A common question this podcast receives is about how to manage the different types of work that come at you every day. So. That’s what we’re going to address today.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 168 Hello and welcome to episode 168 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 all have different tasks, events and ideas coming at us every day and they come from many different places. They come from our customers and clients and because of the way we are conditioned to communicate with our customers and clients, we drop everything the moment an email comes in from them. You might have an over-enthusiastic boss who likes to micro-manage you and never leaves you alone to get on with your work and of course you might work on projects with overwhelming numbers of tasks.  Whatever kind of work you do, there is always a way to manage the workload and to still have a private life where you can indulge in your favourite pastimes.  Now, before we get to the question, if you are struggling to pull together a way of managing your time and feel you have tried everything, then I can help you. I have a coaching programme where we work together to create a consistent way of managing your time so you have time to do your work—whatever work that is—and leave yourself time for the things you love doing.  I’ve worked with lawyers, doctors, executives, real estate agents and salespeople to bring calm and focus to their lives and I can do the same for you.  No matter what you do and what you want time for, I can help you. All you need do is visit my coaching programme page, complete the questionnaire, choose your programme, schedule your call and you’re in.  Places are limited—I only have so many hours in the day, like you, but there are a few places left. If you want in, make sure you schedule your call very soon.  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 Mohammad. Mohammad asks: Hi Carl, I’m struggling to get all my work done. My boss is always calling me asking me what I am doing and my customers use email for everything and expect me to reply immediately. It just leaves me so exhausted. I’ve tried everything but nothing works. What would you advise anyone who just has no time at all to do their work? Hi Mohammad, thank you for your question.  Firstly, don’t worry, you are not alone, there are many people around the world who share your frustration and there are a few things you can do that will bring some calm to your hectic days. First up you are going to have to manage expectations. Most of the problems you are experiencing with your customers are down to their expectations of you and possibly the company you work for.  This usually manifests itself when we are in the initial sales process. In our urgency to get the sale we make promises we will find difficult to keep later. One of the most common ones is to tell a customer that you will always be on hand to answer their questions. And once those promises have left your lips, you’ve just set yourself up for a torrid time.  Now you may not be part of the sales process, but your initial contact with the customer is your only real chance to undo the danger. This is your chance to set out your contact policy. I know that sounds formal, but really that’s what it is. You need to establish a policy for how and when you will be available.  Let me give you a few examples of what you could say.  First up, Tell your customers the best time to contact you. For example, you could say, “it might difficult to contact me between 9 and 11 in the morning as I usually have meetings at that time, but if you leave a message or email me I will get back to you”  Now, don’t say when you will get back to them, doing so only sets you up again for a difficult time.  Now when you tell your customers this upfront, they are not going to argue with you, they will accept it. Your problems will start if you answer emails and messages the moment they come in. What customers want is consistency, not necessarily speed. So you are only asking for trouble if you reply within minutes one day and don’t get back to them for two days on another. And let’s be honest here, nobody expects replies to emails within minutes unless you always reply within minutes. You need to manage your email response times.  You can apply the same rules to phone calls, but obviously, with phone calls, you need to be faster. However, you do still have a little room for manoeuvre. Generally speaking, a phone call should be responded to within an hour or two. Once again, though, be careful here. If you do miss a call because you are talking to another customer or are in a meeting, the best strategy is to call back as soon as you can. Now you need to treat calls a little differently. Let’s imagine you have been in a meeting and when the meeting finishes you have five missed calls. Start with the oldest one first, and once the call is over before you make the next call, put any action steps you promised into your task manager or a piece of paper. This only takes around thirty seconds, don’t make the mistake of panicking and replying to all your calls without taking a minute or two between calls to get down your commitments.  No matter how crazy things get you do need to be following COD (Collect, Organise and Do). When you find yourself in a busy situation you still need to be collecting your tasks, commitments and appointments into your system.  A lot of managing your work is about following a process and having a few rules of engagement.  I remember when I was a competitive middle-distance runner. My favourite distance was 1,500 metres. Now with this distance, you need to be strategic. You will never win the race if you charge off a full speed from the gun. You’ll soon tire out and the other runners will pass you. Likewise, if you are not particularly fast at the end of the race, you would be unwise to risk a sprint finish with the other runners.  To be a good middle-distance runner you always trained and raced to your strengths. There were the basics—speed endurance—which you practised for in the early spring, there were overall endurance and strength which you practised and developed in the winter and in the summer months, when you raced, you focused on your speed.  In races, you always had a strategy based on your strengths. If you pushed yourself too fast too soon you would lose your rhythm and would be passed. No matter how tempting it was to go flat out, you waited and waited until it was the right time—for me, it was around the 300 metres to go mark—and then you focused on your sprint. Keeping your head and shoulders relaxed and use your arms for speed and never pushing so hard because that would tighten up your shoulders and you would slow down. It was all about staying relaxed in the shoulders and head. We trained for hours for that so it was automatic in the race. Whatever the pressure, you had practised your ending so many times you knew when going and you knew what to focus on.  You need to apply the same strategy to your work. The moment you panic and start rushing into your calls and replies to emails you will tighten up and you will slow down. Focus on your rhythm. Do one thing, do it well and then move on to the next thing. That way you shift the emphasis from the speed of reply to quality of your response.  What you need is time in the day to do your work. This is where you need to block time out. Of course, this depends on your role. If you are customer-service, then your job is to answer calls and reply to emails. But, you do need to act on what you promised the customer. So, how much time do you need to do that comfortably each day? Once you know that, you can find time on your calendar to block time out to do the work and make sure you communicate to your customers you will not always be available at that time.  Now how do you deal with your overenthusiastic boss? The first question I would be asking here is does my boss do this to everyone? The reason for this could be that if your boss does not and only does it to you, then there is an underlying problem you need to address. Why does your boss not trust you? What have you done to cause your boss to feel they must always be checking up on you?  For that, you will have to have an uncomfortable conversation with your boss. Find out why they don’t trust you and resolve the issue. You do not need that attention and you need to sort that out.  Explain to your boss your difficulties with managing your work and that their incessant interruptions do not help. Ask them what you have to do to build that trust? Their answer may not be pleasant, but it needs resolving or you will not get them off your back. Set some ‘rules’ where either you report your progress each day or you arrange one call a day where you discuss everything they want to know.  Finally, how do you deal with a lot of emails each day? First up, set up a folder and call it “Action This Day”—a term I stole from Winston Churchill. Now, as you process your inbox, there are only four things you can do with an email. Reply, delete, forward to someone else or archive it if you might need it for reference later.  The key with email is to understand the difference between processing and doing. Processing is deciding what to do with an email—reply, delete, forward or archive—and doing is replying to the email. If you try and do both at the same time managing email becomes a long drawn out chore. And let’s be honest, with the pressures on us today, you just don’t have time for this.  So, either you process or you do. How does this work in practice?  Open up your inbox and go through your email deciding whether something should be replied to, deleted, archived or forwarded. As a benchmark, most people can process 70 to 80 emails in around fifteen minutes. It does take a little practice to get that fast, but if you practice you will soon get fast at this.  Once you’ve processed your inbox, open up your action this day folder and start at the top and do your replies. A key part of this is reversing the order of this folder so the oldest email is at the top and the newest is at the bottom. That way when you open the folder, you don’t go looking for the oldest, it’s right there at the top.  With this system, you do not need to be forwarding emails to your task manager, you only need one task in your task manager reminding you to clear your action this day folder.  So there you go, Mohammad, there’s quite a lot there, but really it boils down to managing expectations, being consistent and if necessary having a difficult conversation with your boss.  There is enough time each day to get your work done and to have time for yourself at the end of the day but you do need to be strategic, focus on the process and never panicking. Do one thing at a time, do it well and move on to the next task.  I hope that has helped and thank you for your question.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, I take you through the importance of developing your own workflows and explain why these are crucial to staying focused on what’s important to you.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet Productivity Masterclass | Create your own custom daily workflow Course Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 167 Hello and welcome to episode 167 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Over the last few weeks, I have been writing and recording videos on the importance of creating your own workflows. This was something I was working on during my end of year break and this week, I am answering a question on how to develop your own workflows using whatever tools you are using to help you with your work and manage your time. Now before we get to the question and answer, I would like to encourage you to take my FREE C.O.D productivity course. Now, for those of you who don’t know, COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and it is the foundation of any good productivity system.  You see, you need to be collecting every commitment, task and event somewhere you trust you will either act on it or remember it. You also need some time each day to organise all those inputs and to make sure they are relevant and decide what needs to happen next and when. And finally, you need to maximise the time you spend doing the work each day. This course is my foundational course and is completely free. If you have already taken it, I would recommend, as we are at the start of the year, you retake the course as a refresher, and if you have not taken the course, then please do. It will help you to understand the basics and ensure that whatever system you do decide to use personally, you have a solid foundation.  