What’s the difference between a project and a goal? That’s the question I am addressing this week. 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 208 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 208 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. With the introduction of my GAPRA notes organisation system—GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas Of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive—I’ve received a number of questions about the difference between a project and a goal and on the surface there is little difference. Both have a desired outcome, a deadline and a set of actions that need to be performed before the outcome is achieved.  However, there are a few subtle differences that I will explain this week as well as explaining why I began organising my notes using GAPRA.  Now, before we get to this week’s answer, just a heads up to let you know if you are enrolled in my Apple Productivity course, you now have the 2022 update ready and waiting for you. It’s a free update and this year, it has extra lessons on GAPRA and how to build that into Apple Notes.  If you are not already enrolled in the course, you can still do so at the early bird discount price of $49.99 for just 12 more hours. The early bird discount will be ending at midnight today (22 November)  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 Johnny. Johnny asks: HI Carl, I’m struggling to understand the difference between a goal and a project. Could you explain how you distinguish between the two?  Great question, Johnny and thank you for sending it in. Okay, let’s start off with the similarities. Projects and goals share a lot in common. There’s a desired outcome. For instance you may have a project to redecorate your bedroom and a goal to lose 10 pounds in weight. You will also have a deadline date for both of these. So in this example, you may have a deadline to complete the redecoration of your bedroom by the 24th December and to lose ten pounds by the end of the year.  So far, very similar.  However, where they differ is in what happens once you have completed these. Once your bedroom is decorated, you have completed the project. It’s over. There is nothing else for you to do except to enjoy the freshly painted room.  With your goal of losing weight, the next step is to keep those ten pounds off. That means you need to change the way you eat and move. There’s no point in losing those ten pounds only to put them back on again right?  Goals are about changing you as a person for the better. They are about improving yourself and moving towards a higher purpose.  How did you feel when you last successfully achieved a goal? Happy? Ecstatic? How long did you feel like that? A few days? A few hours? Minutes? You see the problem with achieving a goal is the satisfaction that comes from achieving goals is short-lived. All goals by their very nature are just one step towards a higher purpose. For instance losing that weight, is about becoming healthier. If you lose those ten pounds and within a few weeks regain the ten pounds, then you completed a project. You did not complete a goal. A goal would be to keep those ten pounds off or go further and lose another ten pounds.  Let me give you another example. Each year I set my company an income goal. This is a goal because the purpose here is to establish a new standard. The underlying goal is to continue to grow and improve my company. So, ultimately, the goal of the company is for constant and never-ending growth. However, each year I need to set a new goal to accomplish to achieve that.  By pushing the goal further each year, the company grows, I get to help more people while at the same time I improve as a teacher—after all, for my company to grow I have to also improve as a teacher. For me to help more people become better organised and more productive, I also have to improve my skills.  I remember watching a Jim Rohn seminar on YouTube a few years ago and he said you should set the goal to become a millionaire, not for the money, but for who you have to become to achieve that goal.  To become a millionaire, you will have to change your mindset and your habits. Most people limit themselves because they believe their income is set by the company they work for. And in the past, if you chose to be an employee, that was likely to be true. The only way for anyone to become a millionaire twenty years ago was to start your own business. Today, that is not true. We have unlimited opportunities to build side-incomes. Creating online courses, or a YouTube channel. Even writing blog posts now can earn you income through sites like Medium.  But, to do that, you will need to break free of your 9 til 5 mindset. You will need to change your thinking from consuming entertainment to consuming education. Learning, growing and being obsessed with generating income. That’s how you become a millionaire. You will learn that if you spend all evening going out with your friends or watching Netflix, you will not change anything. You will stay stuck where you are.  If you spend your evenings on your side project—write, produce videos, sell products through Amazon or Ebay, then you put yourself in a position where becoming a millionaire becomes possible.  I remember back when I was in my early 20s I worked in our local pub as a bar tender. One of the regulars was a gentleman called Albert. Albert had been a millionaire three times and lost it three times. I remember talking with Albert one quiet Monday evening and he told me making the first million is the hardest thing you will ever do. But once to have achieved your first million, earning a million a year is easy.  I didn’t understand what he meant back then, but over the years, I’ve realised that once you know the mindset and develop the skills to earn your first million, if you ever lose it, you don’t need to worry. You know what it takes to become a millionaire and you can repeat the process over and over again.  The key to understanding goals is to know that the goal is less important that the changes you have to make in order to achieve that goal.  A project is static, it does not move. Once you complete the project it’s over. You archive the project and move on to the next project. A goal is fluid, it moves with you. As you improve your abilities, develop new skills, strengthen weak areas you, as an individual, are improving. When you complete the goal, the question becomes what next? How can you continue to grow and improve?  And that leads me nicely onto why I developed GAPRA. All GAPRA is is a way for me to organise my notes by importance. I want my goals at the top because they are the drivers of my continuous improvement. If I am in any doubt about what I should be working on today, I know my priorities will always be with my goals.  Then comes your areas of focus. The eight areas of life we need to keep in balance. These are your family and relationships, your health, your finances, personal development, career or business, spirituality, lifestyle and life experiences and your life’s purpose. These are all important to us but their importance changes depending on where we are in life.  Then your projects. For most working people, our projects are likely to come from our work. But as we move through life, become home owners, parents and take on more responsibilities we will be adding more and more personal projects.  Then we have resources, this is where we keep important information. I keep things like where I buy my clothes from and my sizes. I have a note called my “Anchor Note” where I keep important links and other useful information.  