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

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

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

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

This week, what can you do when the demands of others prevent you from doing your work. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 282 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 282 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Do you have a boss or a customer that expects you to be available 24/7? Perhaps, your boss always wants to know where you are and what you are doing or they rely on you to get them information because they are too lazy, or unable, to look up the information themselves.  These demands and distractions are a common intrusion and do prevent you from getting on with your work. It could be you are being invited to meetings you have little to contribute to but feel you must attend because your boss sent the invitation.  And on the other side, there are clients and customers who expect you to drop everything in order to serve them.  It’s these interferences into our carefully curated schedules that cause a lot of our time management and productivity issues. You are willing, but outside forces prevent you from getting on with your most important work. What can you do? Well, that’s the issue in this week’s question.  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, I’d just like to mention that My Ultimate Productivity Workshop is returning in August. For the four Friday evenings in August I invite you to settle in for a ninety-minute intimate workshop with myself where we cover your calendar, task manager, communications and the daily and weekly planning sessions.  In all, this workshop will give you the know-how to build your own, personalised productivity system—a system that will grow with you over many years.  And not only that, when you register for the workshop, you get free access to my mini-course bundle as this will be important for getting the most out of the workshop.  I hope you can join me, and if you are unable to attend one or more of the sessions, do not fear, you can email me any questions and I will answer them in the session and you can get the recording of the session almost immediately after the session ends.  Anyway, back to this week’s podcast question 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 George. George asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried to implement a lot of what you teach but always come up with a problem. My manager expects me to answer her questions immediately and that stops me from being able to focus on my core work or use time blocking. How have you overcome managers like this in the past?  Hi George, thank you for your question.  You are not alone. This is a pernicious problem I see with a lot of companies these days. And it’s not just micro-managing bosses, but can also be caused by demanding customers and clients who expect you to be available whenever they have a question.  Fortunately, I have experienced these types before, and over the years developed a number of strategies to prevent the interruptions and demands.  I’m surprised this is still happening. I am frequently reminded that companies these days are more considerate about their employee needs and welfare, yet at the same time, old-fashioned managers who feel they need to know what each of their direct reports are doing and where they are are still employed.  If you are a manager who needs to know what their team are doing at all times, then you have a trust issue. Either you are unable to trust your team, or you are employing the wrong people. Either way, the problem is with you. If you want your team to flourish, grow and produce the results you employed them to produce, you need to let them free and get on with it. Trust they will do their part of the work.  Now, in your case, George, you have identified the problem, which is a great start. From that start, you can now begin to come up with some ideas that may reduce the interference from your boss.  The first step, and the one that has always worked for me, is to have a sit down conversation with your manager. Ask her what she expects of you, where she feels you are not performing and what you can do to change that. Never point the finger at your boss, let her tell you what she expects and where she would like to see improvements.  The first things she tells you will not be the real problem. The real problem will be the second and third issues. We all feel uncomfortable criticising other people, so we tend to begin with the gentler, less negative issues. Push her to continue, ask questions about why she feel that way and listen carefully to what she tells you.  This approach will be uncomfortable for you too. Nobody likes to hear criticism, particularly if you pride yourself on being organised and productive. You do not have to accept all the criticisms. A lot will not be fair or true. But it is important for you to listen.  The final few items will not be real issues. We add them to pad out our criticisms, and to make the list, if you like, appear bigger than it really is.  Once you know where your boss feels there are issues, suggest remedies. Think about how you can change things so these issues disappear. Use the If I… Will you.. Approach.  This means when you make a concession, (If I…) you ask for a concession in return (will you…)  For instance: If I commit to updating the CRM system at the end of each day, will you allow me to focus on my work from 10:00am to 12:00pm without disturbing me?  Now you may find you have to negotiate a little. For example, if your boss does not want you to ’disappear’ for two hours each morning, try one hour.  Once your boss begins to see results, she will concede more trust to you. She will give you greater freedom to organise your own schedule. But, it takes time and the onus is on you as much as it is with your boss.  Now, to a related matter. What about clients and customers. How do you deal with their demands? This is an expectations issue and one that can be easily resolved through good, clear communication.  When I worked in law, the barristers we worked with (that’s legal counsel in the UK, not coffee brewers) made it very clear they were in court between 10:30am and 12:30pm and between 2:00pm and 4:30pm each day. We knew we could not contact them between those times. We were the client for these barristers, yet I never remember any barrister not telling us when they would be available. I suspect it was part of their legal training to make sure clients were informed when they were not available.  That has always appeared to be a common sense approach to me, it just made sense. Yet so many people when working with customers and clients cause themselves problems by promising the world knowing deep down they could never keep that promise.  It’s far better, when starting a new relationship with a client or anyone else related to your work, for that matter, to inform them of your availability up front. Tell them the best way to contact you and when. Explain there will be times you are unavailable and what you and they can do in those situations.  