Full details, as usual, 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 Joseph. Joseph asks, Hi Carl, I read your essay on workflows in last week’s Learning Note and wondered if you could explain a bit more about how to set this up and more importantly what to do when you have a boss and clients who are contacting you every minute of the day.  Hi Joseph. Thank you for your question.  Let’s start with the philosophical thinking behind the concept of workflows. To become good at anything you need two things: consistency and discipline. There are other factors such as developing skills and deliberate practice and we do that when we perform our work. But the essentials here are consistency—doing the same thing over and over again—and we need the discipline to make sure we perform those actions whether we are in the mood to do it or not. This is one reason why morning routines when performed everyday work. They allow you to develop the right habits, give you time each day to yourself and brings a little calm in what otherwise can be crazy noisy lives.  So, what does creating your own workflows mean? In their basic form having a workflow for your day gives you a structure to your day. Most of our productivity problems do not come from the volume of work we have to complete. Our productivity problems develop because we are not allocating sufficient time to the important things and that often means we are not taking any time to establish what our core work really is. When you do not know what your core work is—the work that you are actually paid to do—then you will find you are dragged off doing nonessential work that does little to move any of your essential, important work forward.  So, before you go any further, ask yourself: ‘what are you paid to do?’ You are not paid to respond to email, yet how much time do you spend in your email app each day? Now it could be you are paid to take care of your clients who generally communicate with you via email, but that still does not equal you are paid to check and respond to your email all day.  If you are set in front of your inbox for large parts of the day, what that means is you are working reactively and not proactively. You would be better off investing some time anticipating your client’s needs and addressing those needs before they even cross your client’s mind. I remember back in the day when I was working with clients I noticed my clients often picked up the phone or emailed on Friday afternoons and Monday mornings and the questions were always the same: ‘what’s happening with my case?’  At the time I was working with four or five corporate clients and so I produced a simple spreadsheet for each client with a list of all their cases and kept that sheet updated throughout the week. Then immediately after lunch on a Friday, I emailed my clients the updated list detailing where all their cases were and when they were anticipated to complete as well what information we were waiting for. This had the effect of reducing the number of calls I received on a Friday afternoon and Monday morning by over 80%!  That’s how you work proactively. Anticipate your customer and client needs and address them before they address you about them.  Other things you can do is prepare a standard email your email to all your new customers and clients outlining your procedures and timelines. This very often deals with most of the questions you will be getting. This works whether you are working in clinical trials, real estate, law or sales.  Once you know what your core work is and where you need to be spending most of your working time each day you can then develop a workflow that you follow each day. Now, my workflow has gone through a few iterations over the years—usually the name I give each part—but the basics have remained the same for a very long time.  I have a start to the day list which includes my morning routines and a quick review of my most important tasks and calendar events for the day. Once those tasks are completed, I move to my Focus for the day list. This is the list of tasks I have decided need to be completed today. There will never be more than ten items on this list and they are all important.  Why no more than ten I hear you ask? Well, that’s because realistically I know I will not be able to do more than ten important tasks per day.  These tasks do not include non-essential tasks, would like to do tasks or any new tasks that come in through the day. These are simply the most important tasks for that day.  It can be very tempting to fill this list up by telling yourself that everything is important. It’s not. There is your core work—remember, the work you are actually paid to do—your project work that if not done will result in delayed projects and any work that has become urgent.  By restricting yourself to allowing no more than ten items in this list you give yourself a chance to actually complete it consistently. If you are not completing this list consistently each day, then either you are trying to do too much each day or you are adding too many nonessential tasks in there and you need to go back and look at how you are prioritising your days. The final list is your closing down list. This list is for the nonessential tasks and work or the non-urgent stuff that needs doing some time but has no deadline. It’s also where you have most of your daily routines—the routines that just need doing but do not improve your life or move you closer towards your goals.  And also in this list are you closing down procedures. This is where you make sure you have replied to your actionable email, planned the next day and processed your inbox.  Once all of these lists are cleared. Close down your computer and go do something for yourself. Spend time with your family, exercise or just take a walk in nature. If you make sure these lists are functional, kept up to date and done, you will find you have a lot more time for yourself and others and your life will feel so much more in balance. It will not all be work, work, work.  You will find you worry less about what you have to do, what has not been done and whether you have time to prepare yourself for that presentation later in the week.  Because you have blocks of time on your calendar to do focused work, you have time each day to manage your communications and your are working proactively—also known as smart working—then your productivity increases and your stress levels decrease. It’s a win-win for everyone and all it takes is consistency and a little discipline.  To make this happen, use filters, tags to create three simple lists for the day. The first is your opening list. This is for your morning routines and time for yourself. My list includes: make coffee, drink lemon water, do stretches, ten minutes of journaling and process email.  Your second list is for your focused work for the day and this list cannot contain any more than ten tasks. This is where you will find your most importune work for the day.  And finally, you closing down list for all your little routine tasks for the day and for planning tomorrow.  One thing I would add. If you do find you have to deal with a lot of email, messages and phone calls each day, then set aside an hour or so each day for communications. This communication time is for replying to your emails and messages as well as any phone calls you need make. A good time for this is late on in the afternoon. If you reply to email early in the day you are only going to double up the number of emails you will probably need to reply to each day. You get caught up in email ping pong. If you reply later in the day you slow down the pace and the person you are in an email exchange with is forced to work on your speed and not you on theirs.  And there you go, Joseph. That’s how you develop workflows to make your day run smoother and to make sure you are working on the important things and not being caught up in other people’s dramas and nonessential work. I hope that has helped and thank you for your question. Thank you to you too for listening and please get in touch if you have a question you would like answering. All you need do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, I am answering a question about automating your productivity and time management.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:   Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet Productivity Masterclass | Create your own custom daily workflow Course Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 166 Hello and welcome to episode 166 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. These days we hear a lot about automation, AI and machine learning, but what does all this mean for our personal productivity and time management? And can the current state of automation work for us by helping us to improve our productivity and time management? That’s the question I am answering this week.  Now, before we get to the question, I just wanted to give you a heads up about a special offer I am running at the moment.  During my end of year break, I came to realise that the key to seamlessly being able to get your work done is a combination of good habits and workflows—or routines. I know this can sound a little boring—doing the same thing day after day—but it isn’t really about doing the same thing day after day. The tasks and projects you work on every day will be different, but what does make a significant difference to your ability to get your important work done is to develop a workflow that you habitually follow every day.  And that is what my Productivity Masterclass course is all about. It teaches you how to build you very own workflows so you have a structure designed to keep you focused on what’s important that you eventually unconsciously follow every day.  It is the key to building amazing productivity habits and goes a long way to putting you back in control of your time,  So for the next few days, I am offering 20% off my Productivity Masterclass: Building Your Very Own Workflows. It’s an amazing course and one I am sure you will get so much value from. Full details of this course are in the show notes. Okay, time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ruth. Ruth asks: Hi Carl, I read a lot about automation, AI and machine learning and it seems everyone is using it. But I don’t really know what it means or how to set it up and use it. Do you have any tips on getting the most out of this technology?  Hi Ruth. Thank you for your question.  Now the first thing we need to establish is that AI is a long way from being what a lot of people understand by the term “artificial intelligence”. It is not ‘real’ AI yet. All supposedly AI apps and tools are still based on basic algorithms and binary code. We are still a long way from achieving true artificial intelligence. Machine learning is different to AI in that your device is watching what you regularly do and uses that information to present the best options for you. Machine learning is heavily used in your mobile devices these days and can be very useful.  However, the real problem with the current iteration of AI and machine learning is they will never know how you are feeling, what your current mood is, whether you had a fight with a coworker or how much sleep you got last night. Humans are not machines, we are emotional beings with varying levels of energy based on our sleep, mental wellbeing and the food we have eaten.  So what can you do to automate your work that does understand your current energy levels, mood and wellbeing? Well, that comes down to you and the workflows you set up.  One of the things I realised last year is when you develop your own workflows and use the technology we have today to do the organising for you, you develop systems that work for you and because you retain complete control over what is shown to you, you can take in account how you are feeling on any given day.  Let me give you an example. Many people have a morning routine. Now, morning routines are a great way to start the day with consistency and to build a great structure for your day. For some people, a morning routine may include exercise, for others, it might simply be a healthy breakfast and ten minutes of meditation. The beauty of starting building a workflow with a morning routine is that you can experiment a little with this.  If you are using a task manager, such as Apple’s Reminders, Microsoft’s ToDo or Todoist you can create a recurring set of tasks that pop up in your today view every day. What you want to be doing is making sure they pop up at the top of your list every day. To do that, all you need do is add a time to the task. Tasks with times will generally be at the top of your list.  If you are a Todoist user, I would recommend you use labels to denote your morning routines. You can then create a filter from that label to show you only the routines that are due today.  