And finally we have the archive where old project notes and other stuff I have finished with but are not ready to delete yet go. When you organise your notes in this way, you have everything organised by importance. In the past, I’ve found I’ve ignored my goals because often my work projects take up a lot of time. But if I want to grow as a person, become better at what I do and feel fulfilled, I know I will only find that in my goals. So, when I open my notes app in a morning at the top of the folder list is my goals folder, I am reminded every day of what is really important.  It also makes doing my weekly planning session easier. I start at the top and work my way down to projects. So, I can ask myself what I can do to move closer to my goals first, then check my areas of focus are in balance and finally make sure I have sufficient time each week for keeping my projects moving along.  If you want to learn more about why the goal itself is the least important part of the goal planning process, I recommend you listen to my interview with Damon Cart. Damon did a fantastic job explaining that our goals are a vehicle to attaining what we really want. For instance, when someone tells you they want to earn a lot of money, earning the money might be something measurable, but really what people want is the thing that they think money will give them. A nice car? And nice home? Well, again, it’s not really the car or the home they want, it’s the feeling they think a nice car or a nice home will give them. That’s the ultimate goal.  Now the problem with material things is they never bring you the feeling you think they will. Nice houses and cars don’t impress people as much as you may think. But if the goal is to put yourself in a position of financial security so you have the freedom to do the things you want to do, you are setting the right kind of goals.  So there you go, Johnny. I hope that answers your question. The reality is goals and projects are very similar. The difference is that once a project is complete it’s done. Finished. A goal, on the other hand, is about changing and improving you as a person. It’s just a step towards a much higher purpose.  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 207 This week, I have a question about how everything should be working together and why when you do bring everything together, your daily life will seem so much more focused and, more importantly, relaxed.   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 207 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 207 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. I’ve been writing and producing videos for a few years now and over the years I have introduced a number of concepts that are designed to help you better manage your time and become more productive in what you do.  It can be quite confusing if you picked things up a little ad hoc. This week’s question is about how to bring it all together so it is seamless and logical.  Now before I get to the question, the 2022 edition of my Create Your own Apple productivity course is now available, If you are enrolled in the course, this is a FREE update for you and if you are not, but would like to enrol in the course you can do so this week for an early bird discount price of $49.99 (it’s normally $59.99)  This course will show you how to build your own productivity system using only Apple’s Productivity tools: Reminders, Notes, Calendar and iCloud. It’s a great course and one, if you are in the Apple ecosystem, that will give you so much benefit. And the course includes how to set up the Time Sector System as well as my new GAPRA notes organisation system.  All the details are 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 Beth. Beth asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed your podcast for a while now and I know a lot of the things you teach. I was wondering if there is a particular way you apply would use each of those ideas? I get a little confused sometimes about the differences between some of them. Hi Beth, thanks for the question.  There is a logical sequence for many of the principles I teach and when I saw your question I thought this would be a great way to explain how they all fit together.  So. Let’s begin with COD, that's Collect, Organise and Do. This is the foundation of all great productivity systems. If you are not collecting stuff—things like your tasks, your events and ideas, you are going to keep them in your head and that is when you will find yourself swamped and stressed out by the number of things you are trying to remember. Our brains are not very good at remembering things like that.  You will then need some time, preferably each day, to organise what you collected. Asking some straightforward questions such as what is it? What do I need to do about it? And when will I do it? Are all parts of this process. When I describe organising in this way it seems like it will take a long time, but you soon become very quick at processing tasks using these questions. Just to give you a benchmark, I will collect around ten to fifteen things each day, and to process those at the end of the day takes me about five minutes. If a task, for example, doesn’t need doing this week, all I need do is drag it to my Next Week or Next Month folder.  My focus each day is then on doing the work I have assigned myself for that day.  So where does the 2+8 Prioritisation fit? This is the daily planning process. The average person will have around twenty to twenty-five tasks per day including routines and regular work. If all of those had the same level of importance you would freeze. There’s no way you can do that many tasks each day unless they take less than fifteen to twenty minutes to do.  So, we need to get smart and choose the ten most important tasks for the day. Now the 2 parts of this refer to your two “MUST DO” tasks for the day. These are the two tasks you will do everything you can to complete. Now What these depend on the day and what you are currently working on. For instance, when I prepared this podcast, preparing the podcast script and doing my exercise were my two must-do tasks for the day. Yesterday, I had upload the videos for my Create Your Own Apple productivity course update and clean out my office (it really needed it).  What you’ll notice is that my objective tasks are not exclusively work-related. Sometimes they are, but I try to balance things. Now you might argue that cleaning out an office is not a priority, but we have a 12-week old puppy running around the house and I wanted to make sure there were no bits of paper or other such things hiding away on the floor. Puppies have a bad habit of chewing everything.  The eight other tasks are the tasks I should do that day. These tasks come from my core work and my recurring areas of focus. For instance, posting my social media posts and responding to student questions are a part of my core work. Every day these tasks will come up here. There can be other areas where tasks drop into here. The most likely place would be project work.  Again, to give you a benchmark figure, I will complete these ten tasks 90% of the time. It’s usually weekends where I occasionally don’t manage to complete them all. But, the two objective tasks have been completed every day. That is just what I do. It is who I am. I do my objectives every day.  And that is the way you need to look at your two objectives. They are non-negotiable. You just do them.  