I live on the opposite side of the world to the majority of my clients, which means I am between 17 and 8 hours ahead. When it’s 10pm at night for me, it’s 9am in New York, 2pm in London and 6am in LA. To overcome any communication issues, I inform all my clients to email me any questions and promise to respond within 24 hours.  In order to comply with my own ‘rules’, I need to allocate an hour of my day to dealing with communications. That’s blocked off in my calendar and so I know when it’s 4:30pm, it’s time to sit down and respond to my messages. This means whenever a client wakes up, they will see my reply in their inbox waiting for them.  It’s not sustainable to be always available at a moment’s notice for your boss or customers. That’s how things get missed, backlogs build and ultimately your performance at your job will suffer. You need to find time to focus on your important work. Abraham Lincoln is attributed as saying” Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” It makes sense, yes? You are going to be more productive chopping down trees if your axe is sharp. Well, I’ve noticed that the most successful people in business do something similar with their time.  Stella Rimington, the former head of the UK’s Security Service would arrive in her office at 7:00am each day in order to get two hours deep focused work done before the day began. She would read the overnight intelligence reports and use the time to prepare for her work day.  Time Cook at Apple, does something similar. He also arrives in the office early (some say 6:30am other claim it’s 7:30am) and uses the time before the work day begins to get a grip on the day and to ensure he has everything prepared.   Now, if you work purely for the financial compensation, this will not work. For you, working an extra two hours or ninety minutes each day would be sacrilege. But if you are developing a career, using your employment to learn and grow yourself, then this is something worth considering. Perhaps begin your day thirty or sixty minutes earlier and use that time for focused work.  It gets you ahead of the day, it means you have time to process all the information needed to make the most of your day and you are not going to be disturbed. It’s surprising how much you can get done in just a couple of hours early in the morning.  So there you go, George, a few ideas you can use to take control of your day. The most powerful one is to have that conversation with your boss. Reset expectations and use the “If I… Will you…” approach. Tell everyone when and when you are not available. You can even put that into your email signature.  Demanding bosses can be ‘controlled’, just like customers and clients can be controlled. I don’t mean control in a dark and evil way, I just mean in terms of their expectations. Don’t make promises you cannot keep, and be ruthless in the way you apply your rules.  It will be uncomfortable at first, but you will be surprised by the amount of respect you receive and the results you start to get.  Thank you for your question, George and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week’s question is all about breaking tasks down into manageable chunks and how to organise your academic studies. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 281 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 281 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. An area I find most people struggle with is breaking bigger tasks down into manageable chunks. How do you determine something like “write report on Quarter 1 Marketing campaign” when you may not know where to start? While it might be clear what needs to be done, it may not be clear how long something like this would take.  In many ways this comes about because we are not prioritising correctly. If your number one task for the day is to complete a report, or write a paper for your professor, why would an email or message become more important. You have no idea what or how many emails and messages you will get each day, you only know you will get some, but email and messages can never be your priority for the day. They don’t move things forward for you. They might help other people, but if your number one priority is the report, why change your plan?  Anyway, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Meghan. Meghan asks, Hi Carl, thank you for your recent podcasts on core work. One area I struggle with is knowing how long a task will take. Should I be allocating time for each task or just doing what I can. Additionally, how would a Ph.D student define their core work?  Thank you Meghan for your question.  Let me begin with the second part of your question first. What is the core work of a Ph.D student?  This is going to relate to your chosen topic. What are you studying? The vast majority of your work here is going to be researching, taking notes and perhaps conducting studies. This is primarily likely to involve a lot of reading. So how much reading do you feel you need to do each week?  This needs time allocating to and that’s where you calendar comes in. Let’s imagine you want to spend four hours a day reading. How will you break that down? If you were an early bird—someone who likes to start their day early, you may choose 6am to 8am as your reading time. You could then perhaps set aside a further two hours later in the afternoon. That would still leave you with plenty of time for dealing with communications, socialising and meeting with your professor.  If you are not an early bird and prefer doing your reading later in the day you can schedule it for late evening,  Working on any studies you are conducting or papers you are writing should also be scheduled in your calendar.  With these two activities your calendar will tell you your writing and reading blocks and that’s all they say. You task manager and notes will indicate what you will read or write.  Now, onto establishing how long a task should take you. That’s going to be very different most of the time. However, it’s not really about how long you should spend doing a task, it’s more about how much time you have available to spend on that task.  Let me give you a personal example from this podcast. It takes me around two hours to write the script for this podcast. Some days I can write it faster, other days I may need more time. Every Tuesday morning, I have a two hour writing block in my calendar and for the most part I can get this script written. However, this week, I was only able to schedule an hour on Tuesday morning, which meant the script was only half done. I then needed to find another hour later in the week to finish it off.  When looking at my calendar, I discovered that the only time I had available was Saturday evening. Now that raises a question. Do I use time I generally protect for other things, or do I allocate an hour to writing the script? Well, as I need to record and publish the podcast on Sunday afternoon and Sunday morning I have a lot of meetings, the only time I had was Saturday. The decision was made.  