In our final episode of the year, we’re looking at how to improve the productivity of a team. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 258 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 258 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Over the last year or so, I’ve received a number of questions related to helping a team improve their overall productivity. Now, this is a difficult question to answer because each individual team member will be motivated by different things and each person will have a unique approach to getting their work done.  Motivation is a key part to individual productivity. If you are not motivated by your work and you see it only as a way to pay the bills, more fulfilling motives such as ownership of a project or task, developing your skills and helping people solve problems don’t feature in an individual’s mindset. That said, it is possible to build a highly productive team that has clear outcomes each day and week and at the same time builds ownership, camaraderie and a strong team work ethic. And that is what we will be looking at today.  So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Tony. Tony asks, Hi Carl, I manage a team of eight people and we are responsible to sales and the initial after sales programme following delivery of out product. The problem I am having is keeping my team focused on what we are trying to accomplish. They often get distracted by low value tasks that means we often fall behind on our plan. Do you have any advice on helping teams be more focused? Hi Tony, thank you for your question.  As I mentioned in the introduction, working with a team of people has its own challenges when it comes to productivity but there are a few things you can do that will enhance you teams overall productivity. The first is clear communication.  Often what happens within a team is there is poor communication on the results that the team is expected to accomplish. At the beginning of a year or a quarter, team leaders are usually reluctant to talk about what the team’s targets are.  Managers are quite happy to discuss individual targets with employees, but rarely talk about the group target.  The problem here is you encourage team members to focus on their individual targets and the team’s. What you want to be doing is ensuring that the team as a whole knows the target so that they can work together to achieve that team goal.  I remember when I was selling cars in the early 1990s, there were three of us in the new car sales team, plus a sales manager. Claire, Bob and myself.  Claire was an outstanding sales person. She was focused, aggressive (in a positive way) and could pull sales out of nowhere. Bob on the other hand was slower. He was patient and gentler, yet he had an enormous amount of experience and consistently brought ink the sales. Me? I was somewhere in the middle.  Each month out team’s target was to sell 35 cars. Now, traditionally, that number would be divided between the three of us equally, but while Claire rarely missed her targets, Bob and myself struggled to hit the target.  Yet, our sales manager, David, realised that the important target was the 35 cars. Not that his three sales people sold twelve cars each per month. If we had focused on the individual numbers, Claire would have slowed down in the forth week of the month, while Bob and I would be slow at the beginning of the month.  On the white board in David’s office, there was only two numbers. The target (35) and the number of cars we had sold that month. This way, we were encouraged to work as a team.  It also meant that if Claire’s more aggressive approach was not working with a particular customer, David would ask Bob or myself to step in and close the sale. Equally, if a slow burn approach appeared not to be working, we would ask Claire to step in and close the sale.  We had a regular morning meeting at 8:30am and in that meeting we discussed what we had on as potential sales, and we set objectives for the day.  The communication was clear and we set about our day with clear objectives to accomplish that day.  That team was the best team I ever worked in in terms of productivity. As far as I recall we never missed our targets, and we won a lot of awards for the best new car sales team within the group.  The success of that team was down to simple communication and a shared objective.  The next important factor for improving your team’s productivity is to trust your team to get on and do their work. This is about allowing your individual team members to own the task or objective.  If, as a manager, you are micromanaging your team and always monitoring what they are doing, you are destroying the team’s trust. You, as a leader, need to trust your team to get on do what they do best—their job.  As a leader of a team, your job is to ensure your team is moving in the right direction and to remove any barriers your team may face in the execution of their work—more on that later.  What this means, is once you have given your team members their instructions, so to speak, you need to leave them to get on and do it. Hence the importance of clear communication. If you are constantly calling, messaging and emailing them for updates, you are preventing them from doing their work. Your team need space to do their work.  Now in my experience, if a manager or team leader is always requesting updates, it’s a sign they do not trust their team. That is not a productivity issue, but a recruiting one. It means you are recruiting, or you feel you are recruiting, so called “B players”. That needs to stop. If you are employing the right people—the A Players—you can then step back and let them do what they do best.  Now, I know as a leader you need to report to your manager or leader. And that goes back to how you are communicating with your team. If you need to regularly report numbers to your manager, you should set up a simple reporting system that your team updates at the end of each day or week. That way, you will have access to the numbers you need to report to your boss without interrupting your team.  So, make sure you have clear reporting processes put in place for your team. Do not over complicate this. Updating the reporting system should not take your team more than ten minutes each day to do.  Now, back to your role as a barrier remover.  The best managers I’ve ever worked with saw their job as helping me and my colleagues to do their job with as little friction as possible. If there were procedural problems within the company, my manager would step in to sort out these problems. If I ever had a difficult customer, or student, my manager would step in and clear whatever problems I was having.  I remember one occasion where we had a particularly difficult student in our language institute. She was never happy with the teacher she was given and would inevitably complain if the teacher diverged from the textbook. Whenever she turned up in one the teacher’s classes, they would freeze up and their classes became very boring, which meant they lost students.  Our institute manager and I (as I was the native English teacher’s manager at that time) sat down and worked out a strategy to help this student achieve what she wanted to achieve. We even had a meeting with her to explain our teaching philosophy.  In the end it was decided I would teach her next class and before the class started I sat down and explained my teaching methodology to her and got her to agree to following my method for a month.  What we did was take a difficult student away from the other teachers so they could get on and do their job and allowed the most experienced teacher (at the that time, me) to solve the problem. We did. And, I got an invite to that student’s wedding six months later.  The one thing you do not want to be doing as a manager is imposing your productivity system on your team. What works for you is not likely to work for them. Instead, you want to be focusing on is giving clear instructions to your team and letting them get on do what they are best at doing.  The final piece of this puzzle is how you communicate with your team. If you allow your team to communicate in anyway they like, you are going to find you are swamped with emails, Teams or Slack messages and a backlog of phone calls.  Set a standard. If you are not already using something like Microsoft Teams or Slack, then look into adding a channel like this as your team’s communication channel.  This allows you to centralise all messages and gives your team a resource for solving problems that individual team members have solved. It can become a team Wiki page.  You also need to avoid placing response time expectations on your team too. If they feel they need to reply to your messages within minutes of receiving them. They are not going to be productive. Your team need the space to do their work, not worrying about replying to your messages as soon as they come in.  However, if you put in place a workable reporting system, you should not need to be asking your team for updates—that information will be available in the reporting system.  One final part to this is the question about whether you need a task or project manager to manage the tasks within your team. These can help if your team are working on joint projects. These can also help you as a manager to see what’s happening, what still needs to be done and where there are holdups. I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of the various apps you can use here, but in my experience working with teams, the best apps for managing team based work are apps like Trello, Microsoft Planner and Asana—boards seem to work better than lists with teams.  The key to making task and project managers work is someone needs to have responsibility to ensure they are updated. If you, as the team leader are the only one using this system it is not going to work. You need commitment from your team and that means you will need to show the benefits to your team.  I would suggest you set up a training morning or afternoon with your whole team to go through how to use the system. Allocate responsibility for making sure the system is up to date and clearly define expectations.  In my experience, if you commit to training your team correctly in using the task manager, you will get support. A lack of training and understanding of the benefits is usually the reason why these well-intentioned approaches fail to work.  So there you go, Tony. I hope that helped and thank you for your question.  Thank you to you too for listening and let me wish you a wonderful Christmas (if you celebrate Christmas), and a fantastic start to the new year.  This podcast will be back on the 9th January. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