So when do you do your 2+8 Prioritisation planning? This is done before you end the day. Now, again when you first start this it will take longer than normal. For me, it takes around five or ten minutes. But that is likely because I never miss doing a weekly planning session. It is during the weekly planning session I set out what needs to be done that week and when I will do it. More often than not I will just be confirming that things are still relevant when I do the daily planning.  Why the evening and not the morning? That’s because what you want to be doing when you start the day is the most important work for the day. You do not want to be trying to plan in the morning—this is when you are at your freshest so knowing what you are going to start the day with is going to set you up for a great day. It starts the momentum.  Now for me, I’ve been doing many of these actions for over ten years and on those days when I have not been able to do them, I feel very uncomfortable. For instance, I cannot go to bed without knowing what I need to do tomorrow. I just wouldn’t sleep well.  I know when I fly to Europe—a ten-hour flight—but with travel to the airport, and then catching my connecting flight I am travelling for around 18 hours, it throws me out. However, my flight from Korea to Amsterdam is at 1 am, so once we have taken off it’s sleep time and when I arrive in Amsterdam I have a three-hour wait for my connecting flight, so I find myself a quiet corner, get a cup of coffee and do my planning and processing. Of course, when I am travelling it’s rare I would have anything important to do. Often it’s just to process my email’s Action This Day folder and answer student questions. But, I still do it. It brings a sense of control to my day.  I see it as who I am. It is just what I do.  So when you look at it, a well organised day doesn’t really involve a lot of additional work. The problem for most people is getting things organised in the first place. Often when someone embarks on building a productivity and time management system they have a lot of things all over the place and the hard part is getting that organised.  Then there is developing the habits of collecting everything and giving yourself a few minutes each day to organise that stuff. That can take a few weeks.  But, if you want to feel in control of what you are doing each day and would like to live a more intentional life, you will have to change some things. Living an intentional life where you have time to do all the things you want to do, will not happen by accident. You have to change, your habits have to change and change is difficult.  I remember learning to drive a car, when I first started I had to think about every step to get the car moving forward. Now, when I jump in the car, there’s no conscious thought at all. I just open the door, sit in the driver's seat and before I know it we are moving. How did that happen? It was all habit.  And that’s where you want to be focusing your attention. Building the habits. Set a time for doing your daily planning, make sure you automatically collect everything that comes your way into your inbox and make sure at some point over the weekend you do your weekly planning session. Once you have these habits embedded, it’s easy. You just do it.  I can promise you, Beth, that once these habits are embedded, you’ll feel so much more in control and when you begin each day you know exactly what you will be doing.  Thank you, Beth, for the question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 206  This week’s question is about managing overwhelm and stress.   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 206 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 206 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. I’ve received quite a lot of questions over the last few weeks about feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. Not just the occasional feeling, but a general, constant feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it.  If this state lasts too long it can turn into something very bad, so it is important to recognise it and take action. Nobody wants to be depressed or experience a breakdown. Fortunately, if you do recognise the signs, you can do something about it.  Now, before we get into this week’s question, I’d like to remind you that we are now almost at the halfway point of November. We have around three weeks left to brainstorm ideas about what you would like to do next year.  If you haven’t already downloaded my FREE annual Planning Template, you can do so from my downloads page on my website. carlpullein.com/downloads. This is a wonderful time of year to evaluate what you did, and didn’t do and what you would like to change and do next year.  Okay. Time to welcome back the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks: hi Carl, every day I feel stressed out and feel helpless when I look at my to-do list. There is so much on there and I know I cannot get it all done. It feels like every day the list gets longer, not shorter and I am at my wits end about what to do. Can you help?  Hi Tom, thank you for your question and I am sorry you feel the way you do.  The first thing I am going to do is tell you to step back. You are going to fight me and tell me you don’t have time to step back, but I can promise you this is the only way you will regain some control and get on top of that to-do list.  You cannot go on doing what you are doing right now. If you do not step back, take a breath and spend some time going through that list, you are going to find your feelings of stress will continue to climb and that is not going to lead anywhere nice.  So, stop for a morning at the very least. Or if you can, take the next weekend, gather up everything in your to-do list and hide yourself away for two days while you get on top of what you need to do.  What this is going to do is to put a stop to new things coming in. You need this to breathe and to take stock of where you are with everything. Next up, do a run through your task manager and delete any task you do not need to do. You will find there will be a lot of these. We have a habit of throwing stuff in there that we would “like” to do but don’t need to do. We need to clear these out.  In the past, I’ve suggested people move these tasks to their notes app as a single note, but I realised this does not fix the problem. It only moves things from one place to another. Instead, I find if we delete these tasks, if they are important at some future date they will come back up on your radar and you can re-add them to your list.  Doing this pass through on our task manager will clear around 25% of what’s in there. You’ll also find a lot of tasks that are well past their due date and completed tasks. We need to eliminate these. Watch out for those emails you have been meaning to respond to for over a month. Sorry, but it’s too late. Delete these. Seriously, if you haven’t responded for over a month, it’s going to look very unprofessional to reply now. What does that say about your priorities?  I should tell you I’ve had people do this and they’ve removed well over 50% of their tasks. That brings a huge sense of relief.  Next up we are going to have to do some thinking. What are you actually employed to do? This relates to your core work. The work you are evaluated on and are paid for.  This needs to take priority in the short term. We must reengage with what we are paid to do, and that means we need to remove the work that we have volunteered for. I know this can be difficult because we will feel we are letting others down. But you have to remember, you don’t have time to do all this stuff. Something’s got to go and unless you want to lose your job, the first place to look is at is the stuff you have volunteered for.  