I could of course have decided not to publish a podcast this week, but I see this podcast as part of my core work and therefore non-negotiable. So, the decision was easy, block an hour off on Saturday evening.  The truth is that doesn’t happen very often, so it’s not like I have to regularly write this script in my rest time, but if it must be done, it must be done.  Now, for the first part of your question, Meghan. How do you determine how long a task will take? For most of you a lot of what you do will be predictable. A simple example, would be doing a weekly grocery shop. I know, for instance, I need an hour for this. Similarly, taking my dog for a walk will be an hour.  You will also find a lot of the work you do is part of a process. If you were a graphic designer, perhaps much of your work would be sending concepts and ideas to your clients and awaiting their approval. If you been designing for a long time you will likely know how long a piece of work will take. I know, for instance, I need an hour to write my weekly blog post. It’s not an exact science, some days I can write it in forty minutes, other days I need ninety minutes. On average, though, it takes around an hour.  I watched an interesting talk by Jeffrey Archer. Jeffrey Archer is a prolific author having written over forty books in the last forty years. He has an interesting schedule for doing his work.  He will wake up at 5:30am, and begin writing at 6AM. He writes for two hours (by hand, not keyboard) and then take a two hour break. Then from 10am to 12pm he will write some more before taking another two hour break. He will do another two hour session from 2 til 4 and finally between 6pm and 8pm he will read through what he had written for that day.  The interesting thing here is he is not counting the amount of words he writes. That depends on the flow. Somedays he will write a lot, other days it will be a struggle. The key for him is he follows the process each day. He knows, after forty books, it will take him around 1,000 hours to write a book and see it on the bookshelves.  I know after nearly 800 blog posts that a blog post from first draft to publication takes two hours.  Notice that Jeffrey Archer gets six hours of writing in each day and has plenty of time in the breaks to make phone calls, write emails and deal with other administration tasks. He’s focused on the 1,000 hours over six months, not worrying about how many words he will write each day.  So, what about you, if you have a task to do when does it need to be finished by? Imagine you have a task to do and you need to deliver it by the end of the week. The best day to start is today. First task, look at what needs to be done. Do you need to do some research? If so, how much time can you dedicate to the research? Perhaps you can only do two hours. That’s fine, block research time off in your calendar. How much time will you need to prepare the finished task? If its a written piece or a presentation, how long do you need?  If you leave that to Thursday, you are going to find yourself in trouble. My advice is to start writing it no later than Wednesday. It’s likely you will only know how much time you need when you begin the work. I find if I am designing a workshop for a company, I only know how long it will take once I develop the outline. Once I have that I can anticipate how much time I need.  There’s always going to be something in the work you do that will give you an indication how long something will take. Let’s imagine you have a difficult customer. When you first learn of the problem, you will have no idea how long you will need to resolve the problem. You will not know that, until you speak to the customer. So, speak with the customer at the earliest opportunity. From that conversation, you will now have some idea about what needs to be done and how long it will take.  If you delay having that conversation, all you will be doing is guessing. And, worse, your brain will be warning you that you need a lot of time. It’s likely you won’t need a lot of time, but our brain is not logical, it panics until you can give it something solid to work with. So, make the call or open your notes and make a decision on what you will do first and when you will do it.  However, the only way you will learn how long something will take is to develop a process for doing your work. It’s through processes that you will learn how long something will take. When I was teaching English, I used to do seminars for companies in different aspects of English communication. The first time I put together a seminar, I didn’t know how long it would take. The first one took me around twenty hours, the second and subsequent ones took on average sixteen.  Once I knew that, I could plan out my preparation time and refine things. I also focused on the process for building the seminar, so I was able to break down the components parts and make those more streamlined and gave me a better understanding how long each part would take.  It also taught me I needed a minimum of two weeks to prepare the seminar. It was possible to do it in a week, but that would mean working longer hours than I wanted to. I ended up with a process that took sixteen hours spread out over two weeks.  And that’s what I would suggest you do with the work you are doing. Track what you do, how long each part takes and look for ways to naturally break it down. You an then use your calendar to spread out the different parts so they get done.  I hope that has helped, Meghan. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, how do you motivate yourself when you are just not in the mood to do any work? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 280 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 280 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. How often do you wake up in the morning with a long list of to-dos and just want to crawl back under your duvet? Or come back from lunch, look at your desk and just go “naw, just not in the mood”? If it’s more times that you would like, you are not alone. If you are a living human being, it’s going to happen. You are going to have good days and bad. It’s perfectly normal and not something you should beat yourself up about. However, sometimes that lack of motivation to do the work, can be untimely. You may have a deadline, an urgent matter to deal with or some preparation for a meeting to complete. What can you do in these circumstances? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s podcast.  And so, to get things started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Mohammed, Mohammed asks, Hi Carl, how do you stay so motivated each day? I really struggle with this. When I get up in the morning, I feel demotivated and just don’t want to get up. Do you have any suggestions on how to wake up feeling more motivated?  Hi Mohammed, thank you for your question.  