This week, we are digging deeper into the benefits of creating workflows and processes to ensure your most important work gets done on time every time.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 2021 Course 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 179 Hello and welcome to episode 179 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. Becoming better organised and more productive is a process. It’s not going to happen overnight and there is a lot of trial and error.  The first step is to get a system in place: one that ensures nothing is being missed and all your new tasks, events and ideas are being collected. In many ways, it is a bit like learning to walk then run. As a child, our first steps are slow, hesitant and there is a lot going on in the brain telling us to put one foot in front of the other while shifting our body weight from one side to the next.  Over time, this ‘process’ of walking becomes fixed in our brain and we no longer need to consciously think about doing it. We stand up. We walk. The only thought we have is I want a glass of water from the kitchen. We don’t need to plan out each step.  Well, the same applies to becoming better organised and more productive. Our first steps are hesitant. We have to think consciously about what we are doing and that can seem very counterintuitive if our designed goal is to have to think less so we can do more.  In this episode, I am answering a question around that process and development and hopefully what I say will give you some encouragement if you are finding the whole process of becoming more productive cumbersome and time-consuming. While on this subject of building an unconscious process, just a little reminder that if you haven’t already got yourself the free areas of focus workbook, I highly recommend you do so.  This workbook was created to help you create that automation in your life by building in the things that are important to you so you have a lot less thinking to do on a week to week, month to month basis. Once you know what is important to you and what you need to do to maintain these daily, weekly or monthly actions, you will find yourself feeling a lot more in balance with your life as a whole. The link to download the workbook is in the show notes. Okay, 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 Jason. Jason asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed your COD and Time Sector systems and I love them. The problem I am having is it feels like a lot of effort just to keep everything up to date. I feel like I am spending too much time just writing things into Todoist and my calendar and not really doing my work. I enjoy it, but I know I need to spend more time doing work and not managing my work. How do you get your work done more efficiently? Hi Jason, thank you for your question.  You didn’t say in your email how long you have been doing COD and the Time Sector System, so I will assume you are relatively new to these systems. So, as I mentioned in the introduction, when we change our way of doing things—particularly if we have been doing something in a certain way for a very long time the new system can feel like it is taking a lot longer to do our work done.  Part of the reason for this is we have to consciously think about each step, whereas our previous system was just automatic. Even if you felt you did not have a system before, whatever you were doing to get your work done, you did it automatically. An urgent email came in, you panicked, and replied immediately leaving the original email in your inbox. That might not be a very effective way of managing email, but it worked, you replied and you got the job done—in the short term.  If you change the way you manage your email and instead of panicking when an urgent email comes in you consciously move it to an action this day folder, you a) have to think about it, and b) you have to consciously resist the temptation to panic and reply immediately.  Remember, nobody treats email as a form of urgent communication today. Your neighbour wouldn’t email you to tell you your car was being stolen, would they?  So, sure this new way of doing things will feel like it is taking more time…at first. Once, it becomes habitual not to panic when an urgent email comes in and you have confidence in the way you are doing things, it will feel a lot more effective and efficient.  As I have mentioned before in this podcast, the first habit you must develop is to collect. Most people only do this when they consciously think about it so they may collect around sixty per cent, the other forty per cent of stuff coming their way is still kept in their heads. Hopefully, by now you know this is not a great strategy.  Once you automatically collect everything into your trusted place—a task manager, notes app or notebook—you can move on to the next habit to develop. That is the organising. Where are you going to put all this stuff you have collected? And of course, that depends on how you have your system set up.  But beyond that, how do you make sure everything is working automatically?  Well here comes the advanced level—the part that goes beyond the basic structure. Firstly you must know what your core work is—the work that pays your bills and earns your income. That work must be scheduled on your calendar and the micro-tasks involved in your tasks manager. Doing this work, whether it is calling ten prospects per day, writing 1,000 words of your next article, designing the images for the next marketing campaign or reaching out to five potential speakers for your next conference must have time allocated to it every day. To give you an example of this. Let’s say you get a lot of important email and Teams messages each day and you calculate you need around ninety minutes each day just to stay on top of that, then wishing those emails and messages would go away or somehow you will miraculously find that time is not a great strategy. Getting realistic about how much time you need each day and allocating that time on your calendar for communications will ensure you have enough time every day and knowing you have time will take a lot of stress out of your day. This, by the way, applies also to your core work. This is why it is essential to define what that work is. Artists create art, designers design, salespeople sell and teachers teach. There’s the clue to your core work. It’s the art you create, the designs you design and the sales you make. You must make time for doing that core work every day and that means you get it on your calendar. Once you have a consistent schedule of work, that’s when things start to work smoother. That’s when you only need to make decisions about new stuff coming in and how that new, extra work will fit “around” your core work. And, that’s an important point there—this new, additional work must fit “around” your core work, not replace it.  Always keep at the front of your mind that your core work is what puts food on your table and keeps a roof over your head—a lot of this new additional work is work that will not directly affect your core work. This only starts to happen when you are consistent with your work.  Let me give you an example of this in play. I grew up on a farm and I still have an interest in farming methods. When I was very very young, my father had a dairy farm. Now the cows had to be milked at 6 AM, so my father and his brother would get up, get the cows into the milking parlour and start the milking at 6 AM. That happened every day, seven days of the week.  Between 6 AM and 9 AM, it was milking time. Once the milking was finished, the cows were let out into the fields for the day and the rest of the day was spent ensuring the milk that was collected was prepared ready for the milk wagon (as we called it) to collect it. There were never any meetings with National Milk Board representatives or machinery salespeople between 6 AM and 9 AM, no impromptu gossip time or checking that morning’s mail. It was getting on with the work, Collecting that milk was my father’s core work. It’s what ultimately allowed him to put food on the family table and keep a roof over our heads.  Time for meeting with Milk Board officials, salespeople and reading that day’s mail and news, was done once the milking was done.  That’s how you make your system work for you. Establish what is your core work. What work must you do every single day? Make those tasks recurring and get them fixed on your calendar.  This is how successful productive people become successful at what they do. They first identify their core work and the tasks that make sure that core work gets done. Things like prospecting for new customers, doing the design work and seeing patients and fix that before allowing other, non-core work into their workday.  Warren Buffett identified reading the financial news for several hours a day as how he would stay on top of the latest stock market and business trends. Guess what he does every day?  Your system starts to work when these core work tasks become just something you do. When all the people you regularly interact with know that you will be unavailable at certain times in the day—including your customers and bosses—because you are doing important work. But to get there takes time. All new ways of doing things take time. I remember learning to play golf. Just to learn how to swing a golf club properly took several one-hour lessons with a golf pro. I didn’t just walk onto a golf course and hit the perfect tee shot. It just many hours to automate the swing.  And that’s what’s happening here, Jason. You’re learning to swing. It will take time, but through consistent practice, the results will be a much more effective way of managing your work, a lot better structure to your days and a lot more of the important work getting done and being delivered on time.  Once you have identified your core work, those tasks will become recurring tasks, so you are not having to write them out every day. You write them out and they repeat when they need to repeat.  The only tasks you will need to write out are the new tasks coming in and again you will soon get faster at doing it. You quickly learn the best way to write your tasks so they are meaningful and clear about what needs to be done.  So be patient. Stay consistent, you will soon get faster and many of the things you are thinking about when you write out your tasks, will soon just become automatic.  Thank you, Jason, for your question and thank you to you all for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 178 This week, what can you do when your plan for the week is destroyed and your waiting for list get out of control.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Bundle 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 178 Hello and welcome to episode 178 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, you’re finally doing your weekly planning session, you have your focused work times blocked on your calendar and you are confident you will be able to get all your important work done that week.  Then, one email from your boss late Monday afternoon throws everything out. You have to ditch the plan and all the things you have been waiting for are required right now.  How do you manage that? Well, hopefully, in this episode I will give you some strategies to help you stay in control. Now before I do that… Don’t forget, you can save yourself over $200 when you buy The Ultimate Productivity course bundle. This bundle gives you six courses for just $175 including the Time Sector System, Your Digital Life 3.0 and Time and Life Mastery.  With this bundle you get everything you need to build your personalised productivity system at your own pace. And that is important. It takes time to piece together a system that works seamlessly for you and that’s what this bundle of courses will enable you to do. Taking one course each weekend over the next six weeks will give you the knowledge, the know-how and the tools to put together a system that will stick.  So, if you want to finally nail down your time management, goal planning and productivity so you have every part of your life in balance, start today and get yourself the Ultimate Productivity bundle.  Full details and more information are in the show notes.  