Your Time, Your Way

This podcast provides strategies for managing unknown tasks, prioritizing tasks using the time-sector system, and handling unexpected requests. It emphasizes the importance of setting a plan, recognizing priorities, and chunking tasks for increased efficiency.

The podcast discusses the importance of mastering the basics of time management, the significance of a simple task management system, transitioning from physical to digital systems, the importance of speed and simplicity in productivity tools, and the benefits of regular updates and simplification in productivity systems.

The podcast discusses the importance of execution and completing tasks rather than solely focusing on planning and organizing. It emphasizes using the 20 minute rule to focus on major tasks and overcoming procrastination by simply starting a project. The importance of doing the actual work and improving productivity through repetition and muscle memory is also highlighted.

The podcast discusses the problems with adding tasks to a calendar and why it should be avoided. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the difference between tasks and appointments. It also provides insights on how to effectively manage tasks and appointments using a time blocking system.

Discover strategies to make time for one-off projects amidst your core work and routines. Tips for prioritizing critical work and dedicating specific time slots to projects. Importance of planning and structuring your day to ensure completion of big projects. Personal experience of redecorating a room and the importance of time management in project planning.

This podcast discusses strategies for maximizing time and prioritizing activities for efficiency and productivity. It explores ways to save time through efficient day planning and minimizing distractions. Additionally, it suggests avoiding group chats and eating the same thing every day to maximize productivity. The podcast also provides unique methods to save time, such as meal repetition for quicker cooking and decision-making. It emphasizes the benefits of scheduling services for managing meetings and allocating time for side hobbies to unwind and grow personally.

Exploring the shift from projects to processes, the podcast discusses turning work with clients into processes, building processes for success and efficiency, and highlights the benefits of processes in eliminating wasted time and providing clarity on task management.

This podcast explores the overwhelming amount of information on time management and productivity. It emphasizes the importance of understanding focus and distractions, using tools effectively, and building productive habits. The podcast also discusses strategies for effective time management and work-life balance, featuring examples of successful individuals.

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.