Hello, and welcome to episode 432 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.

Before we get started, and linked somewhat to today’s topic, one of the top issues among the people I work with is inconsistency in planning weeks and days.

Now, I understand why it can be a challenge to plan your week consistently. Life often gets in the way, and really, what’s the point of planning when, too often, whatever plan you set gets destroyed by an inconsiderate boss or client?

Yet it still remains the case that those who consistently plan their weeks and allow a little time each day to plan the next day are the ones who get the right things done on time and have more time to do the things they want to do.

So, over the last few weeks, I’ve been updating my Planning Course.

It’s not a long course, and it now focuses on three main areas of planning. Daily, weekly, and project planning. Plus, given the time of year, I’ve added a bonus section on the Annual Planning Template.

If you want to take a significant step up in your time management and productivity, I highly recommend this course.

You can get it as part of my Productivity Academy Membership or buy it as a standalone course.

And if you’re fast, you can get the standalone course for just $50.00 with the early bird discount. (I’ll put the link and the code in the show notes for you)

And a quick tip. Get the course today and do the Weekly Planning Section. It will take you around 15 minutes to do the section, will give you a downloadable Weekly Planning Matrix sheet and will inspire you to do a proper, practical Weekly Planning Session today.

Okay, on with the episode.

Last week, I hosted the inaugural live training of my Productivity Academy. In that session, I shared some research I had done on around 500 of my past and present coaching clients. The question I asked was: “What were the top five struggles (or pain points) they faced?”

The results were not unsurprising, or not that I thought. What surprised me was that the cause of those pain points almost always comes from the same place.

Let me explain.

First, what were the five? They were:

In 5th place, Tool overload and fragmented workflows

This means using multiple apps, duplicating task lists, having unclear homes for information, and excessive system tweaking, which undermined trust in their productivity setup.

All of this results in information all over the place, which causes a sense that they lack clarity and control.

In 4th place, Interruptions and lack of protected focus time

Meetings, emails, messages, emergencies, and context switching push deep or important work out, leaving no time for doing that important work.

Yet one irony is that if the focused, strategic work were prioritised over interruptions, there would be fewer interruptions. Nobody chasing you, telling you something was urgent, and less time for meetings because the work was getting done instead of being talked about.

In 3rd place, Unclear priorities

If you don’t know what matters most, the urgent or “loud” work of other people will always crowd out meaningful progress. If you do not know what your priorities are, then someone else’s priorities will do. At least they appear to be urgent, right?

In 2nd place, Planning and review routines that don’t stick

When daily and weekly planning are skipped because, perhaps, life gets busy, it causes your system to break, which then requires repeated restarts.

Restarts are time-consuming, often overwhelming and never address the underlying problem. (Which we will come to in a moment)

And in 1st place… Wait for it… Overwhelm from competing tasks and projects

My clients face large backlogs, scattered lists, frequent rescheduling, and a persistent sense of being behind.

Now, as I said those five issues, I am sure you were nodding along to many of them. But the question is, why? Why do these pain points keep popping up?

The simple answer is a lack of clarity on what is important to you.

Let me explain. I value punctuality. It is a standard I have had since it was instilled in me at school. If I have a meeting at 9:00 am, I am ready to go at 9:00 am. Not 9:02 or 9:01. I am ready to go at 9:00 am.

I turn up a few minutes early, make sure everything is ready to go and then we start.

My wife, on the other hand, treats time as abstract. If she says 9:00 am, that could mean anything from 9:05 to 9:30 am.

I treat punctuality as something important; she doesn’t.

This same principle follows those who are incredible at keeping things organised. They give higher importance to putting things away after they have used them than someone who you would describe as being disorganised.

When it comes to your work, what are your priorities?

Now, someone who finds themselves running around all day looking for something to get anxious about has no clear plan for the day. They’re waiting for a fire so they have something to put out.

Yet someone with the same kind of work who starts the day with a clear plan is the one quietly getting on with the work they identified as important. Because they are doing that, they rarely come across any fires to put out. This, in turn, leaves them with more time to do the work.

That becomes a positive circle. More work gets done, fewer fires occur.

With the number 1 issue, Overwhelm from competing tasks and projects: Why do you have competing tasks and projects?

Let’s say that you have two big projects with the same deadline. Why did that happen? You said yes to both projects; you agreed to the deadlines.

Now, you can’t do two things at once; there must have been a time when you realised that there was a conflict. What did you do when you discovered that conflict?

Imagine I was asked by two different companies to develop and deliver a training programme. The dates for each session were to be on 30th September.

Theoretically, I could do it as long as the times were different. But accepting both would mean that I would be unable to do anything else in September, and the quality of the training would be compromised.