Okay, 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 Melissa. Melissa asks: Hi Carl, This year I have done really well on doing a weekly review every Saturday morning and I get my week planned and organised. But, I find most weeks, by the time I get to Wednesday, I am far behind on my plan because I get given other work from my boss, I am waiting for my colleagues to get back to me with important information and my customers are always contacting me asking for help. How do you stay with your plan when so many things keep forcing you to change everything? Hi Melissa, great question and I am sure a lot of people find themselves in the same situation as you do. I know it happens to me more often than I like. So, firstly, it’s fantastic to hear you are consistently doing the weekly planning session. That’s important because it keeps you on top of your bigger picture direction and helps to avoid missing anything important. A lot of the reasons why people find themselves overwhelmed and directionless is because they don’t spend any time stepping away and reviewing where they are with their projects and goals.  If you don’t know where you are, how will you ever know what you need to do next to get the project or goal completed?  And let’s be honest here, a weekly planning session takes no more than thirty minutes if you are doing it consistently every week. If you are not doing it consistently, then, sure, it’s going to take you a lot longer because you will inevitably have a lot more to review.  Now, no matter how well you plan the week, unless you are hidden away in a log cabin high up in the mountains with no connection to the outside world, things are going to change your plan. When your plan for the week comes face to face with the week, sparks are going to fly. It’s as Mike Tyson put it: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” However, understanding that things are going to change—you just don’t know what is going to change—is a great place to start.  The key here is to build in flexibility. It’s no good trying to meticulously plan out your week based on what your next week calendar looks like on Saturday morning with time blocks for every hour of the day. That will never work. There are too many variables.  Instead, establish what your important work for the week is. What are your “must dos”? These are your non-negotiable tasks—if you like, they are your red-lines. No matter what, these tasks, meetings and appointments must take place.  It is these that go on your calendar—after all, you have decided they are your non-negotiable tasks.  Your non-negotiable tasks are not just about your work either. Your family and friendships, time for exercise, rest and personal development should form part of your non-negotiable plans for the week.  For instance, if making time to have dinner with your family every day is part of your areas of focus, then you make sure that happens and never schedule work related calls at those times. It’s the same with your exercise time. We all know by now you need to move. You body was not designed to spend all day sat down. You need movement. So, make sure that some form of exercise each day is scheduled. That could be a twenty minute walk after lunch and a thirty minute walk after dinner. Exercise is a personal choice. You do not have to go to a gym. Just make sure you have time for movement every day.  Now, hopefully, once you have your non-negotiable, must do tasks in your task manager and the required time to complete these are blocked out on your calendar there should be enough blank space for you to manage any emergencies that will inevitably come your way.  Now, here’s a tip. Start the week as if you expect the week to turn crazy.  What I mean here is front load your week with your most important work. If a crisis or an emergency is going to happen, you want to know that you have already completed your most important work for the week—or at the very least started doing the work.  There’s no way any of us can predict when things will go wrong. The only thing we can predict is that at sometime in the week something is going to happen that will require us to find some unplanned for time.  Knowing this, if you can, block out Monday for your most important work.  In my experience, Monday’s are the least likely days for sudden emergencies to happen. Most people spend Monday catching up with what they need to do that week, gossiping about what they did last weekend and telling anyone who will listen how much they hate Mondays.  Take advantage of this. Make Monday mornings your deepest focus work time.  Getting your most important work done early in the week, means you have the time and space to deal with all those unexpected requests, crises and emergencies later in the week, safe in the knowledge your most important tasks for the week have already been done.  I actually, block both Monday and Tuesday morning for my most important work. Monday is the day I try to get all my writing for the week done, and Tuesday is when I plan out the content I need to create later in the week—it’s the content planning time that takes up a lot of my time when creating content. So, I want that done early in the week so no matter what happens later, the hardest part of the creation process is done.  The rest of your week needs to be kept as flexible as you can make it. If you can, try to make Wednesday or Thursday your flexible day. By that I mean keep your work time blocks to a minimum.  Knowing you have space on a Wednesday or Thursday to deal with any unknowns that come up earlier in the week, takes the pressure off from worrying about finding time to work on whatever needs working on. It also means you have the space to catch up with anything that has fallen behind.  It also helps to review your plan for the week on Wednesday too. This acts as a method to refocus you on what your objectives for the week are. It also means you can reschedule less critical work if necessary.  Last week, for instance, I had a few unexpected emergencies come up with a seminar I was doing for a company on Thursday. This meant, Tuesday was spend dealing with tech issues to make sure I could connect to the company’s Microsoft Teams system—I understand security is important, but perhaps IT departments need to understand that no company is an island. Employees do need work with people outside the organisation from time to time—anyway just a thought. These issues thew me out of my plans for the week. However, I always have Wednesday morning free so I can catch up if necessary and that is exactly what I did. By Wednesday afternoon I was back on track and I made the necessary adjustments to my planned tasks for the week.  Now what about all those waiting for tasks? Here’s the thing about waiting for lists. What is the outcome here? I’m pretty sure the outcome you wanted when you requested whatever you requested was not to sit and wait for something to happen. That objective would be bizarre. No, the outcome you wanted was to receive whatever you requested.  So, anything in a waiting for list is an uncompleted task. You have not got what you requested, therefore the task is not complete. Moving a task to a waiting for list after you sent the request is just shuffling tasks from one list to another. It’s not completing the task. The task is only complete once you receive the information you wanted.  So, if you want to complete that task, you need to do whatever it takes to get the information you are waiting for. Whether that means you pick up the phone and scream and shout at the person not supplying you with the information or you send a polite, but firm email. Remember the objective is to get the information, not necessarily to build friendships or popularity.  You want to reduce your waiting for list? Get tough, get nasty and do whatever it takes to complete the task. And yes, that means you need to get tough and nasty with your bosses if it is they who are not giving you the information.  Look, when it comes to your annual evaluation and the person doing the evaluation gives you a poor score because you are not completing your targets and KPIs, it will sound pretty pathetic if you try to justify yourself by blaming others for not sending you the information you needed to complete your KPIs. So stop seeing waiting for tasks as somehow being different from the original task. If the original task has not been completed then it’s not complete and you just have to reschedule whatever it is to another day when you do have the information in order to complete the task. Focus on the right outcome and do whatever you need to do to clear you waiting for lists. There should be almost nothing in there.  Hopefully, that helps you, Melissa. Try to front load your week where possible and keep the mid-week as flexible as possible for dealing with the emergencies and crises and review your plan too.  There’s nothing wrong is rescheduling tasks. We all have to do that a lot more than we would care to admit. But life will always throw you off track, that’s just life. Ships are constantly battling winds and seas pulling them in different directions. But as long as you know where you are going you will always find the right port. That’s the same in life. There are constant pulls and distractions trying to pull you away from your planned course.  Just make sure you have a little time each week to review your plan, and readjust where necessary.  Thank you, Melissa for your question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me know to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 177 This week, I’m answering a question on how to prioritise your work and avoid getting caught up in the trivial, low importance tasks   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 2021 Course 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 177 Hello and welcome to episode 177 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. Before we get started, just a quick apology to those of you who were listening to this podcast on Spotify. Last February I upgraded the quality of this podcast and Spotify stopped updating the episodes. It turns out Spotify will only accept the lower quality versions of podcasts which are MP3 files. I was using M4A files as part of the upgrade,  However, I will reinstate the MP3 versions so Spotify will begin accepting this podcast once more.  Okay, on with the show.  This week, it’s all about prioritising and knowing what to prioritise and what to ignore—yes, I said that right, “what to ignore”.  You see, the problem is there are far more tasks to do each day and week than time available and we are not machines. We are apt to feel tired, lethargic and distracted at times and for most of us, these times are unpredictable.  So while we may think we are managing time, we are really better off managing our energy levels. Understanding that concept can really help us to prioritise our days better.  So, before we get to the question, just a little reminder that I have a new bundle of courses available that will give you four of my best courses PLUS two bonus courses, which will give you a time management system that will take the stress out of everything you have to do, and give you the tools and know-how to bring in your goals and dreams.  The Ultimate Productivity Bundle is priced at an amazing $175.00 which saves you 55% off the price of buying all four courses individually.  If you want the complete package with lifetime access, then this is the bundle for you. You save yourself $110 and you get everything you need to build an amazingly productive and fulfilling life.  Okay, 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 Paul. Paul asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of tasks coming at me every day and I struggle to know which ones to do. Most of them really are not that important, but I always feel I have to do them when I probably don’t. Do you know of any strategies I can use to better prioritise my work so I am working on the important things more often?  Hi Paul, thank you for sending in your question.  