This week, what could you change about your system to get it ready for 2023?   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 257 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 257 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. There’s something about an end of year that turns our minds towards cleaning things up, making changes and planning. Yet when you think about it, these things can be done at any time in the year. Cleaning your task manager of tasks that have been sitting around for over a year, reviewing how we manage our tasks and making plans can all be done anytime. All we need to do is make that decision. That said, the end of year often does give us some extra time to do these things. Emails reduce a little, and most people’s attention turn towards the upcoming year. And certainly if you live in the west, Christmas week does take us away from our work and spending time with family and friends.  I find this presents opportunities to clean up my notes for the year, delete tasks I’ve added, not done and are just sitting around in my task manager cluttering things up.  This week’s question is on this very subject. What can we do to change things, reenergise tired processes and fix things that haven’t worked well throughout the year.  So, without further discourse, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Jan. Jan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve seen you mention your end of year clean up in your blog posts in the past but I’ve never seen or heard you describe what you do. Could you explain your process for cleaning things up? Hi Jan, thank you for your question. My end of year clean up has become a bit of a ritual for me now. It’s something I enjoy doing because I am not working in the sense of creating content, instead I am doing a lot of sitting around and TV watching, not something I do at anything other time of the year. It’s relaxing and my mind isn’t “on” in the sense of thinking what to create next. So, where do I start?  The first step for me is to do a review of all the apps I am using. The goal here is to eliminate apps I am not using. That means evaluating the usefulness of the apps I have on my computer, phone and iPad.  Through the year I will test a few apps to see what everyone is talking about. In the past, I’ve had apps like Notion, Obsidian, Things 3 and OneNote on my computer and as they didn’t make the cut, so to speak, I deleted them.  This year, I will be happily removing all the COVID apps I installed, I noticed these were still hanging around on a “just in case” basis. But as Korea is no longer doing test and trace and we can travel without the need for a PCR test, I can remove these.  I should point out if you do this exercise, once you’ve cleared all these apps, your computer, phone and tablets feel faster. I’m sure there’s no difference, but it does feel faster.  Next is to go into my workhorse apps and clean them up. I usually start with Todoist because this is the easiest one to clean up. With the Time Sector System, the folder you want to be paying attention to is your Long-term and on-hold folder. This folder can easily become a dumping ground and the end of the year is a good time to go in there and delete tasks you know you’re not going to be doing.  For tasks that have been sitting in there for a while but you feel you will still likely want to do them, you can move them out of your task manager and create a project note or add them to a list of tasks you want to do in the future but require further planning out, again in your notes.  Then it’s time to go into my notes. Now for me, this year is going to be a difficult one. This is the year I will be making a decision on whether to relegate Evernote to being a storage app and go all in on Apple Notes. Now, the reason for this change of approach with Evernote is because Evernote is going in a direction that will not support how I use notes. That’s not a criticism of Evernote, I feel Evernote is doing brilliantly. However for me, I want my notes app to be simple with as few features as possible. When an app has too many features, the temptation to play around with formatting, colours and setups is too much for me. I spend more time playing than doing and that does nothing for my productivity.  Apple Notes, on the other hand, is simple, has great search features and works across all my devices. The test size is readable (while Evernote on my phone and iPad is too small for me to read comfortably), and it does the job I want a notes app to do with little fuss.  Throughout the year, if you are using a notes app properly, you will have collected a lot of notes that you no longer need. These need to be deleted (or archived). I love this purge. It almost acts as a review of my year. I go through my folders, clearing our old notes and making sure the titles and any tags I am using for the notes I keep are relevant and searchable.  This step is important. The search features on our computers are very powerful these days, and saves us a lot of time when looking for a note. If you haven’t learned how to use the system search on your devices, that’s something I highly recommend you do. It will save to a lot of time.  It during this clean up process when you will also see ways where you can improve your structure. If you’ve read Tiago Forte’s Building A Second Brain book this year, a book I would highly recommend, you may want to implement some of the principles in that book at this stage.  Now while you cleaning up your task manager and notes app, you want to be asking yourself: “how can I do it better?”. We want to be building seamless and effective systems, and there’s always room for improvement. If you remember the principles of COD—Collect, Organise, Do—you want to be asking yourself how you can improve your collecting process and how you can reduce the time it takes you to organise what you collect so you can spend more time doing the work.  The more time you spend in your task managers and notes apps, the less time you spend doing the work. So ask yourself, where can you speed up the process?  The final step to the end-of-year clean up is to go into the folders where you store your documents. Now, this is often the hardest part of the process because, over the year, we will have accumulated a lot of documents that either we no longer need or can be archived.  I use an external hard drive to move files and documents I no longer need. This helps to keep my computer’s drive clean and also reduces the need for more space in my cloud storage services.  I would also recommend you go into your Documents folder on your computer. We often download PDFs and other documents here and then forget about them. Clean that out.  Once you’ve cleared everything up, now it’s time for the fun part. Asking yourself how you can improve your system. Again, what we are looking for here is speed. How can we get faster at finding our stuff? Researching your device’s search tips and tricks is a great way to do this. I’ve learned so much by watching YouTube videos on learning how to get the most out of Apple’s Spotlight (and optimising it to work better for me).  The point of this exercise is to get your systems ready for the new year. You don’t want to be going into the new year with slow, unwieldy systems. Starting the new year with a clean set-up not only speeds everything up, but it also sets you up for a fantastic year.  The final part of this process is to look for bumps in the road where your system isn’t working too well. I find these bumps are usually in your task managers. Your task manager needs to tell you what you should be working on today. Everything else in there is simply holding pens for tasks you don’t need to do today, or you have not yet decided when you will do them.  How can you best set this up so when you go into your task manager to see what needs to happen today, you can see instantly what your objective tasks are—the tasks that must be done today?  And now for the bonus. In recent years, I have taken to using the end-of-year break to go through my calendar to see how I can better optimise my week, so I get to spend more time doing the things I love doing. From spending more quality time with my family to being more consistent with exercise.  For 2023, the area I want to improve is my sleep. I am a terrible sleeper, and I need to be more consistent with this. So, one of my objectives is to redesign my week, so I have a cut-off time each day—a time I need to switch off my computer and a time I need to be in bed.  If you have followed my tip to design your perfect week, you can turn on this calendar and see how you can merge this with your actual week. To give you an example, I want to better use the mornings for creative work. I am at my most creative in the morning and a lot less so in the afternoons. I can block time out on my calendar for writing and recording and push off all my meetings to the afternoon or later in the morning. I understand not all of you have complete control over your calendar. But you likely have more control than you think. Blocking time out now means other people cannot schedule meetings when you could be getting on with your focused work. Try it. It might just work. If it doesn’t, then you can go back to the drawing board and rethink your strategy here.  So, there you go, Jan. I hope that has helped and I also hope you get some time over the Christmas break to play with this. The key is to not put pressure on yourself to do this. It needs to be fun. I like to sit with my parents in the evenings and while they watch their favourite TV shows, I can be getting on and cleaning things up.  As this exercise is fun, I can be present when we are talking and while they are consumed in the TV show. I can be cleaning up.  Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 256 This week, we’re looking at the overwhelming number of so-called “projects” people create and why it’s these that contribute to overwhelm and a lot of wasted time.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 256 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 256 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. I read David Allen’s seminal book, Getting Things Done, around fifteen years ago, and it helped me to transform away from a manual Franklin Planner that had served me well for the previous 17 years to a fully digital productivity system.  In Getting Things Done, David Allen defines a project as anything requiring two or more steps to complete. He also mentioned that most people have between thirty and a hundred projects at any one time.  Now, if you are following a correct interpretation of GTD (as Getting Things Done is called), that would not pose a problem because projects are kept in file folders in a filing cabinet near your desk and your task manager is organised by context—meaning your lists are based around a place such as your workplace, home or hardware store, a tool such as your computer or phone or a person, such as your partner, boss or colleagues.  Unfortunately, when apps began to appear, many app developers misread or misinterpreted the GTD concept and built their apps around project lists instead of contexts. It could also have been a concern for intellectual property rights. But either way, this has led to people organising their task list managers by project and not context. And it is this that has caused so much to go wrong for so many people.  This week’s question is on this very subject and why managing your task manager by your projects is overwhelming and very ineffective.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Lara. Lara asks, hi Carl, Last year I read the Getting Things Done book and have really struggled to get it to work for me. I have nearly 80 projects in my task manager, and I feel I am spending too much time keeping everything organised. I never seem to be able to decide what to work on, and everything feels important. Do you have any suggestions on spending less time managing work and more time doing the work?  Hi Lara, thank you for your question.  So, as I mentioned in the opening, the problem here is you are managing your projects in the wrong place. Task managers are there to manage your tasks, not your projects. If you want to manage projects with software, you would be better off purchasing dedicated project management software. However, those apps can be very expensive and have been designed for corporations and large teams working on a single project. Apps like Monday.com and Wrike are examples of accessible project managers.  However, apps like these are designed for teams of people working together on a single project and will not solve your problem of being able to spend more time doing your work and less time organising it. Now, you did not mention if you wanted to continue using the GTD model or not, but if you want to get things better organised, the first step would be to remove your projects from your task manager and replace your lists with something you can better manage.  Now, I use the Time Sector System to manage my tasks. This means my task manager is organised by when I will do the task. There are five time sectors: This week, next week, this month, next month and long-term and on hold.  This means when a task comes into my task manager, the only thing I need to decide is when I will do the task. If it needs doing this week, it will be added to my This Week folder; if it does need doing this week, I will distribute it accordingly.  In the GTD world, you need to set up your task manager by your different contexts. These can be anything, but they do need to work for you. While in the GTD book, David Allen gives us examples of @office, @computer, @phone and @home etc, these are a bit out of date today. We can do email from a computer, tablet or phone, and many of us work in a hybrid way in that we do a lot of work working from home.  Now, I’ve seen some people organise their work by energy level: for instance, high energy would be for big tasks that require quite a bit of time, low energy would be for easy tasks that can be done at any time.  The great thing about GTD is you can choose your own contexts that better fit your lifestyle.  