There are a number ways you can wake up feeling more motivated and energised for the day. One simple trick is to make sure you get enough sleep. We all need between six and eight hours of sleep each night although we differ on the optimum number—for example, I discovered I needed seven hours, twenty minutes, not the six I thought I needed, I’ve learnt if I sleep less than seven hours, I will not have a very productive day and will likely need to take a nap sometime in the early afternoon.  You can discover your optimum daily sleep hours by doing a simple test. For one week, sleep with no alarm and track how many hours you sleep. At the end of the seven days, total up the number of hours you slept and divide it by seven. That will give you the number of hours you actually need, rather than guessing the number.  Once you know your optimum number of sleep hours, set yourself a going to bed time (thirty minutes before you need to be asleep) and stick to it.  I know this may require you to change a few things. If you are in the habit of scrolling social media or watching TV late at night, you may need to adjust the amount of time you spend doing these things. But I can assure you once you dial in your sleep patterns, you will soon find yourself waking up feeling a lot better than you likely do right now.  While sleep is not going to affect your motivation, it will ensure you have the energy to get through the day.  Now, what about motivation. This has everything to do with your mindset about the work you do. If you see your work purely in monetary terms, you are going to feel demotivated. Money as has been discovered is a poor long-term motivator. Sure if someone offered you a lot of money to do something, it’s probable you will do it as long as it does not conflict with your personal values—after all the saying “everyone has their price” is largely true. But is it the money that motivates you or what you think you could do with the money?  As Daniel Pink discovered several years ago, there’s an amount of money you need to earn to live and anything above that figure will not motivate you. Daniel Pink set that amount at around $70,000 per year. Beyond that, because it does not affect your ability to eat, have a roof over your head or the financial ability to take a holiday once or twice a year, money no longer provides an incentive. (Although we think it does) It might be nice to buy an expensive watch or to own a luxury beach-side villa in the Mediterranean, but your needs—food, and shelter are taken care of and material things are not going to motivate you when it comes to getting up in the morning to do your work.  I’m currently reading about Robert Maxwell. In case you do not know, Robert Maxwell was the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s. (If you are listening in the US, Maxwell also bought the New York Daily News) Maxwell, it turns out was a crook. He was stealing money from not only his public companies, he also stole his employees pension funds and owed multiple banks many millions of dollars when he died in 1991.  Maxwell didn’t steal all this money because he wanted more material things. He already had a helicopter, private jet, a yacht and multiple homes. He stole this money because he desperately wanted to maintain his identity and reputation. His self image prevented him from being able to cut back his excesses and it ultimately destroyed him and many thousands of Mirror Group employees’ pensions.  Maxwell’s motivation each day was his need to maintain his empire and his image as a high-flying successful business giant. It ultimately failed and he was soon exposed for the person he was.  However, beyond narcissism—which can be a very powerful motivator, What does motivate people is the sense we are doing something worthwhile. And that is controlled by what we want to accomplish in life.  My first job was cleaning the changing areas in a hotel health club. It was three hours a day six days a week and I loved it. It was not the work that I loved, that was hard, but I saw it as an education. I was given autonomy on what I cleaned and when and that allowed me to feel I was in control. I took pride in ensuring the showers were spotless when I had finished. That the floors were clean and the towels were neatly stacked in each changing room. I learned about systems and processes for getting my work done and it began my fascination with how to accomplish my work in the most efficient way.  All my early jobs taught me valuable lessons. I saw each one as an education and valuable experience. Working in hotels taught me the importance of standards. Selling cars taught me about the art of selling, working in law taught me about integrity and professionalism.  No matter what work you do, whether you love it or hate it, it is giving you an education. You don’t become the CEO directly out of university, you have to learn through experience, make mistakes and understand the intricacies and nuances of managing people. You don’t become a surgeon straight out of medical school. You have to do your shifts in the emergency rooms, do the rounds and learn from your peers.  When you begin the day, you have a new opportunity to learn something and move your career forward. You also have the choice to go into to work and complain about how much you hate it, come home, scroll through social media looking at people doing what you want to do and feeling jealous and thinking about how unfair life is.  You also have the choice to go into work and instead of hating what you do, look for ways to improve it. It wasn’t pleasant scrubbing walls in the showers, but I learned how to do it better and even today, I use what I learned when I clean my bathroom. Weirdly, I feel a sense of pride in my abilities to clean a bathroom and make a bed (another thing I learned working in hotels)  What else can you do to motivate yourself to get up in the morning? One trick that works is to have a morning routine you love doing. Something you look forward to doing. For instance, making my morning coffee, writing my journal and cleaning my email inbox is pure joy for me. I look forward to sitting down with my coffee and writing whatever’s in my mind into my journal. I also enjoy clearing my email inbox. I have no idea what will be in there. There could be problems, kind comments, newsletters and spam. Each day is different. I also gamify it by timing how fast I can clear my inbox. I especially enjoy the days where I have 100+ emails to process. Learning those in less than 25 minutes always makes me smile.  What would you love doing in a morning that will take less than forty-five minutes? Experiment, and see what excites you.  Another way to avoid that dread of a new day is to ensure you have a plan for the day before you go to bed. This is a psychological trick you can use that will motivate you in a morning called “implementation intention”. Your plan for the day gives you the intention to get it done. Writing these out in a journal in a morning reinforces it. For instance, I could have begun today by planning to write this podcast script. I would have make sure that was flagged in my task manger before I finished the previous day and when I wrote my journal I would write it out again.  