Any committees you’ve allowed yourself to be on, any outside work commitments such as parent/teacher associations or community projects. If you want to get your life back, start to feel more in control of what you are doing each day, then these have to go.  Now for the next six months, you only allow yourself to focus on your core work. Do not allow yourself to be pulled into anything else.  This, by the way, also applied to those of you who are self-employed. You have core work too. What is that work? Make sure you strip away anything additional to that core work. You don’t have to do this forever, but we do need to do a reset to get things back on track.  If you are self-employed, one of the things you can do is look into employing a virtual assistant to deal with the admin. Admin can very quickly build up and take a disproportionate amount of time to deal with. Your talents and time need to be spent elsewhere.  Now, once you have taken these first two steps you will start to see some light at the end of your task manager. You will have not only slimmed down your task manager, you will also have freed up some time.  The next step is to re-establish what is important to you. Often when we get bogged down with tasks, we lose sight of what is important to us. We often think family and friends will always be there when we need them, and while that may be true, to some extent, the last thing you need right now is problems in your relationships.  Likewise, your health and fitness need to be taken care of. Neglect that and you’ll no longer have the energy required to do a great job, be there for your family and if your health fails, your task manager and everything else no longer matters.  With health and fitness, you don’t have to be going out for a run or join a gym. All you need do is move. Humans are designed for movement and when we move we improve our overall mood. We feel less stressed and a lot happier. So make sure you are moving. Take walks at lunchtime and after dinner. Get up and walk around for ten minutes or so between periods of focused work. And the best thing… Always take the stairs. Never take escalators or lifts (elevators for my American friends) Escalators and lifts are the enemies of your health and fitness.  Okay now you have taken these steps, it’s time to turn to your calendar. With all the remaining work you have to do, the question is: when are you going to do it? Now, this is likely to be dictated to us by time sensitivity. What’s due next? Do that.  Time blocking is a great way to make sure you have sufficient time to get your work done. However, all too often people misunderstand what time blocking is. It is not micromanaging your time each day. Elon Musk might do that, but most people do not need to do it.  What time-blocking means is you look for gaps in your calendar you can block off to do focused work. That means working on the projects or tasks that MUST be done. For me, that usually means two to four hours per day for focused work. And, while I have meetings and calls each day, I can usually find those two to four hours no problem.  One way to do this is to block out 9 to 11 am for your focused work. I’ve found that to be the best time. You are still mentally fresh and it’s a lot easier to focus when you are mentally fresh. This means, where possible, you avoid meetings and other commitments at that time. Turn off email and notifications on your phone and computer and focus. Don’t worry, nobody will be upset with you if you do not reply for an hour or two. If you think they will try it out. If they get upset explain what you were doing and why it is important you do it.  Now, the only thing you need to think about is what you will get done this week. Next week does not matter today. You might need to prepare for a meeting or a presentation next week, but this week that’s all you need to find time for; preparation.  The final piece of this fix is to commit right here and now to do a weekly planning session at the end of the week. You need time each week to stop, look at what needs doing and plan when you will do it. As long as you are doing these weekly planning sessions, the only things you need to concern yourself with are the things that need doing this week. Next week can be taken care of when you do the planning session.  Taking these steps, Tom will go a long way to putting you back in charge of your tasks and commitments. Once you know what you need to do this week, just do one thing at a time, take a break then start the next thing. With that focus, you will soon find yourself feeling a lot less stressed.  Now, of course, if your work is causing you stress not because of the volume but because you are unhappy at work or you have a bad boss, that’s a different thing altogether. I would still recommend stepping back and looking at that and then thinking about what you could do to change things. Perhaps you could get a transfer to another department with another boss, or maybe you need to search for another job. Only you can decide that though.  I hope that helps, Tom and thank you for your question.  And thank you for listening too. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 205 / Interview with Damon Cart This week is the second part of my chat with NLP Expert Damon Cart and in this part, we dive a little deeper into setting goals and making sure that whatever goal you are achieving is growing you as a person and leading you towards a greater sense of long-term fulfilment.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Damon’s Website Damon’s YouTube Channel 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 205 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 205 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 episode is part two of my chat with Damon Cart. Damon Cart is an NLP specialist who has studied NLP or Neuro-Lingustic Programming for over ten years. Damon has a very successful YouTube channel, which I have linked to in the show notes, as well as a thriving coaching business where he helps senior executives and high achievers build fulfilling lives.  There’s a lot of valuable information in this episode, so get your notebooks ready and let’s go.   Well, there you go. I hope you got a lot of valuable information from this episode. Thank you so much to Damon for doing this with me and … It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, NLP Expert Damon Cart joins me to talk about how to create long-term goals that inspire you and ultimately brings you fulfilment and happiness.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Damon’s Website Damon’s YouTube Channel   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 204 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 204 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, I am honoured to bring you a very special guest to help you with your 2022 goal planning and to build goals that are not only achievable but sustainable and keep you motivated.  Damon Cart is an NLP specialist who has studied NLP or Neuro-Lingustic Programming for over ten years. Damon has a very successful YouTube channel, which I have linked to in the show notes, as well as a thriving coaching business where he help senior executives and high achievers build fulfilling lives.  I am sure you are going to get a lot out of this episode, and I highly recommend you get your note books ready as there is going to be a lot of gold in this episode.    ________________________________________ Well, there you go, That’s part one. Part two will be coming next week where we go a little deeper into identifying your values and you can use these to build your long-term goals and measure you achievement over time.