However, a better way to manage all this is to treat the folders in your task manager as holding pens for tasks yet to be done. The only thing that really matters is what you have to do today. Allowing yourself to be distracted by what can be done tomorrow or next week will slow you down and bring with it a sense of overwhelm.  But, before we get there, let’s look at how you are defining a project.  In GTD a project is defined as anything requiring two or more steps. This is where I think GTD breaks down. For example, arranging for my car to go in for a service will require more than one step. I need to confer with my wife for a suitable day that we both will be available, I need to call the dealership to book the car in and I need to add the date to my calendar because the dealership is sixty miles away from where we live.  Yet, the only task I have in my task manager is an annual, recurring task that comes up on the 1st September reminding me to book my car in for a service. When that task appears, I know to ask my wife when she will be available. I don’t need three tasks all written out in a separate project.  Equally, much of the work we do is routine. For example, every week, I need to write a blog post, two essays, prepare and record this podcast and create two to three YouTube videos. Technically, in the GTD world, each of those tasks are projects. There are more than one step involved in each of those pieces of content. But I do not treat them as individual projects. They are tasks I just do.  I know I need around five hours a week for writing, so I block out five hours each week for writing on my calendar. I need three hours to prepare this podcast and another three hours for recording and editing my YouTube videos. As I know the amount of time I need for each of my pieces of work, I block the time out in my calendar.  Now, in your case Lara, what is the work you have to do each week? Before you do anything else, block out sufficient time for getting that work done on your calendar now.  Let’s say for example; you are in sales and each day you want to contact ten prospects. How long does that take you? If that takes you an hour each day, then you need to block an hour out on your calendar to do that work. There’s no point in ‘hoping’ you will find the time. You won’t. If it is something you must do or want to do, you need to allocate sufficient time for doing it. On your calendar, you would write “Sales Calls”. In your notes, or a spreadsheet, you would have a list of people to contact. In this example, it’s unlikely you need a task for this because your calendar is dictating what you will do and the list of people to contact are in a dedicated CRM, spreadsheet or notes app. You don’t need to duplicate things.  Let’s look at a different kind of project. Let’s say you are moving house. That’s a big project. How would we manage that?  My advice is open your notes app. Project like this that are going involve checklists, emails, images, designs, things to buy, copies of contracts and so much more would never work well in a task manager. You are also likely to need a file folder on your computer to keep all these documents.  On your calendar, you will have your moving date and perhaps a few extra days for organising your new home.  What would go on your task manager? Very little. You may have tasks such as send signed contracts to landlord or your lawyers, or to call the electricity company to notify them of your moving in date, but you would be managing a project like this from your notes app, not a task manager.  Most of our difficulties with task managers is we are putting too much in there. There’s a limit to what we can do each day. We are constrained by the time available. It’s that part of the equation we cannot change. Time is fixed. The only thing we have any control over is what we do in the time we have available. And it’s there where we need to get realistic.  If you begin the day and there are 60+ tasks in your task manager for today, you have failed. You will never complete all those tasks. You’ve got to get realistic about what you can achieve each day.  For me, if my task manager has more than twenty tasks to do, I know I am not going to complete them all. I will go into my task manager and reschedule some of those tasks. It’s no good telling myself these tasks have to be done, because I already know I will not have enough time to do them all. You need to get strict about what must be done and what can be rescheduled for another day.  So, Lara, my advice is move your projects out of your task manager and into your notes. Whether you use Apple Notes, Evernote, Notion or OneNote (or something else), it’s your notes app that will better manage your projects. You can keep copies of relevant emails, links to documents and so much more in your notes. You can also create checklists. I will be travelling to Europe in a couple weeks. It’s a ten day trip and I’ve create a note for the trip in my notes app. That note contains my travel checklist, copies of my flight confirmation email, and a list of the things I need to do while there. There is nothing in my task manager. A few weeks ago, there was. I had a single task telling me to book my flights. Now that’s done everything related to this trip is managed from my notes app.  The goal, is to keep your task manager clean and tight. Only relevant things that need to be done should be there. Routines such as cleaning my office and doing my admin and cleaning my actionable email each day are in there—while I don’t really need these reminders, they are there in case I have an emergency and need need a lit of things that should have been done where I can decide what must be done and what can be rescheduled. I hope that has helped Lara and thank you for your question. Thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.  

This week, we’re looking at new year goals and what we can do to improve our chances of success. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 255 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 255 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 few weeks ago, I published a video on planning 2023 on my YouTube channel. In that video, I encouraged viewers to create a note in their notes app and to begin a two-month brainstorming period where they looked at a few areas of their lives and thought about what they would like to change.  These areas were around what they would like to change about themselves, their work and their lifestyles. Plus a couple of questions about goals and bucket lists.  The idea here is to open you up so you can go deeper than your usual new year's resolutions and to give you time to think about the person you want to become.  Well, that two month brainstorming period is coming to an end and it’s time to start looking at what you can do in 2023 that will move things forward on the areas you would like to make changes and in this week’s podcast, a break from the normal format, I will take you through the process of building a plan for 2023 that will be achievable, fun and more importantly will be the catalyst for the changes you will need to turn these ideas into reality.  So, this week, the Mystery Podcast Voice will be having a break, and we’ll get straight into the answer. So, if you did the annual planning exercise, you will hopefully have quite a lot of ideas written down on your planning sheet.  Now, don’t worry if you haven’t done the annual planning exercise; there’s still a little time left for you to do it.  So, the four main questions on the planning sheet are: What would I like to change about myself? What would I like to change about my lifestyle? What would I like to change about the way I work? What can I do to challenge myself? Each of these questions is designed to get you to explore a different part of your life, from you as an individual to the way you work. The final question on challenging yourself is there to help prevent you from stagnating and getting stuck inside the dangerous comfort zone.  If you have completed this exercise over the last six to eight weeks, you will, by now, have quite a list. The problem is you will not be able to complete all of these ideas in twelve months. The trick now is to look at your list as a whole and look for a pattern.  Often you will find in the part about making changes to yourself that there will be some areas you have not been happy with for a while. Your time management might be bad, or you may not be happy with the state of your health.  To give you an example, last year, I wanted to improve the quantity and quality of my sleep—which was not healthy. This led me to look at my day as a whole and to see why I was not getting sufficient sleep. I had too many early starts and late finishes. I could see from my calendar that this was not sustainable, so I created a few rules.  Now, I must be finished at my computer by 11pm and be in bed by 11:30pm. I also changed my morning start from 6:00am to 7:30am.  I also made a point to read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, which is a fantastic book and learned a lot more about ensuring I had a better quality of sleep each night. I have not been perfectly consistent with this, but I have made a lot of progress and will continue to refine this going into 2023.  And this is something you will discover. It’s unlikely you will be able to change something perfectly—most things we are working towards will always be works in progress—but the act of starting and building in new routines and habits will lead you towards where you want to be.  When it comes to the lifestyle question, what we are looking at here is the way we are living our lives. Three years ago, at the end of 2019, I realised I had got stuck in a rut in where we were living. A few years earlier, my wife and I had decided we wanted to move to the east coast and away from the noisy and poor air quality of the big city, but we were doing nothing about it. I saw that our reliance on the public transport system was great if we wanted to stay living in the big city, but was the reason we were ‘trapped’ there. We decided that the best way to break this would be to get a car. And that became our goal in 2020.  This meant I needed to get serious about saving money, and that is what I did from the start of 2020. Now, I was helped by the pandemic. That reduced our expenditure significantly because for a large part of 2020, we were unable to go out.  In September of that year, we bought our car, and that changed everything for us. We travelled around the country once a week, discovering new places, and in December, we found a guest house on the east coast that we could rent monthly, and we took the plunge. We signed up for an initial three-month stay in January, and that led to us staying the whole of 2021. At the end of it, we had let our apartment in the city go and moved to a new home on the east coast.  None of these changes would have taken place if I had not identified areas we were not entirely happy with. It was taking the time to look at things as a whole and seeing where we could make changes that would lead us to where we really wanted to be.  Now, what about the way you work? Here you have greater control over things than you may imagine. The pandemic has brought more flexible ways to work, and that’s a great thing. Research suggests that if you are more of an extrovert, you thrive in an environment surrounded by people. Conversely, if you are more of an introvert, you will find working from home incredibly satisfying and productive.  So, perhaps one of the first things you want to investigate is what kind of person you are. Where do you do your best work? Alone, in a quiet place or when surrounded by people and noise.  But there are other things you can look at with your work. For one, identify what your core work is. This is the work you are paid to do. Look at your job description. For instance, a departmental manager is employed to manage a department. What are the core tasks involved in managing a department? Where do you think you could improve in these areas?  For instance, if you want to improve productivity within your team, the best thing you can do is improve your communication. If your way of communicating is not simple, direct, and to the point when assigning projects, that will profoundly affect the outcome of the project.  The method is to tell your team in clear terms what the outcome you want is, and to trust that your team will use their skills and knowhow to deliver the results on time. Interfering, calling too many meetings, and micro-managing will result in a team that performs poorly and is demotivated.  