Deep Dive With Dr Kourosh Dini

You may have come across the quote: “Motivation gets you started, but discipline keeps you growing." By John C. Maxwell, the author and leadership mentor.  Motivation is an interesting concept. It’s often required to get things started, but if you only rely on your motivation to do something, particularly if that something is not easy or particularly enjoyable, it won’t keep you going.  This week, we’re looking at how to use motivation to develop the right habits that will keep you consistent.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The 2026 Summer Sale page The COD Productivity Method  Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script |423 Hello, and welcome to episode 423 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  One of the consequences of writing a journal every morning is that you come up with a lot of ideas about how you would like to change your life or the way you work. And many of those ideas can motivate you to try something new.  That could mean reading a real book every evening instead of watching TV or scrolling through the news and social media. Or perhaps to go out for an evening stroll after work, or plan your day the evening before, so you can enjoy a more relaxing evening. All seemingly easy to do.  And then you decide to do it. The first day is easy, the second a little less so and by the time you get to the end of the week, you’ve lost all motivation and picking up a book or going outside for a walk feels like the last thing you want to do after such a hard day. So you skip it. It’s only one day, it can’t do any harm, can it? And then the next day you don’t do it, and the day after that and so on. Eventually, that great idea you had about changing a bad habit has ended up in the pit of tried-but-forgotten great ideas.  It happens to all of us. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you; all it means is that you’re relying on one of the most overrated ways to change something, motivation.  Motivation is fleeting; it never lasts, and it hates reality. It’s also affected by the quality of your sleep, how distracted you are, and your overall mood. It’s a very unreliable friend.  Great at encouraging you to get started, but terrible at keeping you going when things get difficult.  The good news is there is a more reliable way to make changes, but the bad news is you may need to initially feel uncomfortable. Yet it’s worth it.  So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Fran. Fran asks, Hi Carl, what do you do when you don’t have the motivation to do what you have planned to do?  Hi Fran, thank you for your question.  To answer your question directly, I don’t rely on motivation. I remember the days when I smoked, and almost every night, when I went to bed, I would motivate myself not to smoke the next day.  Thinking about that now, it’s funny, because as I was “motivating” myself, I was smoking my last cigarette of the day. “No, I won’t smoke tomorrow!” Then, when I woke up in the morning, I would make my coffee, then go outside for my first cigarette of the day.  Where was my motivation when I needed it most? It wasn’t there.  In the end, I finally quit smoking by removing all temptation from the house and not carrying any money with me when I went out. Just my travel card and a lunchbox. It was tough, but after a couple of weeks, the habit was disappearing, and by the end of the month, I could not imagine smoking again.  I’ve seen this time and time again with people. Those who motivate themselves to go out for an evening walk after dinner, for example. It’s easy to do that in the summer, when it’s likely still light outside and the weather’s warm and dry.  Then the temperatures cool, the light fades, and the rain comes down. “Ah, it’s cold and raining, I won’t go out tonight, I’m tired anyway, and I left my umbrella at the office.”  The one that still surprises me, though, is the daily planning.  Daily planning takes no more than five minutes and can be done just before you finish your work for the day or as the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed.  Five minutes, and after a while, it can be done in 2 or 3 minutes.  And yet, people still struggle. Why? Because they are relying on motivation.  I remember when I first read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, and when I read the chapter on planning your day, I was incredibly motivated.  I was fortunate that as I was reading the book, I was setting up my Franklin Planner and one of the steps when using a Franklin Planner is to do the “planning and solitude” exercise every day.  It was suggested that you give yourself 15 minutes a day for this, and the first thing you wrote at the top of your Prioritised Daily Task list was “Planning and Solitude,” which would be given priority A1. It was the most important task of the day.  And that’s what I did every evening. I sat at the table with my planner and planned out the next day. Then, I checked off the Planning and Solitude task. This meant that by the next day, my first task was already complete.  And since then, which was the early 1990s, I haven’t missed some form of a daily planning ritual. I cannot imagine going to bed not knowing where I need to be and what needs to be done.  I doubt now I could get to sleep without knowing. I even do this when on holiday.  Just saying that now means I’ve consistently planned my day for over 30 years! WOW! The people who succeed at staying consistent with their plans are the ones who start small.  Often, we will take a course or read a book, get motivated and try to change everything all at once.  That’s the hardest way to do it. Recently, I’ve been watching documentaries on how great football managers turn teams around. I’ve now studied Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, Johan Cruif and Mikel Arteta. And there’s a common thread between all of them.  When they took over a team, the team was not performing. Often, they were struggling at the bottom of their league.  Yet, the change didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, step-by-step process. In all cases, they first fired old players who may have been brilliant, but were unwilling to adopt a new philosophy or were a bad influence on new players.  They recruited professional players who were willing to adapt to the new style of play. And in almost all cases, their first season was not great.  Then things began to change: the team started climbing the league and eventually winning trophies.  These managers treated the necessary changes as a project. It wasn’t about “motivating” the players to play better; it was about having them buy into the new culture of doing things.  As Arsene Wenger, the legendary Arsenal manager, said in one interview when talking about his successor following his retirement: “We need someone who understands that football is not just about winning. It’s about how you win. The philosophy has to come first. The results follow the philosophy, not the other way round. The philosophy is not a tactic. It’s a value”  In other words, when you decide something needs to change, knowing why it needs to change is important. What’s your reason, your philosophy and the value behind that change?  When you know the reason you want to change, “motivation” no longer comes into it.  One of my clients works for a company that was advised by a well-known consultancy to change its management methods to an “Agile” system.  There was then a flurry of activity by senior management, a great deal of money spent on training, and many employees were made redundant.  Ten years later, that company has slowly moved back to the way they managed things before they were force-fed Agile. What went wrong? Well, the motivation was high at the start of the transformation. Senior managers were buying into the vision that the consultancy company was selling. The problem was that there was no clear reason to change.  Sales were great, the culture was one of the best in the industry, and people loved working for the company. The company’s sales team had strong relationships with their customers, and while there were areas for improvement, there was no need for a root-and-branch change in how everything was run.  Today, the company is struggling against its competition, the employees are demotivated, and sales are average at best.  And yet the Agile methods could have worked had the reasons for the change been better communicated. My client still has no idea why the company changed its management methods.  Without a strong reason to change, you will find your motivation runs out very quickly.  Talking with some of the members of my Retirement programme, I’m surprised by how quickly they start taking health and fitness seriously after retirement.  We go through our working lives sitting for 8 hours a day, slowly and quietly destroying our posture and mobility. We don’t sleep enough and eat convenient food because who’s got time to eat healthily when you have hundreds of messages to respond to, and you’ve got to get the latest marketing campaign finished by the end of the week? And then we go for a medical check-up and discover that we are pre-diabetic, we have early signs of heart disease, we are no longer able to get up out of a chair without using our arms, and we haven’t seen our feet for years. Suddenly, we’ve found the motivation to eat and sleep better. We take those daily walks, and many of us join fitness classes.  But to continue with this new, healthier lifestyle requires more than motivation. There needs to be a purpose.  Recently, it was reported that former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. He was fortunate that the cancer was caught early, and he’s now in remission.  Suddenly, a guy who lived an unhealthy lifestyle of cigarettes, wine, sitting around, poor sleep and extreme work schedules has become a non-smoking, vegetarian, teatotaller  Sure, the shock of being within a year of death was pretty good motivation, but why is he sticking to his new lifestyle? Because, as he says, he wants to see his grandchildren grow up. Now that’s a pretty good reason for making these difficult changes.  So there you go, Fran. Motivation is great for getting you started, but ultimately, you want a very good reason to change what you want to change.  Getting organised, improving time management, and being more productive are nice things to do. You feel more in control of your life, are more relaxed, a lot less stressed, and you find you sleep better. But the most important thing is to know why you are doing it.  For me, being less stressed, being more in control of my time, and getting the right things done at the right time give me more time to spend with my family and do the things I love.  That’s my “why”. That’s why I make sure I do my daily and weekly planning, why I am strict about what I say yes to and why I will never let my email and messages become backlogged.  I hope that helps, and thank you again for sending in your question.  Thank you to you too for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

Zig Ziglar said, “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24 hours a day” When you know where you are going and what you want, you will often find that time will take care of itself. Yet when we have no direction, no idea of what we want, and allow other people to dictate what we do and when, that’s when time, or rather a perceived lack of it, becomes the issue.  Today, we’re looking at how to discover our direction and decide what we actually want.    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The COD Productivity Method  Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script |422 Hello, and welcome to episode 422 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  One of the first exercises I ask people to do in many of my training programmes is to establish their Areas of Focus.  There are eight areas that we all share. These are: Family and relationships. Career or business Health and fitness Finances Lifestyle and life experiences Self-development Spirituality Life’s purpose The exercise has you define what each of these means to you, and then identify any recurring tasks that will help keep them in balance so that you are living your life based on what you have identified as important to you.  The thing about your areas of focus is that, while we all share the same eight areas, how we define and prioritise them will differ.  This also changes depending on where you are in life. For someone who has retired, career or business will likely drop in priority and lifestyle and life experiences may move up.  Yet the power of knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is in how they help to give you direction and purpose.  This week’s question is about how to maintain that balance when competing demands outside of your control clash with your own priorities. So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl. I use the Time Sector System, and for the most part it works brilliantly. The problem I have is that my boss and sometimes my family keep demanding my help with things that are not my priority. How can I stay on track with the things that are important to me?  Hi Annie, thank you for your question.  This can be very frustrating, particularly if you have spent time establishing what is important to you, yet other people keep trying to pull you away from doing the things you want to do. This is where having some structure built into your week can help.  Let’s say that health and fitness is high up on your priority list and that you have chosen to exercise three times per week.  From that, you can pick your exercise days. These could be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example.  The first step would be to lock these “dates” on your calendar. Then make sure they are non-negotiable.  For instance, when I was a teenager, I was a competitive 800- and 1,500-metre runner. I was a member of an athletics club and our training days were Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. Those days and times were non-negotiable. I would never miss a training session. My social life, as well as studying for my exams, were built around these days.  