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 203 This week, I have a question about how to stop feeling busy all the time   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 203 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 203 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. How many times did you say “I’m busy” last week? How many times have you said it today? If you’re like most people probably a lot. Why is that? Why are you so busy? I wonder if you have ever stopped and asked yourself that question.  The truth is, being busy is just a feeling. It’s not real. We feel busy, but that’s only because we have no idea what needs doing and we just feel there is a lot to do. Now I’m sure those of you listening to this podcast are doing so because you have an interest in being more productive or want to become better at managing your time, so it is likely you have a to-do list too.  And what do to-do lists do? They show you all the things you haven’t done so that just adds to the feeling of being busy.  Don’t feel bad. Most people claim to feel busy all the time and there are a lot of things you can do to remove that feeling and to start feeling a lot more positive about your days and to feel much more relaxed and in control.  Now before we get to that, I want to remind you that we are now well into October and that means it’s the time of year to start thinking about what you would like to accomplish next year. Don’t worry, this is not more to do. This is the fun time of the year where you can let your imagination run wild and create a list of all the things you would like to do and accomplish next year.  To help you with this, you can listen to last week’s podcast where I go through the four questions and three lists and you can download the Annual Planning Template or Evernote template. It’s all there to help you.  Remember, this needs to be fun. Don’t put yourself under pressure. Have fun with it, the decision-making time comes later. Right now, you want to open up your mind, let your imagination do what it’s best at—giving you ideas.  Okay, it's time now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Darius. Darius asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been trying to be more productive and better with my time management for years. I follow you, David Allen and Thomas Frank and you all have such great ideas. But even though I read all the books and watched the videos, I still feel so busy every day. I never have time to do anything I want because when I finish work I am so exhausted. What do you do to stop being busy every day?  Hi Darius, thank you for your question.  Well, the first thing to do is to stop using the phrase “I’m busy”. It’s not true because as I said, being busy is just a feeling. It’s like being angry or bored. It’s just a feeling. It’s a state of mind constructed by your brain and it is not a very helpful state.  The problem with using a phrase like “I’m busy” is you condition your brain to start believing it to be true and then on those days when you don’t have very much to do, your brain will keep telling you you’re busy, so you start to feel busy when in reality you have nothing to do. So make a commitment to yourself to stop using “I’m busy” today.  Instead, make a joke out of it. Laugh at all the things you think you have to do. That way you retrain your brain to put you in a better state. A state of readiness to deal with whatever needs dealing with.  Okay, once you’ve stopped using that phrase—which after all was just a lie you told yourself right?—we can start developing some strategies that will put you in control of what you do each day.  First up is to make sure you have a plan for the day. Now, in the perfect world, you would do that before you finish the previous day. But failing that, make sure before you start your day, write down the two to three things you must do today. These are the big things that will move things forward whether that be a project at work or one of your goals or to spend some quality time with your loved ones.  Having a plan for the day will help keep you focused on what is important that day. The trouble is, you see, we don’t live in a perfect world, do we? No matter how well we construct our days, unexpected events and crises will always come up. A traffic accident may cause you to arrive at work late, your internet could go down or a customer calls you with a big issue. None of these can be planned for and are likely to derail your day.  By having just two or three big things you want to complete that day, you will have the flexibility to manage any of these unexpected events.  You see, most people’s problems start with their to-do list. Having twenty to thirty things on there without any form of prioritisation, is going to leave you feeling you have no time to deal with these inevitable events. And yet, the majority of the things you have on your to-do list will not be important. They might be nice to do, but they won’t move anything important forward. They are just the “busy-work” tasks we like to think are important, but are not really.  Let’s imagine your role at work is in business development. Bringing in new business is part of your core work. To do that you need to make sure prospective new business or clients are sent a proposal. So, if your target is to submit five proposals each week, these will always be your priority for the week. Following up on those proposals will also form part of your core work, so you need to schedule enough time each week to write the proposals and follow up on submitted proposals. So, you could block two hours each day for proposal writing and an hour for following up on submitted proposals. That’s just three hours a day.  For your planning, you start the day with a clear objective to write one proposal and follow up on three submitted proposals. You need to know who you will be writing the proposal for and who you will be following up before you start the day.  Now, remember, this is your core work. It’s what you are paid to do. So this is the work that gets prioritised. Arranging your next holiday or scheduling a meeting with your team, is not a priority. These tasks can be done if and when you have time in between doing your core work.  Now, remember, if you are doing your core work each day and it becomes almost automatic, you will immediately stop feeling busy. You will be very clear about what needs doing and you get it done. It becomes non-negotiable and when you do that, your important work is getting done every day.  The great thing about this is that the more you do it, the more efficient you get at doing it. Which means you will need less and less time to do it. That frees up more time to do some of those less important tasks.  Which leads me nicely to the next strategy. In any successful business its results that matter, not obedience. Now that does not mean you break laws and rules, what it means is if you need to spend an extra thirty minutes on doing work that will get the result you are employed to get, then not responding to a message from your boss or client for thirty minutes will not matter.  If you are getting the results, no boss is ever going to be upset with you. You get results. That’s what matters.  So, what can you do that will get you the results you want? Thinking about doing something will never get results. If you want to do a great presentation on Friday, setting aside time to prepare properly will get you the result. Finding excuses about how busy you are will not.  