Learn to tell them what you want to and let them get on with it. Develop simple reporting systems that require little time from your employees so they can stay focused on the objective.  If you are a salesperson, what could you change next year that would improve your overall performance? Where do you feel you are weak and what could learn, change or develop that will improve that area?  And that brings us to the final question: what can you do to challenge yourself? One of the biggest dangers in our lives is our comfort zone. Our ancestors had to deal with war, revolution, disease and predators. Today, for the majority of people on earth, our lives are incredibly easy by comparison. We have an abundance of food, safe houses and access to clean water.  This has made our lives far too easy, and we no longer put ourselves in challenging situations. Without challenging ourselves, we stop growing and when that happens our lives atrophy and we fall behind. You cannot let that happen. It’s devastating on your mental health and leaves you feeling left behind.  Set yourself a challenge in 2023. That could be to climb the tallest mountain in your country, or to do the from couch to 5k running race. Alternatively you could sign up for a challenging course such as a masters degree or to design a 30 day challenge for each month of the year.  Something that would really challenge you.  The great thing about setting yourself something challenging is you will reintroduce yourself to the concept of failure. Failure is the best way to learn and to grow. It’s through failure we learn what works and what does not work. From my own personal experience I’ve learned that failure is the greatest teacher there is.  It teaches you to analyse where things went wrong, where they went well and and helps you to reframe problems and difficulties so you find a way around them.  The important thing to remember is you do not have to change everything all at once. Changing slowly over a number of years is likely to give you better results than trying to change everything in one year. One of my favourite Tony Robbins’ quotes is “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade”  So, think long-term. Having an approach of CANI—Constant And Never-ending Improvement will help you to achieve the things you want to achieve and bring you a lot more fulfilment that trying to change too much too fast and giving up. That destroys your confidence and leaves you feeling terrible about yourself.  Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, we’re looking at the unsexy part of becoming more productive and better with our time management. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 254 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 254 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Now, most people in the time management and productivity field, such as myself, will generally talk about systems, routines and applications. And while these do have an important place in the helping us be more productive, there are three other parts to the productivity equation rarely talked about and often overlooked.  What are those?  They are Sleep, exercise and diet.  For many people, these three elements are elephants in their otherwise well-ordered life. You know, deep down, if you are not getting sufficient sleep, not getting outside and moving, and eating highly processed and unnatural foods, you are destroying your ability to focus, concentrate and ultimately that effects your overall output. (Not to mention what these will do to your long-term health) And I am not just talking about work output. If you are constantly tired and unable to concentrate, that’s going to have negative effects on your family life. You will be too tired for quality time with your kids and partner, and that poor diet and lack of sleep will adversely affect your mood when you do have time for your family life.  We have a lot to look at here so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been so busy at work this year that when I get home all I want to do is crash on the sofa and do nothing. I end up watching TV or watching YouTube videos until very late and then not getting enough sleep. I know I should spend some time planning my day and doing some exercise, but I just don’t have the energy. How do you fit in time for exercise and planning?  Hi Ryan, thank you for your question.  This is a problem I know many people face. Planning the day at the end of the day when you're tired and just want to do nothing because you are exhausted. It’s not going to be something high on your list of priorities.  Let’s be honest, we can all operate a reasonably productive day without doing daily planning. For most people, this is how they have operated for years without any immediate adverse effects. However, a question I would ask is without following a few simple daily practices, how are things turning out?  If you are stressed out, anxious and exhausted at the end of your working day, is that a good thing? Is that how you want to feel at the end the of the day?  So, what can we do? Well, this is what I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. While new systems and apps are exciting, and the sexy part of productivity and time management, these things will only go so far. No new app or system will change the work you still have to do. Just because a task is in Things 3 instead of Todoist, won’t change the fact that the task still needs doing.  No app is going to plan the day for you—even with machine learning or artificial intelligence. Only you, as an individual knows what’s important to you. I find it interesting that Outlook Calendar’s AI will fill your blank times with work, never tell you to call your partner, or go for a walk.  Now, I’ve been studying productivity and time management long enough to know that it’s never the case of not having time. You have time. You have more than enough time to fit everything in. The real reason you “feel” you don’t have time is you have not prioritised what’s important to you.  But, let’s step back a little and look at the three absolute basics of being more productive. Let’s start with sleep. When you get sufficient amount sleep, you are more awake, more creative and focused. Those three on their own will give you a far more productive day than being half asleep, and distracted.  I did a little experiment earlier this year. I spent a week surviving on four and half hours sleep each day. That week was a complete disaster for my overall productivity. Work that I was normally able to easily get done in a week, was a struggle. In fact, I had to give up trying to do some of the work I wanted to do.  By the end of that week, I had a backlog. I NEVER have backlogs. I was too tired to clear my actionable email each day. I became irritable towards the end of the week, and I started craving sugary snacks after only two days.  By the end of the week, I was exhausted. My exercise was terrible. Even taking my dog for a work became a chore—something I normally love doing.  Now, I’ve never been a good sleeper. But The lessons I learned from that little experiment got me serious about my sleep. I will cancel meetings and appointments now if I need to, to ensure I get my minimum number of hours (six and half).  So, Ryan, my first tip is sort your sleep out. If you don’t know how much sleep you need, do an experiment over the end of year break and sleep with no alarm for seven days. Make a note of how many hours sleep you get each night and average it out. That will tell you how much sleep you naturally need. We are all different here.  From my experiment during my last break, I discovered I actually need an average of 7 hours 20 minutes. I’m not there yet. As I say, I have a minimum of 6 ½ hours, but next year I will work towards moving that to the seven hours twenty minutes.  I would strongly recommend to all of you that you read Matthew Walker’s book, Why We Sleep. That will change your whole thinking about sleep.  Just getting enough sleep each day will radically improve your overall productivity as well as your mood, so you are a lot more attentive to the people you care about.  Now, what about exercise? Now here’s the problem with exercise. A lot of people hate exercise. Possibly because how they were introduced to exercise at school has left a scar that still lives with them today. Yet exercise is essential for productivity. However, to get the benefit of exercise, you do not need to go to a gym or out running. Really, what is meant by “exercise” is movement. We need to move.  It’s interesting that when Apple were developing the Apple Watch, the two key parts to their exercise app were number of “active” minutes and the number of times you stood up per day. They even put a target on these: Thirty minutes of activity and standing twelve times per day. The standing metric was measured by making sure you stood at least once for sixty seconds or more every hour or so.  So, what is involved in movement or activity. Well, a thirty minute intentional walk would do. But you can go further. Stop using lifts (or elevators as they are called in North America) and escalators. Reintroduce yourself to stairs. The stairs are a great source for getting the blood flowing and improving your focus and productivity.  Even if you have a disability and are unable to walk unaided, any kind of activity you can do that will raise your heart rate counts as exercise. A non-motorised wheel chair gives you wonderful opportunities to move with your upper body for example.  One tip I learned from a preventative medicine doctor (Dr Mark Hyman) is to get yourself outside and walk for twenty minutes after a meal. That movement will prevent your blood sugar levels from spiking after a meal and help you to avoid the ‘afternoon slump’ that affects so many people.  Seventy years ago, it would have been very hard to find a gym. Lifting weights was an exclusive and minority sport and unless you were into body building—a sport most people had never heard of back then—your only introduction to a gymnasium was at school and most people treated those as a wicket form of torture netted out my evil PE teachers. Why were gyms so rare back then? Well, that’s because we moved a lot more and never needed them. There wasn’t the convenience we have today. Escalators were rare, very few people had TVs in their home (and those that did had to keep getting up to change channel) and if someone called you, you again had to get up, go to the hall and answer the phone.  There was no home delivery pizza or other convenience foods, so we had to cook. Our whole lives were based around movement.  Today, it’s perfectly normal for many people to get home, sit down on the sofa and not move again until they head off to bed four or five hours later. They left their home, walked the three metres to their car, drove to the office, parked in the car park, walked the five metres to the lifts, got to their desks, and spend the next eight or nine hours sat down. Then repeated the homeward journey, to spend the evening sat on a sofa.  Is it any wonder in the developed world over 60% of people are dangerously overweight and suffering from some form of preventable cardiovascular disease? And that leads me to the final piece in the mix. Diet.  Yes, convenience food is often delicious. It’s also quick and can fill a hole instantly. You would think if all I have to do is order something through an app, have it delivered to my door within thirty minutes that would allow me more time to get more stuff done.  Well, no. The majority of food we eat today is highly processed, full of sugar and is not satiating. It leaves you craving more which has disastrous effects on your blood sugars. This then leads to spikes in your insulin levels and if repeated over a long period of time will result in you becoming pre-diabetic or full blown diabetic.  And diabetes is not a disease you want. It’s linked to the increasing numbers of dementia, not to mention the likelihood of limb amputations, irreversible heart disease and kidney failure. You really do not want to develop this horrible disease.  The effects of all that sugar and highly processed food on your productivity is devastating. It’s what leaves you feeing hungry mid-morning, sleepy in the afternoon and exhausted in the evenings. You’re not in the mood to focus your attention on anything. This is why we are so easily distracted by email, messages and our co-workers gossiping.  