Pretty soon, everyone in my family circle, as well as teachers, knew that on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, I would not be available for anything. I was training.  Many years later, when I went to university, I did night school. Our lecture times were Tuesday and Thursday night, 6:00 to 9:00 pm.  I was working full-time at the time, and since it took 20 minutes to get from my office to the university, I had to leave the office at 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I made sure my boss and colleagues knew these times, and not once in four years do I remember missing a lecture.  I made sure I never scheduled meetings beyond 4:00 pm on a university day, and my close friends and family also knew when I would be at university. University was easier than the running club. The university worked in semesters; my athletics club didn’t. I remember some of my training partners turning up on Christmas and New Year’s Day if they were on a training night.  There’s an old saying, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse” And having worked with over 500 people in the time management and productivity space, I can tell that old saying is true.  You will find what is important to you by looking at what you will not negotiate on.  I have a friend who is a huge Manchester United fan. He has not missed a home game in over twenty years. It’s now become a point of pride for him.  As soon as the new season’s fixtures list is published, he opens up his calendar and blocks the time out for the whole season.  I remember early on, when Simon began going to Old Trafford, trying to persuade him not to go watch the game and instead to come out with us. The answer was always “no”.  After a while, we stopped asking him. We know he’d go to Old Trafford and maybe, if it was an afternoon game, he would join us later. That was the best compromise we could get out of him.  Looking back now, I have huge respect and admiration for him for sticking to his priorities.  And that’s what happens when you stick to your priorities: people respect and admire you.  It doesn’t happen immediately, but when they see that you do not compromise on what you have prioritised, they stop trying to pull you away.  This is why time blocking, when done right, works.  Everyone in my circle, from my wife to the people who work with me, knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 am, I am doing focused work. For the most part, that work will be my creative work: writing, recording videos or this podcast, for example.  No one interrupts me anymore. They used to. But by sticking to my plan, people left me alone.  It’s only two hours a day, but those two hours add up to 10 hours a week. And you can do a lot in 10 hours.  But it’s not just that you stick to your plan; it’s also that it gives you confidence when you plan your week.  When you know that no one will bother you when you are doing your focused work, you can confidently work with the hours that you have.  Most of the anxiety that we feel is not caused by the volume of work we have to do; it’s caused by not knowing when we will be able to do it.  Yet there’s a fix for that.  Let’s say you have to review and report the sales figures to the CEO each day. As you do that task every day, you will know how long it takes you to do. In this example, you know it takes you 45 minutes, and you have to send the report in by 5:00 pm.  Now you have the two most important numbers.  When you begin the day, you have access to yesterday’s sales figures, so you have everything you need.  That means the question becomes, when will you do it?  If that were me, I would do that as soon as the day begins. Get it done early so that if anything goes wrong in the day, it won’t matter. The sales report is done and only needs to be emailed.  And in many ways, that’s what you are doing. You’re analysing how long it takes you to do the different parts of your job on average and then using that data to decide when, and if necessary, how often you need to do it.  This is like taking your game from being a Sunday League team to being a Premiership team.  The Sunday League team turns up and plays. No thoughts about tactics or strategy other than to score more goals than the opposition does.  A Premier League team strategises, has a plan, and sticks to it. If they go behind, they stick to the plan. They don’t panic.  I recently watched a docuseries on Amazon called All or Nothing. In this particular programme, José Mourinho has just taken over as manager of Tottenham Hotspur.  In one of his first games in charge, Tottenham go behind in the first half and panic. They forget the plan, and everything begins falling apart.  At half-time, you can see Mourinho calming the players down. He tells them to stop panicking and to follow the plan. He talks to them gently and says when they get back on plan, they’ll soon find a way back into the game.  And sure enough, that’s exactly what happens. In the second half, Tottenham are more relaxed, more controlled, and they win the game by three goals.  In our lives, there’s always going to be interruptions and demands from others. Some of them you can politely decline, others perhaps not.  When you cannot decline, because it’s a demand from a boss or a family member, the good thing is the decision is made. You need to do what’s being asked of you.  The key is not to throw out your plan. The key is to get back on plan as quickly as possible.  The worst thing you can do in these situations is to panic. That tenses you up, and you stop thinking objectively. Instead, accept, adjust and execute.  Accept the situation for what it is. It’s something you have to do that you did not plan for. So, adjust your plan. Appraise how much time will be required to carry out the new instructions, and then change your plan accordingly.  Then carry out the work.  It’s helpful if you have a few non-negotiables. For instance, experience has taught me that if I do not spend some time each day on my emails and messages, these will quickly get out of control.  Ideally, I like an hour to respond to messages and emails, but if I’ve had to adjust my plan, I’ll do 30 minutes. It just helps keep things under control and doesn’t mean I have to find more time tomorrow than I planned for.  The most important thing, though, Annie, is that you first decide what is important to you and what is not. This will help you to make the right decisions each day. That’s why going through the Areas of Focus exercise will put you in a much better position.  You will know what is important to you, and you can build your calendar around those priorities.  After that, when things are demanded of you that you cannot decline, stay calm and composed and adjust your plan accordingly.  It’s never the end of the world, and as long as you get back onto your plan as quickly as possible, you’ll soon find that at the end of the week, you’re not far from where you wanted to be.  I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Annie, and thank you to you, too, for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

"A million dollars a shot is my price. But I only take one a year. The rest of the time I maintain my skills." That was Francisco Scaramanga, the villain in The Man With the Golden Gun, played by the superb Christopher Lee. Who, interestingly, was a cousin of James Bond creator Ian Fleming and a regular golfing partner of his. Now, while I certainly wouldn’t recommend following Scaramanga’s career path, there’s a valuable lesson in that line. The reason Scaramanga could ask such a high price was not because he worked all the time. It was because he spent most of his time practising, refining, and maintaining his skills so that when the moment came, he could perform at an exceptional level. And that brings us to this week’s question, which is all about developing, and more importantly, maintaining, your skills at managing your work and your time.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The COD Productivity Method  Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script |421 Hello, and welcome to episode 421 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  There’s a belief, held by many, that becoming better at time management and productivity is something you learn once and then you’re set.  Or all you need to do is buy the latest productivity tool and all your struggles disappear.  Hahaha, it’s not quite so easy.  Theoretically, it may be possible to add a new app or use a new process for getting your work done. Unfortunately, life doesn’t fit perfectly into the little boxes we create. There’s always something different or new.  This is why the idea of plotting out every minute of your day on your calendar doesn’t work in practice.  Simple, natural things are not always predictable. You don’t know when you will need a bathroom break, or if a colleague asks you a question, or perhaps you spill your coffee all over your desk.  If any of these things happen when you have carefully mapped out every minute of your day, your day is ruined.  The missing pieces are flexibility and practice, and that is where this week’s question comes in.  So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Kathy. Kathy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve recently taken your Time Sector System course and loved it. One thing that’s worrying me, though, is that no matter how well I plan my week, by Tuesday, my whole plan is ruined. Do you have any tips on staying on plan when things become hectic? Hi Kathy, thank you for your question.  This is a common discovery. Once you know the theory, putting it into practice can show up bumps in the road that cause problems.  One of the first problems people face is changing habits. If, for instance, you’ve never planned a week or a day, getting into the habit of consistently doing so is hard.  After all, you’ve spent most of your life so far without having a plan; skipping a daily or weekly planning session isn’t going to cause too many problems.  Yet when you are building your system, it’s that skipping that causes a problem. The more times you don’t do it, the longer it will take you to build the essential habits.  The goal is to use your new knowledge automatically. When you’re processing your inbox, you instinctively know what to do. It’s like there’s a voice in your head asking the three questions: What is it? What do I need to do with it? When will I do it? When you start, asking these questions can be slow. You’re naturally thinking too much. But when you’ve done it consistently for a few weeks, you think less, and you automatically move things to their rightful place.  Today, I can process an inbox of twenty items in less than 6 minutes. When I first started following this sequence of questions, though, it would easily have taken me twenty to thirty minutes. I was overthinking and learning patterns.  In one scene in The Man With the Golden Gun, Bond and Scaramanga are having lunch. The lunch begins amiably, but soon turns hostile. At one point, Bond reaches into his coat pocket to pull out his gun. The camera pans to Scaramanga, who is pointing his legendary golden gun at Bond.  The surprising thing here is that Scaramanga had to build his gun from a golden cigarette case, a lighter, a fountain pen, and a cufflink. All Bond had to do was pull his gun from his shoulder holster.  How was Scaramanga faster? Practice.  How many hours would Scaramanga have had to practice putting his gun together to get that fast?  I know, it’s fiction. But the point is, you get faster the more you do something.  This is why people who continually switch apps are also consistently behind on their work. They remain stuck at being slow.  What’s happening there is they have to learn new ways of getting things into their system, and then moving tasks, and learning all the new features. And that doesn’t account for the time it takes to move everything over to the new app.  It’s dead time. Instead, sticking with the apps you already have forces you to get better and faster at using them.  Then we come to the realisation that no two weeks are ever the same. No matter how carefully we plan something, things will inevitably go wrong.  This is where practice and experience come in.  I have a client who travels for work a lot. Sometimes he travels domestically; other times he travels internationally, often to the other side of the world, which involves 20 hours of flying time.  He found the Time Sector System worked brilliantly when he was working from his office, but it fell apart when he had to travel.  When we analysed the problem, we discovered that he was trying to run things the same way while travelling as he did at his office.  How many times have you booked a flight, found that WIFI would be available for the flight and thought, ah, I’ll catch up on my email and messages when flying, only to discover that the WIFI doesn’t work? Now, you could respond to your actionable emails while flying, but you won’t be able to send them until you get into a WIFI zone. But that disruption to your plans can leave you feeling very frustrated.  The solution in this case was to have a travelling routine. On days when my client was travelling, he reduced his task list to the essentials. Rescheduling or postponing routine tasks  He also set up a routine for international travel, using the flight time to plan and clean things up. None of which required WIFI.  The first few times he used this new process, he found he needed to make adjustments, but after a few tries, he had it working perfectly.  And that’s the key part. Build in flexibility.  In my client’s case, it was not to try and follow the same system when travelling as he does when at the office.  When you plan your week, allow for the unexpected.  