Now the goal here is not to rely on your task manager to remind you every day what you want to be doing for your morning routine. Hopefully, after a few weeks, you will automatically wake and begin your morning routine.  When I developed my morning routine, I had each part of the routine in Todoist, but as the weeks went by I soon no longer needed Todoist to remind me and I removed the tasks from Todoist. I now habitually start my morning routine the moment I get out of bed.  I have taken this automated workflow further now. I use my task manager to build a daily workflow that starts with my morning review—that’s a two-minute review of my tasks and appointments for the day and then I move into my important work for the day list and that is where I stay until the end of the day when I go through my closing down list that reminds me what tasks I should do to close down the day and prepare for tomorrow.  What you will find is that there are some things you need to do every day, others perhaps three times a week and some just once. So adding the appropriate dates to these and setting them to recurring when they need doing allows you to create your own automation.  Task managers are designed to show you what you need to see when you decide you need to see them. To do that you add dates and where necessary times and you can set these to recur.  Another way to create automation is in your calendar. Again, you set them up and make them recurring.  For example, you may decide you want to exercise four times per week. So you set a recurring event in your calendar to exercise. That could be Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Just put them in your calendar at the appropriate time and set them to recur.  The same can be for studying or taking a course. Decide when you want to do your study and put it in your calendar and set it to recur.  Doing things this way means you can easily change things around if you are not feeling too good, or for some reason or other things change and you are unable to follow your workflow.  I’ve found the best automations are the ones you set up for yourself. Doing it yourself allows you to mentally prepare for the task or event and as long as you have some self-discipline you will start to do it.  I’ve had a lot of problems with automation services such as IFTTT or Zapiers. These services can be used to join different apps together. For example, if you star an email in Gmail, it will be added to your task managers’ inbox. Or if you add a task with a date and time to your task manager it will be added to your calendar.  There’s a lot of little automations like this and in theory, they are great…when they work. Unfortunately, in my personal experience they don’t always work and if you start to trust these services and suddenly they stop working your whole system falls apart and you waste time trying to figure out where the problem is.  The other issue here is complexity. Adding all these services adds complexity to your system and complexity is what will eventually lead your whole system breaking down.  There are just some things you do not want to trust to third parties. Things like where things go on your calendar, and how your tasks are organised. Your hands-on approach here is important. It means you are using your productivity tools intentionally and proactively keeping you aware of what’s going on at all times.  I find that’s one of the unintended consequences of using automated third-party extensions. You get surprises and wonder where something came from and then you waste time trying to figure out what it is and rearranging stuff.  Ideally, you want to be adding tasks and events yourself. Now, there are some services that we all use. Shared calendars where your colleagues and family members can add appointments, but in those cases, you have agreed to share a calendar and in most cases, you get the option to accept or decline. And of course, you have project and task managers where the project leader can assign tasks to you. However, in those situations, you know who is sending you the event or task and it’s likely to be part of your normal working routine.  Now I am not saying you should avoid all these automations. There are some I would recommend using such as automated backups. I have an external hard drive attached to my computer that every 12 hours does a backup of what’s on my computer. It’s there and it works in the background. But this kind of automation is not critical to my daily work. I am not relying on it to tell me what work to do. If it stops working or my hard drive fills up, I will get a notification and I can fix it.  So my advice is to be very careful about implementing all these automations. When they work they can be great, but there is a high degree of backend complexity involved here and where complexity exists things will go wrong.  It is far better for you to stay in complete control of your work and when you do your work. Those decisions really need to come from you, not some algorithm that has no idea of your current mood, or energy level. It might seem like you are doing extra work, but that’s what you need if you are going to stay hands-on and connected to what’s going on in your life. It also means you stay in control of what you are doing each day.  I’m not so sure I would be comfortable with a machine telling me what to work on next. I would lose that connection to my work and my priorities and it would feel I am a slave to machines and automation.  That said, there are some things where automation does make sense. Automated backups, appointment scheduling services—where you set the parameters when people can book appointments with you and other non-critical tasks. But be careful.  I hope that has helped, Ruth and thank you for the question. And thank you to you too for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering, all you need do is email me at carl@calpullein.com.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, I’m answering a question about how to build an achievable plan for the year.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet The Time Sector Course Page Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 165 Hello and welcome to episode 165 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. It’s that time of year again when we turn our attention to what we would like to do and change. It’s also a time we feel excited and enthusiastic about the future and that can lead to us being a little over-enthusiastic about what we can realistically do and change in twelve months. To make any year a success, we need to temper our enthusiasm and build a plan that is realistic and achievable while still being challenging.  That’s what I will be explaining in this week’s episode.  Now before we do get to the question, the start of the year is a great time to finally get your daily tasks sorted out so you are spending less time managing your work and more time doing your work. That’s where the Time Sector Course will help you. The course is designed to simplify your life, to make collecting everything that comes your way easy and giving you a system that makes it simple and, more importantly, to quickly organise that stuff so you free up more time to do the work.  So, if you want to start the new year, and be ready for all the challenges the year will throw at you, get yourself signed up for the course today. This is one small investment you can make right now that will give you a lifetime of returns on your effectiveness, health and time management. Full details on 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 Janine. Janine asks, Hi Carl I always struggle to create goals and plans for the new year. I have a lot of ideas I want to do, but find I become overwhelmed with everything I want to do and just give up. Can you help me to make 2021 different from all the other years where I have failed? Hi Janine, thank you for your question and happy New Year to you. One thing we all need to remember is one year is really only a small part of our whole life, and we cannot achieve everything we want to achieve in one year. Instead I have found seeing a year as a stepping stone towards a greater purpose gives you better perspective on what to plan for in the year.  Let’s take a simple example. If you plan to have a very active retirement . A retirement where you get to travel to exotic places, climb mountains and maintain a small farm of crops and a few animals, you will need two things. You will need good health and fitness and a robust retirement fund.  Those two things—health and wealth—are not things you can achieve overnight. They take years of work. You need to exercise and eat healthily regularly and you will need to save money. It easy to lose your health by overeating and leading a sedentary lifestyle, and it’s practically impossible to build a sufficient retirement fund in five years. It takes years of consistent saving to build up a sufficiently robust retirement pot.  In this example, the question to ask is what can I do this year to move me closer to creating the retirement I want to myself?  Another example could be with your career. Imagine you career goal is to one day be the CEO of a large company. Now, if you are just starting out on your career you are likely to be a long way from achieving that goal today, but that does not mean you cannot set yourself a few goals for this year that will move you closer towards that target.  Ask yourself what skills are you missing? And which of those skills could you develop this year? Are there any courses you could take? You should also review your current work and see where you could improve and if there are any areas where you are particularly weak and could do with some mentoring. It’s amazing how many people in your organisation who would be more than happy to act as a mentor to you.  By thinking of a year as a stepping stone towards a bigger purpose you will feel a lot less pressured to have lofty and mighty goals and plans. This year is just a step towards a higher purpose or goal. So what could you do this year that will take you a little closer towards you greater goals and plans?  The next step here is to create a board divided up into five columns. In the first column you put your objectives for the year. These could be a fitness or health objective, for example, to lose a certain amount of weight or to complete a full course marathon. Or they could be a career objective such as get a promotion to a particular position.  For me, I have a health and fitness objective and a couple of business objectives. The objective is clearly stated in a simple sentence.  In the following columns you make a column for each quarter of the year. So, in column two you put Q1, then Q2, Q3 and finally Q4. Here you can add the projects and major events you wish to or will do in the quarters.  I have my planned trips in these columns. For instance, all being well, I plan to travel to Ireland in April or May this year to visit my family. That trip is in my Q2 column. I also hope to go to Tony Robbins’ UPW event in Sydney in September or October this year so that’s in Q3. These trips may not happen, they depend on how the pandemic works out this year, but as of early January they are my plans for the year.  Now the reason I put them here is because the trip to Ireland will take up at least two weeks, and Tony Robbins’ event will be a week. I need to be away of my time commitments.  Now the beauty of doing things this way is you will see where you are overcommitting yourself. I know a typical project requires around six to eight weeks to complete. Given that each quarter has at the very most twelve weeks, that means realistically I can only complete two projects per quarter.  That does not sound very much, but that’s still eight meaningful projects for the year. Knowing my bigger purpose about what I want to achieve for my business and family that’s going to make a significant impact on my overall objectives.  Having this chart, or Kanban board, makes it very easy to see where you are over extending yourself. It’s very tempting to load up the first quarter because of our enthusiasm and excitement for the new year , but if you slow down and understand you have twelve months in order to move yourself forward with your life, your career and your self-development, you are much more likely to achieve the things you want to achieve.  Now, I know many of you will be thinking that your work does not operate like that and you have multiple projects every week. That’s true if you cling to the old idea that a project is anything that requires two or more steps. But visiting the doctor for your annual medical is not a project. Seriously. It’s just something you have to do every year and all it requires is you find the telephone number of your doctor and make an appointment. Likewise sorting out a difficult customer or client’s issue is never a project. It’s likely to be your job and you just need to make that call, send that email or talk with your colleague. It’s not a project. It’s a task A project is something much more involved than a couple of steps that could be sorted out in a day or two. The time you waste planning out these in your task manager is not worth it. It would be much faster to just add a task—“sort out Mrs P’s issue” and do whatever it takes to sort that issue out.  Real projects are things that make significant impact on your person life—moving house, getting married, retiring or turning your life around. Or work projects that involve developing and launching new products, building a marketing campaign or hiring new staff. These are real projects that require time, multiple steps and some planning. So, Janine, if you want this year to be different, think about what you would like to be doing in five or ten years time and ask what you could do this year that will take you a step closer towards achieving that. You don’t have to do everything this year. Just a few little things that will move you forward.  As Tony Robbins says: “most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.” Think about the next tens years, Janine, let that be the driver for what you want to accomplish this year.  When you look at a year as a stepping stone towards living a fulfilled life rather than an end in itself, you get to think about what you could do this year that will move you a step closer towards achieving the things you want to achieve.  I hope this has helped, Janine and thank you for so much for your question. Thank you to you too for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering, then just email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer your question.  It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.   