Be careful here, if you write more than two or three things you will fail. There are too many unknowns that could come at you in the day, so limiting it to two tasks makes it doable no matter what is thrown at you.  Finally, what are your long term goals. Where do you want to be in five, ten or twenty years time? If you don’t know what’s the point of getting up in a morning? You don’t have to have lofty expansive goals, it could be you want to learn something new such as photography, or graphic design. Perhaps you would like to learn to swim or play golf. Having something to aim for gives you purpose and purpose gives you motivation and motivation gives you energy.  So there you go, Mohammed. Make sure you are getting enough sleep, you have the right mindset for your work or studies, that you have a plan for the day and you have something long-term to aim for. It surprising how these can transform your life and make getting up in the morning something you are excited about.  Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 279 In this week’s episode, I share with you what happens when everything begins to work as it should. Be prepared; this episode is scary.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 279 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 279 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 comes from a coaching client of mine who has worked with me for a few months and has developed a system and a way of working that has enabled him to get on top of his work, but has also left him feeling anxious and uncomfortable. He told me there’s a sense of missing something, that he should be doing more.  So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Gary. Gary asks, Hi Carl, my system is working perfectly, but I feel there’s something missing. It’s like I have this feeling I am not doing enough. Is this normal? Hi Gary, thank you for allowing my to share this on my podcast.  So why is Gary feeling as if he should be doing more? Well, it’s likely he’s become addicted to the stress caused by feeling overwhelmed and busy. That sense of not being in control, which means each day he felt he was being pulled from one crisis deadline to another without ever feeling he had time to work on what was important or even a chance to take a break.  If you think about it for a moment, when you’ve spend a large part of your working life reacting to events, when you finally reverse that and start to anticipate events so they do not overwhelm you, it is going to feel weird at first. It may even frighten you. You stress levels drop—often suddenly—and that can cause anxiety. If your body has become used to dealing with a lot of stress, not having that around is going to be strange and that is why we often feel something’s missing. There is, it’s called stress. It’s gone.  In many ways, as you become better organised and more productive, you need to prepare yourself for the withdrawal effects of a reduced amount of cortisol (the stress hormone) surging through your bloodstream. These withdrawal effects are often the reason why so many people unconsciously self-sabotage their efforts. They will do things like change their task manager or notes app. Not because the new app is any better than the ones they used before, but because it gives them a sense of doing something constructive—yet, transferring all your notes and tasks to a new app is not a constructive use of your time.  The real question to ask yourself is what can you do with all the extra time you will have once the way you do your work becomes more efficient?  This is where you can look at your areas of focus. Only one part is related to your work, yet, depending where you are in life it’s likely that will be the area that is taking up a disproportionate amount of your time. But what else is there in your areas of focus that is not getting the attention it deserves? For example, a lot of people would like to spend more time with their friends and family. Is there anything you can do to be able to spend more time there?  Perhaps you could pick your kids up from school or call round to see your parents more often.  What about hobbies? I know we don’t talk about these a lot these days, but hobbies are a great way to reduce stress, relax and take your mind off things. Now if you are working in an office environment, how about doing some mentoring? One of the roles leadership involves is mentoring the next generation. Even if you are not a leader, yet, helping your colleagues develop their skills is a great way you can make use of your extra time. The great thing about mentoring is not just what you teach, but also what you learn. Coaching, has not only given me a way to help others, I have also learned an incredible amount from the people I talk to every day.  Something you could consider is to work on your education. Now, I am not talking about formal education, but more unusual fields. For instance, advertising and marketing company, Ogilvy’s vice-chairman, Rory Sutherland has spent the last twenty-years or so learning about behavioural psychology. This is the study of why we do what we do and it has not only been a fascination for him, it’s helped him in his work and given him an avenue to develop a side business public speaking and entertaining people with his observations. If you haven’t already watched his TED talk from 2009, I highly recommend you do so.  He’s also written a book, called Alchemy, which I would also recommend.  The point is, you have the ability to take control of what you do with your time. And, with the way we work changing at a rapid rate—whether we like it or not—and the potential for artificial Intelligence causing some radical changes to the types of jobs available, the people who will succeed are the ones who have the time to look ahead and make choices based on analysis rather than being forced to change.  So, how do you get to this point?  Well, this podcast has given a lot of advice over the last five years on how to get control over your time but the one thing that I live by is to eliminate not accumulate. This insight came from my project a few years ago when I decided to try out minimalism. I read the books, watched the videos and I followed a lot of the advice and paired down my wardrobe and possessions. I also adopted a one in one out policy. So, if I buy a new pair of jeans, I will throw out an old pair. Or, if I buy a new computer, iPad or phone, then the old one goes out.  The temptation when you become better organised is to add more and more stuff to your task manager and notes app. After all, you have a system that will take all that stuff in, but do you really want it to? The more you put in, the more you have to deal with at some point.  I am always looking at ways to reduce the time it take to do things. For instance, I love it when I wake up to an inbox of 100 plus emails. I set a timer and see how fast I can clear them from my inbox. I see this as training, because being fast at making decisions about whether something is important and needs a response or not will help with other areas of my life. The same goes with my daily and weekly planning, I’m always looking at ways to speed it up. Do I really need to go through and review every project? (No you don’t, by the way).  