So, I would have to say no to the 30 September date to at least one of the companies.

Now, I’ve worked with many companies, big and small, and I know that when it comes to setting training dates, there is a significant degree of flexibility from both sides.

Now, if one company insisted that the only date the training could take place was the 30th, that’s good. The decision has been made for me, and I would have to ask the other company if we could do a different date.

If, in the very unlikely event, the other company also insisted on the 30th, then I would have to decline the invitation.

From a practical, realistic perspective, there would be no way I could prepare two separate training sessions for two different companies, each involving a different HR department or organiser.

This is why knowing your limits and being aware of what you are currently committed to are key to being productive, improving your time management, and staying organised.

Yet, if you do not do your daily and weekly planning, all these issues will “accidentally” keep happening. You don’t know what’s coming up, think you have plenty of time, and keep saying yes to more and more commitments. And everyone loves you.

Until you don’t deliver. Then you’re the problem. You’re the bottleneck. You said you could do it, but you didn’t. You missed the deadline, and all trust is now broken.

And all this started from not knowing what your priorities are.

Another example. My professional priorities are: clients, content and then business admin. In that order.

My client work will always receive top priority, then content creation, then the admin associated with running a business.

This means that before I begin a day, week or year, I already know my priorities.

What about you? What are your professional priorities and in what order have you set them?

Competing priorities can often be an issue. What criteria can you set to make the decision easier? For instance, a customer seeking a $20 million proposal will likely be a higher priority than one seeking a $2,000 proposal.

You could argue that all proposals are equal, yet you can work on only one at a time. So how do you choose? Perhaps you can operate a first-in, first-out (FIFO) system and process them in the order they arrive.

Whichever way you decide, you are saving yourself time. No decisions have to be made. Just start and get on with it.

If you look carefully at the five pain points, knowing your priorities and ensuring they get done before anything else will reduce much of the friction you face.

The second cause of these is often one of capacity. Yes, we can do almost everything asked of us, but not all at the same time. There’s a limit to what we can do each day, week and quarter.

Most people I work with are trying to work at overcapacity.

For example, being expected to answer emails and messages and respond to customer calls within minutes of receiving them never works.

I’m reminded of one of my early jobs working in car sales.

When I first started, the company employed a receptionist to answer telephone calls. She would find a salesperson who was free to take the call, or, if there were no free salespeople, she would take a number and tell the caller that someone would call back as soon as possible.

Then the company decided to install a new system, which meant that when a call came in, the telephone would ring on a central speaker, and the salespeople would be responsible for answering the calls themselves.

To ensure calls were answered quickly, a rule was set requiring them to be answered within 5 rings.

They then let go of the receptionist. She was no longer needed.

Then the problems started. Sales began to drop, and salespeople were unable to focus on selling. Every time the phone rang, you could see everyone counting the rings, desperately hoping someone would answer.

Within 6 months, the receptionist was back. And guess what? Sales began to rise. Funny that.

People are perfectly happy to wait for you to return their call or message. And it’s worth remembering that a quick reply often suggests desperation.

The reality is that we are collecting far too much and believing that everything we collect must be done. No, it does not.

Looking at task managers from the 1980s and 1990s, there were around 4 or 5 items on a list. These were bigger things, such as working on this project or calling that client to sort out the issue.

Nobody put letters to reply to or calls to return on a to-do list. These were self-contained. Your letters would be in an in-tray, and you would set aside some time each day to reply to them.

You can do the same today with email and messages. They are still self-contained. You do not also need to add them to your task manager. Now you’ve duplicated a task.

I remember my boss at the law firm I worked at popping his head out of his office door to ask his secretary for his messages. He would do this around 2 pm each day and, for an hour, would return the calls that had come in while he was in meetings.

The lesson here is to take some time to decide what is important to you as an individual and a professional. Pre-decide your priorities. Create some if-this-then-that rules,

If this happens, then I will do that.

This then reduces the decisions you need to make each day, and that will help reduce the mental fatigue that builds whenever something new comes in and you have to make yet another decision.

And if you want to reduce the ultimate friction, remember the phrase: A place for everything, and everything in its place."

How much time is wasted just looking for a document, your glasses or keys? Come on, this should be your basic norm. Know where you put things so you can retrieve them when you need them.

You don’t have to be as obsessed as Hercule Poirot, who kept his bank balance at £444, 4 shillings and 4 pence. Although there might be something to be said for keeping order in everything, you always have the capacity to deal with any unexpected events.

Thank you for listening. And if you are interested in learning more about my coaching programmes, you will find all the details on my website, carlpullein.com. You’ll also find details on how to join my Productivity Academy there too.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.