Do you find it difficult to switch off at the end of a working day? You are not alone. This week, I tackle that difficult balance.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 164 Hello and welcome to episode 164 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. One area that often gets overlooked when we start to build a productivity and time management system is balance. After all, we cannot and should not spend all day and night working. It’s not healthy mentally or physically and can have a devastating effect on our family and social life. Yet, sometimes we just need to do the work. If you are starting a business, preparing for exams or in the middle of a big project, all your time and attention should be and needs to be on that endeavour. What happens to balance in those situations? Well, that’s what I am answering this week. Now before we go any further, I just want to give you a heads up this will be the final episode this year. We’ll be taking a little end of year break. Don’t worry, we’ll be back on the 4th January.  Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I am really struggling to find time for my personal life. I have been working from home since March and I find all I am doing is working all day and night. I don’t have any time in the evenings because that’s the only time I have to reply to email and I feel I spend all day in meetings through Microsoft Teams. Are there ways to help balance out the day when you are stuck at home all day, every day? Hi Kevin, thank you for your question.  I think the flexibility promise of working from home has thrown up some hard realities for a lot of people. At least when we had to go to an office to do our work there was a clear distinction between being at home and being at work. Now the two areas of our lives are being conducted from the same place and that removes a lot of barriers between our working lives and our personal lives.  The first thing I would always recommend is you build in some structure to your day. What I mean here is you set a start time and a finish time for your work. Simple? Yes. But there’s a reason for this. You see, if we have a start and finish time to do our work each day, we now have a psychological deadline. Part of the problem with working from home is we have no structure—a structure that is built into a workplace. When we go to a workplace we have a start time—be there for 9:00 AM—and we have a finish time—leave at 6:00 PM. This means there is a fixed time each day in order to do our work. Whatever we want to accomplish that day, we much finish it by 6:00. It sets a sense of urgency. We must finish this by 6. When working from home, we no longer need to commute, we tell ourselves we can do another 30 minutes. There’s no rush to finish so we can miss the worst of the traffic or avoid being late for dinner. Tacking on an extra thirty minutes to our day does not carry the same consequences. The problem is it does carry consequences. Not the same consequences, but consequences all the same. You start to get complacent about your working time. Those extra thirty minutes one day soon become the ‘new normal’, and there will be days when you work an extra hour or two and soon your whole closing down work for the day becomes very blurred.  So, set a start time and finish time for the day and be strict about following it.  Another area that quickly disappears is the lunch break. How many of you working from home no longer take your full lunch break? I know this one is incredibly difficult as that was one of the first things I stopped doing when I started working from home a few years ago.  As there was no one to go and have lunch with, it was just much easier to make myself a sandwich and eat at my desk while processing my email.  Now depending on where you live in the world, your lunch break allows you time to get outside and get some exercise in. Go for a walk. A tip here is if you walk twenty minutes down the road, then turn round and walk back home you have just walked for forty minutes and that is around 5,000 steps. Do that twice a day and you hit the magical 10,000 steps a day.  My dog has benefitted a lot with me working from home. We go out walking every lunchtime and it’s a great way to get some air, refresh and reset ready for an afternoon session of work.  You also need to make sure you are in control of your calendar because it is so easy to allow people to schedule video calls at lunchtime. First up, you need to eat and second up, you need your break.  The number of people I speak to who have been stuck on Zoom meetings all day and realise they have not eaten or taken a break. No. You have to put a stop to this.  Just as if you were in your workplace you need to be unavailable at your designated lunch break. And if having a meeting at you usual lunchtime, then make sure immediately the meeting ends, you take your break then.  Okay, now for those of you who are saying to yourselves ‘I can’t do that, my boss expects me to be available’, then you have some questions to ask yourself. Are you really happy working for a boss from the 20th century who is clock-watching you? Are you happy working for a company that does not trust you? I know I wouldn’t be and I would be making it a goal for 2021 to find another company or another boss. That takes care of the situation many people have found themselves in this year. However, there will be a day when we regain our freedom of movement and we can move around again. I’m not sure we will ever go back to the way things were before 2020, but a normal, of sorts, will inevitably come one day.  Now, as a person who is self-employed finding balance is difficult for me. However, one thing I have learned in ten years of being self-employed is there will be periods when I need to be focused. For example, if I am recording a course, everything stops for two days. My calendar is blocked out all day and night and for 48 hours I pretty much live in my studio. I don’t check email and only check messages periodically—usually when I am making a coffee or a cup of tea.  But, once the course is launched I take two or three days off. So, it’s a period of say four of five days of intense work, followed by two or three days of complete rest.  You don’t have to be completely structured every day. Balance does not necessarily mean the ‘perfect eight’—that’s 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours leisure. Balance means making time for the things you want to do with the people you like doing things with. And the keyword is making time for it.  It’s no good complaining about not having time. You do have time. You just have to make the decision to stop doing work and start doing the things you want to do.  Hopefully, you already know you cannot push yourself through ten to twelve hours of work every day. There’s a point where you will get diminishing returns. Even in an eight-hour workday, you will start to lose efficiency towards the end of the eight hours. Pushing on will not get more work done. Pushing on likely leads to mistakes that need rectifying later—which results in more work. You need to rest.  So, depending on the kind of work you do, the balance could be two or three days of intense work, followed by two or three days of relaxation.  I can give you another example—a seasonal one. I’m a content creator, my work involves creating content. I also want to have a week of complete rest over the Christmas holidays so, this week and next, I will be doing some intense content creation certainly not being very balanced with my time. However, this means during Christmas week I will have no content to create so I can put my feet up, eat warm mince pies with brandy cream and spend a lovely Christmas with my wife and little dog.  You may be seeing a pattern here, balance is all about getting in control of your calendar. That’s where you can see where you are spending your time. It can warn you about future over-commitment, it can also show you patterns from previous weeks. If you find yourself feeling a bit numb and out of sorts, just go back a couple of week in your calendar, you will likely see you have been pushing yourself too much and losing your balance. When that happens you can use your calendar to reset. Build-in some more relaxing days and take some time off doing what you want to do.  Ultimately, you are in control of your time. Nobody can force you to do things you do not want to do. If you have no time for your friends and family because your boss and clients are demanding so much of your time, then you need to question your choice of career. Despite what you may read in the news, you can always change your job, no seriously you can. The job market is always tough, but that should never be an excuse to trap yourself into thinking the job you have today is the only job you can do.  I changed careers completely in two of the last worst recessions. I quit being a lawyer in the middle of the dot com bust in 2002 and I quit my job as an employed English teacher to start my own teaching business in 2009. Was it hard? Yes, it was. Was it impossible? Of course not, It is always about knowing what you want, and then creating a plan to make it happen.  Ask yourself what’s important to you? Then open up your calendar and schedule time for it. It’s simple.  I hope that has helped you in some way, Kevin. Remember, you are in control of your time, so make it count. Take control of your calendar and make sure you structure your day. Have a start and stop time and build in time for yourself, your family and friends and don’t let anyone take it away from you. Have a fantastic week, a wonderful holiday season and a joyous new year. We’ll be back in the new year.   