One way to do this is to ensure that, when you plan your week, you have time for the essential things. That would be your core work and the parts of your life you have decided are important. Time with family and friends, hobbies and exercise, for example.  Once you have those on your calendar, then really you have the beginnings of a solid plan that should be flexible enough.  Hopefully, you have already locked in your core work.  When I was a teacher, I had an hour each day protected for class preparation. I was teaching around four to five hours a day; those times were fixed each month and were non-negotiable. I had to be in the classroom teaching.  The class preparation time did change from day to day, but it was always there, and I tried to fix it around the same time each day, which made it much easier to make it a habit.  The unknowns often come from project work. Projects, by their very nature, are unique. Each one requires something different. You will find that while you may not be able to plan precisely what needs to be done at a weekly level, scheduling time to work on your projects each week will help ensure you have enough time to keep these moving forward.  If you’ve ever read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you will no doubt remember the chapter: Sharpen the Saw.  In the chapter, Stephen Covey uses the example of a wood cutter who’s working so hard that they never stop to sharpen the saw. Over time, the time required to cut the tree increases, not because the woodcutter is getting weaker, but because the saw is becoming blunter.  Your time management and productivity skills operate the same way. Sometimes you have to stop and sharpen your skills.  For example, I use an iPhone, and every time Apple updates its iPhone operating system, I review my collecting methods to see if anything in the new software will make collecting faster.  For example, when Apple added the action button to their phones, it let me map that button to add tasks to my task manager’s inbox. It’s super fast, and after a few days it became automatic for me to tap the action button when I needed to add something.  The most productive people I know spend time improving their ability to produce. This is why athletes train, musicians practise scales, pilots rehearse procedures, and surgeons continually update their skills. The performance people see is only possible because of the preparation and practice nobody sees. This is also why the Scaramanga quote fits this question. His point was essentially the same. As he said: “The rest of the time I maintain my skills.” Scaramanga’s version is darker, of course, but the principle is identical. Exceptional performance is not the result of the moment itself; it’s the result of the time spent preparing for that moment. If you find that by Tuesday your plan for the week looks destroyed, allow for that when you plan your week.  One way you can do this is to plan your objectives.  What is it that you want to get accomplished next week? These could be: To finish an important proposal Get on top of your emails To clean up the garden  To exercise a minimum of four times To update your LinkedIn profile With these five objectives, you can then decide when you will do them.  One tip here is to front-load your week with these activities. This way, if you do get waylaid, there’s still time to recover in the week.  This reminds me of a story from one of the world’s top rugby coaches. When he joined a new team, he found that if the team got ahead early in the game, they invariably won.  However, when they went behind early on, the likelihood was they would lose.  When he analysed this, he found that the team panicked when they fell behind, dropped their plan, and spent too much of the game taking unnecessary risks to get ahead.  He reminded the team that it was an 80-minute game and that what really mattered was sticking to their plan.  Tackle aggressively, maintain their defensive line and minimise mistakes. If they stuck to that, they would likely end the game ahead.  You don’t win games in the first twenty minutes. You win the game over 80 minutes. It’s the same for you, Kathy; you don’t win or lose the week early on. You win the week by sticking to your plan and making adjustments where necessary, without losing sight of it.  I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening.  It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

“In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics, you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.” That was Tom Seaver, an outstanding baseball player. And it points to an important factor in managing your time and being productive.  And it’s a single word: Consistency.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The COD Productivity Method  Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 420 Hello, and welcome to episode 420 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  There seems to be a consistency crisis. If you were to analyse anyone who has been successful at anything, you would find that, hidden behind that success, lies a high degree of consistency in following the basics.  Last week, I talked about your standards. Setting your standards and staying true to them. Well, a close relation to your standards is consistency.  Yet, consistency is hard. It’s boring, and your brain is often your worst enemy. It tells you that you’re tired; you can take a rest. Or you can skip today. You’ve been busy; it’s okay.  But it’s not okay. Not if you want to develop your consistency. So how can you stay consistent, even on your worst days? That’s what we’re looking at today.  So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Stephan. Stephan asks, “Hi Carl, I’ve been following the COD system for almost a year now, and I know it works. Most days I do well. I collect, and I organise. But I am not consistent. What can I do to get consistent organising and planning my days? Hi Stephan, thank you for your question.  Now, before we begin, I am not going to advocate that you turn yourself into a non-communicative monk. There does need to be some flexibility. Yet to succeed at anything, you will find that, somewhere in the mix, something needs to be done consistently.  Something in the quote I began this podcast with from Tom Seaver jumped out at me. The line was: “If you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.” I know from experience and from feedback from those who have taken my Email Mastery course that if you consistently spend 30 minutes or more on your actionable emails, your email will never get out of control.  The numbers take care of themselves.  This means when you plan your day, you ask yourself where you will find time for communications.  Managing your communications is not about the number of messages you get. We all get too many. There are messages that need answering, messages for information we should read, and a lot of messages we can ignore and delete.  But, when you begin the day, you have no idea how many you will get and of what type they will be. This means you cannot plan for the number or type of message that needs to be replied to. Numbers don’t count. Yet, if you know each day that you will spend at least 30 minutes on them, it’s unlikely you will ever have an out-of-control inbox.  Some days you will clear them; other days, you won’t. But as long as you’re consistent, the numbers will stay low.  Your consistency will take care of the numbers.  When it comes to COD, that’s the collect, organise and do framework. The only area that needs deliberate consistency is the organising.  You see, once you have established your UCT (Universal Collection Tool), you will naturally collect everything that needs to be collected. And if you have that set up properly, what you collect will drop into your trusted inbox.  However, the key is organising what you collected and that involves asking three questions: What is it? A note, an appointment or a task What do I need to do with it? Move it to your calendar, add it to your notes or process the task so that you can ask… When will I do it? That would be either this week, next week, this month, next month or sometime in the long-term.  If you consistently do the organising step, you will become very fast at organising.  When I began following COD, I confess it would take me 20 to 30 minutes on some days. That was because I collected a lot, and asking and answering the three questions was slow.  But I stuck to it. I went through the exciting first stage, then the boring middle (where you ask yourself if it’s worth it) and finally to the stage where it was automatic.  And the benefit was that, as I was pushing through the boring middle, my brain was establishing patterns that sped up the organising stage.  Now, I can clear an inbox of fifteen to twenty items in less than 5 minutes. Something that used to take at least 15 minutes.  But there are other factors here.  The biggest factor, aside from consistency, is that I don’t change my tools. I’ve been using Todoist for 15 years, Evernote for 17 and Apple Calendar for 25. I know these tools inside out. I’ve set up keyboard shortcuts, and they are now part of my muscle memory.  When any of these tools update and add features, I will look at the new features and ask myself whether each will improve my workflow and make things faster. If not, I don’t use the new feature.  Evernote, for example, has recently added an AI-enabled feature that automatically assigns a title to a note. Nice. But it takes me less than ten seconds to add a title, and I know from the mistakes I’ve made in the past that if I don’t add a title that means something to me, I’ll not be able to find the note as quickly as I would like in the future.  So, I don’t use that feature.  So, how do you become more consistent? There are two things that will help.  The first is to start small.  Doing a huge overhaul of your system and adding multiple steps to keep it organised will ultimately fail. You’re asking too much of yourself.  Instead, pick one area.  For example, when you’ve run COD for a while, you will realise that your notes rarely contain anything urgent. The urgent area will be what you throw into your task manager.  This means you can start by committing to yourself to always process your task manager’s inbox at the end of your workday, and to leave your notes, perhaps organising and cleaning up, once a week.  When you make this commitment, don’t just imagine you will be able to do this from your laptop while sitting at your desk. Consider how you will do it if all you have is your mobile phone.  While I like to do my organising on my laptop at my desk, there are days when I am travelling and cannot.  However, checking my task manager’s inbox each day is a must, so I will do that on my phone.  I’ve done this from airport lounges, buses, my parents’ living room and once from a motorway service station.  Another area where consistency is incredibly helpful is doing the daily planning.  Daily planning involves three steps.  The first is to check your calendar to see where your appointments are tomorrow and where you need to be in the morning. (20 seconds max?) The second is to curate your to-do list so that your tasks for tomorrow are realistic. (Around two to three minutes)  And finally, to decide what your two must-do tasks are for the day. (Another 2 to 3 minutes)  When you are consistent with this, it will take you no more than 5 minutes. And best of all, if you are pushed, you could do this from your mobile phone.  One of the benefits of consistency is that you no longer need to look at how much you have to do.  Because you are consistently planning, clearing your communications, and protecting time for your most important work, all you need to do is ensure you are prioritising the right things each day, and the number of things to do will take care of itself.  I recently saw a documentary on Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese football player (soccer player for my friends across the pond).  Ronaldo is 41 years old and is playing in a record sixth World Cup this summer.  How has he remained at the top of the sport for so long? Can you guess? Consistency.  Interviews with former teammates talk of a person who turns up for training an hour before anyone else. Who stays and practices his shooting long after his teammates have finished and a person who prioritises sleep and diet. Ronaldo was doing that long before other professional footballers were.  When asked about it, Ronaldo says he learnt early in his career that consistently paying attention to what matters was the key to getting to the top.  Being consistently on time for meetings, handing in work on time and doing what you say you will do when you say you will do it are just examples of good manners and professionalism. Not doing so damages your chances of promotion.  But I again go back to what I said earlier: don’t try to change everything at once. Pick something you want to improve and start there.  It takes time and effort to build consistency. If you have to remind yourself to do something, you’re not ready to move to the next one.  Doing my focused work in the morning and allowing 45 minutes each day for my communications didn’t happen overnight. It was a stuttering start. Yet, eventually, it just happened. I no longer needed to think about it.  It’s the same with doing my daily planning each evening. Today, I cannot imagine not going to bed without knowing where my appointments are tomorrow and what my must-do tasks are.  That’s how you build consistency. One step at a time. Now you mentioned the COD system, Stephan, and on that subject I do have some news. I’ve just cleaned everything up and added a new quick start guide to the resources section.  If you’re already enrolled, head over to the course on your dashboard, and you will see the guide at the bottom.  If you’re not enrolled and want to learn more about COD, you can do so for free by taking the COD course. I will leave a link for it in the show notes for you.  Thank you, Stephan, 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.   