Daily planning can be done in less than five minutes if you have a process for doing it. Mine is simple, Calendar to see where my appointments are for tomorrow and Todoist to review my task list and to ask myself is this realistic.  But one of the greatest benefits of adopting an eliminate not accumulate philosophy is a lot of the stuff you may be collecting today is likely to sort itself out it you leave it alone. I learned this with my online course learning centre. Occasionally, someone will have difficulty logging in to their account—they may have forgotten their password or are using the wrong email address. They send me an email asking to help.  In the past I would rush to respond. Now I wait an hour. I’ve discovered nine times out of ten I soon get a follow up email saying they’ve figured out the problem themselves.  Best advice here is slow down. A lot of what you are asked to do is a reflex and if you slow down, people will often find the solution themselves.  Another tip for you is to make yourself less available. I learned this from reading about the routines of successful people. Authors such as Stephen King and John Grisham lock themselves away when they are writing. No internet or phone. Just a quiet room so they can spend three or four hours focused on their writing.  How much work could you get done if you had just two hours each day where you knew no one can disturb you? Being less available is scary at first, but you soon become used to it and the best thing you boss and colleagues will begin to respect your focus time because they see the results you are producing.  Don’t ever accept the thinking you have to be available all the time for your colleagues and customers. You don’t. Set some boundaries. Experiment and see what people will accept or not. You might be surprised how accepting people are.  So there you, when you make the decision to become better organised and more productive you are setting yourself on a course where some big changes will happen. You will have more time, be a lot less stressed and it will feel uncomfortable at first. However, don’t let that stop you and certainly don’t self-sabotage your hard work. The anxiety and feeling uncomfortable is just your brain’s way of adjusting to the new you. A person in control of their time and not stressed.  Thank you Gary and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Are you the master or slave of your task manager? In this week’s episode, I’m going to show you how to take control of your tasks.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 278 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 278 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. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people were busy, much as we are today, yet we never began the day with to-do lists of twenty-plus tasks. That wasn’t the way we used to-do lists. To-do lists were for the essential, must not forget to do tasks.  Most desk diaries at that time only had space for around six tasks at the bottom of each day’s column. Ironically, six tasks was the number Ivy Lee recommended when he devised the Ivy Lee method for Bethlehem Steel in 1918. That method worked then and it still works today.  So what has happened over the last fifteen years or so? Have our brains diminished somehow? I don’t think so. I suspect the reason why we are struggling now is because we believe everything that must be done should be added to the to-do list, yet does it? How effective would you be if the only things you saw on your list each day were the things that really mattered? I know you would be a lot more focused.  That’s what we’ll be looking at this week, so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Michelle. Michelle asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried so many times to use a to-do list and it always begins well, but after a few days, it becomes overwhelming. I know how helpful they are and I wondered if you could break down what should and should not be in a to-do list.  Hi Michelle, thank you for your question.  Let’s go back to Ivy Lee. While we don’t know why Ivy Lee chose six tasks to add to a to-do list, what we do know is anyone who has used this method almost always complete the six tasks and has enough time at the end of the day to plan the next six.  Ivy Lee’s method is simple. At the end of the day, write down, in order of priority, the six tasks you want to complete tomorrow. Leave that piece of paper on your desk so when you arrive back at work in the morning, the first thing you see are those six tasks. Then, you begin at the top and work your way down the list until you have all six crossed out.  Think about that for a moment. How confident are you at being able to consistently complete six tasks each day?  Let’s imagine for a moment you are a university professor. Today, you have two ninety minute lectures to give from 9:00am. Your lectures will finish at 12:15pm and then you have to arrange some meetings with your Ph.D students, mark some papers, spend a little time writing your own paper, respond to your email, prepare for your lectures tomorrow and exercise. That’s six tasks. Do you have time for anything else? If you work a typical eight or nine hour day, three hours have already gone lecturing, which leaves you with five to six hours to do everything else.  Exercise can be done after you finish for the day, but marking papers, writing your own paper and responding to email are not five minute tasks. I would say, if you try and cram anything else into your day, you’ve already lost the day.  The key to this Michelle is to understand that time is limited. We do not have an infinite amount of time each day. Sure, you can work eighteen hours a day trying to do everything, but that is not sustainable. You might be able to that for a couple of days, but eventually you will break. You are not a machine and there needs to be balance between work and rest. (Whether you like that or not).  But look at the professor’s day, if she were to do the tasks she had set for herself, she would be moving important things forward. She might not be able to finish everything, that’s fine as long as she’s consistently working on the important things.  In many ways, we are our own worst enemies. Thinking that everything has to be finished in one day will always lead to overwhelm and in the worst case scenario, burnout. It’s not possible to complete everything at the first try. Sometimes you need to continue with a task on another day.  Now, there is something else at play here. How are you writing your tasks? You are not going to do very well at the supermarket if all that was on your list was: food, drink toiletries. Sure you would pick up something, but more than likely you would pick up all the wrong things. Instead, we need to be smarter than that and be more specific. Apple, bananas, chicken, salmon, broccoli, sprouts, red wine and shampoo would give you a better (and faster) experience at the supermarket.  