Last week in my Todoist video, I showed how I process my inbox at the end of the day. This generated a lot of questions, so this week I am answering those questions.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet   Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 163 Hello and welcome to episode 163 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. There are three parts to any good productivity system. There is the collection of the inputs being thrown at you. There’s the organising of those inputs—what do they mean to you? What do you need to do? And When? And of course the most important part, the doing.  This week’s question is about the collecting part and how to get those collected inputs into your system.  Now, before we get to the question, hopefully, you will now be in the final stages of your 2021 planning. Yo really do not want to be doing your 2021 planning in the final week of 2020. That’s a time for reflection, resting and where possible spending time with your family.  So, if you would like help in formalising your ideas into achievable goals and to begin the year with a solid plan, then I have a personal one on one coaching programme. You can get yourself two fifty-minute calls with me, personally, to help you set up 2021 for just $149.00.  I know this might not be for everyone, but if you are serious about turning 2021 into a great year, then just head over to my coaching page on my website, complete the questionnaire and lets get you set up for an incredible year.  Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Zoe. Zoe asks, Hi Carl, I’ve taken your COD course and the one area I struggle with is deciding where I should put a task when I have put it into my inbox. Deciding what context to add and which folder to put it into can be so overwhelming, I usually just don’t bother. Are there any tips and tricks you could share that will make organising my tasks easier? Hi Zoe, Thank you for your question.  I often see this problem when I am coaching. When you are not organising your inbox on a regularly basis the number of tasks builds up and one of two things will happen. Either you will stop adding new tasks because you stop trusting your system or you start to do your work directly from your inbox because the rest of your system has collapsed.  Neither of these situations is very good.  So what can you do? Well, if your task manager’s inbox is overloaded with tasks that have been there for days or weeks you need to stop. What I mean by stop is you need to schedule an hour or so to process your inbox.  Unfortunately, when your inbox is overloaded, the chances are you will be telling yourself you are too busy to stop and process it. And of course, when you say that to yourself it becomes a vicious circle. Your inbox continues to grow (or not as the case, maybe) and you continue to feel overwhelmed and busy.  So, stop. Just stop. If you cannot do it during your office hours then do it between 9 and 10 pm. Or wake up an hour earlier than usual. You need this hour and you need to be offline and off the grid when you do it.  The first thing you have to do is process it.  Now there could be an underlying problem that you eluded to, Zoe. Your folder structure and contexts are too complicated.  Processing your inbox should be easy and fast. It should not need too much thought.  This is why the Time Sector System came about. I found myself processing my inbox and getting stuck where to put something. Was it a project (because I knew I was going to have to do two or more things to close it out) or a single action item? Or was it part of another project?  Then once I had decided where to put the task, I had to think about what context to add to it. Did I need a specific tool—my phone, computer? Or did I need to be at a particular place?  Agh! Way too many decisions and far too slow. So how do you streamline this?  First up, you have to simplify your system. Do you really need contexts today? The old @office, @computer, @home, @hardware store etc.  Contexts worked twenty years ago when you needed a computer to reply to your email or write a report, but today you can do those things from your phone. In fact, the last statistic I read was around 70% of email is done on a smartphone today. And I often begin writing my blog posts using my phone.  You may find contexts work for you, but if you are not using those lists, then don’t use them. If you do use those lists, then there’s no reason to add a context.  Next your folder structure. As I am sure you already know, I no longer manage my tasks by project. I manage my projects from my notes app and that is my project support file. All my projects both active and inactive as well as completed projects are all contained in my Notes app. So I do not need to create a folder structure that duplicates my projects.  For one thing, I am not working on all my projects at the same time. Projects are usually worked on in the order of priority—usually deadline priority.  So my task manager is organised by when I will do a task. This means the only folder I need to look at on a weekly basis is my This Week folder. While I am doing my work, anything I want to or need to do next week is irrelevant. I’m doing that next week.  When I am doing project work, I am working from my project notes, not my task manager. If I have a meeting about a project, I can open the project file in my notes app and add comments, tasks and relevant information directly into the project notes, If I receive an email or a Twist message related to a project, I can, if I wish, copy and paste any relevant information into my project notes. It’s a central place for anything related to that project.  Now, when I do my weekly planning session, I can go to my projects and decide which projects I will be working on next week and add tasks to my task manager then.  So, when it comes to processing and organising my inbox tasks is simple. I have two questions to ask: What is it? And when will I do it?  It’s strange as I say that, it sounds complicated, but really it is quite simple. If you open your inbox now and try it, ask yourself what is it? What do I have to do? And then ask yourself “when can I do that?”  So for example, let’s say you have a task such as: “find a website designer to create a website for my new company” the first question is what is it? This is a research task, so when will you do it? You may decide you don’t need to do it this week, and you will do it next month, then just drop it into your next month folder. There’s nothing else to do with the task now. You’re not going to do it until next month so put it into next month’s folder and forget about it for now.  You could have a task that says “call Jenny about her resignation letter”, now this is something you likely have to do ASAP, so all you need do is decide when you will do it. Let’s say you decide to do that tomorrow, so add tomorrow’s date and drop it into This Week’s folder.  And that’s it. That’s all you need to do to process your inbox. Over time you will get faster at this. I can clear fifteen to twenty tasks in my inbox in less than five minutes. Knowing that means there’s no resistance to processing. It’s just something I do just before I finish my day.  Now a few words of caution here. The Time Sector System only works if you do a weekly planning session. If you are not bringing your next week tasks forward to this week and dating those tasks everything will fall apart.  If you are not going into your project list to see what needs doing and pulling tasks into your This Week folder then you will soon find yourself falling behind with your projects.  But, if you do the weekly planning session, you will be fine. The great thing about a weekly planning session is you are in a quiet place… hopefully, and you give yourself thirty minutes or so to get yourself set up for the week ahead. The feeling you have once you have done it is fantastic. You feel organised, on top of everything and ready for the week ahead.  When I did my planning last Saturday, I saw I would be away from my desk on Tuesday for most of the day so I was able to reschedule my Tuesday tasks to other days. I’m not worrying about anything being missed because I have gone through everything and made sure I am on top of it all.  So there you go, Zoe. Ask yourself do you really need those contexts? You probably do not. And do you really need all those folders in your task manager? Again, you might be happier managing your projects from your task manager. But if you do, you will need to review all those projects and make sure there are not errant tasks that crept into the wrong folder.  I hope that has helped. The best approach is if something isn’t working, then find another way. There will always be a way that works for you. Keep experimenting and you will soon find it. More often than not though, the simplest approach is the best approach.  If you would like to know more about the Time Sector System, I have a comprehensive blog post you can read about it, I also have a playlist on my YouTube channel and you can take the course. All the links are in the show notes. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 162 This week, it’s all about putting into place a plan for the new year.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 162 Hello and welcome to episode 162 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. Back in October, I shared with you a simple template you could use to brainstorm ideas for what you want to accomplish in 2021. Now the idea behind that is you give yourself a few weeks to think about this and there are a few areas where you can give some thought. Your lifestyle, your career, your relationships as well as your bucket list and how you can challenge yourself.  So, this week’s question centres around what happens next with this list.  Before we get to this week’s question though, I would like to thank everyone who took part in my holiday sale this year. Without your support none of what I do to help people would be possible. So thank you so much.  Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Richard. Richard asks; Hi Carl, I downloaded your annual planning sheet and have filled it out. You mentioned that when we get to December we need to filter this list into a few actionable goals. Could you tell me how you would go about doing that? Hi Richard, thank you for your question and thank you for downloading the planning template. Now, before we start, if you would like a copy of this template, you can still get it from my download page on my website. What it is is a series of six questions about what you would like to change in the new year. These range from your personal life—your relationships, your health and fitness to your professional life—how you do your work, whether you would like to change your career etc.  The purpose of these questions is to provoke you into thinking about what you want from your life and once you have a set of ideas written down, you can move on to the next stage—which is where Richard is asking for some tips.  So, once you have your ideas written down, what do you do next? Well, the first step is to go through your list of ideas. Many of the ideas you collected will likely be unrealistic at this stage. For instance, you may have written down on the list to sell your house and buy a yacht and live in the South of France. A wonderful idea, but perhaps realistically, this is not going to happen in 2021, but could be something for 2025. However, while you may not sell up and buy a yacht next year, you may find there are a few things you could do next year. You may decide you would like to visit a harbour in the South of France as part of your holiday next year and get some ideas on the types of Yachts available. You may want to do some research on how to buy a yacht, what second-hand ones cost etc.  Working on these areas keeps the idea alive and also builds excitement towards the ultimate goal.  You may have a few ideas on your list that you could work on next year. Health and fitness, of course, is a common one. With the restrictions on our movements this year, you may have accidentally gained a few pounds in weight and you want to get yourself back into shape. So, you can bring that forward to a goal or project to work on.  With something like that, all you need decide is when will you start and how will you do it. Let’s say you want to lose fifteen kilograms (around 30 pounds or 2 ½ stone). So by when would you like to lose that weight? For something like this, you would probably best do it over a six-month period. So, giving yourself six-months, how much weight do you need to lose per month? That would be 2.5 KGs - that’s a realistic—and more importantly healthy—figure to aim for.  Next up would be how? How will you do it? Will you diet only—a tough way to do it—or with you combine a little dieting with exercise? If so, what kind of exercise will you choose?  Let’s say you decide to do cycling, then perhaps you need to get your bike serviced, or even buy a new bike ready to get started.  So, from that one idea, you are likely to find you have a number of tasks to perform to put yourself in a position to be able to start from the 1st January.  Or you may have to change your career on your list. With something like this what skills will you need to be able to switch careers? Do you need to go back to school and get some formal qualifications? If so, there’s your starting point. Research possible universities that do courses that will give you your qualifications. Will you need to save money or could you get a grant? There’s a lot of research there. So, you may decide January will be your research month  Other items on your list could be to create a purpose-built home office so you can move towards working from home career. One thing this year has done is to accelerate the changes to the way we work. So what would a project like this involve? Would you turn your basement into a home office or your spare bedroom? What will you need to purchase?  