If you follow the English Premier League, you will know that Arsenal won the Premier League title a couple of weeks ago.  It’s been a tough 6-year journey for their manager, Mikel Arteta, but what stood out is that no matter how hard things got, Arteta stuck to the standards he set at the club and, more importantly, focused on following his plan.  He knew that to take Arsenal back to the top, there had to be a plan, and to ensure the plan was followed, standards needed to be set. In this week’s episode, we’re looking at how your standards matter and why having a plan to fall back on will always give you clarity, focus and make better decision-making easier.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 419 Hello, and welcome to episode 419 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you will know I have written and spoken a lot about having standards.  Standards for how Long it takes you to respond to emails and messages, and how you manage your calendar, for example.  It’s the standards you set for yourself that will ensure that you do the right things day after day. That if things go wrong, you have something to fall back on that feels familiar and keeps you doing the right things.  My communication standard is to respond to emails within 24 hours. This means that no matter how busy I am, if I have an actionable email I have not responded to that is approaching the 24-hour limit, I will do whatever it takes to respond, even if that means working a little extra time at the end of the day.  This week’s question is related to these approaches. So to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Sonya. Sonya asks, Hi Carl, I love COD and the Time Sector System. Both have really helped me to get much more focused on what matters to me. But what frustrates me is that I still have too many days when I procrastinate and don’t get what I want done. How do you stay so consistent?  Hi Sonya, thank you for your question. As I alluded to, it comes down to the standards you set for yourself. I know that sounds easy, and I know it is not, but the standards you set are what help you push through when you are not in the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done.  Let me explain.  It can be very tempting, when you have just finished reading a book or have taken a course, to be full of enthusiasm to change things.  And that’s not a bad thing. But it’s important to be realistic when setting up your processes and new way of doing things.  If you were to set up a two-hour closing-down routine at the end of each day, you would fail. It’s too long.  Similarly, I’ve seen people get excited by the idea of having a solid morning routine. Then they add so many things to their morning routine that it takes them two or three hours to complete them.  That’s never going to promote consistency. There will inevitably be days when you cannot complete those routines, and then you get it into your head that you’re a failure or that having routines doesn’t work for you. Neither of which is true.  The place to begin is with your non-negotiables. What must happen every day, no matter what?  I know many people, for instance, who will not go to bed until all the dishes have been washed and put away.  That might seem a small thing, but to the people who do that, it is their standard. They couldn’t imagine going to bed without doing it.  One standard I try to get my coaching clients to follow is to do a five-minute daily planning session before they end their day.  That planning session is to review your calendar for appointments, look at your list of tasks, make sure it is realistic and to decide what your two must-do tasks will be.  That’s it. Five minutes tops.  This is a realistic planning session. You can do it from your sofa and on your phone if necessary.  Once you have set it as a standard, you do this every day, including weekends and holidays. Now, weekends and holidays are easier. You will likely have fewer tasks and appointments, but it’s a standard. You do it anyway.  Consistency can be hard when you don’t have any clear standards. Yet, those standards need to be realistic.  One way to do this is to set minimums.  Imagine you decide to read a book every day. Now, I’ve seen people set very unrealistic targets here. This usually begins with deciding to read something like 50 books per year, which is then broken down into reading a book a week.  So far so good.  But what happens if you read something like Andrew Roberts’ book on Winston Churchill or Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci? Both are over 1,000 pages. Those books will take you longer than a week to read.  That’s why this kind of target setting is wrong.  Let’s start with what your purpose is here. Is it to read a set number of books? If so, choose short books, and you’ll hit your target. But it’s more likely that you want to build the habit of reading. This means it doesn’t matter how many books you read in any given year. All that matters is that you spend time reading each day.  So set a realistic minimum.  If you were to set the target at reading for a minimum of twenty minutes each day, it would not be long before you settled into a routine and just did your reading.  What happens is that the books you get into and enjoy reading, you’ll read for longer than twenty minutes. Slower, harder books will likely have you reading for twenty minutes. That’s fine; you’re still reading. You did what you set out to do, and after twenty minutes, you can stop.  That’s a realistic standard to set for yourself and one likely to become a non-negotiable.  Incidentally, you can do this with exercise and dealing with your messages. Set a daily minimum amount of time you will spend doing these activities.  And I should say there is some psychology behind the twenty-minute minimum. If you were to tell yourself you will spend an hour on a particular activity every day, your brain will push back.  On the days you are feeling tired, a little sick or ‘just not in the mood’, that one hour will feel like an eternity. Twenty minutes, on the other hand, seems achievable, no matter how you feel. Remember, it’s a minimum. Once you’ve done your twenty minutes, you can stop. Often you won’t, but you can if you are still not feeling up to it.  I do this with my emails and messages. I like to finish my day with all actionable messages cleared. But there are days when, for one reason or another, I cannot do so. I then apply the twenty-minute minimum.  I tell myself I will spend twenty minutes clearing as many as I can.  It’s this standard that makes it easy to keep on top of messages.  I began this episode by explaining how Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, turned around the club by setting non-negotiable standards.  Arteta’s attitude is that if you cannot accept these standards, then you’re out the door. It’s as simple as that.  And I saw this with Manchester United’s former manager, a brilliant manager, Alex Ferguson. Ferguson took over the management of Manchester United in 1986. On his arrival, he set about setting some very high standards at the club.  It took around four years, but by setting those standards, Manchester United turned the 1990s into Manchester United’s greatest generation.  Change is hard. It’s particularly hard to stick to your new set of standards when things don’t seem to be improving. When there’s no immediate payoff.  Your old habits don’t want to die, and they will fight to stay around. This is why trying to change everything all at once almost always fails.  Instead, start small. Daily planning is an easy place to start because all you are doing is reviewing your appointments for the next day, ensuring your list of tasks is realistic, and identifying your must-do tasks.  With practice, you will be able to do this in about two minutes, and the more you practice, the more you see the benefits of having clarity on what must be done and where you need to be each day.  From there, add in a weekly planning session. This is where you set your plan for the week and decide your objectives. It is not about reviewing all your tasks and projects. You’re not reviewing, you’re planning. Reviewing is entirely different.  The best time to review a project is when you’ve just finished working on it. The project is fresh in your mind, and you will know precisely what needs to happen next.  It’s by having a plan that you will find you procrastinate less. You don’t become frozen by the number of things you need to do. You know what your objectives are for the week, and you will do what needs to be done to accomplish them.  Commit to your plan, and you will have the energy to push towards it. Without a plan, you’ll procrastinate because all you will see is a mountain of work to do, and you have no idea what to do or where to start.  Let me show you this in action:  Imagine you have thousands of emails in your email inbox, and you are desperate to get it under control and clean it out. But the sheer size of it freezes you. Where do you start? What would be the best way to go about it? And you’ll be thinking this will take forever.  But what if you decided to start with the oldest ones and spend a minimum of 20 minutes a day on this project until it’s done?  Let’s be honest, if you’ve got thousands of emails in your inbox, it doesn’t really matter where you start. You’ve just got to start somewhere.  Twenty minutes a day, from the oldest to the newest. Now that’s a plan. And you’ll find that by starting with the oldest first, you’ll be deleting a lot. Most of what you have will be out of date, moved on or already resolved. That builds momentum, which in itself generates energy.  If you’d like to learn more about setting your non-negotiables, having a plan for the day and a set of clear objectives for the week, my recently released Quiet Productivity Method programme will help you.  It’s packed with ideas like these, along with the right set of tools to give you clarity, focus, and a sense of calm throughout your day.  I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you to learn more about this immersive programme.  Thank you, Sonya, for your question, and I hope this answer has helped.  Thank you also to you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.   