The same goes for starting a blog or podcast. Thinking about doing it will never get you the result you want. You get the result by writing a blog post or recording a podcast and publishing it. Telling yourself you are too busy to spend time writing or recording is just giving yourself an excuse. The question to ask yourself is: what are you busy doing? And, is what you think you have to do more important than your future goal to be a blogger or podcaster?  So, before you start the week, spend some time thinking about what results you want from the week. And as you start each day, ask yourself: what result do I want from today? When I started today, I wrote down the results I wanted: I wanted to write this week’s blog post, learning note, and podcast script. I also wanted to interview a friend of my wife’s for an assignment I need to complete for a course I am taking and to exercise.  Now there are a few other things I would like to do today, but my writing, completing the assignment, and exercise are the results I want from today and as long as I do those, I will have had a great day. And that’s the way I see my day. Writing, interviewing, and exercise. Three things. I’ve almost completed my writing targets today, I did the assignment interview over lunch and I will be exercising once I have finished my writing. If I broke all that down into little steps, my list would be huge. It would give the illusion I was busy, but I have enough time to do everything I want to accomplish today and more. I am not busy, I am focused on getting the most important work done and that is the result I want today and I will get it. The way to stop feeling busy is to shift your mindset from tasks to results. Do you have ten calls to make today? Then make it a part of the result you want today to do those ten calls. Don’t treat them as ten different tasks. Think of it as one task to complete ten calls. Do you want to exercise today? Then don’t think about having to leave work at a specific time, drive to your gym, get changed, do your work out, shower, and go home. Think of it as one task. Do exercise. You already know what time to leave and to get changed. Just do the exercise.  Are you behind with your email? Then the task is to get up to date with your email. Not to reply to thirty emails. That will give you the illusion you’re busy. The result you want is to get your email up to date. So do that. One task.  So there you go, Darius, being busy is an illusion—it’s just a feeling and we have complete control over our feelings. First, get to know what your core work is. What are you employed to do and make sure you do that work as a priority. Next, stop looking at tasks, group them together and treat them as a single task. You have twenty emails to send today, then getting your email done is one task. The real question is, how much time do you need to get the results you want? I hope that helps and thank you for the question, Darius.  Thank you too to you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 202 As we enter the final three months of the year, now’s the time to start planning next year and I have a special way of doing this, and today, I’m going to share that with you.   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 202 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 202 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, I know a lot of people think the best time to begin planning next year is around about the middle of December, but there is a problem with that. It doesn’t give you enough time to think.  A lot of our desires and wants are buried deep inside us—hidden underneath a lot of the battle scars of failed goals we have picked up from past experiences and daily life and we need time to let these ideas surface and develop.  Before we dive into this, I want to let you know that I have a few free materials you can use to help you. I have an annual planning template you can download from my downloads centre on my website—carlpullein.com, and if you are an Evernote user, I have an Evernote template you can get—the link for that is in the show notes.  I should also say, if you are enrolled in the Time And Life Mastery course, now would be a good time to redo that course to get you motivated and lit up ready for the next eight weeks.  Why eight weeks? Well, that’s how much time you have to spend letting your mind go wild. And that’s what you want to do. Just let your mind go wild and write out as many things as you can think of that you would like to, or might like to, do next year.  Now, don’t worry, you don’t have to do all of them—that is likely to be impossible anyway—but for the next eight weeks, you want to be building a formidable list so that when we reach December you can start the second process—filtering the list into something smaller, yet incredibly inspiring.  Okay, so why a template? Well, there are four questions and three lists you want to be building over the next eight weeks. These are: Ideas: This is a list you use to just throw stuff into. They can be goals you missed this year (or in previous years), things you think you might like to have a go at such as learning a foreign language, or to paint or things you’d like to start such as meditating, a minimalism project or taking up a new sport.  Some of these items will naturally fit onto some of the other lists in this template and when that happens you can move them. Next up comes the first question. What would I like to change about myself? Now this question is about looking at yourself and asking if there is anything you would like to change. Have you gained a few extra pounds over the last eighteen months or so and would like to lose them? Do you have a bad habit you want to change? Or something else?  One of the things I’ve added to my list for next year already is to have the three wisdom teeth my dentist told me need removing, out. I’ve kept putting this dental work off because I hate going to the dentist—I associate these places with a lot of physical pain—yet I know I must face up to my fears and just get the work done.  So look at yourself, and see if there are anything areas you would like to change.  Next question is “What would I like to change about my lifestyle?”. Here you want to be thinking about where you live—would you like to move to another place? Are you happy with your present lifestyle? If not what would you change?  Or it could be something material such as a new car, a bike or even having a new kitchen put in. Whatever’s been on your mind about how you live, get it onto your list. Remember, you don’t have to do any of these things, but getting them out of your head is likely to lead you down many different paths. The second question is: What would I like to change about the way I work? Are you happy with your work today? Is there anything you would like to change?  One thing that has been on my mind this year is moving my home office out to a real office space. Commercial property rentals are very cheap where I live these days and so I’ve added to my list to look into moving into a purpose build office and studio. This would help me to improve the quality of my videos, allow me to build a place where I could do webinars and so much more.  Another area of your work life you may consider is your current position. Would you like to try for a promotion? Change your job or your company or even start your own business? With this question, there are a lot of possibilities.  