So, as you can see, from the ideas you have collected over the last month or two, you will have quite a few ideas that you can now expand and turn into projects and goals for 2021.  So, where do you plan all these out? For me, I take the projects and goals I have decided to work on and create individual notebooks or folders for them in my notes app. I have a master note for each project or goal where I can transfer the original idea and I will then brainstorm the next steps to making this happen.  Let’s take the Yacht example, I may decide this is not going to happen until 2025, but next year I need to investigate the costs involved. How much would a boat cost to buy? Can I get a finance package? How much will harbour fees cost? What are the maintenance costs etc? While I may not actually buy the yacht in 2021, there could still be a lot of preparation work I could do.  You can then keep your collected information in your created notebook. Things like quotations, website links and meeting notes.  For your fitness goals, you can collect inspiring pictures and articles and keep them in your project notebook. You can also create a training log in there to track your progress. The way I see it is, October and November are my idea generation months and December is where I plan out the projects and goals I want to accomplish next year.  Now, a few tips here.  Remember you are limited by time. You only have twelve months and so try not to do too much. The idea with the annual planning sheet is you keep it in your notes app so you can refer back to it next October when you restart the process. You don’t have to do everything next year.  I break things down into quarters. So, one of the ideas on my list is to write a book next year. I love writing books but find I am limited by time. But, next year, I have planned out to write the first draft of the book in the first quarter. I want to find an hour a day to write the book. That’s not too difficult as I already know I spend an hour a day on various social media channels and YouTube. So I can cut that time down and write my book instead.  Another project I have is to re-record all my courses that are not in HD. That’s five online courses. So, I will do one course every two months. The content is already there, so I do not need to plan out the courses again—I still have the outline. All I need do is review the outline, update where necessary and then set aside two or three days for recording. So it is a realistic project for next year. I am using Todoist’s new boards feature to plan out when I will do these projects and that means I can see what I have planned for each quarter and make sure I am not overloading myself.  Overall, you will find this process exciting. It also acts as a real motivator as well because it gives you a goal for the year and these goals and projects are goals and projects that will improve your life and push you forward towards a life you love living. You can also add in places you want to visit for when the world opens up again—don’t worry it will. We humans are natural adventurers—so I am planning a trip to the UK and Ireland in the second quarter next year. Really excited about that.  But remember, you don’t have to do everything you wrote down next year. You can hold some back for 2022. I do. One the beauties of this is you start to see a trend. If you keep writing down something like move to the countryside—something that has been on my list fir the last four years—that could be an indicator that there’s something deep inside that you really want to change about your lifestyle.  You may not be in a position to move next year, or even in 2022, but it might be a realistic plan for 2025. With things like this, you can ask yourself what can I do next year that will make that move closer? So there you go, Richard. There’s quite a lot you can do in December to really start to make some of these goals and projects a reality. Enjoy this planning time. It’s a lot of fun, it’s inspiring and motivating and it leaves you very excited about the start of 2021.  Good luck and thank you for your question.  Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, then all you need do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week. 

This week, how to manage a seemingly never-ending to-do list   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 161 Hello and welcome to episode 161 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week’s question is all about managing time. Now I know some people will claim you cannot manage time, and if we are talking about the amount of time we have each day that is true. But we can manage how we use that time and that is where many people struggle yet when you understand what you have and you know your limitations then it can be very easy to manage. Now, before we get to this week’s question I just want to give you a heads up on my 2020 Thanksgiving holiday sale. This year I have kept things as simple as I can. All my courses and bundles of courses are currently available with a 30% discount. And for my coaching programmes, you can get yourself a 20% discount.  I’ve had to limit my coaching programme offer to the first twenty people as I do all the calls personally and I want to do the best job I can in helping people.  So if you are interested in joining my coaching programme please act soon as the available places are going fast.  Okay, on with this week’s question and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Juan. Juan asks, hi Carl, I started to use your Time Sector System earlier this year and it has really helped me to simplify my workload. The problem I have though is I rarely complete my tasks for the day. I feel I have too many tasks and I don’t know how I can stay on top of all my work. How do you manage your tasks? Is there a way to always finish your work each day? Hi Juan, thank you for your question.  Let’s look at this as an equation. There is two sides to this equation. The first side is time available. That’s fixed at 24 hours each daily cycle. You cannot change that. It’s the same for all of us. The second side is the work required to be done. That’s variable.  So, when you base your thinking on the fact that of the two sides to the time management equation only one is variable we can focus our attention on managing that side. But first, on the work to be done side of the equation we have to factor in some fixed pieces. The first is sleep. We have to sleep. Now depending on your own personal sleep requirements that could be anything between six and nine hours per day. We also need to eat and that likely will take up a further ninety minutes.  So, of those twenty-four hours, we are already down to say fourteen hours per day (taking an average of ten hours for sleeping, eating and taking care of personal hygiene) Now, having taken out time for the essentials—sleeping and eating etc—individually we may have other important tasks to take care of. For example, I schedule exercise time every day. I cannot function properly without exercise so I have an hour a day set aside for exercise.  You may have a young family and they will require time attention each day and that could be two to three hours.  Then we have our regular routines, household chores, paying bills, taking the garbage out and walking the dog. All these can quickly add up to an hour each day.  So, when you take into account your fixed time requirements, you are likely to have no more than eight to ten hours left to do all your other work.  But, it does not really end there. Another factor in this equation is your energy levels. We often assume we will have bundles of energy every day, but you know this is rarely the case. You may have not slept well the night before, you may be feeling a little sick or have a headache. All of these can have a debilitating effect on your energy levels which will affect the amount of work you can comfortably do each day.  The reason I explained that is most people’s expectations of what they can do each day is unrealistic. They bite off more than they can chew—as my mother used to say. You need to get realistic on this side of the equation. It’s the only part of the equation you can manage.  If you use the Time Sector System, the key folder you are focused on each week is your This Week folder and you quickly learn how many tasks you can realistically accomplish each week because at the end of the week if you have any remaining tasks it will be an indicator of one of two things. Either you were being overoptimistic when you did your weekly planning or an emergency arose that took up a lot of time.  The longer you operate the Time Sector System you learn what your realistic task number is. For me, I have 17 recurring areas of focus each week. These are my most important, must-do tasks each week. They relate to my most important work such as preparing and recording this podcast, writing my blog post and recording my YouTube videos. They also include the tasks I need to complete in order to achieve my goals.  That leaves me with around twelve other tasks I can complete without putting myself under strain.  You might think twelve tasks in one week is not many, but when I talk about a task it could be planning an update to a course which will require around three to four hours, or preparing a workshop for a client company. These are not tasks like replying to an email. Email replies are part of my daily routines.  As long as I am doing my area of focus tasks and routines I am taking care of my most essential work each day. My major work. The work that will give me 80% of my results.  So knowing I have room for twelve additional tasks, when I do my weekly planning I can decide what needs to be done the following week.  Now, life is not that simple, of course. Through the day emergencies and urgencies will happen. They always do and you cannot plan for those. You just have to deal with them as they come up. You just have to have the flexibility to deal with those.  Now the beauty of the Time Sector System is you stop thinking in terms of what you get done each day, you start thinking in terms of what you get accomplished each week. So, if an emergency occurs and you get none of your planned tasks done one day, you can do a daily planning session and reschedule those tasks for other days in the week.  This week, for example, I could not prepare this podcast script on Tuesday because of a family trip. I saw that on Monday evening when I did my daily planning and rescheduled the podcast script to Thursday morning. It meant Thursday was busier than usual, but I was able to find the additional ninety minutes by waking up a little earlier than usual.  Having the freedom to shuffle tasks around on a daily basis allows me to be more flexible about when I do my tasks. Obviously, if a task needs to be done by Tuesday morning it needs to be done on Monday, but not all your Monday tasks will have the same tight deadline. Some may be just moving a project forward task and could be done later in the week if you don’t have enough time to complete it on the day you’d like to do it.  But the key to all this is learning to prioritise. You cannot do everything and you will always have more tasks on your to-do list than you could complete in a day or week and those tasks will keep coming. It’s like email. You can get yourself to inbox zero and within twenty minutes you’ve got a full inbox again.  So the real decision you have to make is which of all these tasks are you going to do. You cannot change the amount of time you have and so, you have to decide what tasks you will do and which ones you will not.  Of course, you could change that third variable—your energy levels, but quite often that involves time. You need to get plenty of sleep and you need to be exercising to increase your energy levels, so you still need to find a balance.  One pointless complaint is to complain about a lack of time. You don’t have a lack of time. You have the same amount of time as everyone else. Complaining about time is looking at things the wrong way round. You have too many tasks and you can always reduce that number by saying “no” to new inputs.  One way to help you is to monitor how you are using your time each day: How much time do you spend ‘chatting’ with your friends through chat apps? How much time do you spend on social media during the day? How much time do you spend chatting with your co-workers? How much time do you spend going through message threads in Microsoft Teams, Slack or Twist?  How often do you “check” email and not do anything with it?  How much time do you spend searching the internet for things to buy?  