I am sure this is a common issue for many people. There is so much being pushed on us, that it can be very hard to know what to work on. The most important part of prioritising though is planning. You see, if you are not planning then everything will seem important because you have not taken the time to look at what’s on your plate without the day to day rumble of emails, tasks and messages. It’s like you need to get off the road for a moment, climb the hill and look at your landscape and see where you are going. Without that bigger view, you will likely be travelling down roads that will take you nowhere near where you want to go.  So, strategy one is to plan the week. Now, this does not mean spending an hour or two going through all your projects as some productivity systems recommend. You know what projects need your attention—or at least if you are paying attention to what going on in your life you should do.  At the very least you need to know what projects are due this quarter. This bigger picture view will give you the knowledge of where you should be spending most of your attention next week. It also means that any project not due in the next three months can be ignored for now. You do not need to be wasting valuable time going through those projects. They are not due yet and you need to put your focus on projects that are due in the immediate future. To use the car analogy again, you would not be worrying about what to have for dinner at lunchtime when your car is low on fuel. Your priority needs to be getting fuel in your car, not dinner tonight. Find the petrol station, and worry about dinner once you are refuelled.  So, spend twenty or thirty minutes at the end of the week and go through your projects for this month and next. Clear out your inboxes and get your email cleared. Review your calendar for appointments and deadlines next week and plan out when you will do your most important tasks.  Now, a quick warning here, when you do your first weekly planning session it will take you longer than thirty minutes. You’re going to be fumbling around trying to find things and thinking more about the process. Don’t give up. After a few weeks, it will become much more natural and you will think less about the process and will get faster.  Again, with the car analogy, when you first learn to drive a car, it takes you a little longer to get the car started because you have to think about the process. But after a little, while you no longer need to think, you just jump in, push start and off you go. It’s the same with weekly planning.  The next strategy I would suggest is to think in terms of outcomes not tasks. Most people focus far too much on the tasks that need to occur to complete a project, yet quite often a lot of those tasks do not need to be done. Outcome thinking is far better than process thinking and always focuses you on the right priorities.  Imagine you need a copy of a report to complete your project. So you email the person who has the report you need, but they haven’t replied for two or three days. Now ask yourself—what’s the outcome you want? Well, it isn’t to send an email, is it? No, it’s to get a copy of the report. So if you really want the report and your email was not responded to, what do you do? Call them? Drive to their office and get the report? There are far better ways to get the report faster than telling yourself—well, I sent an email. Sending the email was not your outcome. Getting the report was. So, focus on the outcome you desire. That way you will always be able to ask better questions such as: how do I get a copy of that report this afternoon?  You also end up prioritising your action steps. Instead of just going through the motions, you taking what Would describe as direct action to achieve the result you want. This all links back to knowing what your priority projects are. If you know what your most important projects are and you know the desired outcome, then you will know what to do, rather than getting caught up in tasks that you know will not take you closer to achieving that outcome.  You can ask simple questions such as “will doing this task take me closer to accomplishing my outcomes?” If your answer is “no” then consider what will happen if you don’t do the task. Will there be any consequences?  What do I mean by this? Well, if you get a message from your boss asking you for some details, what would the consequences be if you did not drop everything you are doing right now to answer a question you know your boss could easily find out if she opened up her laptop and looking for the answer? Likely very little.  Of course, these are your calls. When I was working in an office my priority was my clients, Not my colleagues or boss and I never got fired. I still got my bonuses each year and I increased my performance time and again because I prioritised the right thing—my clients, not impressing my boss.  Now another strategy is to be her-aware of what your areas of focus are. I’m surprised how few people know what is important to them. If you were looking at an Eisenhower Matrix, these would be your Quadrant 2 areas. The important but not urgent things.  So, things like your health, your finances, your relationships etc. Why do people like Tim Cook, Satya Nadella and Dwayne The Rock Johnson wake up early to do their exercise? Because they know these areas are important. They know if they neglect this important area of focus their immense abilities would soon decline. And it’s the same for you. If you are not prioritising your health, and your relationships you will soon find yourself drowning in overwhelm and stress. You need to make sure your areas of focus are in balance and you are not neglecting them.  If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to download my free areas of focus workbook. In there you will find a step by step guide to establishing your own areas of focus so you can build a set of daily routines that keep these front and centre of your life. These are where your daily priorities need to be.  Once you have these three strategies in check, you will find knowing what to work on will become almost second nature. You will automatically know what something is and whether it deserves any of your time and attention.  However, there is one more area you do need to know and understand before you can go confidently into the day knowing you are working on the right things and that is your core work. What is your core work? What are you actually paid to do?  Now I’m pretty sure you are not paid to reply to email and Slack messages all day. You were employed to do something fundamentally more important than that. So what is it?  If you are in sales, you are employed to maximise your sales, not to be completing sales reports and other associated admin. Likewise, if you are a doctor, your job is to treat patients, not fill out patient forms. Always remember your core work.  I remember back in the day when I was in sales, the worst salespeople—the people who were always at the bottom of the sales league were the best at doing sales admin. Funny that. The best salespeople were hated by the admin department because their sales documentation were terrible. But the company didn’t care. They got results in the work they were employed to do—selling. So what are you paid to do? That is where your priorities must be every day. If you are a sales manager, then your role is to serve your sales team is such a way that they maximise their sales. It is not to be constantly bothering them for updated sales reports. How does that improve your overall sales?  So there you go, Paul. I hope that has given you some food for thought and give you some ways that will help you prioritise your day more effectively.  Thank you for the question, Paul and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 176 How overwhelming is your to-do list? Do you find yourself not wanting to look at the list of things you have to do each day? It seems you’re not the only one.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 2021 Course 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 176 Hello and welcome to episode 176 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, you have a system in place. Your areas of focus and routines are filtering into your daily list and your calendar is supporting you by managing your available time each day. That’s great. But now, you find your daily list looks horrendous. It’s huge and leaves you feeling uninspired each day. What can you do about it? Well, that’s what I will be answering this week. Now, before I get to the answer, just a quick heads up, if you don’t know already last week, saw the launch of my 2021 edition of my Email Mastery course. Now the course is in glorious HD, it’s updated for the way we are managing emails today and I’ve added a few new lessons on processing your emails—a feature requested from the previous version.  So, if you use Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail, this course is a must for you. This course will take the stress out of managing your mail and bring calm and focus to an area of work and life we cannot ignore. Links to the course are in the show notes. Okay, 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, I took your Time Sector course and really enjoyed it. I have set everything up but now I find I have so many tasks in my today view I just don’t want to go and look at it. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?  Hi Anna, thank you for your question. Now there are a couple of reasons why your daily list is looking overwhelming and fortunately, there are ways you can manage that.  However, the first thing we do need to look at is how you are writing your tasks. There are two schools of thought here. One says you should break down your tasks into small bite-sized chunks and the other says to do the opposite. Personally, I like a hybrid of the two.  Let me give you an example. Imagine you have had a headache for a few days and you feel it’s time to see a doctor. With the first school of thought, you would write the following tasks: Get telephone number of doctor Call doctor and make appointment In the second school of thought, you would just create a single task called make appointment to see the doctor.  Now, I know this is a very simple example, but it shows you what can quickly happen if you break down your tasks into smaller tasks. You end up with double the number of tasks.  Personally, I don’t think there is a right or wrong way. The best way is the way that works for you., But, if you want a list each day that is less overwhelming I would suggest you ere on the side of writing macro-tasks rather than micro-tasks.   For me, I prefer writing macro-tasks. My task list contains tasks such as write blog post, do expenses, clean the office, plan YouTube videos. I could break these down into write the first draft of blog post, clean the carpets in the office or prepare YouTube video plan, but I don’t need such detail. I see the task: write this weeks blog post and I know exactly what needs to happen next. When I go into the office, I can see immediately what needs cleaning, I don’t need to break it down into the different parts.  Now the other reason you may have an overwhelming daily to-do list is that you are just trying to squeeze in more than you can do. This is very common. It’s a human condition to believe we are capable of doing far more than we really are. It’s the same as our inability to estimate how long it will take to do something. We think responding to an email will take around two minutes but often it takes five or ten minutes. We are terrible at estimating how long things will take.  This is one of the reasons I developed the 2+8 Prioritisation method. This is where you select ten important tasks for the day and make these the tasks you will focus on for the day. Two of these tasks are your must-do objectives and the remaining eight are your should do tasks. By limiting yourself to ten meaningful tasks per day, you force yourself to be realistic about what you can do each day.  Now, these ten tasks do not include your daily routine tasks—these just need doing anyway, but those are not all that important and so if you were unable to do a few of them one day it would not be problem. You can always catch up with them the next day. This is why in the Time Sector system I recommend you set up your routines to recur when they need to recur. You can always reschedule these if you find yourself running out of time.  