The trouble is most people are in denial about the state of their diet. They think the problem is they have too much work, they are overwhelmed or their systems are a mess (so they need to find a new app).  No. If you’re not getting enough sleep or exercise and your diet is a disaster zone, that is the reason why you are stressed out, overwhelmed and tired all the time. It’s not your work or the things you have to do.  Now, as we come towards the end of the year, my advice is start with these three unsexy parts of the productivity mix. Make a commitment to yourself to start moving and sleeping more and sort out your diet.  As I mentioned before read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep book. In addition, I would recommend Dr Mark Hyman’s Pecan Diet book as well as Dr David Perlmutter’s Drop Acid.  Once you’ve read those three books read Dr Jason Fung’s Obesity Code.  If you commit to reading those four books over the end of year break, you will furnish yourself with the knowledge to make better choices about how and when to sleep as well as what to eat. They will dramatically change your life.  Making changes in these three areas of your life: your sleep, movement and diet will have a profound impact on your energy levels through the day which will impact the quality and quantity not only on what you do last work, but with your relationships with the people that matter most to you.  Plus, of course, you will significantly reduce your risk of developing debilitating lifestyle diseases that will ultimately prevent you from living the life you have always dreamed of.  Thank you, Ryan, for you 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, we’re looking at building balance into our lives, and I explain why we look at the whole idea of balance the wrong way. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 253 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 253 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. We frequently hear about balancing our lives. Terms like “work/life balance” are bandied around as if it’s something we can achieve. The trouble is, building balanced days and weeks is an elusive goal. There’s simply too much we want to build into our days: Seven to eight hours sleep, quality time with our family, exercise, eight to nine hours of work and time for eating, resting, TV and hobbies. Add all that up and it’s more than twenty-four hours.  This week’s question is about how we can build a more balanced life and there is a way, but first we need to dispose of the traditional thinking about what a balanced life is and embrace a different approach.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question from from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl, I work a full time job, have two young kids, a husband and a lot of hobbies I want to pursue. The trouble I have is I cannot fit everything I want to do into my schedule. I’ve tried your perfect week idea, but I find I run out of time. Are there any other ways I can try to have a more balanced, less stressful life?  Hi Annie, thank you for your question.  I was very much in the same boat as you a few years ago. I was trying to build a business, work a full time job, exercise every day and spend quality time with my family and it was impossible.  Whenever there was a public holiday, I wanted to work on my own business, but there were family responsibilities that could not be ignored and my regular work days were lengthening. I found myself working well past midnight, and having to wake up at 6 AM to get to my first classes.  It was around then I realised that there will always be periods of time when we need to get our heads down and do our work. But these intense periods of work do not last.  Take starting a business as an example. If you decide to start your own business, the first thing to get thrown out of the window is the idea of working nine til’ five. That’s a corporate office life concept that does not work when you start your own business. Starting your own business requires a 24/7 commitment. If you’re not working on your business, your brain will be solving problems and coming up with fresh ideas. It’s constant and doesn’t stop.  However, that’s when you are in the startup phase. Once you have your business up and running, things slow somewhat. You develop processes for doing your work and you soon start to get your time back.  When I first began my YouTube channel, it took me pretty much all day on a Friday to record and edit my videos. Today, I can do the recording and editing in less than three hours. I developed processes. I learned how to use Adobe’s Premiere Pro video editing software and I have systems in place to ensure everything is uploaded quickly and efficiently.  What we need to do is to look at time and balance over a longer period. You are not going to balance individual days, everyday. You may be able to balance occasional days, but to do that you would have to almost micro-manage your day, and there are so many things that could torpedo your plans, trying to do this too often will just result in stress and anxiety.  For example, Annie, if you are trying to juggle your work, your family, hobbies and other things in your life, you could look at your whole week. Accepting on, say, Tuesday and Thursday you will be focused on work, but you could also make Wednesday and Friday family nights and Mondays could be used for your hobbies.  For this to work, you would need to be doing a weekly planning session. It would be during this planning time where you block activities on your calendar for the following week. Having a plan like this then allows you to plan at a deeper level at what you will do. For instance, one of your children may have a swimming lesson on Wednesday evenings. You could block out Wednesday evenings to go to the swimming pool and perhaps add going out for dinner with your kids afterwards. That’s spending quality time with your kids.  If you know, you will have time on a Thursday for catching up on work, you would be much more relaxed and present with your kids on a Wednesday.  One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that there will be periods of time when we need to be completely focused on a project. A project that requires a lot of time and attention over a month or more.  In these situations, if you are worried about trying to balance your time, you are introducing a lot of unnecessary stress into your life. Important projects that need lot of focus need time. You cannot rush these things. Introducing stress into the mix is going to harm that focus and will be very unhealthy for you. However, if we look at a period of say three months, and see how balanced those three months were, you are likely to find that you have been pretty balanced. When I analyse my last three months, I’ve worked on two big projects, spent a few days with my family, exercised almost every day and managed a few easy days of rest and relaxation.  Those big projects consumed me for around ten days each. They involved a few sixteen hour days and a lot of focus and thinking. But a three month period has around ninety days, so twenty days out of ninety is pretty balanced.  In those ninety days, there have been twelve days off (I try to take one day off a week) for you, Annie, you may two days off a week, so that twenty-four days.  Most people’s problem with balance is they are looking at things in a too shorter time frame. If you extend the time frame over three or more months, you have a far greater chance of balancing your life.  If you look at author, John Grisham’s work and life balance, he will spend around three to six months of the year in intense writing mode. Each day for those three to six months he’s completely consumed with the book he is writing. Once finished and the manuscript is sent to his publishers, he disappears on holiday. For the next few weeks it’s all about rest and relaxation.  The great thing about seeking balance over a longer period of time is you feel a lot less stressed and anxious. You know you can allow certain parts of your life to consume you for periods of time. Whether that is work or family related. It also means you can be much more present in the moment, without worrying about what you are not doing.  Another concept I’ve looked at in the past is the eight week work cycle. This is where for six weeks you focus all your efforts and attention on working on a specific project and once that has been concluded, you rest for two weeks. During those two weeks you attend to all the things you haven’t put much attention on.  Around two years ago, I adopted a quarterly week off. This is where I take the last week of each quarter off. I got this idea from Tim Ferriss. He actually takes two weeks off and travels to a different country or city for the duration of the break. He’s a little stricter than I am in that he comes off the grid entirely. No phone, no internet, just him his thoughts and a notebook.  What I’ve noticed is people who have adopted a longer time frame to create balance in their lives get a lot more done and are a lot happier and less stressed. They know there will be time for spending with their family and friends, and when they are with their family and friends they really are with them. Not being physically present but mentally being elsewhere—thinking about work, or a project that is not getting done.  In a recent weekly newsletter, I wrote about the time pendulum. In this the needle swings to the left occasionally when you have a lot of work related stuff on your plate. It’s all consuming and needs you attention beyond your regular work hours. However, the pendulum will always swing back towards the right where you get time to rest recuperate.  Fighting to keep the pendulum in the middle is a stress you do not need. Acceptance of the intense period of work, knowing that the pendulum will swing back to the right is a welcome way to maintain a reasonably balanced life.  There are always going to be periods when your time and attention will be dominated by a single project or event. That’s life. There’s no point in fighting it, you cannot win that battle. However, acceptance, though, relieves you of that stress and you no longer feel like you are in a fight. Instead, you can put all your focus and attention on the task in hand, knowing you will soon have time to rest, recuperate and focus your attention on other areas of your life you feel may be out of balance.  Hence the reason why it’s so important to know what your areas of focus are. If you haven’t taken the time to build out your areas of focus, that would be the first thing I would recommend you do. I’ve put a link in the show notes for you to download the areas of focus workbook. I would recommend you give yourself a few days to go through that and build out those eight areas that important to us all.  Thank you Annie 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, we’re looking at how to stop overthinking and over-complicating our lives. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 252 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 252 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. One of the biggest drains on our productivity is over-thinking things. It’s this overthinking that usually leads to overcomplicating our task managers, notes apps and work in general.  However, there are a few things we can do that will eliminate the need to think too much about things. One of those, I’ve written and spoken about a lot, and that is in the way we write our tasks. If you write tasks in a haphazard way, you will end with tasks such as a website address with no idea what you need to do, or a single name with no indication what you need to do with that name.  Whenever you write a task, you need to have an actionable verb telling you precisely what needs to be done. For instance: “look at this website for design ideas” or “call Jenny about next week’s meeting”. It’s a simple trick that adds, perhaps, a few seconds to writing out the task, but it will save to a lot more than a few seconds when it comes to deciding when you will do the task.  It’s surprising how much time we lose when we need to think about what to do and how to do it. It’s when we do that that we discover multiple different ways to do something, and if we are not motivated enough to get whatever needs doing done, we use the excuse to “think about it” as a way to delay doing the task.  