Is it possible to remain calm and focused when everything around us is getting faster, noisier and seemingly more demanding?  I think it is, and in this week’s episode, I’ll share some of my insights so you, too, can remain productive in a quiet, focused way.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived   The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 418 Hello, and welcome to episode 418 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  Recently, I had a call with one of my coaching clients who is completely on board with AI. He’s gone down the usual rabbit hole of ChatGPT, then Claude, then back to ChatGPT, then to Google’s Gemini and now he’s obsessed with Claude again.  It reminded me of the late twenty-teens when everyone was switching between Evernote, Notion, Apple Notes, and then Roam Research. It was an amusing merry-go-round.  One of the ironic things about my client is that he’d had to wake up at 5:00 am to review the materials for a workshop he was delivering that day because he suddenly thought Claude might not have given the correct information, and he needed to check everything before 9:00 am.  I asked him how long he usually took to prepare for a workshop like this, and he replied that it normally took three or four hours. However, he said emphatically, with Claude’s help, it’s taking him around six to eight hours. I did point out the obvious. With AI’s help, it’s taking twice as long, but he dismissed that, saying AI was the future and that by doing it this way, he was learning and would eventually be faster.  Fair point.  But he did have to wake up two hours earlier than normal. Not something I would enjoy doing.  This reminded me that life, whether it’s our personal or our professional lives, shouldn’t be lived at speed. Life should be lived at our own pace.  Two YouTube videos I recently watched emphasised this. One was by Matt D’ Avella, and the other was from Samurai Matcha.  In Matt’s video, entitled I Tried to Optimise my Life. It made it Worse, Matt pointed out that trying to live a productive life left him feeling frustrated. All the curated lists and time blocks on his calendar just set him up for failure.  If he didn’t clear his to-do list or he was unable to follow his time blocks, he’d end the day feeling that he’d failed. This left him feeling miserable all evening and wondering what was wrong with him. Then I watched Samurai Matcha’s video entitled “10 Real Japanese Organisation Tricks”, in which he explained why his girlfriend’s organisation philosophy was brilliant.  Her philosophy was that the goal of organising is to always know where everything is. This meant that things were stacked so you could see what was in a cupboard or refrigerator as soon as you opened the door. That clothes were arranged so that, just by looking in a wardrobe, you could instantly see what was in there.  It isn’t about having everything look pretty and tidy, only to be unable to find what you are looking for. It’s about knowing instantly where everything is.  So there you have one person trying to optimise everything and setting himself up for failure every day. And another who is essentially working by her own logic, making her life as simple and easy as possible.  You can guess who was the more relaxed, settled and happy with life.  And this is the point. Life’s not about optimising everything. We’re human beings, but we’re trying to turn ourselves into machines that can be programmed to wake up at a particular time, jump into a bath of freezing water, do a two-hour morning exercise routine, spend an hour writing morning pages and then finish it all off with twenty minutes of meditation.  That’s not what life is about at all.  One way to get started in creating a calmer, quieter way of living is to begin with your non-negotiables. What are the things you must do each day? There are the obvious ones, such as sleeping, brushing your teeth, washing and eating. Most of those our bodies have ways of ensuring we do them. We get sleepy, and we get hungry.  But what other things would be non-negotiable for you?  For me, taking Louis out for his walk, doing a little exercise and enjoying a cup of tea with my wife when she gets home from university are non-negotiable at a personal level.  At a professional level, my non-negotiable is spending 2 hours a day creating. That could be writing, recording or planning. It doesn’t matter what I create; all that matters is that I create something.  And that’s it. Together, that’s around four to five hours a day.  Once you have established what your non-negotiables are, it becomes easy to say no to things that could interfere with them.  Another way to bring some calm and quiet back into your life is to focus on time not what you have to do.  Let me explain.  Most of what comes at us each day is not within our control. You do not know how many Slack or Teams messages you will get today. Neither do you know how many emails you will get nor what you will be asked to do.  What you do know is how much time you can dedicate to these inputs.  Over the years, I’ve learnt that if I allow 40 minutes or so each day to respond to my actionable messages and emails, I’ll mostly stay on top of my communications. Sure, occasionally I am behind, but as I can see I am getting behind, I can allow a little extra time to catch up if necessary.  I also know that if I have two hours a day to create, I’ll always hit my publication schedule.  If you work on projects, what would happen if you dedicated 2 hours a day to quiet, focused work on them? No distractions, no interruptions, just quiet, focused work. From the people I’ve worked with who have done this, they’re amazed at just how much work they get done each week. And how deadlines no longer become stressful or missed.  Two hours may not seem much, but over a working week, that’s ten uninterrupted hours. Ten hours you know you will not be interrupted by anyone.  The great thing about this approach is that you gain control over your time. And with a little consistency, you soon find yourself on top of your work.  You also learn where your limits are.  I know my brain gets tired around the 90-minute to 2-hour mark of focused work.  Sure, there are days I would love to spend three hours in focused work, but experience has taught me that the extra hour is a wasted hour. I make more mistakes; I start snatching a quick look at my messages and emails, looking for anything to distract me. That pile of washing suddenly needs to be put away, or those cups and dishes need washing and putting away.  Once you know your limits, you can work within them.  This approach is a more human way to go about your day. It’s not optimised to create impossible days, leaving you feeling exhausted, unfulfilled and disappointed with yourself.  It’s set up to work with your strengths and, more importantly, with your biorhythms. Your body’s natural rhythms.  The advantage of this kinder, calmer way of going about your day is that you naturally slow down. You have the space to deal with the urgencies and the demands of your bosses, clients and colleagues. And that results in fewer mistakes, leaving you with less corrective work to do.  The problem with being human is that we are really quite fragile. My client, who woke up at 5:00 am to fix Claude’s mistakes, will find the afternoon a dead zone. He’ll be exhausted and trying to operate at 100% with less than five hours of sleep.  That lack of sleep will likely affect his food choices at lunchtime. He’ll probably grab a quick sandwich or something else high in carbohydrates, which will spike his insulin levels, leaving him feeling drowsy afterwards.  And then we’re also susceptible to all sorts of bugs and illnesses, which can have a debilitating effect on our energy levels.  Again, not within our control unless we seal ourselves off from the outside world. Not a great idea.  I can assure you that the best approach to managing time and improving your productivity is to be human about it. Work with you and your natural state, rather than trying to be like a machine.  Take care of your three foundations: get enough sleep, eat healthy and move frequently.  Then, have a plan for the day. Not a minute-by-minute plan, but one that takes care of your non-negotiables, allows for some focused work time and has enough flexibility to take care of unknowns that will inevitably pop up throughout the day.  Since the 1980s, technological advances have consistently promised us less work and more leisure time. And yet that’s never materialised. Instead, the opposite happens.  Smartphones took business communications out of the office and made them omnipresent, leaving us with no place to hide. The desktop computer eliminated the typing pool and left managers and executives responsible for crafting their own letters and emails.  Cloud computing eliminated the filing cabinet and placed company documents within our reach 24/7, even when we were supposed to be on vacation.  What’s more, all this technological advancement has sped everything up. And it’s this speeding up that has left us with so much more to do. What used to take us three or four days to do is now expected to be done in an hour.  That’s where the problem is.  Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate this: be human. Make your own decisions about what you work on and when. Wrestle back control of your calendar and protect time to do the things that matter.  These are simple steps, not easy to implement initially, but worth putting the effort into implementing them.  As Matt D’Avella has discovered, and Samurai Matcha’s girlfriend already knew, keeping things human, simple and logical to yourself is the best way to live in a calm, quiet, focused way. Now, before I go, if what you’ve heard today in this podcast resonated with you and you want to learn more, my Quiet Productivity Method programme will do just that.  Recently updated to cover your non-negotiables, the superb daybook system and how to plan your days and weeks so you are living within your time means, this programme will teach you, step by step, how to create a system that works for you. How to find time for what you want, and much more. In addition, you will also become a part of the Quiet Productivity Method community, where you can share ideas, ask questions and join the monthly live sessions that will answer your questions and hold you accountable as you move away from the unsustainable task-based systems of old and towards a sustainable, humane, time-based system.  I do hope you can join me.  Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

There’s a conflict in time management and productivity that few people ever talk about. That’s the conflict between being productive and being responsive.  It’s almost like the Ying and Yang of life. A sort of Newtonian “everything has an equal and opposite reaction.” While we may want to shut ourselves away and give our full focus to an important piece of work, there’s always someone, somewhere, who wants to interrupt us and keep us from being productive.  It’s this that we will be looking at this week. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here. Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 417 Hello, and welcome to episode 417 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  I’m sure we’ve all been there. We have an important piece of work to complete, and we need a good two or three hours of uninterrupted focus to do it.  We block our calendars and pre-plan our day to minimise the risk of anything happening that will interrupt our plan.  And then the day starts, you turn up for work, and all hell has broken loose. Bosses and colleagues are in a panic, and you’re told you must attend an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. No ifs or buts, you must attend.  Argh! It’s enough to have you asking what the point is in making plans when this always happens.  Well, not so fast. It’s just Newton’s third law of Motion acting in a way Sir Isaac Newton never expected.  The pressure of needing two or three hours of quiet, focused work is matched by the force of people needing your attention right now. Finding the antidote to this phenomenon is what this week’s question is all about.  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 Tim. Tim asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve tried to do time blocking for years and have never found a way to stick with it. My colleagues always seem to have urgent questions or need me to do something right now. Do you have any ideas to avoid this from happening?  Hi Tim, thank you for your question.  You may have heard of the concept of manager vs maker (or sometimes producer). A manager’s role is to ensure the work is getting done, allocate resources, and hold meetings.  A maker’s role is to produce the work.  The conflict is between the manager’s need to know what’s happening and the maker’s need for uninterrupted time to produce the work the manager is chasing.  In my experience working with teams, the best teams are those where managers trust their teams to get the work done. Where the flow of information is smooth and works both ways, and the need for “update” meetings is minimal.  The most ineffective teams are those where managers constantly want to know what’s happening, are unclear about what they want and by when, and don’t protect their team from interruptions.  You can tell these managers by the number of “status” meetings they have each week. Every day is full of them. I remember seeing an interview with Toto Wolff, the CEO and team principal of the Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 racing team. In one response to a question, he said: “My role is to hire the best people, tell them what I want, and then get out of the way and let them do their work.”  Toto Wolff is not an engineer or aerodynamicist, but he is an excellent leader and manager.  Many of the software engineers I’ve spoken with tell me they need about 4 to 6 hours a day to focus on writing code. And even with the help of AI, there’s still a lot of focused work required.  AI doesn’t magically produce code. It needs prompting, the right context given and a clear outcome. And the results need to be carefully checked and tested. A lot of focused work. The answer to many of these issues for the people who produce the work is to use time blocking.  Now, time blocking often gets abused. I’ve seen countless articles and videos suggesting that you block every hour (and sometimes minute) with something.  This is wrong. That’s not time blocking. That’s setting yourself up for failure, bordering on self-abuse.  Time blocking that works is when you protect two or three hours a day for deeper, focused work. You then leave the rest of the day open for meetings, interruptions and lighter work such as responding to messages and emails.  It’s balancing the need for being productive with the need to be responsive.  Yet it’s also about putting in place barriers that help you get your work done, and communicating to your colleagues and bosses that you cannot be disturbed right now.  I’ve found it’s that communication step people struggle with. There seems to be a fear that people will think less of you because you are not available to their every whim when they need you.  Complete fallacy. The people in your organisation who get the most respect are the ones who are strict about when they are available and when they are not. They have clear barriers, and no one crosses those barriers.  The people who get the least respect and are often the ones left behind on the promotion ladder have no barriers. They are always willing to stop and chat about this, that, and the other.  These are the people who end up taking their work home and are always the last to submit on a project.  As Jim Rohn said, "When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two.” The problem here is that when you don’t set boundaries and are always available, your bosses feel they have to supervise you more. You get caught in a vicious circle.  