The other benefit of using the 2+8 Prioritisation Method is it forces you to prioritise your tasks. You can’t do everything all at once, so you need to make decisions about when you will do them based on their deadlines, importance and your schedule.  In today’s world with so many tantalising distractions, we need a mechanism that restricts the flow of things we want to do. Like most people, I want to do a lot each day, but I have to be realistic about what I am capable of doing. I want to spend some time with my family, I want time to exercise, read, relax and get enough sleep. If I filled my to-do list with all the things I would like to do, I would not have any time for those important personal things I want to do and would quickly find I have no time to sleep or eat. That’s why I use the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. It acts as a way to restrict the amount of things I do each day leaving me feeling refreshed and safe in the knowledge that I have completed the most important things each day.  Now there is one more area that needs attention if you want a more manageable and less overwhelming to-do list and that is make sure you are doing the daily and weekly planning sessions. Time and time again, when people reach out to me for help, the problems they are facing are caused simply because they are not doing any kind of planning.  You see if you are not planning the week, your daily planning is going to take a lot longer. If you plan the week, your daily planning will only take around ten to fifteen minutes a day and we can all find ten to fifteen minutes a day. If not you have much bigger problems in your life than simply time management.  The weekly planning session is all about scheduling your most important tasks throughout the week and finding a balance to each day. If you see you have back to back Zoom meetings on Wednesday, you can avoid scheduling bigger tasks on that day and spread your tasks out on other days. You might see you have a meeting-free day on Thursday, so you schedule more of your important tasks for Thursday. This way not only do you find balance in your week, but you also prepare yourself mentally for the day.  The daily planning session is essentially a check to make sure your plan is holding up. You will find important tasks have been collected during the week and you need to find time to add those to your list and so things may need to be moved around. That’s life. You will never be able to create a perfect plan, but having a plan does give you the peace of mind knowing that you have time to get all your important tasks done for the week. Sure, you may have to renegotiate some of these, but that’s fine. It means you are engaged with your world and moving with the flow of the week.  One final area you may want to consider is how you are using tags, labels or contexts in your task manager. If you use a task manager such as Todoist, you can add labels to your tasks. This means you can filter out tasks. So, for example, if you have a label called “communications” you can add that label to any task that requires you to communicate—email, phone call or Slack messages. Then, when you decide it’s time to deal with your Communcations for the day, you just bring up that label for the day and all you see are tasks related to communicating. Really the only tasks you need to see at that moment.  That is a leaf directly out of the Getting Things Done book, and if you are a GTDer, then that is a modern take on using contexts. We’ve come a long way since 2001 when GTD was written. We don’t have to be in the office sat in front of our work computer to reply to email today, we can reply to email anywhere from our phones. But if you want to reduce the lists you are looking at you can create contexts based on the type of work you are doing.  So there you go, Anna. Thank you for your wonderful question. I hope that has helped and will give you a few ways you can reduce your daily list to a more manageable number.  Thank you to you too for listening. Next week, this podcast will be taking a little break, but I will be back with another episode answering your questions. So, if you do have a question you feel I can answer, then you can email me; carl@carlpullein.com and I will be very happy to answer your question. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.  

How do you manage a situation where your company uses a particular set of tools that cannot be accessed outside of the office? That’s the question I am answering this week.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Email Mastery 2021 Course 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 175 Hello and welcome to episode 175 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. A common question I am asked is how to manage a situation where the tools you prefer using are different from the tools your company uses. Another variation on this is where your company does not allow you to access the company tools outside of your company or your company’s devices. It’s a dilemma I know many face.  So, that is what I will be answering today. Now before we get to that question, I want to give you a heads up that my Email Mastery programme has just been updated and is now available.  This course will teach you the concept of Inbox Zero 2.0 and is designed to help you to get your email under control so you are not being constantly distracted by it and any actionable email is dealt with quickly and effectively.  The methods and workflows taught in this course will change your whole relationship with email. It will remove the overwhelm, the thousands of emails sitting in your inbox and will give you a system that requires little effort to maintain.  This system works. It has helped thousands of people get back in control of their mail and given them time back to work on more important things.  And if you join the course this week, you will be able to buy it for just $39.99 as part of the early bird discount.  Full details of the course are in the show notes. If you want to take the stress and strain of managing hundreds of emails every day, this course is for you.  Okay, 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 Stian and Steve. The question is: Do you have any tips and tricks for managing tasks and calendars when you have to use the software your company tells you to use and that cannot be used on personal devices. This makes managing to-dos and calendars very difficult as there are at least two of each. Thank you, Stian and Steven for your questions. Hopefully, we’ve summarised your questions accurately. This question is about being in a situation where your company has very high standards of security on company materials, software and devices, and this is understandable given news like the recent hack on Microsoft Exchange servers.  Now before we start, the first thing I would not advise is to fight the system. The tools and devices a company uses are chosen for a specific reason. A lot of research has generally gone into this by IT departments and while there often is some bias towards the IT department’s favoured operating systems, on the whole, they get it right.  If your company uses Microsoft’s suite of tools, then those are the tools you will need to use. Sure, that can be frustrating if you prefer third-party tools, but that is the way things are and unless you can demonstrate to your IT department that your solution is better than the existing arrangement, you are going to be fighting a losing battle.  So, instead of fighting the system, take a step back and look at what tools you are permitted to use.  Think of it like the scene in the film Apollo 13 where the engineers have to build a CO2 filter using only the materials on board the Lunar Module. Essentially fitting a square peg into a round hole.  I have always said the tools you use to work your system are less important than the system itself. A great system should work with a pen and notebook. If the system you are using to manage your work cannot work with pen and paper, then your system is too complex and the problem is there, not with your tools.  All you really need is a place to collect your inputs—your tasks, project notes and other important information. A way to organise those inputs so that what needs doing comes up when you need to see it and you need to be getting on with your work.  For collecting, organising and doing you do not need anything elaborate.  Now, if your company insists you use their Microsoft suite of tools you have an amazing set of tools that are getting better and better. It might be nice to be able to choose a task manager such as Todoist, Things 3 or OmniFocus, but those options are not on the table here. The only option you have is Microsoft ToDo or Planner.  Now, I am old enough to remember a time when to read and respond to my company’s email I had to be in the office at my work station. I could not access my company’s calendar or email system outside of office hours and that was fantastic! It gave me a natural barrier between work time and personal time.  Today, most people no longer have that luxury now they have access to their email and calendars 24/7 and that means work emails arriving at 11 pm on a Saturday night—because there’s always someone who thinks sending emails at 11 pm on a Saturday night is a good idea.  If you have read the original Getting Things Done book, published in 2001, that was written at a time when most people had to be in their office to be able to see what their projects were and the tasks they had to do. You could not do that from home on a Sunday evening. To do a weekly review, the book advised you to do it on a Friday afternoon before going home. That made sense. All your work-related projects and tasks were there. It was also a nice way to finish the week.  So, if you do have to use your company’s software, take a step back and review what tools you have. Apply the Apollo 13 mindset. For most people that would be a Microsoft Outlook account that gives you email and a calendar. You will also likely have access to OneNote for note-taking—which is one of the best note-taking apps out there today anyway, and Outlook Mail is excellent—even on a Mac now.  Think about it. Many salespeople are given a company car that enables them to visit clients and prospective clients. Most company car drivers do not have much choice about which car they can have. It’s usually a medium-range Ford, Hyundai or Toyota. I’m pretty sure if we could choose any company car we’d all be choosing Porsches, Range Rovers or Bentleys. That’s not the way the world works… Sadly. The same goes for the tools our companies use. IT would be a nightmare for companies if every employee used different tools to get their work done. We saw this being played out a year ago when there were concerns about the security of Zoom. In the end, IT departments standardised which video conferencing tools employees were allowed to use. Some went with Zoom after they beefed up their security. Others went with Microsoft Teams.  So, if we can’t change the tools we have to use at work, what can we do to mitigate this? The first thing I would do is to find out all the various inboxes I have where work is coming in. There will be your email inbox, possibly your Slack or Microsoft Teams inbox, plus maybe a SaleForce inbox. Knowing where your work is coming from is the number one priority.  Next, create a start of day checklist that includes checking all these inboxes and task lists for new work coming in. Then copy and paste your tasks for the day into one list. Now that might be a third party task manager if you are allowed to do that, or just a simple list in your company approved notes app. This list will form part of your daily task list. All you need is a simple list of tasks you need to complete that day.  Another thing worth investigating is whether you can subscribe to your work calendar. I don’t usually advise people to put their personal events on their work calendar—who knows who has access to that. But you may find it is possible to subscribe to your work calendar and have that coming into your preferred calendar of choice be that a Google or Apple calendar.  