The same applies to your to-do list. Writing things like; Ph.D curriculum, Bathroom and Board meeting, on your to-do list is not going to help you. What do you need to do related to the Ph.D curriculum? What does the “bathroom” mean? Perhaps what you mean is you want to redecorate the bathroom. Great, what does that mean at a task level? Pick up some paint swatches? Buy paint and brushes? What?  Another thing about writing vague words down on your task list is you will have no idea how long it will take you. Ph.D curriculum, how long will that take you? How about if instead of writing a statement, you wrote something like: continue writing Ph.D curriculum”? Now you can decide how long you will spend writing the curriculum. Using the word “continue” (or begin) here puts you in control of the time you spend on the work. A simple change, but one with a huge benefit when it comes to reducing an overwhelming to-do list.  Now, let’s go back to the number of tasks you are putting on your to-do list. Many to-dos have what I would describe as a natural trigger. For instance, your garbage can needs taking out when it is full. I know I see my garbage can every day, so I can tell when it needs taking out. Similarly, I know when my car needs washing every time I drive it. It would be pointless add these as tasks to my task manager.  How about email? Do you send all your actionable email to you to-do list? Why? You already have the mail in your email app, why do you need to duplicate it in your to-do list? All you need is a folder in your email app, called something like “Action This Day”. Any email that requires action can be placed in there and if you dedicate a given amount of time each day for dealing with your actionable emails, you can simply go to that folder and work from there.  Now, I know there can be an issue with emails that contain a bigger task. For instance if your boss emails you and asks you to prepare a report for this month’s board meeting. That’s not going to be a five minute task. However, rather than sending the email to your to-do list, add the task itself and archive the original email. You can then make a decision about when you will write the report. Once the report is finished, you can retrieve the original email from your achieve (it’s simple to do with search) and send the report.  Now, I know I may have made this sound easy, the trouble is it’s not. To reduce your to-do list requires a change in approach. If you’ve been told to capture everything, it will seem counterintuitive to not do so.  I advise to look at all your tools. For instance, if you need around an hour a day to respond to your email and messages, then schedule that hour in your calendar. There’s no point in saying you cannot find an hour for emails and messages, when you still need an hour. That’s fighting against time itself, you will never win that battle. To give you an example, generally, I set aside 4:30 to 5:30pm each day for responding to messages and emails. For the most part I can be consistent, but occasionally, I have to move the time around. That’s fine. The objective is to do it, not necessarily do at 4:30pm.  Exercise can also be put on your calendar. I’ve found if you put exercise on a to-do list, you will find an excuse not to do it. On your calendar, and it’s unlikely you will find an excuse.  Project notes are a great place to put your dependent tasks. A dependent task is a task that cannot be done until something else has been done. For example, you cannot complete a sales report until all the sales data has been collected. Or you cannot redecorate the bathroom until you have bought the paint.  Another tip I would give is to keep your grocery list separate from your task list. For example, I use Todoist as my to-do list, but my grocery list is in Apple Reminders. I wear an Apple Watch and to add an item to the list is as simple as raising my wrist and asking Siri to add something to the list. You can also keep a shopping list in your notes app if you prefer.  If you are struggling with your to-do list, remember the only list that matters today is your today list. Nothing else is important. If you are planning the week and giving yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to review your tasks for tomorrow you can make sure you have not over-committed yourself before the day starts. You should not be working from your folders. That’s a sign you have not planned the week. Weekly planning gives you time away from the noise to calming decide what needs to be done next week. That will go a long way towards reducing your daily list.  I hope that helps, Michelle. That you for your question. And thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, how do your task manager, calendar and notes fit together in a time management and productivity system? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 277 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 277 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. A frequently asked question is how does everything fit together? By that what is meant, is having three separate productivity tools too much for something as simple as being guided toward what needs to happen next? On the surface it might well look like that. After all, why use three tools when one tool could do it all. Your calendar, could easily manage your appointments and tasks and quite a few task managers have tried this by integrating with the mainstream calendar apps.  However, what is missed is the ability to compartmentalise. To be able to quickly see the big picture of your day and then to drill down deeper to the micro level and make decisions about what you can or should be doing with your time at that moment.  So, that is what we will be looking at today and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Andy. Andy asks, Hi Carl, I’m struggling to understand why I need to use a to-do list and a calendar. Everyone seems to talk about this but why not keep everything you need to do on your calendar and dispense with using a task manager?  Hi Andy, thank you for your question.  The truth is you do not need a task manager at all. When I began my time management journey, I used an A4 desk diary that showed a week over two pages. When open on my desk, that diary showed me the whole week at a glance.  At the bottom of each day, there was sufficient room to add a few tasks and that is exactly how I used it. Appointments in their allotted time and to-dos written out at the bottom of each day. It worked brilliantly for over fifteen years.  However, with that said, digital tools have made somethings a lot easier. For instance the digital to-do list allows us to create recurring tasks—tasks we would frequently forget to do. This way we can off load a lot from our brains into a digital system without feeling anxious about whether we will remember to do something or not.  However, why do we need three productivity apps when in theory one could do everything for us?  