And because you are always submitting your work at the last minute, you’re being interrupted by colleagues and bosses asking how you’re getting on.  When it comes to protecting time on your calendar for focused work, timing is everything.  According to several studies, around 80% of people are at their most focused and creative in the morning. This means, if you want to produce your best work, do it when you are at your most focused and creative.  If that is the morning, protect time in the morning and leave your afternoons open for discussions, meetings and other responsive tasks.  To give you one example, I have a client who is a software engineer.  She’s the manager of a team of engineers, and each morning at 8:30 am, they have a 15-minute ‘stand-up meeting’ to inform everyone of their plan for the day. (They all follow the Daily Planning Sequence).  This informs the team when each of them will be doing their focused work time (usually a three-hour block), what meetings they have, and when they will be available to discuss projects.  My client blocks her calendar from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm for doing her focused work, but does allow 9:00 am to 9:30 am to discuss any issues with individual team members or her bosses.  Then 9:30 hits, and she shuts down Slack and email, opens up her coding software, and for the next three hours, it’s complete and total focus time.  Since she and her team adopted this practice, they’ve never missed a deadline, and no one ever has to take work home. And more importantly, their productivity, as individuals and as a team, has shot through the roof. This has the added benefit of their bosses now knowing not to disturb them during focus time. There’s plenty of time to update projects or gather information before and after a focus block.  It works. It’s balancing the need to be productive with the need to be responsive. And during an eight-hour workday, her team is only unavailable for three hours, not all at once. So there is always someone available to field questions from higher-ups and clients, if necessary. Now, there is another block I would highly recommend, and this one will help to reduce and even eliminate backlogs. This is the communications and admin hour.  Let’s be honest, Slack and Teams didn’t do what they promised. Make communicating between teams and colleagues easier and faster. All these tools have done is take away the immediacy of email, move it to another tool, and made it noisier than email ever was.  We still get far too many communications, and far too many low-value and time-wasting messages.  The problem today is the one we’ve faced since the dawn of email: the feeling that we must respond immediately. Now, I’ll take you back to the two opposing forces at play in your workday: the need to be productive and the need to be responsive.  If you were 100% productive, you wouldn’t be communicating with anyone and would be focused solely on your work. If you were 100% responsive, you’d never get any work done, as you’d be responding to interruptions and answering questions and messages all day.  So, there’s a need to find some balance.  In my real-life tests, I’ve found that if you set aside an hour later in the day to respond to your messages, backlogs rarely occur, and if they do, they remain under control.  This only works, though, if you are consistent with this method.  You’ll never be on top of your messages if you sporadically deal with them throughout the week.  But if you consistently spend an hour or so responding to these messages and catching up on relevant threads, you’ll never feel overwhelmed, and if things do build up, adding an extra 30 minutes is often all you need to get things under control.  Now, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. You’re open calendar.  Time blocking will never work if you do not get control of your calendar and get in first. In other words, your focus block and your communications and admin time should be pre-blocked on your calendar.  I’ve seen people wait until Monday morning to find time to get their productive work done, only to discover their calendar is full of meetings.  No, no, no. It doesn’t work like that.  You have to go into your calendar and begin protecting time today. Perhaps your calendar is now full for the next two weeks. If so, go out three weeks in the future and set up some recurring blocks of time for doing your productive work now.  You can change these later if the time you’ve protected is needed for something important, but if you don’t do it now, you will never do it, and the pattern you’re stuck in today will be the same pattern you’re stuck in in three weeks. I would also recommend setting these up as recurring blocks. That makes your life easier, and you soon come to respect these time blocks.  This also makes planning the week simpler. Knowing that you’ve got a couple of hours each day protected for your productive work, you can assign dates to your work more confidently. I know when I begin the week, that I will have time on Thursday to write this script. I have time protected for doing so.  So there you go, Tim. I hope that has helped.  Look at the work you do, calculate where your balance between being productive and responsive lies, and then reflect that in your calendar.  I mentioned two hours a day for focused work, but if you are in a role that requires you to be particularly responsive, you may only allow one hour a day. But that is far better than nothing.  Good luck, and thank you for your question.  Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

If you’re listening to this, there’s a good chance you’re a human being. (Although the speed at which AI is developing may be not all of you… A big hello to Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT (As Boris Johnson would say it) And, as a human being, you’re attacked every day by emotions, fatigue, viruses and micro-managing bosses and demanding colleagues. You’re not going to be able to stay consistent with your productivity systems and processes. (And even AI gets confused from time to time)  You WILL fall off the wagon from time to time As David Allen, of Getting Things Done (GTD), often emphasises, falling off the productivity "wagon" is normal and expected. His most famous quote on this topic is: “If you don't fall off the wagon regularly, you're not playing a big enough game.” So, what can you do when you do fall off? How can you quickly get back on track? Well, that’s what we’re going to look at today.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here.   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 416 Hello, and welcome to episode 416 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  One of the most common questions I get is what to do when your systems become neglected following a particularly busy period, a holiday, or illness or even plain, good old-fashioned laziness.  It happens to everyone from time to time, and it certainly doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.  Yet it can leave you feeling that there’s something lacking, that perhaps there’s something wrong with you.  Of course, simply not true. There’s nothing wrong with you at all. It’s another sign that you are a functioning human being. (That’s a good thing, by the way)  All that’s happened is you got very busy and attended to the most important work that needed doing in that moment, or that you’ve just got back from holiday (vacation), and there’s a lot of catching-up and cleaning up to do.  Both scenarios can leave you with some tidying up to do. That doesn’t mean everything has failed. It just means there’s some tidying up to do.  So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Ernesto. Ernesto asks, Hi Carl, thank you for the Time Sector System. Finally, I have a system that works after many years of trying. My question is, what do you do when, for whatever reason, you fall off the wagon and let things slip? Is there a quick way to get back on track?  Hi Ernesto, thank you for your question.  Firstly, as I mentioned, this is perfectly normal. So many things can cause us to stop following our system, leaving us feeling anxious about everything that needs cleaning up.  The first place to start is by cleaning up your to-do list for today. This is what I call the business end of any task management system. Your today list.  With the exception of your inbox, all your other lists are just holding pens of tasks that you have processed and decided do not need doing today. Your inbox is where unprocessed tasks sit until you decide what to do with them.  So get your list of tasks for today cleaned up. Reschedule tasks that do not need to be done today, and delete or check off those that have been completed or are no longer needed.  This one step will clear the runway and give you a curated list of things that do need to be done today. One of the tricks I have to help me here is to give myself a few minutes each evening to clear this list. Anything I have not completed that day is either checked off if done, rescheduled if not, or deleted if no longer needed.  Doing this every day ensures it takes only a few minutes, and by the start of the new day, my today list is curated, accurate, and focused.  I’m reminded here of a story I learned from friend of this podcast, Simon Jeffries, a former UK special Forces officer, who mentioned that when he joined the Royal Marines, from day 1, the training instructors began teaching a simple habit that all marines live by: As Simon says, “the military doesn’t take civilians and turn them into soldiers overnight. It can't. Day one of training, the standard is simple... Turn up on time. Keep your kit clean. Look after your rifle. That's it. A few weeks in, the expectations layer. Month after month, the load increases. The standards compound until discipline is second nature — under fatigue, under pressure, under fire.  Centuries of trial and error went into that approach. And the reason it works isn't complicated. You cannot expect discipline under fire unless it's second nature. And second nature requires progressive, consistent training.” Now I’ve often talked about the standards you set for yourself. That could always end the day with a clear plan for the next. It could also be to clear your today’s to-do list so it’s reset and ready for tomorrow.  Being consistent and making it a non-negotiable, no matter how tired you are, will soon embed this habit so it just becomes second nature.  The next list to clean up is your inbox. There’s potential for something important and urgent to be missed here.  If you’re like most people, you will be throwing a lot of things in there throughout the day. By the time you get to the end of the day, a lot of what you added will have been forgotten about.  It’s this that makes keeping this list under control important.  The good news about your inbox is that while you will be adding important things in there, you’re also likely to be adding things that, in hindsight, you do not need to do. These can be deleted. What remains can be processed using three simple questions:  What is it? A note, an event or a task. If it’s a note, copy and paste it into your notes. If it’s an event, such as an appointment, move it to your calendar.  For what remains, ask yourself: What do I need to do with it? This is about making sure the task is written clearly, so it’s clear what you need to do.  And finally, ask, “When will I do it?” That will guide you where to put it now that you have processed it.  Is it something that needs to be done this week, or can it wait until next week, etc.?  If it needs to be done this week, you will again ask the question: when? When will you do it?  Beyond that, everything else can wait until your next weekly planning session.  One of the side benefits of the Time Sector System is that you will find many of the tasks you postpone to next week, this month, or next month will sort themselves out and can be deleted. This is one of my favourite aspects of the Time Sector System, the natural elimination of low-value tasks.  It’s worth mentioning a couple of tips David Allen, yes, the Getting Things Done David Allen, gave me when we met in Seoul a few years ago.  David had been travelling through Asia for around ten days, and I asked him how he stayed on top of everything while he was away on business trips.  He said that the most important thing to stay on top while travelling was communications. Emails will back up very fast if you’re not dedicating some time each day to clearing them.  Even if all you can find is 20 minutes in the morning before your day begins, take it. One missed day of managing this beast, and you’re going to have to find twice as much time tomorrow, and so on.  The second tip is to block off at least half a day when you return to catch up. Process your inbox and clear or reschedule any overdue tasks.  David Allen blocks a whole day if he’s been away for a week or more. Half a day if it’s less than a week.  Treat this day as an extra day of your trip. Nobody knows you’re back. You quietly get on and catch up with everything you have collected while you were away.  I adopted both these tips for all my travels, and they work.  If you don’t do this, you’ll be spending the next two to three weeks trying to catch up while getting on with your regular work.  Think of it this way: if your regular work naturally takes up your full working day, why do you think adding in a load of catching up will be easily absorbed? It won’t.  Make the time for it.  Think of the end of each day only happens when you have done a reset and got yourself ready for the new day. I will add that I also have a closing-down routine that involves washing any remaining dishes, brushing my teeth, locking all the doors, and closing the terrace curtains. It takes less than five minutes, but it’s now something I automatically do before going to bed.  It doesn’t require any extra energy or thought. It just happens.  Doing the daily reset should also be automatic. I remember when I first entered the workplace as a young twenty-year-old and seeing how all my colleagues used to tidy up their desks before going home.  Nobody would ever dream of leaving papers, pens, pencils and files all over the place. They were tidied up, and that marked the end of the day.  Funnily enough, as I think about it, I still do that today. My work day is not complete until I have a tidy desk and my task list is reset and ready to go for tomorrow.  Less than five minutes, and all reset and ready to go.  That’s how you guard against falling off the wagon. Having a few small habits to ensure you clean up at the end of each day.  I know it’s human nature to overthink things, but if you stop and consider what’s really important, knowing where you need to be tomorrow morning and what your most important tasks are for the day is all you really need to get yourself back on track.  And one of those important tasks could be to catch up and clear your inboxes, if that is where many of your current issues are. You get to choose. But do make that choice. Don’t ignore it and make the excuse that you are tired.  It’s less than five minutes. Come on, you can do that.  Many of the concepts I’ve talked about here and much more will be a part of next week’s live Ultimate Productivity Workshop. 2 sessions, 2 hours each over two Fridays (or Saturdays if you are in Australia or Asia)  There are some places left if you want to join us.  This workshop has helped hundreds of people finally gain control of their time and build a system that prevents backlogs and keeps them from falling off the wagon.  And, given that it’s live, you have the chance to share your own experiences, learn from others and ask questions.  There are a lot of exciting lessons in this workshop. I do hope you can join me and let me help you finally make time for the things you want time for.  I will include the link where you can learn more and register for the show in the show notes. Thank you, Ernesto, 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.   