In my experience, having two different calendar apps causes conflicts with your time. You will likely double book yourself one day. If you can’t subscribe to your work calendar, then try it the other way round and subscribe to your personal calendar—just make sure nobody else can see it.  The reality is there are no magic bullets that will miraculously allow your work and personal systems to converge. When you find yourself in a situation where your company essentially locks down their information, the only way you will find a solution is within your work permitted tools.  Should you run two systems? Well, it’s not impossible but it’s not ideal either. But maybe that is the only solution you have. However, no matter how security sensitive your company is, they are not going to stop you from writing down things like “call Charles Grey about the proposal” or “work on Project X presentation” into a third party application. No nefarious corporate spy is likely to figure out what those simple tasks mean. You can use your phone to collect these tasks into your preferred app. But that said, the simplest way to manage this is to just use the company-approved apps. You may not likely them, but if they show you a list of tasks you need to complete each day and you have a notes app where you can keep your notes and project support materials for your projects then you have a system. Maybe a system not using your preferred tools, but at least you have a system.  SO, the best advice I can give you if you are in a situation where your company is running multiple tools is to not fight your IT department. By all means, reach out to them to see if you can use your own apps, but you get a firm no, then look at what is available and set up your system within those tools.  Make it a routine start of day task to collect all your work tasks from the various inputs your company has into one consolidated list and work from that list each day.  One final tip I may suggest that has worked for some people in the past is to use a task manager that will email you a list of your tasks each morning. Todoist does this, for example, and you can set it so it emails you at 5 am in the morning. Then when you get to work, all you need do is print off that list, and use it as not only your task list for the day but also as a collection system. You can write down new tasks onto that paper and when you get home at the end of the enter the new tasks and check off the tasks you did. You can do that as part of your daily planning session.  I hope that has answered your question, Stian and Steve, Thank you for the question.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Learn about how a Type 2 Diabetes diagnosis changed the guest's life and helped him become more organized and productive. Discover the importance of planning in the food service industry and how being organized improves productivity. Explore the significance of communication, support, and empowerment in work environments. Recognize the early symptoms of Type 2 Diabetes and the importance of prioritizing self-care. Reflect on the wake-up call of experiencing health problems for the first time. Emphasize the importance of good health for a fulfilling retirement and the need for individuals to make appropriate plans.

This week, how do you turn a list of over 200 tasks into a manageable list of daily actionable tasks.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Bundle 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 Script Episode 173 Hello and welcome to episode 173 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. For those of you familiar with Getting Things Done, you will have come across the term “mind sweep”. A mind sweep is where you sit down with an empty piece of paper or blank screen and just empty your head of everything that’s on your mind. These could be things you need to do, ideas or pretty much anything on your mind. You get everything out of your head and into an external source.  Once you have done that you then go through your list and decide what the ‘next action’ for each item is  Done correctly, this list could soon build up in one very large list with hundreds of tasks and ideas on it. The great thing about a mind sweep is when finished you feel a huge sense of mental relief. Your brain is no longer trying to hold on to things and you realise that many of the things you were afraid of are not really that difficult to resolve. However, one problem many people find is once you have this long list, how do you turn them into actionable tasks that you can complete and that’s what I will be looking into this week. Now, before we get to the question, for those of you interested in my online courses, I have recently updated my Productivity Bundle. This bundle now includes Your Digital Life 3.0, The Time Sector System and Productivity Mastermind courses. This bundle gives you access to five courses because Your Digital Life includes my Email Mastery and Ultimate Goal Planning courses for free.  The bundle is priced at $175.00 which saves you over $100 if you were to buy all five courses separately.  So if you are ready to get yourself organised, build a system that works for you so you can live a more balanced life without having to worry about work and anything else you may be missing, then this bundle of courses will set you on your way.  Okay, 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 Bret. Bret asks: Hi Carl, I have a long list of tasks from various mind-sweeps that I am having difficulty managing. How best can I structure this list so that (a) I don't miss scheduling anything important for the next 1-5 days and (b) I don't have to look through a list of 300 plus items every couple of days when making my most important tasks list? Hi Bret, thank you for your question.  Firstly, it’s great that you have done a mind sweep, these are great ways to get everything on your mind off your mind. Doing a mind sweep does help to free up some cognitive space so you can relax and be more creative.  That said, mind sweeps can also create their own problems. Done correctly, a mind sweep will produce a lot of tasks and you need somewhere to put these tasks. Most people tend to put these into their task manager’s inbox and then process them through their various projects or time sectors. The problem here is that this over inflates your task manager developing overwhelm and a lot of redundant tasks that very quickly disappear into your system never to be seen again or pop up again six months later and you cannot remember why you ever put them into your system in the first place.  The first thing we need to recognise is we cannot do everything all at once. There’s a limited number of hours we have each day and each week. Whatever we put on our master task list needs time allocating to it. You will also find that mind sweeps produce a lot of ‘would like to do one-day’ tasks that really should not be in your task manager.  Would like to do one day tasks should go into your notes app on a note called “would like to do one day” or if you are following GTD, a “someday / maybe” list. You really do not want these low priority tasks on your task manager.  One of the ways to keep a task manager relevant and effective is to keep it clean and tight. By that I mean you only have clearly defined tasks in there that you know must be done at some point. You do not want your ‘would like to do if the circumstances are right’ tasks in there because these are not clearly defined. “Would like to do someday” is not a clear definition. I would like to see the films North by North West and Goldfinger in a cinema on a big screen one day, but how and when I have no idea so these are not clearly defined. Instead, they would be better put on a bucket or wish list.  Another type of task you want to be careful of is the “clean out the garage” type task. This type of task is deceptive because on the surface “clean out the garage” sounds defined. You have a garage, there’s a lot of stuff in there that needs cleaning up or throwing out and you want to do it.  The trouble with this type of task is not the what, but the when and how. If your garage needs cleaning out it likely means you have a lot of stuff that a few garbage sacks will not do. You probably need to hire a skip or truck to take what you throw away to the tip. It’s also unlikely to be a task that will take you a few hours. You likely have to dedicate a few days to do it and when that happens there are always other tasks that will become more ‘urgent’ on the day you decide to start doing it.  With this type of task, unless you are ready to set a date for doing it, you are best keeping it well away from your task manager until you are ready to make that decision.  How many times I’ve seen “clean out the garage” on someone’s list and discover that task has been on a list for over a year is incredible. Seriously, keep it off your task list until you are willing to block out two to three days on your calendar for completing this task.  So how do you make sure those important tasks get on to your task list?  This is why doing a weekly planning session is crucial if you want to be on top of your life. The weekly planning session is about making a decision about what is important enough to get onto your list of tasks for the week. And I really do mean that. The question to ask is: What is important enough to get onto my list for the week?  Your time is valuable—very valuable and you want to be selective about what gets on your task list. Throwing random unimportant tasks onto your task list for the week is not a good strategy. You start with your most important tasks for the week. These are the foundation for your week. I like to call these my objectives for the week. Once these are on if I feel there is space for some less important tasks I will put the next level tasks on my list. By their very nature, less important tasks are not urgent, they are those nice to be able to do tasks, so it’s not the end of the world if you cannot get to them.  Once you have your objectives on your list for the week, you no longer need to be going back to a huge list of tasks. You’ve already made the decision on what is important this week and that’s where you need to be focused.  You see the problem you will have if you keep going back into a master task list every few days is you will lose focus on what’s important that week. That list will become a distraction and you will be tempted to keep adding to your tasks for the week. Remember, if you have done a weekly planning session you have already decided what’s important for the week. You don’t want to be allowing yourself to be distracted by more tasks. You can review your master list in your next weekly planning session and decide then what you want to work on next.  Remember, no week will be static. Once the week gets underway you will be collecting more tasks some of which will be urgent and need attention now. So while you may feel there is room for more tasks, the reality is there won’t be. The less is more principle applies when you do your weekly planning session. The less you put on your task list for the week the more you will get out of the week. You will be more focused on what you have decided to do for the week and you will have the time to do your tasks to the best of your abilities.  It also means you will be less stressed and overwhelmed because you will know that what you have on your list is important, and doable. And that makes your list more meaningful and inspiring.  I can’t stress enough how important it is to be doing a weekly planning session every week. It’s very hard to predict what you will be doing much further out than a week. Meetings you will have in ten days time are likely not have been scheduled yet. You could get a mind-numbing toothache and need to visit the dentist, or a project on track today could turn south in six days time.  Your weekly planning session is where you can review your mind sweep list select important tasks to add to your task list for the week and then only focus on those tasks over the next seven days. You will get a lot more done that way and you will stay much more focused.  I hope that has helped, Bret. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you want answering, all you need do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer your question.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.  