So, before we get into the depth of this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Leon. Leon asks, Hi Carl, I’ve been following you for a long time now, and I understand how to set up my system. The problem I have is I feel I waste so much time trying to decide what to do and how to do it. I collect everything in my inbox but then never do most of the things I put there. How do you manage all your tasks?  Hi Leon, thank you for your question. When you say, “I waste so much time trying to decide what do and how to do it” I presume that this will be a symptom of how your write your tasks and not being clear on where your priorities are. If we leave writing your tasks out for the moment and look at the decision part, this should be almost automatic. When you know where your priorities are, there will always be a natural hierarchy for the tasks that you do.  For instance, if you were a salesperson when at work, your priorities would always be those tasks that risk you gaining a sale. Everything else, no matter how loud the task is—colleagues or bosses screaming at you for an activity report, for example—are not priorities.  I know it’s hard to ignore your boss. But if you needed to call your boss about your activity report or a customer asking for further information, your customer is the priority and there shouldn’t even be a debate about it. Remember, you’re a salesperson. Your job is to sell. So, of the two calls; calling your boss or calling the customer, which one is likely to result in a sale?  A doctor would never leave a seriously ill patient to answer a question from a manager. Doctors are trained to identify where their priorities are. You need to train yourself to know instinctively where your priorities are.  And therein lies the secret to simplifying your work.  When you know what your objective is, all you need work out is the fastest way to get from where you are now to where you want to be.  Now, it would be very rare for you arrive at a project or task you haven’t done before, or done something similar. A manager having to hire or fire someone will have done that before. The difference is the role you are recruiting for or the person you are firing. However, there will already be a process to achieve these results.  Over time you want to be fine-tuning your processes. I understand when you do something for the first time it’s likely to take longer, but as you are doing it you are learning how to do it, and you can fine-tune your process as you go along.  The key is the keep focused on your outcome. What are you trying to achieve?  Imagine you need to hire a new designer for your design team. Your company will likely already have a recruiting process, and if not, someone within your organisation will have hired someone at some time. Find out how they did it. Open your notes app, and write out a checklist of all the steps you anticipate you will need to do. Once you have your checklist, go through it and look for the shortcuts.  When we brainstorm these ideas, we overcompensate. We think of all the little things that likely don’t need doing. Once we have brainstormed what we think needs to be done to achieve our outcome, we should go through the list and eliminate the unnecessary (and obvious tasks). Now, I’ve covered daily and weekly planning numerous times on this podcast, and it is a vital part of making decisions about what to work on.  What I’ve noticed is those people who get the importance of daily planning and do it consistently, are the ones who are not overwhelmed or struggling to get their work done. It’s this step back at the end of the day to look at what needs to be done and deciding what you must get done the next day that makes all the difference.  It eliminates procrastination at a key part of the day—the start. You know, from the moment you wake up what you will do first.  For instance, last night, as I was doing my planning, I identified my next YouTube video needed to be uploaded and scheduled and this podcast script had to be finished before 11:00am.  If you look at that sentence, two important words: “needed” and “had” to. There’s no debate. Once my morning routines were finished, I completed the YouTube video and uploaded it, and now I am writing this script. The current time is 9:40am. There’s no question in my mind about whether I will get these two tasks complete before 11 AM. They will be done.  This means, right now, my email is off—anything coming in in the next sixty minutes can wait and my phone is on do not disturb. I am focused on the job in hand and anything else can wait until this script is finished.  Now, if you have never allowed yourself to be in an environment where you cannot be disturbed by all the digital noise in our lives, you will find working in this focused way very uncomfortable. But the discomfort is temporary. When you know what’s on your calendar, and you know what needs to be done before your first commitment of the day, you will be relaxed and focused on the job in hand.  The worst thing you can do is to look at your task list first thing in the morning and try to decide what to work on. This will inevitably lead to procrastination and you waste so much time trying to decide, that very little of your important work will get done before you have to attend to your first appointment or the noise coming in from your phone or email.  Now here’s a quick tip for you. Do this planning on a weekend as well. On a weekend we do not need to be as meticulous, but it’s a very powerful way to make sure that the things you want to do in your personal life get done. For example, if you decide on Friday night that tomorrow you will wash the car, there is a greater chance you will do it without hesitation. Equally, you may decide that Sunday morning, you will take your kids out for a bike ride or a walk in the park. Make those decision before you end the day. When you wake up, you will be focused on getting your kids ready and won’t be looking for excuses not to do it.  Finally, how are you writing your tasks, Leon? David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, says: when you write a task in your task manager write it for your dumb self. What he means is, if you write out a task such as: “mum birthday”, that tells you nothing about what you need to do. All it tells you us your mum has a birthday.  Instead, what do you need to do about your mum’s birthday? Do you need to organise a family dinner? Buy her a present? Or something else? Make sure when you write a task like this you include what you need to do. For instance, “Call my brother and sister to organise a family dinner for mum’s birthday”. Sure, it will take a few extra seconds to write a full task, but doing so will save you so much time later when you come to doing the task. You won’t be wasting time trying to remember what you need to do.  When you next do your weekly planning session, go through your tasks and make sure they are written out in a way that makes immediate sense to you.  If you are like most people there will be a lot of tasks that have been in your task manager for a long time. If they are not written out in a way you would immediate know what to do, either rewrite the task or delete it altogether.  That one trick will turn your task manager from a hodge podge of random tasks into a set of meaningful activities you can do something with without trying to remember what needs doing.  A way to remember this to make sure you have an active verb in your task. If there’s no active verb, it does not belong in your task manager.  I hope that has helped, Leon. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.  

How best to organise all your files, documents and articles? That’s what we’re looking at this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 251 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 251 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Over the years, we have seen a lot of wonderful ways to organise our stuff. Elaborate notebook and tag structures in Evernote, Complex folders on our computers organising every facet of our lives.  And all that’s great. It’s a fantastic way to get things organised and gives us the motivation to clear out our stuff—which is no bad thing. We do collect too much stuff anyway. However, are all these wonderful organisation methods the best use of our time? You see, getting all our stuff organised is a great idea, but that’s a one-time task that may take a few days or even weeks, but long-term we have to maintain this new structure and therein lies two problems.  The first is it will take time for you to develop the natural muscle memory to move stuff to their rightful place, and in my experience, most people have enough on their plates as it is. And secondly, the deeper the organisation structure you build the longer it will take to move the stuff you collect in the future—which will mean you won’t do it. After all, you likely don’t have a great deal of free time as it is, so adding a new process that takes time is not going to solve any problems.  So what can we do? Well there are a few things you can do and that is what we will look at this week. However, before we do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks: Hi Carl, I am a professor at a large hospital and I not only have patients to see, I also teach. On top of that, I need to stay up to date with the latest research. This means I have a lot of papers to read, review and study. I really struggle to keep all these things organised and wondered if you have any tips and tricks that might help.  Hi Janine, thank you for your question. This is the dilemma that has been creeping up on us over the last ten to fifteen years. More and more digital stuff has been replacing what typically would have been paper.  I remember in the late 1990s, I had a filing cabinet in my study that held all the important papers and documents I needed to keep. My car and house insurance, a file folder for gas, electric and water bills as well as bank and credit card statements oh, and a place to keep my running magazines and Law Society Gazette.  And because if I didn’t file these papers away almost immediately, they would be left sitting on the dining table, there was a constant reminder that these papers and documents needed to be filed.  Today, most of these documents are now online or in digital format. I don’t get bank or credit card statements through the post anymore. They are all digital. I no longer have a filing cabinet in my office. I am now largely paperless—save for documents such as my passport, residency permit papers and such like.  I can keep all these important documents in a single drawer in my office.  However, the problem isn’t really just about these important documents. The problem now is we receive so much more digital clutter than we ever received paper. Largely because it is so much cheaper and easier to send out a digital document than a paper one, we get exponentially more digital stuff.  So, how do we manage all this stuff. First I would recommend you establish some basic rules. Don’t put files and documents in your notes app. Over time, this will slow down your notes app. It’s far better to put receipts, documents—such as your medical and teaching documents—into dedicated folders in the cloud.  Now it doesn’t matter whether you use Google Drive, Microsoft OneNote, Dropbox or iCloud. What matters is how you structure your folders. My structure is based around the work I do. For instance, I have a folder for my Online courses, YouTube, and Company documentation, which includes my receipts. Inside those folders the relevant parts are added as sub-folders.  For example, inside my company folder, I have all the company registration documents, invoices I need to keep for my accountant, salaries and other such administrative documents. These are inside appropriately titled folders. For you, Janine, you would structure your folders as Medical and Teaching and then inside of those folders you would have the different areas. For instance, you would keep documents related to the different subject matters you teach inside your teaching folder under their relevant topic.  Now one piece of advice I would give you here is to try where possible to use your computer system’s drive. For example, if you are using a Windows computer, use OneDrive or if you are using Apple’s OS, use iCloud.  The reason for this anything on OneDrive will be searchable through your computer. Similarly, anything in iCloud will be searchable through Apple’s Spotlight search tool.  