What are your priorities today? What about tomorrow? Do you even know?  This week, I’m sharing a simple switch you can make that will make prioritising your work almost automatic… Almost.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   What is Time-Based Productivity? Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here.   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 415 Hello, and welcome to episode 415 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  How do you decide what to do and when? Do you operate a FIFO methodology (First In, First Out) or is it something more nuanced than that?  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that almost everyone has too much to do and too little time to do it. That’s perhaps the reason you are listening to this podcast.  It’s further complicated by the scope of what we are asked to do. Today, we have Slack or Teams messages that somehow cut through our defences and turn into long, time-consuming “chats” about a minor issue on a project that isn’t due to be completed for another six months, preventing us from doing the rather more important work we had planned to do that day.  Then there is email, treated slightly less urgently than instant messages, but it can again destroy our focus, leaving us distracted and unable to finish the work we need or want to complete.  Every day is a challenge. What to do, what is the most urgent, and what is the most important thing you can do today? And if you can work on the most important thing, will you have enough time to do it? If not, would it be better to do something else?  Agh! It’s enough to drive anyone around the bend. And it’s not isolated. Every day we have to go through the same decision-making process. It’s exhausting and stressful (Is this the right thing to work on, or should I respond to that email I just received from my colleague?) and can lead to a prioritisation freeze and activity addiction, where looking busy is more important than doing work that matters. This week’s question is about ideas for solving these challenges, so to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, What are your thoughts on organising work into categorised FIFO-style lists, adjusted for priority, and then using time blocks to work through them without expecting every block to result in a fully completed task unless there’s a real deadline attached. Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question.  I think you are on the right lines with your ideas there.  Let me give you an example of this working.  I teach a method called Inbox Zero 2.0 for managing emails. This method has two parts. The first is to clear the inbox. This is about speed, and all you are doing is filtering out the informational emails that don’t need any action, except to archive them and moving any actionable emails to a folder called “Action This Day”. Later in the day, you go into that folder and try to clear it.  Now, the ‘secret sauce’ of this method is that the emails in your Action This Day folder are in reverse order. The oldest ones are at the top, and the newest ones are at the bottom of the list.  (You can do this from the folders’ settings in Outlook and Apple Mail. I’ve never been able to find a way to do this in Gmail)  This means, when you come to ‘clear’ the Action This Day folder, you start at the top and work your way down. You try to clear it every day, but often that’s not possible; sometimes there are too many in there.  However, because you start with the oldest, the remaining emails, the ones you were unable to get to, will likely have only recently come in, so the urgency is less than the ones you did respond to.  Now, occasionally, an email that recently came in needs to be responded to that day. Here, you would “adjust for priority”, as you aptly call it, Benjamin and respond to these out of their natural order.  It’s a system that has worked for years, never letting me down. Because I spend at least 20 minutes a day on my actionable emails, my emails rarely back up; my inbox is cleared every day, and nobody needs to wait more than 24 hours for a response.  Now, you mentioned doing as much work as you can within the time blocks you set. That is exactly how to do it.  This is also where many people go wrong with time blocking. Time blocking isn’t about squeezing in a specific amount of work within the time you have set. That’s never going to be possible.  You see, there are too many variables acting on us each day. The first is that you have no idea what emergencies will happen in the middle of a time block.  I’ve worked in offices where I settle down to write an important contract only to be interrupted by a fire alarm that took more than an hour to have the building declared safe. Rare, but does happen.  More common are the interruptions from our colleagues. We just do not know for sure that something more urgent will pop up when we are trying to complete a planned piece of work.  However, that does not mean time blocking doesn’t work. It does.  It does because it allows us to organise our days by what matters most.  For example, if you are a lawyer who needs time each day to prepare or review contracts, blocking two hours each day for this work ensures you always have time to do this important work.  Blocking time for it means no one in your office can steal that time from you. It’s like you have an appointment with yourself each day to do your most important work.  If you do not, for whatever reason, complete as much as you would have liked to, it’s okay, because you can pick it up again in your next blocked time slot.  This is more about consistency than time blocking. If you consistently turn up and do the work, you’re never going to be far behind and are unlikely to have any significant backlogs.  Yet if you don’t protect your time, it’ll be stolen.  Not blocking time for doing your most important work is like parking your car in a high-crime area and leaving your wallet on the passenger seat with the windows wide open. There’s a good chance your wallet won’t be there when you get back to your car.  Time blocking gets a bad reputation because people erroneously think it’s about blocking your entire day with activities. No. That’s not time blocking. That’s masochism.  Time blocking your whole day wouldn’t work anyway. A traffic jam, a distraught colleague, a micromanaging boss, or a fire alarm would ruin your day, and then you’d waste time trying to reschedule everything. Time booking works when you use it lightly.  Look at it this way: You build each day around a few critical blocks of time. For instance, two hours of deep solo work where you get on and write the reports, prepare the presentation, or sort out an issue that’s been dragging on for weeks.  Then there’s likely to be time required for responding to all the messages you get each day. I doubt anyone can escape that deluge, but ignoring it will just create bigger and bigger problems further down the line.  So perhaps you set aside an hour for dealing with your communications and any low-value admin. (Another area that can backlog pretty quickly if you’re not staying on top of it.) That’s just two blocks, consisting of a total of three hours. Yet it’s three hours, which, if followed consistently, would keep you on top of your critical work and prevent backlogs in the areas most susceptible to them.  Three hours that would reduce your stress, lower your anxiety, and put you ahead of 97% of your colleagues. This does not guarantee you will always be on top of your work. As Baz Luhrmann’s 1990s hit says:  “Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind… the race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.” But what will guarantee you stay ahead is being consistent with it.  When you start each day, ask yourself: where’s my focus time and where’s my comms and admin time?  You mentioned categorising your tasks, and that’s a great idea too, Benjamin. Not all work is equal, and sometimes a deadline will need us to adjust our priorities.  Now, categorising your work can be a minefield if you are inclined to overcomplicate things. This should be avoided.  Think of it this way: When a pilot prepares for a trans-Pacific flight, there are just three categories. Pre-flight, in-flight and landing.  Each of those categories has distinct types of tasks to be completed.  For us, knowledge workers, it really comes down to a few simple categories. For example, there are four that almost everyone will have (including airline pilots): Communications Admin Planning  And chores Chores are always there. We all occasionally have to pick up a prescription, make a dentist’s or doctor’s appointment or take our kids to ballet, football or cricket practice.  Beyond these four, it will depend on the kind of work you do. A lecturer at a university may have student affairs, lectures and research as categories.  A salesperson may have prospecting, follow-ups and proposal writing. My advice is to keep your categories to no more than eight and make them as general as possible.  For example, with the lecturer, student affairs could include grading papers, setting exams, writing references and arranging for one or more of your students to participate in a work experience programme.  Once you have your categories, you have a way to prioritise your work.  Again, this will depend on your work. For me, my most important priority each day is my content category. I create content every day. It could be this podcast, a blog post or a YouTube video.  For a salesperson, the most important category may be prospecting, because without a steady supply of potential customers, everything else will eventually dry up.  This now helps you with what you will do in your time blocks. For me, 9:30 am to 11:30 am is my content creation time. It is blocked on my calendar, and everyone knows not to disturb me during that time—including my wife!  The salesperson may choose 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm as their prospecting time, and that, again, would be protected as a time block on their calendar each day.  The idea is to match your most important categories with time blocks on your calendar.  This is how time-based productivity works. It works on the time available to do your work. Not everything has to be done today or even this week or month.  When you’re processing your work inbox, you decide what you need to do with something, then choose the best time to do it.  There will be other factors to take into account, such as the deadline, who’s asking you to do something and so on. But ultimately, you are deciding when to work on a particular category.  This is the opposite of the more traditional task-based systems that treat every task as individually important and as something that must be done ASAP.  That way is unsustainable, as I am sure many of you have found out. It creates huge lists of stuff that may or may not need to be done, which just overwhelms you. You cannot do everything at once or even this week.  If you want to learn more about time-based productivity, I have added a link to a blog post I wrote about it in the show notes.  And just a heads up. The next Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming soon. On Fridays the 15 and 22nd May, 2 sessions, 2 hours each over two weeks.  If your calendar is swamped with meetings and commitments, that leaves you with no room to do the work these meetings are generating. If you find your inboxes are overflowing with tasks and messages, and you cannot see a way out of it all, then this is the workshop for you This workshop will teach you, in a live setting, how to move from an unsustainable, task-based system to a more sustainable, time-based one, along with many other lessons to help you get control of your calendar and all those inboxes.  I will put the details in the show notes so you can learn more about how this workshop will help you. (Oh, and a warning, be prepared for some homework if you join us)  I do hope you will be able to join me.  Thank you, Benjamin, for your question. I hope this has been helpful.  And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