Podcast 172 This week, I have a question about creating balance in your life, something I have been writing quite a lot about this week.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The 2021 Task Management & Time blocking Summit 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   Script Episode 172 Hello and welcome to episode 172 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 what do we mean when we talk about a balanced life? I think this will mean something different to all of us. For me, it’s having sufficient time to do my work, spend quality time with my wife and have time for exercise and working on myself. For others, it might be being able to hang out with friends, coach the local rugby team or playing the piano. A balanced life is all about having the time to do what you want to do each day, week and month.  Now, before we get to the question, I would like to let you all know about the 2021 Task Management and Time Blocking Summit. It’s a free summit with some amazing speakers all about…well, time management and time blocking.  The event takes place from Thursday 4th March and runs through to Saturday 6th.  It’s a FREE event and all you need do is register. I’ve put the registration details in the show notes. There’s a lot you can learn here and well worth joining. Oh, and I have a session on managing your to-do list.  Okay, 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 Stuart. Stuart asks, Hi Carl, I have been using a To-do list for years, but what I noticed is most of my tasks each day seem to be all about work. I rarely have time for doing any personal tasks so I don’t put them on my list anymore. It makes me feel that my life is just work and more work. Is there a way to balance out a to-do list?  Hi Stuart. Thank you for your question.  I think this problem has come about because most books and articles about time management and productivity frequently have a business and work slant. And, let’s be honest here, work does form a large part of our lives between a certain age. It’s difficult to avoid it.  There are few people left who have what used to be called a private or independent income. And we need to earn an income to be able to put food on our tables, be able to enjoy going out and meeting friends and travelling.  However, life should never be all about your work. There does need to be some balance. But, how do you find balance if your work is taking up all your daylight hours and your thoughts when you finally get home? Well, the first thing is to stop allowing your to-do list to control your day. A to-do list is just a list of things you want to or need to do. It should never be used to determine how you spend the day.  The tool you need to bring balance to your life is your calendar. Your calendar will never lie to you because we only get 24 hours a day and that’s it. Whatever is on our to-do list is irrelevant if you don’t have time to do it. You cannot magically make more time.  The other thing about your calendar is it will show you where you are spending most of your time. Sure, Monday to Friday will be dominated by your work. Most of us are contracted to work a certain number of hours each week. The average being 40. That could change in the near future with the shift away from working in an office and working more from home, but right now that’s the standard.  But it is only 40 hours. There are 168 hours in a week, so those 40 hours is 24% of your week. What are you doing with the other 76%? That’s 128 hours you get for things other than work.  I know, we have to sleep and eat, but it still leaves us quite a lot of time. What are you doing with that time? That’s where you want to be starting. With that question.  This is why your calendar will help you. You will see all that blank space on your calendar once your work is in.  So, what would you like to do in that free time? For me, I want an hour a day for exercise. So I block that off on my calendar. I also like thirty minutes for reading. Although I don’t put reading time on my calendar, I just go to bed around thirty minutes early so I can read before going to sleep.  I also like an hour in the morning for writing my journal and doing my morning routines. So, between 7 and 8 AM I have a time block on my calendar for morning routines.  You don’t need to make big changes to begin feeling more balanced. Making time for yourself each day for important things like exercise, journaling and meditation can do wonders for your mental wellbeing.  I also make it a point to have lunch with my wife every day and recently we’ve added a family walk with our beloved dog every morning.  But if you add up all the time I have for my non-work activities, it’s about three to four hours a day and those three to four hours take care of so many important areas of life—my mental and physical health and my family relationships.  So in any given day, I work for around ten hours and I spend three to four hours on my personal activities. So, let’s say 14 hours a day. Now I don’t need ten hours for sleeping and eating. I like six hours of sleep, so what do I do with the remaining four hours? I don’t know. They just disappear.  If you do your own analysis, you will like to find you have more time than you think. What you will notice is you will have some lost time each day. The question is what are you doing with that time each day? Most people will tag on an extra hour or two of work, or slump down on the sofa mindlessly watching TV, or the scourge of modern society, doom scrolling through news and social media. We don’t schedule this time, it just gets lost and it can be hard to figure out what we did.  Now, you don’t have to do anything with this time. If you are happy letting it go, and you feel your life is pretty balanced, then let it go.  But, and I suspect you fall into this category, Stuart, if we are feeling our life is made up only of work and not much else we need to reclaim this lost time for the things we want to do. That’s why your calendar will help you. Start by scheduling the things you want to do. Work takes care of itself. It’s fixed. Monday to Friday 9 till 5—or whatever your working hours are—so the areas you want to be scheduling are the times in between.  Start with your morning routine. Even if you don’t have a morning routine right now, make sure you wake up at least an hour before you need to do anything. This hour is important because this hour is for you. Nobody else. This is for you to do whatever you want. You could use it for exercise, for reading the news, meditating, learning something, writing a journal. This is your time and you must protect it.  I have a rule. If I have to start my day at a given time I will wake up precisely one hour before. I often have coaching calls at 7 AM, so I wake up at 6 AM on the days I have calls at 7 AM, even though this is an hour before I usually wake up. A few weeks ago I did a training session for a company at 4:30 AM my time. I woke up at 3:30 AM so I still had my hour of “me time” before I started the day.  Being able to start your day your way sets you up for a great day and you will feel a lot happier about your day. Think back to the last time you overslept and had to rush to get out of bed. How did you feel all day? Rushed, yes? It’s not a good way to start the day feeling rushed you will always feel behind and trying to catch up. Now, look at your evening time. What do you generally do? Are you exhausted? Do you just slump in front of your TV? Or, do you spend your time replying to emails and other work-related communications? Whenever you do this, you are exercising a choice. Nobody’s forcing you to respond to your work emails late at night or to slump in front of the TV.  Whatever you want to accomplish and do after work is a good time to do it.  A lot of our problems with time comes about because of habits we have developed over a number of years. It gets to a point where we do not think about it. We just do it. Slumping in front of the TV, mindlessly scrolling through our phone while watching TV with our partner, staying in bed until the very last minute because we think the extra twenty minutes of sleep will make us feel less tired in the day.  As these are habits developed we can change them. We can wake up an hour before we need to leave the house or start work. We can pull out the exercise bike and do twenty minutes of cycling before we sit down to dinner and we can read a book for thirty minutes after dinner. We can make different choices and develop different habits at any time. We just have to choose.  So, don’t focus on your to-do list Stuart. Use your calendar to build some balance into your life. Use your to-do list to tell you what needs doing—task wise, but for the activities you do, use your calendar.  Let me give you an example. I find people who have “exercise” on their to-do list often ignore it. If they move “exercise” to their calendar they are more likely to do it. Why? Because when it’s on your calendar you lose the excuse you don’t have time. You do have time, it’s right there in front of your eyes.  Finally, you need to adopt a rule: What goes on your calendar gets done. Your to-do list is negotiable. Your calendar is not. If it’s on your calendar you do it.  Of course, you can reschedule things if you have to. Let’s say a meeting overruns so you find you have to push back a few other events on your calendar. That’s okay. Sometimes that’s going to happen. But for the most part, once something is on your calendar for the day, it gets done.  I hope that has helped a little, Stuart. Thank you for your question. It just remains for me now t wish you all a very very productive week.   

