,000 a month, and that way I know if I curb my spending in the early part of the year, that would begin the momentum. If I found by June I had saved $6,000, I would start to believe that with a little push, we could very easily have sufficient money saved up to be able to go in September or October.  The only thing I need to focus on is making sure I am sending money over to the account every month how much time does that take? Five minutes?  You see, whatever it is you want to accomplish or change in 2022 doesn’t require a lot of time to do. You first need to identify the habits and behaviours you will need to adopt and make sure each day or week you schedule sufficient time to make sure it happens.  Developing habits requires an extra effort to start with. For instance, I drink a glass of squeezed lemon juice in water every morning. When I first began doing that, I had to consciously think about it every morning. I even had a little alarm set on my phone to remind me every day for the first month. After about two weeks I no longer needed the alarm.  What you will find is you make a few modifications over time too. For my lemon water, I used to squeeze a lemon into a glass of water every morning. I found that wasn’t the best approach. Now, I prepare a bottle of lemon juice every three days and keep that in the fridge. That way, when I wake up in the morning, turn on the kettle to brew my coffee, I can reach into the fridge, pull out my bottle and pour my lemon juice and drink it while. Wait for my coffee to brew.  The same goes with changing your diet or building exercise into your life. There’s a lot of experimentation in the early days while you find the best approach. That’s fine. If you keep tweaking and modifying you will soon find the right approach for you.  I have spoken about the time I followed Robin Sharma’s 5 AM club routine. That’s where you wake up at 5 AM and do 20 minutes of exercise, 20 minutes of planning and 20 minutes of studying. I was able to do that for eighteen months, but I began doing coaching calls between 10 PM and midnight and it became exhausting to do those calls and wake up at 5 AM.  In the end, I realised it wasn’t so much about the time of day you woke up, it was all about what you did in the first hour that mattered. So, I adjusted my wake up time. I now wake up around 7 AM and use the first hour of the day to work on myself. I write my journal, do some light exercise and stretching and review my schedule and plan for the day. It works fantastically, and I get enough sleep.  So, as we head into December, start thinking about what you would like to do and change for yourself in 2022. Then work out what small steps you could take each day that will gradually build up to you achieving whatever it is you want to do in 2022.  It works, it’s a great way to feel fulfilled and successfully accomplishing these goals will generate incredible momentum to achieving things you currently think would be impossible.  Have a wonderful week and thank you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast all you need do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I’ll be happy to answer it for you. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.