I know that is not always possible, but where it is. Stick with your computer’s system cloud storage system. It will just make your life a little bit easier.  Now, before we go any further, what about all your articles that need to be read (or you want to read). Use a read later service such as Instapaper or Pocket. One of the downsides to being able to save articles we see on the web is we save articles into our notes apps and then never read them. Often I see people saving these articles into a “read later” folder in their notes and then never go in there to read those articles. Soon they have hundreds of articles saved that never get read and just clutter up your notes app. Use Instapaper or Pocket to filter out articles you will never read. My system is simple. Any article I want to read, I will send to Instapaper and then, only after reading it, if Want to keep it for future reference, I will then send it to my notes app.  One thing that has happened over the last five years is Microsoft, Apple and Google have realised we are terrible at organising our stuff. For years these companies left it to us to organise our stuff how we want to and we failed. I know some people have created good, clean organisation, but most people haven’t. Just look around your colleagues’ desktops. They are full of documents, PDFs, Presentation files and so on.  Unfortunately, what happens then is we waste time searching for something we need.  So, Apple, Microsoft and Google have started to take that responsibility away from us and have developed excellent search tools. Apple’s Spotlight for instance, will search iCloud for any document I have with a keyword, date range or type of document. It doesn’t mater whether I am on my phone, MacBook or iPad. It will find those documents.  This means, once you get comfortable with how the system search works on your device, the only responsibility you have is to make sure the title of your document is something you will find.  For that I would suggest you create a format you use for all your documents. To give you an example, I use the same file naming convention for all my documents. This is The date to document was created or downloaded, the type of document. That could be invoice, receipt, or company I am creating a presentation for. And then the title.  What this does is helps me to quickly find what I am looking for directly from Spotlight. For instance, if I need to find a presentation file for a presentation I did for a company last year, All I need do is type the company name into Spotlight and I will see from the list of results what I am looking for. I can see the date, so I know I am choosing the right document and I know it is a presentation.  Another thing that Google, Apple and Microsoft have done in recent years is to keep like documents together. This means if you have an Excel file, you can keep it inside Excel. Now the document itself is kept in OneDrive, but when you open Excel, you will see all your documents in one place. Google does this with its Docs, Sheets and Slides and Apple does this with Pages, Keynote and Numbers.  At first I resisted this sticking to my old-fashioned ways of moving these documents to separate folders. However, over the years I’ve trusted Apple to organise these for me and it’s so much easier. If I am looking for a Keynote file, all I need do is open Keynote and I can quickly find the file from the start menu.  Google is even better at this, if someone shares a Google Doc with me and I open it, it automatically gets stored in my Google Docs folder.  What I’ve learned over the last few years is don’t fight the system. All these companies are making it easier for us to find out stuff. If we stubbornly stick to our old ways we are making it harder for us to do our work productively. If we allow our computers to worry about how we organise things, we are saving ourselves a lot of time.  We don’t need elaborate organisation systems anymore. All you need is a loose folder structure that covers the different areas of our lives. This will help to keep things neat and tidy. Apart from that, let your devices worry about the organisation and start trusting your computer’s system to find what you need.  Incidentally, this also applies to email. In the past I’ve had a lot of complex folder structures. Now, all I have is four folders: An inbox, an Action This Day folder for emails that need some form of action from me, an Archive for stuff I may need later and the trash. That’s it.  Email search is incredibly fast and easy. I can search by person, date range, keyword or title. I have no need at all for elaborate folders that only slow everything down.  I hope that has helped, Janine. My advice is keep things simple, let your computer do all the hard work and focus you attention on getting your work done.  Thank you for you 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 podcast answers the question: where do goals fit into a task manager? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 250 | Script Hello, and welcome to episode 250 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. We are told that setting goals for yourself is important, and, yes, I would agree with that. But the question is, once you have set yourself some goals, where do the activities you need to perform come in? If you are already close to your limit in terms of what you can do each day, how will you find time to add more stuff?  Now I think of goals as milestones on the road of a much longer journey. The destination of that journey is the same for all of us: death. Sorry to be so melodramatic, but that is true. Nobody gets out of life alive. It’s a very predictable end.  The good news here is that we all have a degree of flexibility and freedom to choose what road we take. The difficulty we face is there is so much choice. So many paths we could take and trying to decide which path to follow is scary. Which is why it is all too easy to make no choice and just follow the ebbs and flows that life throws at us—which unless you are extremely lucky is not going to lead to a fulfilled and happy life.  So, this week, I will share with you ways you can build your goals into your daily life so they become less of a task to be completed each day and more of just something you do, because that is who you are and what you do.  So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Adrian. Adrian asks; Hi Carl, I recently saw that you opened a new course on goal setting. I would love to have some goals, but I just don’t have the time to fit them in. I’m sure I’m not alone with this dilemma. Do you have any tips on fitting goals into an already busy life?  Hi Adrian, thank you for your question. You are right to be concerned about adding more stuff you an already busy day, but there is a difference with tasks or activities related to our goals. Goals are not something you do, and once complete or accomplished; you stop doing. A goal’s purpose is the create change. Once that change has happened, you don’t want to be returning to where you were before you started the goal. That would not be a clever move.  I remember in my twenties, many of my friends (and myself, I have to admit) would hit the gym in the spring and try to lose our ‘winter weight’ ready for the summer holidays so we could strut confidently up and down the beach. Once the summer was over, we’d pile the weight back on.  Looking back now, I can see how ridiculous this form of yoyo dieting and exercise was. Now I am older (and allegedly wiser), getting into shape should not be something you do for a particular time of the year; it should be an ongoing thing. Keeping your weight down and exercising regularly is a necessity if you want to enjoy a robust, healthy life.  So, today, I am careful about what I eat—no refined carbohydrates and plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. I also exercise pretty much every day, whether that is a session in the gym, a run or a gentle walk with my dog.  It no longer feels like a task. Spending an hour on exercise is an investment in my future. It’s built into my daily schedule, and I use it as a break from sitting at my desk all day doing work. I see exercise as something that assists my productivity rather than as something that needs to be done.  The same applies to financial goals. If you’ve read Dave Ramsey’s book; Total Money Makeover, he gives you five strategies to build a safe and healthy financial plan for you and your family. None of those strategies involves a lot of work. For instance, paying down your debts is a single action each month. Once you get paid, you use a percentage of your salary to pay down one of your debts.  Equally, a second strategy is to build an emergency fund that would cover your expenses for a given amount of time if you were to lose your job. For something like this, it’s simply putting a little money aside each month into a savings account. That would be around five minutes a month (or less if you were to automate the payment)  The goal here, for example, maybe to clear all your debts over the next three years. That’s a simple task. You send money to the debt each month until it is clear. You have a timeline (three years), and you have an action (send money somewhere).  However, the bigger goal here is to change your behaviour from one of spending to one of saving. Once that becomes a behaviour, it is not something you ever need to think about again. You just do it as part of who you are.  When you set a goal, whatever that goal may be, there is an initial stage where you need to be consciously taking an action. That stage will usually last around a month or two. Once you have been consistently taking action on your goal for that time, you find it becomes something you automatically do.  For instance, today, I know I will be going to the gym at 2:30pm. This means when I planned today, I knew I had around three hours of focused work plus a couple of meetings before I needed to go to the gym. That gym time has given me structure to my day. I know when my calls are, and I know what focused work needs to be done before I go to the gym. I have a purpose from the moment I wake up.  The way to look at a goal is to treat it as a waypoint. It tells you that you are moving in the right direction. I use fitness goals to make sure I don’t go stale. The habit of exercise is built into who I am. I am a person who exercises every day. However, like most people, I can quite easily become bored with doing the same thing over and over again, so I set fitness goals every three months.  These could be to run a certain distance or to run a half marathon in under two hours. Alternatively, I might decide to focus on strength for three months and set a target weight to bench press or squat. I mix it up depending on the season. I use the goals to give me focus and direction.  If you were to set a goal to complete a master's degree, what would be the behaviour or habit you need to develop? It would be to spend some time each day studying. The habit of working on your own self-development (an area of focus) should already be something you are doing. Whether that is spending thirty to sixty minutes a day learning something new or being more focused and setting yourself some study days each week doesn’t matter. Developing yourself by learning means you are growing mentally. Something important if you want to feel fulfilled and accomplished.  So the goal to complete a master's degree becomes the waypoint—the signpost—to give you something to focus on and to push yourself beyond your comfort zone.  You see, the real reason why we need to set goals is to prevent us from stagnating. Whether we like it or not, the world is constantly changing. It’s changing around us and we either change or we will get left behind.  During my time teaching English, I worked with many middle management people who refused to learn the new technologies that emerged from the smartphone revolution. Within five years, they were trapped in middle management no-mans land. They were passed over for promotion, and rather than staying where they were, their jobs were downgraded or removed altogether. They had become too comfortable with the way things were and resisted the changes that were happening around them.  