How much time do you spend looking through your to-do list looking for something easy to do? All these are huge time sucks and can take up a disproportionate amount of time each day. It’s surprising how many minutes can be lost getting sucked into a message thread and how much of a time waste it can be when the message thread does not concern you. There are enough videos, articles and books on say no to new inputs, tasks and projects. Of course, you can always ignore that advice and carry on doing what you are already doing. You can keep trying new apps, rearranging your Notion pages and watching more videos on productivity in the hope that you will find a way to miraculously do your work without changing anything. Or you can change right now and work on the only thing you can work on. Prioritising.  So, how do you prioritise?  Again, know your limitations. How much can you comfortably do each day? You cannot do everything in one day, so you need to choose what you do. This is where the 2+8 Prioritisation method can help. That gets you to choose your two objectives for the day—the two absolutely must-do tasks and eight other focus tasks, or “should do” tasks that you will do everything you can to complete.  In my research, the optimum number of meaningful tasks anyone can complete in a day is ten. By meaningful I mean tasks that move projects and issues forward and take more than twenty minutes to do.  Focusing on getting ten meaningful tasks done each day does two things. The first is it focuses you on your MITs—your most important tasks and secondly it forces you to be realistic. When you know you are only allowed to schedule a maximum of ten tasks each day, you have no choice but to prioritise and say no.  These ten tasks do not include your routines, those just have to be done and routine tasks can be done anytime. Cleaning your house, washing the car and taking the dog for a walk can be done anytime.  I take my dog out for two walks a day. So, I do a session of focused work for a couple of hours in the morning and then take the little one out for his morning walk as a break for me and a walk for him. That way, I am completing my routine tasks in between my 2+8 tasks.  You can tell me you cannot say “no” to your boss or your clients and that may very well be true. But if the amount of work you have said “yes” to is greater than the time you have available what can you do? You cannot do anything about the time available—that’s fixed. The only variable is the amount of work you have said “yes” to. That’s the only part of the equation you can change.  So if you really want to consistently complete your assigned tasks for the day, get real about the number of tasks you are trying to complete each day. Time available is non-negotiable for all of us, the number of tasks we perform each day is negotiable so focus on that side of the equation. Reduce your commitments, say “no” to new inputs wherever you can, avoid time sucks like chat threads, social media and reorganising your lists.  Focus on your ten meaningful tasks per day. Get them done as soon as you can so you have the time to deal with the emergencies and unplanned events that will crop up each day.  And remember, if you have planned your week, not completing everything you planned to do one day, can always be moved off to another day that week.  I hope that has helped, Juan and thank you for your question.  Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast all you need to do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, in a rather special episode I am going to set you a challenge that if you accept, will guarantee to transform your life in terms of your health, your fitness and your mental and physical toughness.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet   Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 160 Hello and welcome to episode 160 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 am I talking about? I want to challenge you to commit to running and completing a full marathon in 2021.  Why? As I will explain in a moment, marathon running teaches you life lessons that will benefit you in so many different ways. From improving your health, managing your weight to showing you that you are capable of doing something you previously thought was impossible or that you didn’t have enough time to do.  I’ve heard all the excuses, and so I want to show you in this episode that no matter where you are fitness-wise, you can take this challenge and completely change your lifestyle.  Now before I explain this to you, I just want to give you a heads up that my Create Your Own Apple productivity course has been updated and is available on my Learning Centre. While this year has not seen many functional changes to the apps you use, there has been a few changes to the way iCloud Drive works and I have also included how to set up the Time Sector System using only Apple’s productivity apps.  So, if you only want to use the built-in apps that Apple provide for free and want the peace of mind using built-in apps bring you, then this is a course for you.  Now, if you are already enrolled in the course, this is a free update for you, and if you are new to the Apple ecosystem and want to create a simple to use intuitive productivity system, then this course is for you. Full details of the course are in the show notes.   Okay, no mystery podcast voice this week just me explaining why you should get yourself involved in the challenge.  So, how does running a marathon transform your life?  Well. Firstly, no matter what fitness level you have right now, to run 26 miles or 42 kilometres requires practice, or as we call it training. You are not going to be able to decide to run a marathon today and go out on Sunday and run 26 miles. Marathon running does not work like that.  To complete a marathon requires a period of about six to ten months of consistent training. You have to go out and run five to six times per week, every week for six to ten months. There is no getting around that and you cannot take any short cuts.  Because you are committing to training that many times per week you have to plan your training. If you have a busy week, where are you going to fit in your training runs? When you go on holiday, how will you continue your training?  What will you do when the inevitable injuries happen—and they will—how will you maintain your fitness?  All of these factors need careful consideration.  Plus, if you are over the age of 35 and have not exercised for a number of years, you will need to visit your doctor for a medical check-up. Marathon running puts a huge strain on your physical body and you need to make sure your heart and lungs are capable of going through the effort you will have to put yourself through.  Okay, so there are the challenges before you start. How does running a marathon help your productivity and your self-development? The first, and in my opinion the most important, is it develops your self-discipline. Life is too easy for most of us today. We live in an incredibly convenient world. You’re sat down on the sofa binge-watching The Crown on Netflix and you feel hungry, all you need do is open your phone go to your local pizza takeaway app and order your favourite pizza and within 30 minutes you have a hot steaming plate of delicious pizza in your lap. With the exception of answering the door, you hardly needed to move. Total calories expended—about 40. Your pizza will contain at least 1,200 calories and watching TV will amount to less than 100 calories.  But, when you know you need to get in your daily run, you have to pull yourself up, get off that sofa and go out and run. No excuses. To do that requires a huge amount of self-discipline and effort. When it’s pouring down with rain, the temperature has plummeted into the minuses (less than 30 degrees Fahrenheit) and the wind is blowing a gale, the determination and self-discipline required to put on your running shoes and go outside is massive.  That kind of mental training prepares you to achieve anything. It teaches you to push through no matter how hard—or boring— something is. And you learn that to achieve anything takes consistent effort over a period of time.  Secondly, marathon running moves you away from the pernicious instant gratification trap many of us have fallen in to. The last twenty years or so has been fantastic. Technology has transformed almost everything we do. Sadly, the drawback to this is we expect everything to come to us at the push of a button.  I remember when you ordered something by mail order, at the bottom of every order was the notice “please allow 28 days for delivery” and we were absolutely fine with that. Today, if you live in the right area, you can order something online at 8 PM and it will be sat outside your door when you wake up the following morning. Nobody is prepared to wait 28 days for their delivery today.  I can order a box of food from the UK using the fantastic site, The British Corner Shop, and that box will be delivered half-way around the world here in Korea within three to four days. Something that was impossible just fifteen years ago.  But with that instant service has come an expectation of instant gratification, yet great things take time to develop. Completing a marathon might not change the world, but it will change your world. The time and effort you put into preparing shows you that by taking consistent steps five to six times per week you move yourself bit by bit to a successful outcome.  And that is how great businesses are built. It’s how amazing careers are developed and it’s how you build a successful life. None of these can be achieved at the push of a button. To achieve any kind of success takes time, effort and consistency. You have to push through the difficulties, you have to learn how to deal with adversity and you have to learn to stay focused on the outcome.  Marathon running does that. To finish your marathon, you need time, you need consistency and you need to put in the effort.  Another lesson marathon running teaches you is that Google, Facebook and books can only take you so far. You will never complete a marathon by just planning and researching, At some point, you have to get outside and run. You can plan and research as much as you like, but that will never prepare you for a marathon. The only way you can prepare for a marathon is to get outside and run.  Too often I come across people who tell me they want to start a blog or begin a podcast but first they must… You fill in the blank. There’s always more research to do, there’s always something else they must do before they start their blog or podcast. No! Research and thinking will never create a blog or podcast. Only by recording or writing content will you create a blog or podcast. Doing. Doing the hard work of sitting down in front of a screen and writing or recording. That’s how you create a blog or podcast.  Research has its place. When you embark on training for a marathon you will need to read about training programmes, the best running shoes etc. But at some point, that research has to stop and you have to take those first steps. You may have to start by jogging 100 metres and then walking 200 metres, those first steps can be painfully slow. But as you do it, you gradually find that those 100-metre jogs turn into 200 metres and then 300 metres and before long you are jogging 800 metres (almost ½ a mile) and that in turn becomes 1.600 metres or almost a mile. It’s a slow process, but consistently going out for your daily run moves you closer and closer towards your target.  And marathon running teaches you about setbacks and how to handle them. Part of preparing for a marathon means you will pick up a few running injuries. You will get calf strains, hamstring pulls and blisters. When you take the first few steps, you will wake up the next morning and your legs will feel as stiff as boards. You will suffer soreness like you’ve never felt before and if you are training through the winter the chances are you will sprain your ankles at some point too.  That’s all part of the process. You will learn about RICE—the acronym for Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation—you will have a freezer full of frozen peas. Not to eat, but to put on your knees, ankles and calves when you pick up those running injuries.  But these setbacks only make you mentally stronger. You learn the importance of taking a rest day. You learn that setbacks are part of the process and that the way through them is to be patient, follow the process—RICE—and within a few days or a couple of weeks, you will be back to your best and raring to go again.  Because our convenient world has taught us we can have almost anything at a push of a button we have lost the art of persistence, determination and hard work to achieve the things we want in life. Yet, the realities are that instant gratification is short-lived. It does not make us happy in the long-term, it leaves us craving for more and a feeling unfulfilled.  