The biggest problem with having everything contained within one app is the overwhelm it will produce. Seeing everything on one page (and I mean everything) will prevent you from quickly seeing what is important and what is not. Generally, in the hierarchy of tools the calendar gives you the overview of your day. It tells you where you need to be at a given time. For example, if you need to collect your kids up from school at 4pm, that would be on your calendar. Similarly, if you have a meeting with an important customer at 1pm, you need to know about that and you need to see it in the context of your whole day.  With tasks, you likely have ten to twenty tasks to perform each day. These will include big important tasks, such as preparing for an important meeting with your boss, to smaller, less important tasks such as refuelling your car before an early morning start the next day. Preparing for the meeting and refuelling your car can be done at anytime in the day and in terms of priority, will be less important than being outside your kids’ school gates at the correct time. (I hope) If you were looking at a list of all your appointments and tasks for the day, it’s going to look overwhelming—even on the easiest of days. You will have important and not important tasks all mixed up together and being able to quickly distinguish what you should be doing will be challenging.  Instead you can look at your calendar as showing you the big picture of your day. It tells you where you need to be with who and when. It’s a quick reference tool in that you can glance at your calendar and see instantly where you should be next and when. It’s not overwhelming because it only shows you your events and blocks of time where you can do the smaller tasks.  Your task manager is the micro-level of your day. It shows you, at a micro-level, what needs to be done. For instance, today, I have a task reminding me to call into my dog’s vet to pick up some anti-tic tablets (it the tic season here in Korea). This task can be done at anytime as the vet’s clinic is a twenty-minute walk from my home. I’m not going to schedule that as I can do it anytime up to 6pm and I know I will need a break at some point in the day and I can do it then.  My task manager also shows me all the little routines I should do today. From clearing my actionable email and updating my business tracking spreadsheets to scheduling my social media. I do these everyday throughout the day and it’s helpful to see what I have and have not done when it comes to closing down my day.  Your notes is something different. This is a tool that has always been used, whether keeping these in notebooks or on bits of paper, we’ve always kept notes and they have been separated from our productivity tools. As far back as Leonardo Di Vinci or Isaac Newton, notebooks have always been where we kept thoughts and ideas.  In our productivity toolbox, notes are the support for your projects and ideas. You only need these when working on a particular piece of work. The great thing about digital notes is they are searchable and that is where they have a huge advantage over paper notes. It means less time filing and searching.  The key to having all these tools working effectively is in how you use them. I recently looked at replicating my old paper-based desk diary system in my digital calendar and it works exceptionally well—which really shouldn’t have surprised me as it’s simple. The only issue I had was not being able to cross completed tasks out. It was either the task stayed at the top of my calendar or they disappeared, which meant I did not have a record of what had been completed. However, in theory the system would work.  However, the issue of overwhelm raised its head again. Seeing all my appointments and tasks in one view is just not a pleasant experience. It dilutes your attention and will cause you to cherry pick easy tasks just to clear some space. That’s not the more effective way to do your work.  Instead, what I have found works best, is to use tags (or labels) to correspond with my focus work time blocks. Let me give you an example of how this works. On a Monday I have a two hour block on my calendar for writing between 9:30 and 11:30am. In my task manager, I have a label for writing. When I plan my day, all I need do look at my writing tasks for that day and decide which one I will do.  I am not being distracted by emails I may need to respond to—I will do that in my communications hour later in the day—or if I need to do any project work. My calendar tells me I am writing for two hours between 9:30 and 11:30 and as long as I respect my calendar—and after all, I was the one who decided I would be writing at that time—then I know each day I will be working on the right things and not being pulled off onto less important, but perhaps louder tasks.  And that’s an important point. Your calendar is your creation—or at least should be. When you get a calendar invite, you don’t have to accept it. You have a choice: accept, decline or maybe. If the invite clashes with a focus block time, you need to have the courage to stand your ground and request an alternative time. A quick tip here, when suggesting an alternative time, always offer two times. You increase the chances the other person will accept your offer of another time with that technique.  Now if your calendar is “compulsory”—at least once you have finalised your calendar for the day it should be, your task manager is discretionary. Never get upset if you do not complete all you tasks for the day, but hold a full blown investigation if you ignore your calendar.  The reality is, there are too many unknowns that could happen in the day—particularly if you are working with other people—you may begin the day expecting a meeting with an important client, only to find they had to cancel and ask for another day and time. Suddenly the meeting you were going to have this afternoon in another part of the city is cancelled. Now you have three hours, you didn’t expect. What are you going to do? That’s where being able to open up your task manager and bring a few tasks forward is helpful.  It’s quick, and you can quickly rearrange the appointment knowing the important things you had planned for that week will not be interrupted if you have to rearrange a meeting.  Now, I should point out, none of this will work if you are not doing any weekly planning. If you’re not planning you will always be working on the latest and loudest. You will never look at the big picture, and you will always feel overwhelmed. The weekly planning sessions are all about giving you some breathing room to look ahead, see what’s heading towards you and making decisions about what you should be working on.  Not everything is important and a lot of what we think we should be doing will, given time, sort themselves out. But, you will never know what those are without doing a plan for the week.  So, there you go, Andy. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remain s for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.