On the podcast this week I answer a question about to-do lists and why they don’t always work.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   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   Script Episode 171 Hello and welcome to episode 171 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. You would think that the simple act of writing down everything you have to do onto a coherent list would be simple and easy to do. It makes sense, get everything out of your head and onto a piece of paper or into a digital task list so you don’t forget what needs doing.  Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that. Problems start because of the kind of things we put on our todo lists and the kind of things we omit from the list. We then end up focusing all our time and attention on the wrong things leaving the more important things left off and neglected.  This week, it’s all about making sure you have the right things on your list every day. Don’t forget, if you do have a question you would like answering on this podcast, all you have to do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer the question for you. Okay, 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 Jen. Jen asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been making to-do lists for years but have never felt they help. When the list gets too long I just ignore it because it is so overwhelming, and when I do use the list all I end up doing is doing more work. It leaves me with no time to rest or relax or do anything else but work. Is there a correct way to write a to-do list that I am missing?  Hi Jen, thank you for your question. You are right is asking this question Jen, because there is a misconception about to-do lists that many people have and that is if you write everything down that needs doing you are help-way to becoming organised. You are not.  You see, when we think of to-do lists, most people think they are the realm of your work only and any personal tasks are just an afterthought. So you will often find twenty or thirty tasks are all related to your work—write this report, prepare that presentation or call this client—and then two or three tasks related to your home life—do laundry, clean up the living room or take the trash out tonight.  Now it may well be true these tasks need doing, but they are superficial. None of these improve your life in anyway. They don’t improve you as a person, they don’t move your goals and aspirations forward and while you might get credit for doing a good presentation, that’s all you get—credit. You rarely learn anything that improves your life.  I’ve had an interest in reading and learning about successful people since I was around eleven years old. I’ve been fascinated by what makes one person massively successful and another a failure. I don’t mean that in a judgmental way, I mean that in the way a highly talented, initially successful person, loses it all and never comes back. I can spend hours reading articles and books and watching documentaries about people.  The thing about highly accomplished people is they don’t use to-do lists. Well, not in the way most people use them. And this is the same for seemingly very productive people too. They just don’t use a to-do list in the same way most people do.  So what is this secret? Well it starts with knowing what is important to you. You see, if you want to become more accomplished in the things that you want to be more accomplished, then the majority of what goes on your to-do list must be the things that will move you forward on those things.  If these are not on your to-do list you will never accomplish them. Period. Sure, you will accomplish getting your laundry done and your living room cleaned up and if that is your life’s goal then well done, you’ve found the secret to creating a meaningful to-do list.  But let’s be honest here, I’m sure getting your laundry done and your living room cleaned is not your life’s mission.  So what is it you want to accomplish? That’s not an easy question to answer because there is so much choice in the world today.  If we go back two-hundred years when most of us lived an agrarian life, there was always a purpose. Prepare the land for the seed, sow the seed, tend to the crops during the summer and harvest in the autumn. The goal was to maximise the yield of our crops. If we didn’t there would not be enough food for our family to eat during the winter months. Our life’s purpose was to ensure there was enough food for our families.  We did not waste time repairing walls, painting our house or other cosmetic tasks in the spring, summer or autumn—if these things needed doing we did them in the winter months. During the growing and harvesting seasons, our focus was on making sure we maximised the yield of our crops. It was a life or death decision.  Today, when you look at most people’s to-do list, very few of those tasks involve maximising the yield of anything. Most tasks are cosmetic and move very little forward.  This problem is because with so much choice about what we can do, we end up dabbling at many things and mastering nothing, but if you want to be accomplished, if you want success at anything you have to stop dabbling and start focusing on mastering.  And what does that mean?  Well, you need to know exactly what it is you want to accomplish. If you don’t know what you want, how will you ever know you are on the right path towards achieving it.  How many of you are mothers and fathers? I am sure you want to be a great parent—being a parent is certainly not something you want to be dabbling at. But let me ask you this: how many of you have tasks related to being a great parent on your to-do list?  Surely, if being a great parent is important, you want to be spending time each day on nurturing that, not panicking about whether you completed last month’s sales figures for your boss. If you are panicking about these types of tasks, then your to-do list is not working for you. It’s working for your boss (or company)  So what can you do to make your to-do list more effective and more in tune with your needs and not the needs of others?  Well, start with that question: What do you want? Now there are eight basic areas in everyones’s life that needs attention. These are:  Family and relationships Personal finances Career and business Health and fitness Personal development Life experiences and lifestyle Spirituality Life’s purpose  Almost everything you want out of life will come from these eight areas. We all want great relationships with our family and friends, we want a successful career or business. We want to be fit and healthy, have continuous personal development, a solid financial base, enjoy life and live in the moment and not the past. When you have these in balance you will feel happier, more fulfilled and relaxed about your life.  If you put all your time and effort into your work, you will feel the imbalance and it will be like you are just a cog a the wheel. You won’t feel happy, fulfilled or even enjoy life.  And that is why most to-do lists do not work. They are too focused on your work and not on your life. You need to switch it round. Your to-do list needs to be focused on your life, not just your work.  How do you do that? Let say you want to become an author. It’s been a dream of yours since you were in middle school but you have never done anything about it. Where do you start?  You start by writing a book. That’s the only way you will become an author. What do you need to do to write a book. You need to write. So, you need to make sure you have a task on your to-do list called “write book” or “continue writing book” and that task needs to come up on your to-do list three to four times a week. You also need to find time for writing on your calendar each week. Set aside a block of time however frequently you want it to be and make sure that is what you do at the appointed hour.  Or it could be you want a great family relationship, then you need to make sure you have tasks on your to-do list that support that endeavour. Tasks like “arrange date night with my partner”, “decide where to take the kids this weekend”. The tasks won’t happen by themselves. You need to initiate them and they need to be priorities. The next thing you need to do is to understand the concept of “when at work do your work. When at play do your play and never mix the two”. What this means is you have time each week for when you are at work. Traditionally this would be Monday to Friday 9 til’ 5. So between these hours, that is exactly what you do. You do your work. You don’t socialise, do online shopping or doom scroll through your news or social media feeds. You do your work.  Then you have ‘play time’ or time when you are not working. During these periods you work on your other tasks—developing your relationships, working on your health and fitness and hobbies. You work on the things that are important to you.  Now most modern digital to-do lists will allow you to tag or flag your tasks. So all you need do is flag or tag tasks related to your work and when at work those are the only tasks you see. You work on these. When you finish work, you close your work tasks and you pull up the list of non-work tasks and you work on those.  When you build this balance into your to-do list, you know you are working on your life and not just your work. Work is just one part of a life. It’s important, but it is not all important to the exclusion of living your life. You life needs to be nourished, developed and lived Most people feel unfulfilled, stressed out and overwhelmed because their to-do list promotes this imbalance. It might help your work, but it destroys your life and no work is that important.  It also goes to heart of why your to-do lists don’t feel like they are working Jen, they don’t work because they are imbalanced and no motivating you.  The only way to change that is to understand that work is just one part of your life. You need to bring in all parts of your life and make sure you are working on these consistently.  Finally, back to something I eluded to earlier. Mastery. To become a master at anything means you work on developing your skills consistently. Let’s take the example of becoming an author. The only way you will master writing is to write. Make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and write some more. You need to be doing this consistently. I mentioned Ian Fleming before—Ian Fleming created James Bond and he had a process for writing his books.  Between March and December he would research and practice writing—he would collect product names, research them, write about them in a little notebook, experimenting with different prose styles and word combinations. Then between January and March each year he would go to his bungalow in Jamaica, and each morning write between 9 AM and 12.  This consistency produced a book a year for twelve years between 1952 and 1964, when he passed away. None of these books wrote themselves. Ian Fleming had to have the tasks—continue researching book and continue writing book on his task list.  What was the driving force behind this activity? Ian Fleming knew what he wanted. His goal was simply to write "the spy story to end all spy stories" and that is what he did every year for twelve years. He executed on his goal and the tasks related to that goal were on his task list.  There you go, Jen. Hopefully that has helped. Don’t use your to-do list for your work tasks exclusively. That will only create an imbalance in your life and leave you feeling stressed out and unhappy. Instead make sure the things you want do and accomplish are prioritised on your list every day.  Thank you for the question and thank you, again to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, the question is all about how to achieve your goals when you have failed miserably before.