The final question is: What can I do to challenge myself? I love this question because it is asking you to step out of your comfort zone. It can be very easy to get stuck in a way of living our lives and lose the excitement of something challenging. My dental treatment idea would fall under this category because what’s put me off from getting the work done has been my fear of going to the dentist. Facing that fear and doing something that will bring me better health and comfort later is something worth doing. What if you have found yourself becoming a little too attached to your sofa over the last few years and you know deep down this is damaging your long-term health? Perhaps challenge yourself to do something like the from the couch to 5k challenge.  Having two or three things you could do next year that would challenge you would do wonders for your energy and vitality.  Next up we have our goals list. What goals will you set for yourself next year? Again, remember this is a provisional list. You don’t have to actually do anything about these goals. All we are doing is stimulating our brains to come up with ideas. The more ideas you can come up with the easier it will be to filter the list down to something more achievable in December.  Are there any goals laying around that have been dormant for a while that you know deep down with one big push you could accomplish? Sometimes these goals may take multiple years—which could be why you’ve done nothing about them—perhaps next year you could do something that will get you started by breaking the goals down a little.  If you’ve ever run a full marathon, for instance, we rarely go from nothing to running 26.2 miles. The goal is achieved step by step. Perhaps running a 10k in the first year then a half-marathon in the second year and finally a full marathon in year three.  If you are a business owner, what goals do you want to set for your business next year? What will be your revenue target? How much growth do you want? This is the place to write these down.  Finally, are there any things on your bucket list you would like to go for next year? We all have a bucket list. For some it may be written down, for others it could be in your head, but is there anything you’ve always wanted to do that you could do next year with a little bit of focus?  Bucket lists are only useful if you are knocking things off from the list each year. Perhaps 2022 would be a great time for you to finally do something about it. The whole purpose of this exercise is not to come up with a definitive list for next year now. The purpose is to engage your imagination and open yourself up to what is possible. Now it is not about how or why, it’s about “what”. How and why comes in December.  This is a great exercise and you will enjoy doing it. There’s a sense of freedom you get with this exercise because you are not committing to anything. All you are doing is creating a list—a list that will energise you.  Now, if you did this exercise last year, there is another step. Pull out last year's planning template and go through what you wrote out last year. I find this is a great place to start because things I put on the list last year, that didn’t make the final list could be put on this year's list. It’s also a great place to go to see how much you have progressed this year. That too can add a bit of motivation. You start to see how effective this little exercise is at moving your life forward.  All great productivity systems are built on a foundation of long-term goals. When what you do each day is contributing towards what you want out of life and is not full of low priority, mundane stuff you have to do, or other people’s emergencies you start to feel more relaxed, happy and fulfilled. You have a greater sense that your life is going where you want it to go and that is what energises you.  You’ll also be amazed at what you accomplish—just externalising what you want and doing something about it leads to you doing a lot more than you ever thought possible. So, go get your templates. You can download it from my website or Evernote users can get the template from the link in the show notes. And remember to have a lot of fun doing this. You’re not committing to anything just yet. All you are doing is opening up your mind to possibilities.  Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week’s episode is the second part of my interview with Mark Ellis of Mark Ellis Reviews. Mark is a prolific writer and YouTuber and I wanted to get him on the show to give you a taste of what it takes to start blogging and or YouTubing and to explain his workflow process.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Mark’s Website Mark’s YouTube Channel Mark on Twitter Sign Up For My Free weekly newsletter Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook More about the Time Sector System 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  

This week’s episode is part one of an interview I did with Mark Ellis of Mark Ellis Reviews. Mark is a prolific writer and YouTuber and I wanted to get him on the show to give you a taste of what it takes to start blogging and or YouTubing and to explain his workflow process.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Mark’s Website Mark’s YouTube Channel Mark on Twitter   Sign Up For My Free weekly newsletter Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook More about the Time Sector System 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 200 |  Hello and welcome to episode 200 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, this week’s episode is different, but it is the 200th episode after all, so what better way than to geek out for twenty minutes or so and learn about starting a content-creating business and how to juggle creating content with a freelance career.  So sit back, listen and enjoy. Part of two of this conversation will be posted next week.      So, that’s part one. Coming up next week, Mark and I talk about Apple’s iOS15 release and a few other topics related to getting your work done.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

How do you save and store your digital files? Things are changing in this area and it’s what this week’s question is all about.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Sign Up For My Free weekly newsletter Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook More about the Time Sector System 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 199 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 199 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 I asked you to find a Keynote or PowerPower point file you created three years ago, how long would it take you to find it? How about a file you created six months ago?  This is a problem many people are discovering. They cannot remember where (or if) a file is stored.  Several years ago, we would create a folder structure on our computers loosely based around work and home. Our music and video files would be stored together and were accessible via our computer’s media players. But those Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, these were and still are difficult to categorise.  If you were organised, you likely had these saved in sub-folders related to either the project or client, etc.  Whichever way you organised your files, it was time-consuming and once your computer’s hard drive filled up it took at least a day to begin transferring files over to an external hard drive.  Oh, I remember those days well. A lot of fun, but very time-consuming.  This week’s question is all about what to do now to store and keep your files. I can’t wait to get started. So, 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 Dermott. Dermot asks, Hi Carl, do you have any advice on managing files and documents on your computer?  Hi Dermott, thank you for your question.  