By taking up this marathon challenge, you will learn so much about yourself. You will reset your approach to life by knowing that the best things in life take effort, hard work and patience. And more importantly, when you cross the finish line, exhausted, you will experience an exhilaration you have not felt for years because you have achieved something that just a few months before you thought was impossible and you have done something only a tiny percentage of people in the world have achieved.  And remember, marathon running is not a race. It’s an achievement and everyone who crosses the finish line after running 26.2 miles is a winner.  So I challenge you to become a winner in 2021. Put the awful 2020 behind you and focus on achieving this one thing in 2021. Not only will you accomplish something incredible, but but you will also teach yourself that nothing is impossible given a little patience, a lot of action taken constantly over a period of time.  Good luck and thank you so much for listening to this podcast.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week it’s all about why, and how, you need to be ding a weekly planning session.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet   Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post 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 159 Hello and welcome to episode 159 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, do you do a weekly planning session every week? If not, have you asked yourself why? I ask that question because as I review the questions I get through my YouTube channel, my online courses and some of the issues I see in my coaching clients, most of these are related to the weekly planning session. You see, if you are not consistently doing a planning session each week, you are leaving yourself at the mercy of the events around you.  This week’s question goes to the heart of that problem and so hopefully you will learn why these sessions are important and what you need to look at so you create a plan for the week that is manageable, motivating and more importantly doable. Ooh, before we start, I am being asked about this years Create Your Own Apple productivity course update. Yes, it’s coming. I am almost finished with the update and all being well it will be available from next weekend. So, if you are already enrolled in the course, go to your learning centre dashboard next weekend and it should be there for you. And don’t worry, as always this will be a free update for any already enrolled in the course.  And, of course, if you are not enrolled and want to create your own productivity system using only Apple’s fantastic productivity apps, then you can enrol at any time and will receive updates every year. Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for the week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jack. Jack asks, Hi Carl, I hear you talk about the importance of the weekly and daily review. I’ve never been able to find time to do these and was wondering if they really are all that important. Could you explain why you think they are necessary? Hi Jack, thanks for this question It is true, I have spoken a lot about the importance of the daily and weekly planning sessions. You see the reality is if you don’t have a plan for the week, then you will end up working on someone else’s plan and that is not likely to be a great plan for you.  But aside from that, one of the reasons we feel stressed out and overwhelmed is because our brains are not really our best friends when it comes to the things we have to do. If you do not have any idea where all your projects are, then your brain will take over and start telling you are behind, tasks are overdue and all sorts of horrors are just waiting for you around the corner.  Spending a few minutes going through your project notes gives you a reassurance you are on top of things and you will clearly see what needs to happen next. Once you know that, the only decision you need make is when you will do whatever it is you need to do next. And that does not take a lot of time. These days, I do my weekly planning on a Saturday afternoon. That process of going through my project notes allows me time to decide which projects I will work on next week.  At any one time I have around ten to twelve active projects, but I cannot work on them all in one week. So, I need to decide which ones I will work on next week. Sometimes that decision is easy because the deadline for a particular project is approaching. Other times it can be more difficult. Generally, I only work on two to three projects each week. Most of the time, one of those projects will be in the planning stage so most of the work will be reading, meetings and thinking. Other times, the next steps to completing the project are clear and all I need decide is which tasks I will do next week and even then these are mostly obvious.  Just knowing all my active projects are moving forward is enough to settle my anxious brain. And that, for me, is one of the most important reasons for doing a weekly planning session.  Another reason for the weekly planning session is it gives you time away from the daily hustle and bustle to get your inboxes clear. Now, for the most part, I will clear my inbox every 24 to 48 hours, but I can get a little lazy on a Thursday and Friday and leave the processing until Saturday. I love processing these on a weekend because there are fewer demands coming from clients and colleagues. I have time to think about what something is, whether it is connected to an active project or whether I really want to do the task. Once I know I want to do something with it, all I need to decide is when I will do it. Will I do it next week and if so, when? When will I do the task?  And for that, I will have my calendar open so I can see what my week looks like. Where my meetings and calls are and if I have any prearranged work blocks.  For instance, this week, I will be putting the finishing touches to my Apple Productivity Course. I have blocked Tuesday and Wednesday for doing that, which means I need to get all my writing and any other work done on Monday. Essentially, I will be losing two normal working days to project-specific work.  Now, doing the weekly planning session means I see that and can reduce the tasks I plan to complete next week.  You may have added a training workshop to your calendar three months ago and if you are not doing a planning session you could easily have forgotten about that. Suddenly on Monday you see the workshop and realise you have lost two full working days. That is the worst time to be reminded you will be away from work for two days.  Now, if you are using the Time Sector System, once you have looked at the list of your active projects, all you need do next is move the tasks you have in your next week folder to your this week folder and do a quick check of your This month folder to see if you can bring any of those tasks forward.  For me, I check the tasks in my next week folder before moving them forward just to see if they are still relevant. Often I have a task in there that either I have completed already, or I decide does not need doing next week. The less I have in my this week folder the better as far as I’m concerned.  You see the thing about doing a weekly planning session is it sets you up for the week ahead and it makes the daily planning so much easier.  All you are doing with the daily planning session is checking to see if things are still relevant and adding anything new you may have collected through the day. It gives you time to process your inboxes and check you are on plan to complete your objectives for the week. So what do I mean about your objectives for the week? One of the best ways to make each week count is to set yourself a number of objectives. Now, these do not need to be work-related, they can be personal goals. In my case, I am currently doing a 60-day exercise and steps challenge. My objective is to exercise every day and hit a 10,000 steps goal each day for 60-days. So, I need to make sure each day I am doing my exercise and hitting the steps goal. Likewise, this week it’s all about getting my Apple Productivity course updated and published. Those are my objectives for the week.  Having these objectives means I stay focused on what is important.  Just a quick tip on setting objectives. Don’t set too many. The more you set the more diluted they become. The sweet spot for me is two and at a push three. So this week it’s hitting my exercise objective and finishing the Apple Productivity course. Just having two means I wake up knowing exactly what I need to do and I do not need to be constantly checking my to-do list looking for something to do. I am very clear.  Now, these objectives could be things like sort out a problem customer and turn them into your biggest fan. It could be to get a project you have been procrastinating on started or it could be to make a decision on a new job. You choose. These do not have to be big objectives. The only thing is you will do whatever it takes to get them accomplished that week.  Last week, one of my objectives was to keep Friday night clear so I could have a Sean Connery night. I accomplished that and it was wonderful! What a fantastic actor Sean Connery was. So how long does all this take? Well, the weekly planning session takes around thirty minutes. It does depend on how many items you have in your inbox and how fast you are at making decisions. The thing is, the more you do this the faster you become at making decisions. I can plan out the whole week in thirty minutes, often less.  The daily planning session takes around ten to fifteen minutes. Although I have to be honest here, it does depend on how tired I am. The only thing you need to do in the daily planning session is to review your calendar for tomorrow to see what’s coming up and your task manager to make sure you have a realistic number of tasks. If you do the 2+8 Prioritisation method, this is where you do that. Decide what your two must-do tasks are and what your eight should-do tasks are. For most people, the hardest session is doing the daily planning session. My advice is to set a time each day when you will do this. Remember, it is only ten to fifteen minutes so if your regular work time finishes at 6 PM, then set an alarm for 5:40pm to remind you to begin your daily planning session. Even if you have work to finish, just stop doing what you are doing and do the planning session. You can always go back to whatever you were doing before you stopped.  Likewise for the weekly planning session, having a set time each week helps you. My time is 12pm Saturday. I make a cup of tea, put on some music and start. If it helps you can create a checklist in your notes app to guide you, although once you become consistent at this you won’t need to checklist as everything will be automatic.  If you have never done a weekly planning session try it this week. Look at your active projects to see what needs to happen next and look at your calendar and see where your busiest days are and make sure you do not have too many tasks allocated for that day.  One final part of why you should be doing a weekly planning session is to make sure you are not over-committing yourself. No matter how much work you think you have—and that can be a lot—the two barriers you will always come up again are time and energy. Both of these are limited. Each day you only get 24 hours and depending on your physical and mental state, you only have a limited amount of energy.  Knowing this (and it doesn’t matter who you are, if you are human you are limited by these two factors) you need to limit the number of tasks you are trying to do each day. You are not going to be able to do everything no matter how urgent things are. You need to prioritise.  For me, I limit my weekly tasks to thirty and that includes my recurring areas of focus. That might not seem very much, but each day new inputs will come—trust me they do—and whenever I have allowed more than thirty tasks into my this week folder, at the end of the week, I have to reschedule a lot of tasks because I just did not have time to do them. Get serious about what you can and cannot accomplish each week and each day and stop trying to fool yourself. You cannot do everything so you need to pick what you can do and do that to the highest possible standard.  Find your limit and then use that as your guide to what you can accomplish in one week. All you need do is track how many tasks you are doing each day and each week—that is actually doing and completing—and then use that as your guide. It will take a little time to find your sweet-spot, but when you do, your weekly planning will take a much more meaningful roll in your productivity life.  I hope that has helped, Jack. Thank you for your question.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.