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Bundle (Lunar New Year Offer) Todoist Office Hours Goal Planning and Tracking Episode 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   Script Episode 170 Hello and welcome to episode 170 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 have reached that time of year where over 80% of the goals set on January 1st have been dropped. Where resolutions, goals and new good habits are just a distant idea and where old habits and practices have returned.  That’s a terrible statistic—80% of all new year goals and resolutions fail by the first week of February. Yet it really does not have to be that way. Achieving a goal is possible for everyone if it is approached in the right way. And how to do that is what I will be answering this week. Now before we get to the question and answer, I would just like to let you know that we have been celebrating the Lunar New Year here in Korea over the weekend and to celebrate the new year, I have put together a bundle of my finest courses to help you go from where you are today to where you want to be in the future.  This bundle includes the Time Sector System, my Productivity Masterclass AND Your Digital Life 3.0. With these three courses, you will have everything you need to create your own time management and productivity system, you will learn the skills to develop an organisation system that makes finding your files and notes quick and easy and you will learn a way of managing your email that takes the stress and overwhelm out of dealing with a massive amount of email.  Plus, as part of Your Digital Life 3.0, you also get free access to my Ultimate Goal Planning course—so a course relevant to today’s question.  Normally, if you buy all three of these courses it would cost you over $180, but for the Lunar New Year, you can pick up this bundle for just $99.00.  You will have to hurry, as this bundle will be ending on Wednesday 17th Feb. Full details on how to pick up this bundle can be found in the show notes. Okay, 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 Ashley. Ashley asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you speak about goals and goals planning before and wondered if you have any tips for someone who fails every time they set a goal. I’ve failed so many times now I just laugh at myself every time I think about setting a goal. Is there anything I can do that would help me to set and achieve goals?  Hi Ashley, thank you for your question.  Now, this is a timely question because last week I did a talk for Todoist’s Office Hours series where we talked about goal setting and tracking using Todoist and as I was preparing for that talk, I went through the three main components and tried to think of better ways to explain why each part is important.  So, let’s start there. There are three parts to achieving a goal: What, why and how.  This translates to what do you want, why do you want it and how will you do it.  Now you need to be very clear about what it is you want. It’s no good saying “I want to lose weight” or “I want to earn more money” while you might think these are clear they do not specify exactly what you want. How much weight do you want to lose and by when? How much more money do you want to earn and by when? Unless you know this, then if you skip dinner tonight and weigh yourself tomorrow you will likely to have achieved your goal. Or your boss could say, okay I’ll give you an extra $5.00 per month—probably not what you had in mind.  So get very specific about what it is you want: I want to lose ten pounds by the end of March. I want to earn an extra $1,000 per month by July.   What do you want and by when do you want to have achieved it? That’s fairly straight forward.  Now the mistake most people make is they decide what they want then move straight to how they are going to do it.  Now, let’s look at why this is a problem. Everyone knows how to lose weight. It’s a very simple formula: eat less, move more. Now we could argue about the semantics and talk about the types of foods you should be eating, but even if you are eating the healthiest foods, if the calories going in are higher than the calories coming out, you will still gain weight.  No matter what goal you want to achieve, all you need do is spend a little time on Google and you will find all you need to know about how to achieve it. If you want to become an astronaut and spend some time on the International Space Station and do a spacewalk, Google it and you will find a road map explaining everything you need to know and do to become an astronaut. The difficulty in achieving your goals is never about the how. How to do it will be well documented. How to save money, how to earn more money, how to get your dream job, how to become a doctor. Whatever your goal is the how to do it, will never be a problem. So, if you know what you want and you know—or can at least find out—how to do it, then why do so many people fail at achieving their goals?  It’s because their reasons for achieving those goals are not powerful enough.  The key part to achieving your goals, Ashley, is in your reasons for wanting to achieve your goals.  How to lose weight is easy. If you eat less and move more you will lose weight. However, there is one factor that will always get in the way. Hunger. When you reduce your calories sufficiently to lose weight your body will tell you it does not like eating less food and so will produce a chemical response in your brain to tell you you are hungry and you must eat something right now.  However, it is unlikely you will feel hungry first thing in the morning when your willpower it at it’s highest, you are more likely to feel hungry later in the day when your willpower is at it’s lowest.  This means your reasons for wanting to lose weight need to be stronger than your body’s reason for not wanting to feel hungry.  So, if you have decided you want to lose weight, then why? Why do you want to lose weight? It is for cosmetic reasons—you want to look good? Is it for health reasons—you don’t want to develop diabetes? Why do you want to lose weight?  Likewise with earning more money, or complete a masters’ degree or getting a promotion at work. Why do you want to do these things?  When your reasons for wanting something are strong enough, your motivation for sticking to your plan—the how—will be stronger than the forces pulling on you to stop making these changes.  You see our minds and bodies do not like change. We love habits. We love routines. It’s why we feel tired around the same time each day and why, if you allowed it, we would wake up quite naturally without an alarm clock. It’s why, weirdly, the amount of money we earn is usually roughly the same as the amount of money our friends earn. We love stasis. We hate change.  But, if you really want to achieve your goals you will have to change. You will have to go through a period of discomfort where your mind and body is fighting you to get back to it’s comfort zone.  You know the most dangerous place anyone can be is when they are earning enough money to feel comfortable. To be able to drive a reasonably nice car, to live in a nice house in a nice neighbourhood. To have a comfortable job with a stable company. That is a very dangerous place to be because the fear of losing any of that will always be stronger than the desire to improve and change. So changing anything will scare you. The problem is change is inevitable.  There will come a time when your company wants to make changes, you may perhaps reach an age where you will not be able to progress further in your company and younger colleagues begin to pass you on the promotion chain and your worst fears will become a reality and begin to live a life of fear, dread and anxiety.  So, for you to begin achieving your goals you need to reset your comfort zone. You need to become uncomfortable being where you are today. You need to be uncomfortable weighing what you weight today. You need to be uncomfortable earning what you are earning today and you need to be uncomfortable not knowing what you need to know to perform at your best.  So how do you find strong reasons for wanting a goal? Well, in my experience, the stronger the emotional attachment to your reason the more likely you will succeed. I’m reminded of the story of a successful businessman who had everything he wanted. A great job, a wonderful family, a nice car and house etc.  He was also a very heavy smoker. Smoking was his pleasure. He would sit down in his favourite armchair and smoke every evening. His doctor, his wife and friends all urged him to stop smoking but he refused, telling them smoking was his one pleasure in life.  Then one day his five-year-old daughter came into his room crying. She was saying “Daddy, I don’t want you to die” He calmly said, “I’m not going to die honey”.  “No Daddy, you are going to die” she replied pointing to his cigarette.  At that moment, he stopped. He realised he wanted to be there to walk his daughter down the aisle on her wedding day and to play with his future grandchildren. At that moment, he got a very powerful reason for quitting smoking. From the very next day, this guy never smoked a cigarette again. And, yes he did walk his daughter down the aisle and got to play with his grandchildren.  You see, when you make you reasons for wanting to achieve your goal incredibly powerful by making them emotional, you will succeed no matter how hard it is because you will have a reservoir of motivation for those days when things are very tough.  So, make what you want clear. Be very specific about what it is you want. Make your why a powerful, emotional reason for wanting to achieve this goal and change your habits and behaviours so they fall in line with your desired outcome.  However, there is another level to consistently achieving your goals. That level is who do you want to become? How do you want to live your life? What do you want to be doing in ten or twenty years time? What kind of lifestyle do you want to live? What do you want for your family and friends?  This is what I call your North Star. Your North Star is your journey. It takes you in the direction you want to live your life. If you have a, as Tony Robbins calls it: “A compelling vision of how you want to live your life” then your goals, your habits and your daily activities will follow suit.  When your goals align with your long-term vision of the life you want to lead, you will find achieving your goals becomes easy because as you journey towards building the life you want, all you will be doing is making tiny adjustments to the way you live your life today. It’s why you will often hear: “most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade”  When you are working towards a longer-term vision the changes you need to make are much more manageable. I’m sure many of you have heard of the book called “The Secret”. The book’s premise is that if you want it, if you desire it and if you can imagine having it, then you can have it. It’s as the Bible says “ask and you will receive”. Well, it turns out there is some truth to this.  If we ask questions like “why can’t I lose weight?” Your brain will answer that question. It will give you all the reasons why you cannot lose weight. Same for “why do I never get promoted?” And “Why can’t I find the love of my life?” That’s exactly what you will get—reasons why you cannot do something. Change the question and you will get different answers. Instead of asking why you cannot lose weight, ask “what do I have to do to lose ten pounds?” “What skills do I need to learn to get promoted?” “Who do I need to talk to to find the love of my life?”  These questions will give you a list of all the things you can do to achieve your desired outcome.  So there you go, Ashley. It’s not that you cannot achieve your goals, you can achieve your goals, but you need to begin focusing on your why. Why do you want to achieve these goals? How will being successful with your goals align with your future vision? Get this part of the equation right and you will no longer have any difficulties achieving your goals.  Thank you for your question, Ashley, and thank you to you for listening. Don’t forget to check out my Lunar New Year bundle. There is something in there for everyone.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.