Podcast 414 "Organisation is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. But if you spend all your time organising, you never do the 'something'." That’s a paraphrase of a quote from A. A. Milne and his book The House at Pooh Corner. And touches on the question I’m asking this week.  Let’s go,    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Time Sector System  Take the Time Sector System Course   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 414 Hello, and welcome to episode 414 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.  How do you organise your work?  There was a trend a few years ago to organise our tasks in multiple different ways. There were the original Getting Things Done contexts: @office, @home, @phone, @computer, etc.  Some preferred to manage their tasks by project, creating long lists of projects and assigning tasks to them.  Most of these trends died out because, ultimately, they were just new ways of avoiding the work while still feeling that the work was getting done. A kind of modern-day equivalent of shuffling papers on your desk.  All these trends did was create a longer list of lists, full of spurious tasks that likely didn’t need to be done or had already been done but not checked off.  Then there is the idea that we can organise tasks by how much energy we estimate a task will consume. This one still persists, and I will explain shortly why this one doesn’t work. Yet there is one way to manage your tasks that has been around for well over a hundred years and still works, one that almost all top-level executives use, but given that it is simple and we humans love to overcomplicate things, it never seems to get much coverage.  Anyway, this is what this week’s topic is all about, so to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Ken. Ken asks, Hi Carl, what do you think is the best way to organise tasks? I’m thinking about using energy levels to keep my lists low. Have you had any experience with this method? Hi Ken, Thank you for your question.  I have to confess that over the years, I have jumped on every trend for organising my lists of tasks. And, except for two methods, pretty much all fail.  They fail for the reasons I alluded to a moment ago. They are too complicated and require far too much maintenance to keep organised. You see, the methods that work are simple, and therefore, in today’s world, they are not sexy.  The simplest of them all is one I personally have gravitated back to in recent years. That is a simple daily list of tasks to be done today. These are taken from a master list, which is organised during the weekly planning session into the days you plan to do them on.  This method has a built-in safety valve. You can see how many tasks you have allocated to a specific day, and if it looks unrealistic, you can move them to other days to balance out your week.  Given that you are looking at this daily list every day during the Daily Planning Sequence, it can be adjusted for any unknowns that suddenly arise as the week progresses. (Which of course always happens) To maintain this method, all you need is two to three minutes a day and around thirty minutes for your weekly planning.  Not exciting, sexy or newsworthy. It doesn’t require expensive apps or AI. You can operate this method using a simple $1.00 notebook or a text file on your computer.  But it works. It’s flexible, and as long as you are being sensible, you’re never going to feel overwhelmed.  This is where other methods go wrong. They often involve a lot of organising, and given that you are not always looking at the lists you are creating, you have no idea what kind of monster is growing.  Take organising by projects as an example. I don’t know where this comes from. It certainly doesn’t come from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. GTD, as it is called, organises lists by what David Allen calls “Contexts”.  Contexts are created around tools, places or people. For instance, if a task requires a computer to complete it, you would assign it to the @Computer list. If you need to talk to your partner about something, you would add it to your @Partner list, and if you can only complete the task at home, you would add it to your @Home list.  The danger with this kind of organising is twofold. First, some of your lists will become enormous. So big that you don’t want to look at them, as they become scary and leave you feeling anxious. And second, some tasks could theoretically fall into two or more lists. For example, if you need to book flights for a trip with your partner, you could allocate it to your @computer list or your @Partner list, and, as you will likely do this at home with your partner, it could conceivably be placed in your @Home list.  So where do you put it?  So you create a Project called “Family trip to Jamaica” and place the book flights task in there. Excellent. Next, you may add “Book hotel” and then maybe add a packing list and places to visit. Soon, a simple “project” has an array of tasks, some of which need to be done before you go and others when you get there.  That isn’t really the problem. The problem is you don’t have a single project like that. You may end up with projects like buying a new car, redecorating your living room, and, not to mention, all the various projects you will have at work.  Soon, that project list is out of control.  Just maintaining it and reviewing what needs to be done next takes hours.  And let’s be honest here, how many of you are willing to consistently spend two or three hours of your weekend reviewing all your projects?  For something like your trip, it would be far easier to create a note in your notes app. Here you can keep your flight tickets, hotel reservation confirmation, packing list and places to visit in one place and have a master checklist for everything you need to do.  In your task manager, all you need now is a single task reminding you to book your flights, or simply to look at what needs doing next on your checklist.  Now you mentioned managing your list by energy levels, Ken.  On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. After all, why would you tackle a task that will require a lot of energy when you are not feeling energetic?  And when you are feeling low on energy, you can clear off some of those low-energy tasks.  Hmmm, but does it work? Well, no.  For one thing, your energy levels are not consistent. Some days you feel on fire, and others you feel like you’ve been hit by a bus and dragged through a hedge backwards.  The trouble is, when you go to bed, you have no idea how you will feel the next day.  Then there is the issue of deadlines. Whether you feel like doing a task or not, if the deadline is 12 pm today, you’ve got to finish it, no matter how energetic you feel.  Then there’s the human factor. We are wired to be lazy. This comes from the days when we lived on the Savannah. Food was scarce, and we needed to conserve our energy for hunting food.  Then there were the winters when finding food was even harder. Only fatter people would survive winters because we needed to live largely on our fat deposits when we were unable to find food.  This is why it’s easy to gain weight and much harder to lose it. Our body wants to store fat. It does not want to let it go.  While we consciously know food is not scarce for most of us today, our lizard brain doesn’t know that. And our lizard brain controls our survival instincts, so it will override our conscious intelligence.  This means when we are feeling low on energy, the last thing we will do is open up our task managers and pick something to do.  Instead, we’ll crash on the sofa or take a nap.  And so your low-energy list will keep growing.  Then there comes the question of how to define a medium-energy task. What does that mean?  It’s likely you will define those tasks differently depending on how you feel on the day you process them.  The second way to organise your tasks that actually works is to go by when a task needs to be done.  Let’s go back to the flight example. If you are planning your trip for September and want to get everything booked by the end of June, the window to complete that task is from now through to the end of June.  Given that you want to do this with your partner, it’s likely you will do this task when you are with your partner.  If you are away on a ten-day business trip this week and next, you cannot do the task then, so don’t put it on your list for this week or next.  As we are about to start May, I would add this task to my Next Month list. I don’t need to do it now, but it will need to be on my list in June.  Hopefully, you are familiar with the Time Sector System. This organises your lists by when you will do them.  The only list in play each week is your This Week list. This contains all the tasks you have decided need to be done this week. Everything else is in either your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or long-term and on-hold lists.  Each week, you look at these lists and decide what to bring forward to your This Week list.  The simplicity of this method is that when you process your inbox, you are asking three simple questions: What is it? - Is it a task, an event, or a note? What do I need to do to complete it?  And, when will I do it?  In a very short time, you get super fast at processing your tasks, and with the exception of your long-term and on-hold list, none of your lists will grow out of control. Well, not if you give yourself about 30 minutes each week to maintain and update your lists.  Given that you are working from a single list, your This Week list, once again, you have the built-in safety valve because you can see how many tasks are on your list before the week begins and can adjust it to be more realistic if it becomes too large. The purpose of your long-term and on-hold list is to eliminate, not accumulate. In other words, every month or so, you go in there and delete tasks you no longer want or need to do.  To learn more about the Time Sector System, I have a course that will teach you how to use it as well as a comprehensive blog post explaining why this method works so well in today’s world.  I will put links to both in the show notes for you.  So there you go, Ken. There are always new, exciting ways to organise your tasks, but ultimately it comes down to what needs to be done today. That’s all that matters at the work level of managing our tasks.  Things that don’t need to be done today should never be on your daily list.  Your energy levels will fluctuate throughout the day; it’s not something you can control. Energy levels can be affected by the quality and quantity of your sleep, what you ate for lunch and whether you are coming down with a cold or the flu.  What you can control is what you do right now. You could take a nap, go for a walk or sit down and attack that list of prospects that you’ve been meaning to contact for the last three weeks.  My advice would be to work with what you have direct control over, and that ultimately comes down to when you will do something.  I hope that has helped Ken. 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.