Now, many of you may have noticed that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are pushing you to keep all your files and documents in the cloud and there’s a very good reason for this.  Google began this by not developing separate computer apps for their Docs, Sheets, and slides. It’s also the reason why we don’t have a stand-alone Gmail app on computers. This is quite different from your phone or tablet where there are dedicated apps.  These companies want you to store your documents in the cloud for a number of reasons. First and foremost is because we have multiple devices now—your phone, tablet, and computer, and if you want access to all your files on all your devices it makes sense to have them located in a central place where you will have access to the latest versions anytime anywhere.  The second reason for this was caused by us. Yes, us. Why? Because the vast majority of us never backed up our files and if your computer died or was lost or stolen, you lost everything. There was no way to retrieve these files. I’m sure those of you who have been using computers for the last fifteen to twenty years will have experienced this at some point or another. Not a great experience.  Now, what you will have noticed is if you are using a Word or an Apple Pages document, the default location for saving is either OneDrive or iCloud. This is because Microsoft and Apple believe they have a better way to manage your documents than you do. And to a large extent, it is true.  If you create a Word document and find yourself rushing off to a meeting, autosave kicks in, and your file is automatically saved to OneDrive’s Word folder. What you will find is if you’re using a Surface Tablet in the meeting, all you need do is open up Word, and there it is. The file you were working on is now ready and available for you to continue with your work from your Surface.  The same happens with your MacBook or iMac. Begin a document there in Pages, then go off somewhere with only your iPad, as soon as you open up your iPad, you’ll find that Pages document ready and waiting.  It’s a brilliant system and has saved us from losing a lot of information.  Now, you can save files the old-fashioned way if you wish, you can change the default save location at any time, but I’d advise against doing that for another reason.  Often when we are working on a document, be it an Excel, Word, or Keynote file, we will be returning to it multiple times. A report or presentation file is rarely completed in one sitting. So, opening up Word or Keynote and seeing that file right there in your files list is fantastic. It’s one-click or tap and you’re right there where you left off. It couldn’t be any easier.  Now, what about all those documents you have completed and finished with? This one’s a difficult one to answer because we are all going to organise things differently. I run two companies, so I separate these by tags in Mac OS. As each company has different types of documents and files the folder structure I have for these is quite different.  In my From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course, I advise participants to manage their files by date. This is because often we are doing a complete reorganisation and most of your older files you will never need. For instance, a presentation file I used ten years ago, would be very out of date today. The slide design would look dated and the content would need a lot of updating. It wouldn’t be worth me doing. So, placing these old files in folders by organised by year makes sense. Or of course, you can delete them. But for me, this is a record of all the content I have created over the years and it’s a nice record of what I have done and how I have developed my skills over the years.  Documents created more recently can still be organised by year, but you may want to organise these year folders with sub-folders for your different projects. This way, if you do ever need something from them in the future, you can quickly find them.  Before going on, I should point out another area where your computer system has improved to help you. Search. On a Mac, you have Spotlight search which will be coming to iOS in the next week or two, and on Windows, you also have a search function. Search capabilities on your devices are now so good you really do not need to worry too much about where you put a document. Everything either in the cloud (that would be iCloud on a Mac or OneDrive on Windows) or on your computer’s hard drive is searchable.  But, and there is a big but here. If you want this to make finding files easy, you will need to make sure your naming convention is consistent. A lot of documents we download or are sent to us are likely to have names we would not naturally search for. I’ve downloaded important PDFs with incomprehensible names and if I do not immediately rename them they will quickly get lost in the system.  The best file naming system I have come across, and the one I’ve used for years is to name files with the date first. I date these in a computer-friendly way which means you start with the year, then the month, and then day followed by the type of document and name. This means I can search for documents by date or date range as well as type and or name.  To give you an example of this at work, after each call I have with a coaching client, I write feedback for them. It’s a summary of what we discussed during our call. The file name is the date I created the feedback, followed by the word “feedback” and then the name of the client.  Then next time I have a call with the client, all I need to do is search for the client’s name. I get a list of all their feedback in date order and I can click the latest one and have it up on my screen when we talk. Searching for that file takes around half a second. It’s a lot faster than going into my folders, looking for my coaching folder, finding the name of the client, and then looking for the last document.  For you Mac users, to get Spotlight, the keyboard shortcut is Command + Space bar. I’m not sure what it is on Windows, but it is worth looking for as using the keyboard shortcut will save you a huge amount of time.  Now for your notes, pretty much every notes application now has a very robust search. Evernote is famous for theirs, and Apple Notes is excellent too. I should point out that if you do use Apple Notes, you will find using your computer’s search it will also search your notes too.  But for search to be useful, you do need to make sure you give your documents a clear name. That’s the key to making sure you will be able to find everything.  The best advice I can give you is to not overcomplicate this. The more complexity you add to your file structure the harder it will be to find something later. Try not to have too many sub-folders. My limit is one sub-folder. I’ve been down the road of creating multiple sub-folders inside my folder structure and it rapidly becomes a nightmare. Think in terms of your projects. Have a master project folder where you put your current projects. Each project has its own sub-folder. Do the same thing for your areas of focus. One partner folder is called areas of focus, and each of your areas nests inside that folder. This prevents you from having to dig too deep looking for something.  Ultimately, when it comes to managing your files, the best way is to manage them in a way that works for you. If you are not doing so already, take advantage of the cloud services. It means your documents are saved on all your devices, are backed up, and will be completely searchable. And learn how to search for your documents through your system’s search function. Thank you Dermott for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.