The onus is on us to make sure we have time to learn new things. To stay ahead and to keep pushing our boundaries, so we continue to grow. The good news is the world changes at a slow pace. We can change at a faster pace, and that’s where goals help us. They pull us towards changing ourselves for the better.  Now one tip I would give you here is to not set too many goals all at once.  The way to use goals is to step back and look at your life as a whole. Where do you feel you need to improve? Are your skills giving you an advantage in the workplace? How is your health? Are you moving towards the vision you have for yourself in the next ten to twenty years? What do you need to change in order to feel more fulfilled in life and work?  To set strong, motivating goals, you need to do quite a lot of self-reflection. You need to find people who are already doing what you want to do and research them—a kind of healthy cyberstalking. Find out what they did to get where they are and see what changes you can make to follow a similar pathway.  We are building a life, and a big part of the pleasure we get is the journey to achieving that life. The goals you set form part of that journey; they ensure you are moving along the right path and tell you when you need to adjust your direction. The old phrase: “if at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again” is very apt when goal setting. There will be a lot of failures. A lot of adjusting, and with that you learn so much more about you.  I remember a few years ago I decided to do Robin Sharma’s 5AM club. I loved the idea of waking up early and having a series of activities that were dedicated to me and no one else. And for eighteen months I was pretty consistent with it.  However, as my coaching practice developed I found myself working alter and later into the evening and it came to a point where waking up at 5AM was no longer practical. For a few weeks I fought on, but in the end I “failed” to maintain the consistency.  I reviewed the goal and realised that what I really wanted was the empowering morning routine. The waking up at 5AM was nice, but it wasn’t the main purpose. The purpose was to have an hour or so for myself every morning. I revised the goal and set it to being consistent with my morning routine no matter what time. Woke up.  That adjustment began three years ago and there has not been one day since that I have not written my journal, done my stretches and drank a glass of lemon juice.  Now, I don’t even think about it. I just do it.  That’s what goals are there for. They change your habits and behaviours so you adopt better living practices that fulfil you and leave you feeling happy, accomplished and focused on what’s important in life.  I hope that has helped, Adrian. 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, it’s all about multiple projects and tasks—all in one day.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 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 249 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 249 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 do you manage running a new business, or even running your own department with multiple things happening each day and projects that need to be got off the ground, or maintained. It a real challenge and leave you feeling exhausted, and more importantly, stressed out about what you may or may not have done. This is one of the many reasons why getting yourself organised and being consistent with your daily and weekly planning is so important. It’s this planning that gives you an edge. It elevates you above the fray and keeps you focused on the bigger picture.  Without a plan for the week, you will inevitably get sucked into the daily churn of low and high important tasks. It will feel endless and it doesn’t lead to a great outcome. Sure, you may have a reasonably successful business or department, but you, as an individual, will be exhausted, tired and stressed out and that leads to poor decision making and mistakes.  Now, before we get into the question, I just wanted to give you a heads up that I have just launched my latest mini-course. The Goal Setting course will give you a blueprint to build the life you want to live by developing the vision of what you want, and then using goals to make sure you are moving along the right pathway.  It’s an exciting course that will inspire you to grow, develop and start making the changes you need to make to become the person you want to be.  Full details of this mini-course will be in the show notes.  Now, on with this show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Cara. Cara asks: Hi Carl, I run a growing start up business and have found managing multiple tasks and projects each day is a real pain point. How would you suggest we manage multi-tasking to keep the business running and developing new projects? Hi Cara, thank you for your question. Now, we better first deal with the concept of “multi-tasking”. Straight up, don’t ever do it. Or rather try to do it. It’s impossible, never works and only leads to mistakes which will need correcting later.  Slow down. There is more than enough time each day to work on the important things. You don’t have to do everything in one day. I know our minds are telling us it has to be done today, but really? Does it?  When you step back, take a breath and look at what you have on your list of things to do, you will see that many of those tasks don’t really need to be done today. It might be nice to be able to do them, but it would not be the end of your business if you rescheduled the less important tasks to later in the week.  Now, there’s a good reason for rescheduling less important things to later in the week and that is most of these will not need doing anyway. They are what I call “reactive” tasks. Tasks that seem important right now, but with a little time resolve themselves and can be discarded.  I’m reminded of a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who would put aside his letters and memos for ten days before reading them. What he found was 90% of the issues resolved themselves and the remaining 10% was where he needed to put his attention.  Now, in today’s world things move a lot faster than they did in the 1980s, but the principle still remains, most of what comes into our inboxes will resolve themselves, there is no need to rush. You can put aside most issues for twenty-four to forty-eight hours without any problems. When you do come to them, it’s likely many of them will have resolved themselves.  I’m always surprised at how many emails I get asking a question, only to find an hour later the same person writes to tell me they’ve resolved the issue. That taught me to slow down and not rush into a response.  Of course, there are some issues that do need dealing with straight away. But most don’t. Learn to slow down. You will thank yourself for that later.  Now, I mentioned in the opening about the importance of planning. Planning is the key to staying on top of everything being thrown at you. You need some time each day and week to step back and evaluate what is important. What needs to get done about all else.  For instance, last week, my priority was to launch my Goal Setting course. I still had my core work to do—content and coaching client feedback—but aside from that work, my priority last week was launching the course.  Now, this was not the first course I have launched, so I have a process for launching courses. However, that process still requires a lot of time. This meant, each day last week, I made sure my core work was done early. For instance, on Monday, when I wrote the blog post, I started my day by getting that written. Once that was written, I blocked out two hours to work on the course.  For those of you who don’t know, your core work is your most important work—the work you are employed to do. If you are a salesperson, your core work is any activity that results in a sale. If you are an analyst, your core work is any activity that involves analysing. Everything else (email replies, meetings and admin work) is secondary to that.  When I finished each day, I gave myself ten minutes to go through my task list to see what I had on for the next day and prioritised two things: my core work and the course. I then looked at my calendar to see where I could fit those tasks in.  This month I have two courses to work on. That’s unusual, not only do I need to launch my Goal Setting mini-course, but I also need to work on the update to my Apple Productivity course. It would be easy to stress myself about the Apple Productivity course, but what’s the point? I can only work on one course at a time, so the only question is which one do I work on tomorrow? Now that the goals setting course is launched, I can turn my attention to updating my Apple Productivity course. My work is much more manageable and realistic.  If I had tried to do both at the same time, I would be stressed out and inevitably make a lot of mistakes that will need to be resolved later.  The key is to focus on one project at a time. Of course, you may have multiple projects going on at the same time, but given that you cannot work effectively on two or more projects at the same time, you need to decide, at a weekly level, which projects you will focus on that week.  One thing that has worked for me, is to allocate time each week for certain activities. I also know a lot of business founders have also found this method effective. That is to block time out each day of the week for certain activities.  For instance, email and communications. These come in every day and it’s unlikely you will be able to stop them. This means, you need time each day for managing your communications. For me, I need around forty minutes a day to stay on top of my communications. So, I have a one hour block each day between 7 and 8pm for responding to my actionable messages.  Find an appropriate time in the day and block it out on your calendar for managing your email.  Other activities you need to do regularly, for example, prospecting, accounting, admin and your personal life need time allocating to them. You could dedicate Mondays to prospecting, Tuesdays to admin and Fridays to accounting. Wednesday and Thursday could be dedicated to project work.  Knowing you have time allocated to prospecting, admin and accounting leaves you feeling less stressed and it makes it easier to decide when you will do something. I would add, that it helps to keep one day each week as free as possible for catching up when you have fallen behind with something.This is one of those inevitable things in life that our carefully laid out plans will get disrupted by an emergency. Knowing you have a reasonably free day later in the week for catching up helps to keep ion track with the things we need to do.  Finally, as a start-up business everything will be new and so you won’t have any settled processes in place. It’s important to be looking for the process for doing your work. I have a number of admin tasks to do each day. When I first began collecting the information, it would take me around ninety minutes each day. I focused on building the process and now, three or four years later, I still have the same admin tasks to do, but it takes me around twenty minutes to do.  Because I have settled processes, I know how to start, where to look for the information and can do the work in a lot less time.  If your projects are similar in nature—in my case creating or updating courses—you can develop checklists and processes there too. This makes doing project work a lot easier. You know where to start, have a reasonably good idea how long each part will take and you can build that time into your calendar.  Essentially, it all boils down to giving yourself time each day and each week to look at what needs to be done and planning out when you will do the work. If you are not planning out when the work will get done, your brain will convince you that you don’t have sufficient time—when you do—and that’s where stress and anxiety will come from.  Make sure you are planning the week. Identifying which project, or projects, you will work on each week. On a daily level, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to plan the next day. What will be your priority the next day and make sure you have the time blocked out in your calendar so you know you have the time to work on it.  I hope that has helped, Cara. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.  Don’t forget, if you want to learn more about my brand new Goal Setting course, the links are in the show notes.  It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.